Tea Party & Dickensian Apathy: Ebenezer Paul?
It's clear that the American Right, that bastion of Christian idealism, truly understands one of the central tenets of Christianity: letting the poor rot and the sick die.
"LET HIM DIE," chants the Tea Party and its candidates, because that is precisely what Christ preached in his time on earth. Christ is famous for his apathy toward the poor, and his flouting of the sick. Christ loved the death penalty. He loved it so much he willingly submitted to it.
Then again, he could afford to care about the poor and infirm: he could heal the sick and create bounty out of seven fishes and seven loaves of bread. He could water into wine. What did he care about healthcare welfare?
Listening to the appalling--I mean appalling, how hateful can the Right in his country truly get--beliefs of the people running on the republican ticket, I remembered the exchange in Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, in which two alms-gatherers knock on Scrooge's door, asking for money for those "in want of common comforts."
"Are there no prisons," the famous miser asks. "And the Union workhouses, are they still in operation."
The charity workers affirm that they are.
And Scrooge tells the solicitors:
"I wish to be left alone," said Scrooge. "Since you ask me what I wish, gentlemen, that is my answer. I don't make merry myself at Christmas and I can't afford to make idle people merry. I help to support the establishments I have mentioned-they cost enough; and those who are badly off must go there."
"Many can't go there; and many would rather die."
"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!"
The Republican party is taking its social policies out of the mouth of one of literature's most famous villains. From one of the most soulless, heartless, mean-spirited, broken, terrible, selfish, evil, hateful characters in literature, the Tea Party is choosing its course for the country. Of course, Scrooge turns it around in the final reel--only after he is forced to experience loss and hatred first hand, only once he is forced to face his own impending damnation first hand.
We generally don't have plot devices like that in real life.
Which his too bad, because right now it looks like they're winning.
I've always said that conservatives want not only to keep us int the status quo, they want to send is backwards--to a time when women stayed in the kitchen and cooked, where wife and child remained submissive to husband, and to a time where homosexuals were considered mentally ill and could be blacklisted for publicly declaring their attraction. Pre-war, I always thought, as in World War II.
Apparently they want to send us back further than that. Back to the industrial age.
Too bad America has no industry of its own.
And too bad America couldn't care less that the supposedly Christian candidates on the right have co-opted their policy from Dickensian apathy and from the mouth of the world's most famous asshole.
And where are those three ghosts when you need them?
