I encountered a story yesterday that took place a century and a half ago. The story is about a very successful businessman who finds himself surrounded, on all fronts, by laggards and layabouts. Everyone wants to take advantage of him. His workers are never thankful for the opportunities he has created for them. The only opportunity they care about involves those that will allow them to steal from the very institution they work for.
The community begins to change around him and moves inexorably towards communism. As it does the city starts to demand that the hero comply by a series of attempts to force him into redistribution of wealth.
As he continues the good fight the community resorts to a conspiracy of the highest order. They work together to bring the hero into compliance by spreading the harshest of lies about him to all who will listen. Finally, one evening, they drug his food and later that evening torture him with a series of ghastly enactments designed to finally break his will.
He’s excoriated as a selfish capitalist out only for himself. The conspirators even distort his achievements while under the influence and twist them all into evil aspirations of a heartless capitalist. In the coldest of enactments he’s ridiculed for not giving more than his share and is told that he is directly responsible for the likely eventual death of his own beloved assistant’s child for lack of support for adequate socialized health care.
What starts out as an uplifting story about our hero fighting against the evils of Communism and Marxism ends deplorably as his will is broken and his sanity shattered. Everything he worked for is now adapted for the good of the whole and he lives out his final days in the ignorant bliss of calculated insanity.
This story is a rather popular one published in 1843 by well-known author Charles Dickens. We know it as, “A Christmas Carol“. I saw the new Disney version yesterday (review soon to follow) and my viewing was partially ruined by my continual realization of how a dogmatic conservative would see this movie in a completely different, and frankly, sad and disturbing light. For him Ebenezer Scrooge is a hero and the tale ultimately one of failure and compliance. I can easily see how this wonderful story could be viewed by such people as an attempt to indoctrinate us via the evil arm of the MSM (mainstream media).
If you think I’m going too far consider that on several occasions Sean Hannity has decried Halloween as a leftist holiday designed to brainwash our children into socialism and the welfare state by teaching them that handouts are good and there simply for the asking. Through the eyes of such people I can easily see such a re-imagining of this timeless tale. Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, with visions of death camps and re-education camps would have little trouble seeing this as a plot to steal the minds of our children.
It’s from this perspective that I realize just how lost our fellow citizens have become. God bless us—everyone.
