Lessons from a Carol

We sat down the other day to watch my favorite holiday movie--The George C. Scott version of A Christmas Carol.  

Dickens was such a progressive.

Dickens's religious beliefs were those of most 19th century British Unitarians. In his will he urged his children to adopt a liberal, tolerant, and non-sectarian interpretation of Christianity, "the teaching of the New Testament in its broad spirit." He recommended they "put no faith in any man's narrow construction" of isolated passages. In The Life of Our Lord, written for his children and not published until 1934, Dickens summarized his faith as "to do good always." He believed humanity, created in the image of the divine, retained a seed of good. He preached the gospel of the second chance. The world would be a better place if, with a change of heart, people were to treat others with kindness and generosity.

Dictionary of Unitarian and Universalist Biography

 

Here's a shocker from this English teacher:  I love books.  I especially love a well-turned phrase and a timeless message.  I love characters so well described they begin to feel like family.  I like my heroes with flaws and my villains complex.  And Charles Dickens can deliver on all those fronts.

You know you have a classic when the name of a character you create becomes totally synonymous with those characteristics--all we have to say is "don't be such a Scrooge," and immediately anyone who's familiar with Western culture gets it.  You also know you have a classic, I suppose, when it's parodied in every imaginable form, from the Muppets to Mickey to Beavis and Butthead.  See this link for a fun chart of versions of the "visited by three spirits at Christmas" theme--and that doesn't even include the number of times it's been used as a plot device on countless sit-coms, soap operas, and made-for-tv dramas.

While I was watching this year, though, with all the events of 2005 running through my mind, I was struck by--well, by the Neo-conservative tone of Scrooge.  His lines could have been straight out of a modern Republican platform, with the emphasis on keeping the material profits his own hard work and circumstances have provided, complaining about too many taxes, and announcing that anyone else in dire circumstances had only their own laziness and bad choices to thank for it.  

You gotta love Jacob Marley, though, that old ghost who appears to set the record straight:

``But you were always a good man of business, Jacob,'' faultered Scrooge, who now began to apply this to himself.

``Business!'' cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. ``Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!''

Kind of sounds like a platform for health care, equal rights, and tolerance--kind of, oh, Democratic, maybe?

Later on, in one of my very favorite scenes, the Ghost of Christmas Present has one more surprise for Scrooge.  This spirit, who is described all in images of abundance and plenty, has a secret hidden in the core of this prosperity:

From the foldings of its robe, it brought two children; wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable. They knelt down at its feet, and clung upon the outside of its garment.

``Oh, Man! look here. Look, look, down here!'' exclaimed the Ghost.

They were a boy and girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half so horrible and dread.

Scrooge started back, appalled. Having them shown to him in this way, he tried to say they were fine children, but the words choked themselves, rather than be parties to a lie of such enormous magnitude.

``Spirit! are they yours?'' Scrooge could say no more.

``They are Man's,'' said the Spirit, looking down upon them. ``And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it!'' cried the Spirit, stretching out its hand towards the city. ``Slander those who tell it ye! Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse! And bide the end!''

``Have they no refuge or resource?'' cried Scrooge.

``Are there no prisons?'' said the Spirit, turning on him for the last time with his own words. ``Are there no workhouses?''

The bell struck twelve.

I doubt George W. Bush has ever read A Christmas Carol, although I might make it my Christmas wish that he be visited by Three Spirits of his own--there are certainly enough scenes he could be shown of how life really is for many people in America and around the world, and enough victims of his actions and neglect to make Tiny Tim and his family look like The Brady Bunch.  

At Christmas time, when so much goodwill seems possible, perhaps a night wrestling with some demons might melt even the heart of the scrooges we have sitting in the Oval Office.

Cross-posted at Street Prophets