Here is the beating heart of A Christmas Carol: The world can change if Scrooge can change (an essay by Dwight Lindley, Eng. Professor at Hillsdale College)

At certain times, we find ourselves caught in a curious paradox: I want to do a meaningful thing, to be involved in this or that important occasion, yet it’s just so hard. How can an activity I care so much about still be so difficult — even to the point of being off-putting?

Depending on what’s at the forefront of your mind, this could sound like a description of your political or family life. There’s a presidential election coming next year (as you may have heard), and it is important: Why then is it so discouraging to think about doing your part? And soon you’ll be gathering with family for Christmas: You may want — even need — to do it, yet is there anything more stressful to contemplate sometimes?

In each case, the phenomenon is the same. Both situations come down to the possibility of change in a broken world. We want to believe that transformation, personal and social, is possible, yet we have a strong hunch it might not be. Is there anything more hopelessly gridlocked than contemporary politics and culture? And in the family setting, as we reenter our natural habitats, why would we think things could ever be different? All the old wounds, burdens, and complicated memories are there: My mother will of course expect me to do X, which I hate, and my cousins will certainly go into Y in their usual way. None of this will ever change. Can’t we just stay home this year for Christmas and sit out the election cycle?

Against such a backdrop, the undying popularity of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol makes sense. The little book has never been out of print since Dickens first wrote it in 1843, and as we know, it has been repeated, rehashed, and reimagined in countless films, TV adaptations, stage productions, public readings, parodies, and so forth.

These are signs of some essential good thing we desire, abiding and profound, that A Christmas Carol gets at. Part of that desirable good is wrapped up in its picture of human transformation. Inside the story, the drastic about-face undertaken by Ebenezer Scrooge seems possible, despite all the odds. Change, we think as we read or watch, can happen. A Christmas Carol strikes us as an expression of hope in a dark time.

At the story’s beginning, Scrooge is not only greedy, alienated, and unhappy, but completely cynical as well. “A merry Christmas, uncle!” says his nephew, Fred. “God save you!” After his expected “Bah! Humbug!” Scrooge makes clear what he thinks about Christmastime revelries: Given the hardships of life, and especially those of the wintry close of the year, what reason is there to rejoice?

“If I could work my will,” says Scrooge, “every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas,’ on his lips, should be boiled in his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!”

Like us contemplating the family gathering or pausing over the latest poll data, Scrooge is bitter because he senses there is no real possibility of a happy outcome. Things are what they are, and the costs outweigh the benefits, so why bother pretending all is well?

Nevertheless, Scrooge’s point of view does shift, gradually, with the help of his ghostly visitors. Part of what he begins to see, of course, is the truth about others — that there is a possibility of happiness in a dark world (as at his nephew’s house), and hope for the healing of those in need (as in the case of Tiny Tim).

But beneath these realizations lies a deeper and more foundational truth: that Scrooge himself can change. The Ghost of Christmas Past famously shows Scrooge his sad childhood self, eliciting his pity, and his early employer, Mr. Fezziwig, who calls forth Scrooge’s love.

Of Fezziwig, the older Scrooge remarks, “He has the power to render us happy or unhappy; to make our service light or burdensome; a pleasure or a toil. Say that his power lies in words and looks; in things so slight and insignificant that it is impossible to add and count ’em up: what then? The happiness he gives, is quite as great as if it cost a fortune.”

Between the desire to help his pitiful former self and delight in Fezziwig’s gratuitous goodness, Scrooge has been called beyond his old miserly limits into a new life where he must be a different person. Love requires it. The rest of the narrative builds up his hope and confidence that this transformation will be possible.

Here is the beating heart of A Christmas Carol: The world can change if Scrooge can change. If he can become a better lover, a soul of generosity and warmth, then he can love the world around him into a better place. As the end of the book says, “He became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world.”

So we, in our families, broken but beloved as they are — and we in our bumbling, bickering, great nation — can find a starting point again this year in Scrooge. The poet Richard Wilbur once wrote that as a person begins to rise in the morning, “the soul descends once more in bitter love / to accept the waking body.”

Dickens’ A Christmas Carol gives us the strength and hope again to make this difficult acceptance, to rise up and believe that we and others are capable of becoming who we are meant to be. If that is possible, anything is possible.

“God bless Us, Every One!”

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[Dwight Lindley teaches English literature at Hillsdale College. (The above article reprinted w/o permission from THE FEDERALIST (25 Dec 23)]

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MERRY WHATEVER AND HAPPY BLAH-BLAH-BLAH by K2

OK, so here we are on the annual Christian holiday of ‘Christmas Day’. It’s been a bloody, chaotic, embittered year, thanks in no small part to all the leftist radical progressives who steadfastly refuse to accept irrefutable facts and laws (at least they seem so, as best we are able to determine) of the physical universe and persist in believing in Pink Unicorns and other utter fantasies of the terminal (leftist) ideologue.

The radio stations are all pumping out a variety of mass media sewage that is unique to this season, which consists of a mix of hard-sell, low-brow commercial advertisements, mixed with ‘number unknown’ marketing’ expressions of thanks for past purchases (...oh, and Best Seasons Greetings!). Televised fare is far worse, with dozens of crappy, ‘B-movie’ Christmas movies that can be cheaply bought from the broadcasting syndicates at rock-bottom prices, all, naturally interspersed with so many ‘commercial messages’ that whatever story-line they contain is submerged in their excremental dreck and mostly lost.

Your friendly bean-counter healthcare HMO Human Relations Department is sending you Christmas Cards from your kindly HMO doctor that are thoughtfully signed by signature-simulating machines (saying, for the most part, “Best Seasons Greetings from your personal doctor who always has your best health needs uppermost in his mind!” and other bullshit statements). We are exhorted to spend, spend, spend lavishly on a surfeit of materialist luxuries (because if we don’t, the whole economy may crash!) and goody-good organisations like the Shriners Hospital and the Saint Jude Foundation are trotting out their grotesque little poster-children who promise to send you a teddy-bear throw if you’ll just send them ‘only $19 a month to show them you CARE!’ (pause to wipe away tears).

Meanwhile, the down-home, cowboy-hat-Dude that shills for the Wounded Warrior Project on expensive TV spots also tells us, between embarrassing set-shots of grotesquely disfigured and disabled vets, that he also wants your ‘...only $19 a month to show that you care!’ Ditto for the DAV (Disabled American Vets), who have now gone big-time, spending God-knows how much of their substantial donations on expensive commercial broadcast media air-time to plug that tear-jerking, emotionally plaintive message.

Leaving the whole progressive nightmare that now exists in America (thanks to ‘woke’ activists and Marcuse’s Marxist inspired ‘Critical Theories’) aside from all this for the moment, overseas the world is equally chaotic, with the Jews and the Islamic radicals going at it as never before, slaughtering countless numbers of innocents on BOTH sides of that yawning and irresolvable, unhealable divide; the relatively wealthy and well-off Western democracies are presently being overrun by the sheer number of illegal immigrant refugees whose motivation for leaving home is 9/10ths economic and probably less than 1% to escape persecution. As a result, the entire world is off kilter, teetering on Atlas’s broad shoulders and about to spin off into the void, as China, North Korea, Russia and Iran do an anticipatory jig on the envisioned graves of American and European democracies.

Yes. Folks, there really ISN'T a Santa Claus. Best NOT to take actor Jimmie Stewart’s rather premature statement that “It’s a Wonderful World” to heart because it ain’t now and ain’t never gonna be, bunkie!

I reprinted the above brief article by Hillsdale College’s English Prof (Dwight Lindley) that precedes these words because, although Hillsdale College generally has a positive, uplifting take on life that most of us may possibly benefit from, in this particular case they are absolutely dead wrong. The title of that brief secular homily by Lindley is (more or less), ‘Because we can change, so can the world!’

First of all, extracting a principle that it is possible for all of humankind to change from the example of one single individual is both falacious, nonsensical and disproven by practical reality! Not only that but it's very bad science'.

Second, the presumption that because so utterly philistine a shriveled soul as Ebeneezer Scrooge can have a change of heart (note: it pays to observe here that his dramatic change of heart…not from actual cardiac surgery…has been forcefully imposed upon him by means of spiritual torture by ghosts, which are naturally enough fantasy creatures that are about as real as any human being claiming to be the Son of God!), then so too can the entire world follow suit...

“Oh, fabjous day, callooh, callay (we chortled in our joy), to quote Mr. Dickens in a separate fantasy fable of his, as we contemplate this rather presumptive bit of shared optimism from the likes of Hillsdale College…C. S. Lewis would be so very proud!

I fondly hope that anyone who is even the merest student of sociology, human psychology and/or the behavioral sciences would recognise that ‘the world can change’ is about as attainable an ideal as ordering real green cheese from an FDA-approved factory in Oceanus Procellarum  (the largest of the Lunar Maria) is!

Anyone, additionally, who has read some of the more notable tomes of behavioral science, such as Gustav LeBon’s 1895 classic, ‘THE CROWD’, will all too readily understand the sheer impossibility of the entire world EVER really ‘changing’ in that manner. It’s simply all too utterly simplistic to warrant any response other than a cringing shrug and perplexed wonderment over what the distinguished Professor of English has been smoking recently (just recall the 70s’s ‘Tiny Doctor Tim' O’Leary, if you think that pedigreed academics can’t wig-out on substance, whether chemical or spiritual, LoL).

Dickens was, as we all know (or should, at any rate), a typical Victorian proponent of good works and empathy for the down-trodden masses, and his marvelous literary works are truly wonders that everyone (worth their undergrad ‘honors’, at least) should be acquainted with (oh, but no one reads classics anymore, do they?...unless said classics have been perversely transmogrified into woke paeans by the Disney people and turned into an SFX movie).

Unfortunately, Mr. Dickens was altruistically deluded, although his heart was in the right place (in the substernal area of his abdomen, LoL). To draw such a blindly charitable, grossly hope-filled presumption as he manifests in his many works, promoting the cause of Christian altruism, is an insupportable and unrealistic stance to take when contrasted against the backdrop of mass humanity’s bi-polar essence.

I seriously doubt that the Russians waste any kindly thoughts on the fate of the victims of their Iranian-supplied aerial weapons, or that the Hamas radical extremists have guilt feelings about the Israeli civilians, as they fiendishly rape and tortured their hapless captives. Extreme violence and genocidal predation is, of course, not a franchiseable commodity exclusive to Hitler’s German National Socialists, or Genghis Khan’s Golden Horde, or anyone else.

If Professor Lindley (or Doctor Lindley, assuming he has attained that august status) wishes to step out into the midst of one of the dozens of ‘no-man’s’ lands that currently exist around the world (or even confront a bunch of keyed-up, radical progressive woke leftists, for that matter) and plead his case with them to ‘Please, for the love of God, have a change of heart!’, he’ll definitely get my personal vote for ‘Christian Martyr of the Year 2023’ (but he won’t get a penny towards his funeral expenses, since he was/is a big boy and should have known what he was doing).

To change tacks briefly here, aside from having studied comparative religions as a Berkeley undergrad many years ago, I also spent a number of years working closely with and living among the Arabs of the Southwest Asian region (formerly the 'Middle East’). While I had many friends among them and grew to love their cultural achievements, cuisine and many of their customs, I early-on came to realise that the ages-old Jews versus the Islamicists contention shall never be resolved, regardless of countless numerous Western diplomatic interventions and political attempts to heal the festering wound that the conflict constitutes. In order to better understand exactly why that is the case, I’m afraid you’ll have to read some of my other essays on topics such as the Arabs, Islam and Islamic extremism, but suffice it here to say that after 15+ years of experiencing direct associations with the Kuwaitis, Saudis, Egyptians and Iraqis, my obervations have merely confirmed what my academic knowledge of religions had already convinced me of.

Chief amnng these being that given the intensity of most religious believers (especially those with sparse or no education, who come from sere, volatile lands and are highly emotional to begin with), there can never be any meaningful accommodation between any of them (especially between Radical Islam and Christianity) and all the others. QED, the Catholics vs. the Protestants, the Jews vs. the Christians, the Islamicists vs. the Jews (or even between the secular scientists of demonstrated physical reality vs. the followers of the Great Pink LGBTQ+ Unicorn, for that matter). You name the religious conflict of choice: you eventually end up with BIG SH*T (i.e. the killing of others in the name of some God or another).

I should state here that while working in the Southwest Asian area, I also worked with a large number of Palestinian expatriates who had been given refugee sanctuary by the Saudis (in the midst of all the terrible fighting that was then going on in their ‘shared’ homeland), so I have in fact ‘walked the walk’ as well as ‘talked the talk’ in these regards. And while I made a number of friends among them also, I also quickly discerned the fact that they will never be amenable to any sort of compromise in their on-going battle to settle who has the most legitimate right to claim Palestine as their homeland.

After all, you must remember that prior to the massive expansion of the Islamic Caliphate from the Arabian Peninsula (from 632 ACE onwards), Palestine had been largely conquered by European Christians, so any arguments of who stole what from whom suffer considerably from a lack of absolute credibility on either side of the issue. The Jews therefore have just as much right to claim that area as their homeland as the indigenous Arabs who (way back in Mr. Peabody’s Time machine excursions) inhabited what is now Palestine. In short (and in summary), both sides are farting sideways and blowing smoke out their nether extremities in the names of their collective interpretations of God...which wouldn't be so bad if their CH4/H2 exhaust wasn't fatally toxic.

Right. So here we are, back in the present midst of all the festering, cranky contention that characterises the modern age, with each and every one of us feeling that we’re the sole light of wisdom and reason extant in a darkly crazed world. Not a happy scenario, is it? And then, along comes Dr. Lindley with his cheerful, optimistic message that it IS POSSIBLE for the world to change for the better.

Sorry, Dwight (and sorry, readers), it just ain’t ever gonna happen, so the best advice I can offer, given all the foregoing, is to strive to be as kind and as supportive you can be to all in your personal immediacy who indicate they are worthy of that regard. But don’t ever fool yourself into thinking that an Islamic tiger can change his/her/its stripes, or a Christian leopard his/her/its spots…unless they’re all simply misguided/deluded fools.

Ironically, the Christian message we all hear repeated endlessly this time of the year is, of course, “PEACE ON EARTH, GOOD WILL TO MEN!”

I would modify that somewhat to a more realistic “PEACE ON EARTH TO ALL MEN/WOMEN/GENDER-NEUTRALS/WHATEVERS OF GOOD WILL!”

Finally, good luck in 2024, Pilgrims! Don’t forget to have the conductor punch your banana for the return trip…as the 70s group, The Firesign Theatre, so famously put it in ‘Don’t Squeeze That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers!’ Urg!…Douglas Adams would be so very proud!

As for personal happiness, don’t delude yourself into thinking that you can reverse all the inherent disharmony in the world with kindly thoughts, prayers and intentions. Just focus on creating your own personal happiness any way you can short of interfering with anyone else’s to a significant extent and be grateful for what you (not your neighbor) have! It's likely the best we wretched mortals can strive for in this vale of tears called the 'human experience.'

At risk of endlessly repeating the same sage observation of Antonus Marcus Aurelius about the meaning of life, it may help to recall that he is reported to have said (in his Meditations), “The Chief aim of life is not to be in the majority but to avoid joining the ranks of the insane.”