Pessimistic Politics: Chick Tract Trashing - The Missing Day (Chick Outdoes Himself)

Yes, Zasada already bashed this one, but Selmek just couldn't leave this one alone. The following is his take on "The Missing Day." If you somehow missed the tract completely, you can view it here.

Okay, I’m going to come out and say it. Chick has outdone himself. He has taken a holiday with absolutely no religious value and turned it to his own twisted purposes.

It was annoying when they did it to Christmas 500 years ago. I’m sure most of you have heard this story, about how nobody really knows when Jesus’s birthday was but it was most likely in September. About how the pagans had a holiday to celebrate the shortest day of the year, but the church couldn’t handle any non-fundamentalist leanings and stripped the holiday of any fun it once had.

Halloween is a weird one too, but you could sort of see it coming. After all, it was always supposed to be the day that the dead walked the earth again, and recent times have only made it more horrific. If someone wants to start calling it the Devil’s day, then the truth is that it really doesn’t offend anyone.

But those two examples took the full weight of the Vatican for any number of years to change anybody’s old habits. Jack Chick has stretched out his hand totally at random, and with a mighty thrust, forced Christianity into something that at best had nothing to do with it, and at worst would prefer to forget it.

Let’s examine the real facts of “The Missing Day.” Chick’s Puritans were a bunch of nuts too, crazy even for the religious conservatives in Europe. Most of them were in prison, until Europe had the really good idea of exiling them out into what was thought to be the edge of the world. Unfortunately for all concerned, they found America.

When they finally did reach land, these fun loving folk who “wanted to worship God and reach the lost” decided to set up a colony at, oh, say, right around… Salem, Massachusetts, so they could start accusing each other of witchcraft. It is an accident of history that the entire village didn’t go up in flames.

Let me also point out, for the record, that they are a bunch of morons for having such a difficult time when they reached the new world. According to Chick, “where they landed were no houses, no restaurants – nothing but rocks, trees and wild animals.” Yes, that’s a direct quote.

So, let me assume that they weren’t so stupid they forgot to bring weapons too. They arrive in a bountiful wilderness with fruit hanging from the trees so thick they couldn’t get through it and animals walking up to them happily because they’ve never seen a person like them before. Starving to death here is like starving to death in the middle of Wal-mart (that’s a metaphor, in actuality you would probably need money).

Let us not forget the kind Indian who came out, who Chick says spoke “perfect English!!!” These loving souls not only took the trouble to learn an entirely new language simply by observation, they showed a bunch of retards (and if you re-read the last paragraph, you’ll know I’m not exaggerating) how to hunt, harvest, cook and ration their food. If you have any questions about how we paid them back, let’s examine that other fun loving time period, the Wild Wild West, wherein we continually violated our own treaties, deliberately infected the Kiowa with smallpox, demonized and scalped Indians because it was “fun” (don’t make me explain this; whites did start scalping Indians before they started scalping whites).

Don’t ask me why this is always such a sore point. I am not an Indian, nor have I ever been a close friend to an Indian, but I still think that as bad a deal as they got, we sort of owe them something. Something maybe a little better than casting them in westerns and making them the bad guy. Oh well.

Okay, the historical context is out of the way. Let me look at this from yet another twisted point of view.

I’m going to be forced to say a few things about Christianity here that may seem positive, so don’t hold it against me. Christianity, by and large, is a good religion that encourages people to “do unto others.” In fact, it specifically encourages people to be even nicer when other people are being mean to them, if only because it’s annoying as hell. The first Christians had to hide themselves and encountered enormous opposition to their message. It is probably for this reason that it lasted at all.

The disadvantage here is, as I said, Christianity thrives on the perception that your beliefs are being persecuted, that way you can be a good person in spite of temptation, retain your faith in spite of trials, and generally tell yourself how really great you are. In modern times, even when Christianity dominates the nation, most Christians still require a sense of hopelessness to keep them going, to help them expect a miracle.

We all know they aren’t being persecuted nearly as much as they probably should be, that’s why their minds are warped. But through this logic, Jack Chick knew that if he was going to create a new religious holiday, he needed to create opposition to it. He needed to physically dredge up a faithless majority in order to make his faith shine even brighter.

Or failing that, you can always fake your facts.

In line three, Chick has a middle aged man asking if Thanksgiving is the same thing as “Turkey Day,” a title I have never in my life heard before. On the next line, he actually has children asking “what’s Thanksgiving?” and saying “we can’t say ‘Thanksgiving’ in our school.”

Okay, a word about religion in schools. No school in America prohibits public prayer, that’s something Christians make up so they can feel persecuted, as I said. No school would prohibit the word “Thanksgiving” even if it were a religious holiday, which it isn’t. Chick just does a very good job of trying to make people believe it is.

And as if that weren’t enough, I happen to have this handy list of all the sins this “normal” family can exhibit in the space of a few minutes:

Line 1 Lateness, hates home cooking, diabetes (?), cursing and missing football.

2 Selling drugs to cousins, wearing “Nuke ‘em” tee-shirt, hating the Christian.

3 Buttering up old geek, feeding fish to dog.

4 Cursing and missing football, buttering up old geek.

…

10 Calling old man nuts and denying the need for salvation

11 Our whole nation sucks

12 Atheism, Agnosticism, Paganism, homosexuality

…

18 Persecution

19 Letting invisible demons hold their hands over your eyes

20 Having a wonderful party in hell, being gay

Only a few things I need to point out about this one. I am genuinely confused about the girl crying that her blood sugar is low in the first line, because it seems to imply that diabetes is a sin. Maybe it is a curse from God for being sinful. Whatever, that’s why I put a question mark next to it.

Panels three and four I already talked about.

In panel 11 Chick seems to imply that mom, beer and apple pie are tricks of the Devil to make us feel secure, when really our souls hang by a thread. Panel 10 is the classic Chick Tract sin of being either with us or against us, and this family tree apparently has a lot of very bad limbs. Clearly, if you aren’t a psycho-Christian, then you must be a devil worshipper. That’s just the way it works in Chick’s world.

Panel 12 exhibits all the big ones, showing just how royally fucked up this loving, Christian family has become. No doubt Bob Williams is going to hear about this one.

In closing, I want to say how genuinely scared I am about this tract. In it, Chick has demonstrated more ambition than ever before, magically transforming something totally unrelated to religion into a religious statement.

What’s next? The star of Bethlehem leading Columbus to the new world on October 10th? Joseph and Mary met on Valentines Day? God decrees that thou shalt celebrate Labor Day and Veterans Day?

Don’t laugh, as you would have a month ago if someone suggested that Thanksgiving were a religious holiday. But what scares me the most is that he has made a very convincing case to an increasing majority of people who are warped enough to accept his ideas. Like 1984, the past is not fixed, and if enough people believe Thanksgiving is a religious holiday, then it really will be.

And that should scare you too.