What Lies Beneath: Ghosts of Christmas

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

In "A Christmas Carol" by Charles Dickens there are so many statements that run counter to today's conservative fad, and yet run side by side with the love we seek to emulate.

First, we must contrast that love with the disregard for humanity that hearts mired in mammon manifest everlastingly.  We must peer where hard waters flow down and down and down.

I give you Ebenezer Scrooge, the man from Mammontown.

He ridicules his nephew for wishing him a merry Christmas.  I suspect if his nephew had said, "Happy Holidays!" Scrooge would not have been less rude.

We all know how he mistreats his lone employee.  He's a pure capitalist, a man of business, this coveting old sinner Scrooge who sees Bob Cratchit as a number. 

And what is the number of this beast of burden?  It is the lowest amount he must pay to avoid being accused of being a slaver.  

That amount is recorded in his accounting ledger under "labor expense."

However, it is when Scrooge tells two solicitors asking for a contribution to help the poor that we see where his politics lie.  He says he supports prisons, union workhouses, the Treadmill, and the Poor Law.

We Americans love to put poor people into prison and think nothing of the expense.  But give a man a food stamp, well, that's breaking a law of the god mammon.

All that sound we hear of squalling children is not the sound of want and ignorance ringing in our ears,  but the sound that Lord Mammon hears, that ripping sound of the very Kleenex of society shredding itself when the "undeserving" get fed from taxes that all of us good, hard working people pay.

In all fairness, Scrooge preferred a conservative solution to poverty.  He supported those institutions mentioned above.  It was not compassionate conservatism, but when has it ever been?

Indeed, prisons we know, but the Treadmill we know not today.  

That was a device whereby prisoners could generate power for mills by climbing onto a large paddle wheel.  While holding a bar, they stepped onto the blades and turned the wheel.    

Oscar Wilde wrote of it when he was imprisoned for being a homosexual in 1895 (the good old days for a lot of people in 2013...one of my hometowns celebrates a 1890s Day...imagine that...I never went).  

This is from Wilde's "Ballad of Reading Gaol."

We banged the tins and bawled the hymns

And sweated on the mill

But in the heart of every man

Terror was lying still

The Poor Law was devised by a prime minister, who was himself a rather cold hearted tea named Earl Grey.  It stated:

(a) no able-bodied person was to receive money or other help from the Poor Law authorities except in a workhouse;

(b) conditions in workhouses were to be made very harsh to discourage people from wanting to receive help;

(c) workhouses were to be built in every parish or, if parishes were too small, in unions of parishes;

(d) ratepayers in each parish or union had to elect a Board of Guardians to supervise the workhouse, to collect the Poor Rate and to send reports to the Central Poor Law Commission;

(e) the three man Central Poor Law Commission would be appointed by the government and would be responsible for supervising the Amendment Act throughout the country.

This is the antipode of welfare as we know it.  Food stamps would be decades away in our nation.

Next time, ghosts more humane than humans.

Blessings...