It’s Christmas season! When you’re young, it lasts forever. When you are older, it goes by pretty quick.
One must do in the Gast household is watching A Christmas Carol. I prefer the Alastair Sim version, but we have the George C. Scott version. So, I keep waiting for General Patton to start ranting and raving at the Ghost of Christmas Present. It’s good, though. At a Christmas party last year I actually got a copy of the actual story by Charles Dickens, and finally read it. It’s very short, easily managed over a few lunch hours at work. Unlike some other Dickens I have tried to read, it was very enjoyable.
I often try to think of nations as having life cycles and events like people. After all, a nation is just a collection of people; why wouldn’t it have the same organic rhythms as human beings? One metaphor for the state of our nation that I think really fits is the United States as Ebenezer Scrooge.
With the Ghost of Christmas Past, we see America’s origins.
Scrooge is at a boarding school, somewhat orphaned by his distant father, struggling to fit in. His only real positive relationship is with his sister, Fan, but that doesn’t last as she dies. As a young, up-and-coming man of business, he finds himself in a joyful situation with a beloved mentor, Old Fezziwig, who encourages him to stop and smell the roses. But his once lively romance with his fiancée Belle turns sour, as he faces a choice to pursue his career, or a comfortable marriage. Scrooge chose money, and we see a glimpse of the life he could have had.
America was founded as a nation of orphans; a bunch of castoffs who didn’t want to stick around and endure the wrath of the rulers of Europe. Though we left, we still retained some fond ties with nations like Britain and France, but those have withered over time. We never really fit in with our boarding school peers in the New World. Sure, Canada and Mexico are close neighbors; Brazil is nearly as large a people as we are; but we don’t really fit in here, and there’s nothing really to go home to across the pond.
Despite a rough upbringing, we landed in a sweet spot. From the founding until after World War II, we had what George Washington called a “great degree of tranquility, union, and plenty, which we have since enjoyed.” Though, with one ugly blip in the Civil War. We were a young, hungry nation, climbing the ladder. There were many joys around us—even romantic times—but often we refused to stop and enjoy Fezziwig’s party, and kept our noses in the books.
Once the devastation of the World Wars left much of the Old World spent, we had our opportunity to be the leader of the world’s business. We also had an opportunity to settle down in our vast, cozy continent, as many of the Founding Fathers originally envisioned for us, but we chose our love of prosperity, and assumed the mantle of an Empire. We are a different empire from those of the past, but nevertheless a mighty nation with interests throughout the globe. Perhaps we are not so different as we like to believe.
With the Ghost of Christmas Present and Scrooge’s present life on Christmas Eve, we see where our path has led us.
What always strikes me about A Christmas Carol is despite all of Scrooge’s love of prosperity, the rest of his life is barren. He does not live in a well-lit mansion. He does not dress well. He does not throw lavish parties. Much like his office, it seems he doesn’t keep his own fire lit well. No family. No friends. No love. He experiences ill health, hoping a plain bowl of gruel will help ease his cold instead of hosting a lavish Christmas Eve feast.
This is where you, reader, might question if my allegory breaks down. After all, America seems to revel in comfort and trinkets. But look at what happens when societies thoroughly embrace modernism or Left Wing ideas. Compare Osaka Castle in Japan with their modern sleep pods at the office. Compare the Cathedral Church of Saint Peter in Cologne, Germany, with the soulless concrete blocks in Communist East Berlin. Look at American downtowns, from the transition of the early 20th century to today; the plain ugliness seems to be the point.
Listen to many media personalities talk about the holiday season and family gatherings. I am sure they aren’t a completely faithful representation of most of our experiences, but our broader culture instructs us these family gatherings are antiquated rituals meant to be survived at best, not enjoyed. Bah, humbug! We even tell people family is whatever you make it: formed or dissolved at will, whatever is most convenient.
Gone are the powdered wigs and frilly robes (OK, maybe that’s a good change); today our power brokers wear boring suits, or increasingly, monotone clothes looking like something out of Chairman Mao’s closet… or even sweatpants. Does Mark Zuckerberg not visually look like nihilism personified?
We’re increasingly alone and isolated. Fewer marriages, and fewer that last. Like Scrooge, we fear poverty and so can’t fully commit. What if something bad happens?
There are fewer children. Our aging parents are shipped off to death’s waiting room, so that we are secure in our blank white houses with ugly, industrial looking LED lights, where every object is always exactly where we left it.
Our bowl of gruel is the massive numbers of prescription drugs we take to ease our ever-present ennui.
We go about our days, seeking to further our prosperity. Even though we have drastically better lifestyles compared to our great grandparents, it’s not satisfying enough. What do you mean a house three times as big as one built in the 1950s costs a lot more? We look down on the tired religious nuts like Bob Cratchit, who probably should have just aborted Tiny Tim.
Yeah, we say we like to party, and “experience” life, and we’ve made Jeff Bezos a very rich man with our Amazon addictions, but do you get the sense people are enjoying all of this? I mean, really enjoying it? We say we are more unhappy than ever.
Meanwhile, we have rich scolds flying around admonishing people for driving cars, leaving lights on, and using straws that function. We need to be more miserly to save the world, they say. How dare you?! Coal is expensive, you know.
We look around, and see the addicted, the troubled, those bereft of meaning and hope, those left behind by an economy so addicted to growth and efficiency that we’ve lost all reckoning of a human economy. We’ve devastated entire regions of our nation to save a few bucks on consumer goods. We don’t want to fix any of that ourselves. No, the government will handle that. And how will they fix it? Well, there’s no problem we can’t fix by just shoveling more money at it. Money is our golden idol.
We nod along with Scrooge, when he is asked by some do-gooders to personally invest in making the world more humane:
“Are there no prisons? And the Union workhouses? Are they still in operation? The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour, then?”
Although, I will say ironically enough, having actual institutions like asylums was probably better for both broader society and the mentally ill themselves; better than homelessness and then an overdose death. At least the lest fortunate interacted with people back then, rather than just getting a check electronically deposited into their accounts.
We fret about too many people overrunning the planet, or suffering the “indignity” of living life with a disability. As long as we’re personally fulfilled, that’s good enough. We just can’t be bothered otherwise:
“If they would rather die," said Scrooge, "they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population. Besides—excuse me—I don't know that."
"But you might know it," observed the gentleman.
"It's not my business," Scrooge returned. "It's enough for a man to understand his own business, and not to interfere with other people's. Mine occupies me constantly. Good afternoon, gentlemen!"
A Christmas Carol presents us two paths: one in the spirit of Christmas, and the other in the spirit of the world. Scrooge rejects Belle and an abundant life for a cold, bleak life of money. His only end is accumulating more money, until he dies alone.
Ironically, a love of money makes one poor and empty. Once you run out of the joy of gaining new possessions, there is nothing left: “No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.” Matthew 6:24
The real spirit of Christmas is the joy of an unearned gift; a real savior, not just a cheap trinket or even a compelling allegory.
So, with the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, what is our future?
An early grave. Dead children. Uncaring barbarians picking over our still warm remains for our trinkets; not mourning us, or remembering our great deeds.
Like Scrooge, it seems most of America believes we must keep on accumulating stuff forever. That’s it; that’s the point. They have a struggle getting outside of their own heads. Like Scrooge, we comically can’t see our own demise right in front of our faces.
Can we change?
Absolutely. I’m with Rocky: “If I can change, and you can change, everybody can change!” (Incidentally, Rocky IV is a Christmas movie…)
I don’t know if we will. The patterns of human life are so hard to break. Every great nation and civilization falls. But Scrooge changed. What did it for him? Perhaps there is a lesson there, for us?
Many things affected Scrooge on his evening journey, but what seemed to move him the most was Tiny Tim, and the two children that the Ghost of Christmas Present had under his robes: Ignorance and Want. What can be done for them? He seems far more affected by others than his own misfortunes. Perhaps he connects on a human level with Tiny Tim, seeing himself. Despite everything that’s happened to Scrooge, he’s still the small, lonely boy in the boarding school, hoping to come home.
America is still the nation of quirky, independent dissenters who left the Old World to live in peace, conquering a vast wilderness, and able to worship according to the dictates of their conscience, not overbearing governments. A lot has happened since then. Like Scrooge, we aren’t alone in the world facing a slow decline to our nation’s death.
Perhaps God will grant us the mercy of visitations to make us remember who we were, what is going on around us, and what will happen to us in the near future. Perhaps not.
Who are the Tiny Tims in our time? “It’s for the children” is such a terrible political cliché, but perhaps we can learn to love children themselves again, and that can reawaken our national spirit.
So, who are we in the story? Or, who should strive to be?
Fred. Definitely Scrooge’s nephew, Fred.
We should try to remain joyful. Even if America looks at us and resents us because they see us as a reminder of a painful past, we should keep showing up. We should keep inviting America to the party. Maybe someday she’ll take us up on the offer.
“‘There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say,’ returned the nephew. ‘Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round—apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that—as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!‘”