It's My Vacation -- Now Go Away, Or I Shall Taunt You A Second Time

The Lord of Truth reminds us why the French have been in decline for the last three hundred years or so...

For the religiously inclined, the holy day Whitsunday, or Pentecost, falls as always on the seventh Sunday after Easter. A state fiat won't change that, and the French Catholic Church didn't protest when the authorities recently proposed to cancel the national holiday called "Pentecost" to raise two billion euros -- a cut of that day's work -- for a special fund to care for the elderly created in the wake of the 2003 heat wave, which killed thousands of seniors. But the majority of Frenchmen -- 66% according to a survey in Le Parisien daily -- consider that Monday sacred.

So a self-avowedly secular Republic with diminishing church attendance fights Marxist -- aka the religion-as-opiate creed -- trade unions to drop a Christian holiday from the calendar. The government even implores the public in quasi-religious terms to make this "sacrifice" in the name of "national solidarity." "This is not solidarity, this is a rip-off!" responds the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), a big union. Righteous anger over Pentecost could break out in national strikes next Monday.

When we first tried to reach CGT for comment, no one answered the phone at the union's offices Friday, officially a working day. You see, last Thursday was Ascension, a holy Christian day that remains a state holiday, which emptied France's cities and offices for the long weekend. In France, the real state religion is vacation.

This is probably why they surrendered in World War II. They would have fought, but who wants to cut into precious vacation time?