John Leech, “Scrooge and Marley”
Tuesday – Christmas Eve
I learned in a Capital Times article the other day that, in some of his radio addresses during the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt read aloud from Charles Dickens’ Christmas Carol. Today we obviously need to turn to Dickens once again, what with unemployment running high, with Republican members of Congress already cutting $5 billion in food stamps and wanting to cut $40 billion more, with them also allowing longtime unemployment insurance to lapse three days after Christmas, with Republican legislatures and Republican governors (with some exceptions) doing their best to deny the working poor insurance under the Affordable Care Act, and with one Georgia Senate candidate even calling for poor children to begin working in the school cafeterias if they want to receive free lunches.
These people tell us that they’re concerned about the budget, but their deficit insincerity is exposed the instant one suggests raising taxes on the wealthy or cutting tax loopholes.
Dickens reminds us of the spiritual cost that comes with such hardness of heart. Here’s his description of Scrooge:
Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge. a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dog-days; and didn’t thaw it one degree at Christmas.
Scrooge, you probably will recall, is visited by his old partner Marley, who warns him of the hell he will face if he continues to turn his back on the needy. Then he walks him to the window and shows him a terrifying sight. Although Scrooge witnesses ghosts, those of us who are still alive suffer similar existences when we allow our greed to suffocate the benevolent longings of our souls. As Scrooge’s nephew puts it, such offenses “carry their own punishment”:
The air was filled with phantoms, wandering hither and thither in restless haste, and moaning as they went. Every one of them wore chains like Marley’s Ghost; some few (they might be guilty governments) were linked together; none were free. Many had been personally known to Scrooge in their lives. He had been quite familiar with one old ghost, in a white waistcoat, with a monstrous iron safe attached to its ankle, who cried piteously at being unable to assist a wretched woman with an infant, whom it saw below, upon a doorstep- The misery with them all was, clearly, that they sought to interfere, for good, in human matters, and had lost the power for ever.
Roosevelt saw Dickens as an ally. In John Nichols’ report on FDR’s use of Christmas Carol, note especially what Roosevelt says about entitlement programs and unemployment insurance, both of which are under attack by today’s right wing:
“A Christmas rite for me is always to re-read that immortal little story by Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol. Reading between the lines and thinking as I always do of Bob Cratchit’s humble home as a counterpart of millions of our own American homes, the story takes on a stirring significance to me,” Roosevelt recalled in his 1939 address. “Old Scrooge found that Christmas wasn’t a humbug. He took to himself the spirit of neighborliness. But today neighborliness no longer can be confined to one’s little neighborhood. Life has become too complex for that. In our country neighborliness has gradually spread its boundaries — from town, to county, to state and now at last to the whole nation.
“For instance,” Roosevelt marveled, as he spoke just days before the first Social Security checks would be dispatched, “who a generation ago would have thought that a week from tomorrow (on) Jan. 1, 1940, tens of thousands of elderly men and women in every state and every county and every city of the nation would begin to receive checks every month for old age retirement insurance — and not only that but that there would be also insurance benefits for the wife, the widow, the orphan children and even dependent parents? Who would have thought a generation ago that people who lost their jobs would, for an appreciable period, receive unemployment insurance — that the needy, the blind and the crippled children would receive some measure of protection which will reach down to the millions of Bob Cratchits, the Marthas and the Tiny Tims of our own ‘four-room homes’?”
Today we can ask who, a generation ago, would have thought that we would start denying people unemployment insurance at a time when there are three or more workers for every available job.
It’s worthy noting that it brings us far more joy to support the poor than to wage war on them. Note that, when Scrooge sees the light, he immediately (to put the case in contemporary terms) raises the minimum wage, provides health care for a family with a preexisting condition, is probably thinking of educational support, and adds in energy credits. Oh yes, and there’s also a food stamp equivalent in the large turkey that Scrooge sends to the Cratchit family. :
‘A merry Christmas, Bob!’ said Scrooge, with an earnestness that could not be mistaken, as he clapped him on the back. ‘A merrier Christmas, Bob, my good fellow, than I have given you for many a year! I’ll raise your salary, and endeavour to assist your struggling family, and we will discuss your affairs this very afternoon, over a Christmas bowl of smoking bishop, Bob! Make up the fires, and buy another coal-scuttle before you dot another i, Bob Cratchit!’
May such a spirit of Christmas enter our own political discourse. God bless us every one.
