Classy American Christmas

Yes, Virginia, there was not always a Santa Claus. In the early 19th century, Washington Irving, in the guise of a venerable colonialist of the ruling Knickerbocker dynasty, borrowed the old Dutch legend about Saint Nicholas and re-purposed it into the prototype of the American Santa Claus. A scant hundred years later, Coca-Cola re-purposed the re-purposing, and created the mass market image of Santa that we cherish to this very day - the morbidly obese dude with the snow-white beard and the red suit. 

Depression-Era Santa With His Handy Whip

 I guess Santa must have imbibed a whole lot of that original cocaine-laced high calorie sugary drink to gain all that weight and still be able to fly as high as a kite all night long. The subliminal message of Coca-Cola, even as it markets its brand to poor third world countries today, is that it's always better to be an unhealthy fat person than to look like the original St. Nick: decrepit, pale, and skeletal.

Although Charles Dickens is regularly credited as the "inventor of Christmas,"  the modern American version is very much the joint creation of the landed New York gentry, Wall Street and Madison Avenue. Our own post-Puritan, modern secular observances started as a public relations/propaganda campaign to get the rabble off the streets, and indoors, and therefore so out of sight and mind that the minority rich, safe within their own mansions, didn't have to give them another thought or another penny.

In the early days of the Republic, Christmas, when it was celebrated at all, was celebrated more like we observe Halloween today. The hoi polloi would roam the streets and bang on the doors of the high and mighty for handouts of food and money. Since the revelers were often drunk and rowdy, this had become a matter of grave concern to the moneyed classes. For one thing, Coca-Cola hadn't even been invented yet, and there was no electricity, let alone TV and Internet. The growing immigrant population couldn't even be trusted to go to the theatre to watch a Shakespeare play without it devolving into a fatal fracas.

The poor, especially the newly-arrived immigrants, had been rioting at Christmas-time practically since the founding of the Republic. Enter Washington Irving a/k/a Dietrich Knickerbocker. This writer, whose Legend of Sleepy Hollow has long been a staple of Halloween in America, actually helped to reverse our fall and winter holidays with his lesser-known Christmas stories. He had the leisure time to write his tales thanks largely to the generous support of his brother-in-law, a wealthy Wall Street financier.

Irving's yuletide yarns centered not around the harsh realities of New York's teeming slums, but around a benevolent, but entirely fictional, English squire who proactively welcomes the whole neighborhood into his Bracebridge Hall manor house before they get the crazy idea of annoyingly begging, not to mention breaking and entering. In the "those were the good old days" fashion so beloved of American myth-makers and modern demagogues, Irving tried to market Noblesse Oblige as a way of denying that hardships even existed in the tenements and sweatshops of New York City. In his own totally non-existent world of the recent European past, the rich and the poor had mingled as one great big happy family. Irving literally invented such legendary Christmas traditions as "The Crowning of the Lord of Misrule" as a more desirable way for exploited and restless working people to hope for the future, to believe in the beneficence of the plutocrats, and to celebrate the Winter Solstice as quietly and as peacefully as their betters. It was the 19th century version of Fake News.

Indeed, the Upper Crustopoly of yesteryear sounds remarkably similar to the 21st century Republican ideologues and liberal philanthrocapitalists and their insincere hectoring of the poor to get out their "culture of dependency" and embrace hard work and damp down their anger and resentment through the occasional entertainments provided to them by their necessarily stern masters.

Irving unctuously wrote,

There is something genuine and affectionate in the gaiety of the lower orders, when it is excited by the bounty and familiarity of those above them; the warm glow of gratitude enters into their mirth, and a kind word or a small pleasantry, frankly uttered by a patron, gladdens the heart of the dependent more than oil and wine.

Irving's literary propaganda was slow to catch on with "the lower orders," however. Either his targeted audience didn't read, or they were too poor to buy his books, because in 1828 the ruling class of New York City was finally forced to officially create a metropolitan Police Department to protect their lives and their property from the mob. Poor people had gone way beyond merely hitting up the aristocrats for food and petty cash at Christmas-time. The were rioting, burning, and looting to protest against gross class inequities. Wars among immigrant factions erupted, including attacks on worshipers as they came out of church. The ruling class essentially reinvented Christmas out of stark nativistic fear of the growing political power of ethnic populations, particularly Irish Catholics.

Astor Place Riot of 1849

  Santa's co-optation as a jingoistic political prop also proceeded apace. During the Civil War, he was drafted for a psy-ops campaign against the Confederacy. President Lincoln commissioned famed cartoonist Thomas Nast to create a bellicose image of the Right Jolly Old Elf (already having been further modernized by Irving's plutocratic pal Clement Moore in The Night Before Christmas) regaling a group of Union soldiers, an image that was to be distributed en masse in the slave-holding states.

If you thought that Billy Bob Thornton's hilariously perverted portrayal of Bad Santa was extreme, just get a load of Nast's vision of a St. Nick who gives with one hand and kills with the other. As historian Matthew W. Lively describes it,

Nast drew a patriotic Santa dressed in striped pants and a coat covered with stars sitting on his sleigh beneath a waving American flag. Two drummer boys in the foreground of the sketch appear fascinated with a jack-in-the-box toy. One soldier is shown opening his box to find a stocking stuffed with presents, while another soldier holds up the pipe he received as a present. In the background, other soldiers play football, chase a greased boar, and cook Christmas dinner. 
More surprisingly, Santa is shown amusing the soldiers by hanging a wooden effigy of Confederate president Jefferson Davis. So no one is mistaken as to its meaning, a text accompanying the drawing notes: “Santa Claus is entertaining the soldiers by showing them Jeff Davis’s future. He is tying a cord pretty tightly round his neck, and Jeff Davis seems to be kicking very much at such a fate.”

This was a direct slap in the face to the South, where Alabama, in 1836, had become the very first state to declare Christmas a legal holiday. It did not become a formal national holiday until 1870. Could this North vs. South campaign be the real, albeit forgotten, source of Fox News's perennial War Against the War Against Christmas agit-prop campaign?

Christmas just wouldn't be Christmas in America if we didn't get an endless loop of Yuletide TV spots of greetings from the troops in our nearly 1,000 military bases throughout the world to help us appreciate that killing and war happen, even during the Season of Peace. As an added propaganda bonus, theocratic Vice President Mike Pence even put the Christ back in Christmas with his visit to, quite literally, a whole second generation of US soldiers in Afghanistan. They've been there for almost as long as Washington Irving's Rip Van Winkle was in his 20-year coma.

Meanwhile, good luck to the 21st century gentry as far as getting poor people off the streets back home. Protests and riots might now be in a state of abeyance thanks to the relentless trickle-down, fear-mongering propaganda of the consolidated media-political complex and the country's addiction to electronic gadgets and drugs. But right along with the skyrocketing death rate from opioid abuse, homelessness once again is on the rise in the Homeland. People have taken to the streets not to protest, but because they have nowhere else to live.

More than half a million Americans will be spending Christmas outdoors or in a temporary shelter this year.

But, as Donald Trump's Housing and Urban Development Director Ben "Bootstraps" Carson puts it, "homelessness is not a government problem. It's everybody's problem" - meaning it's nobody's problem, especially not the problem of the pathocratic billionaires who've just received Congressional carte blanche to literally steal the last shriveled apple from the last little child's ragged Christmas stocking.

So despite the booming stock market and record economic "growth" and slightly lower poverty rates and slightly higher average wages, the rent is still too damned high for a lot of people. As reported by The Guardian, 

There was an increase [in homelessness] of 4.1% in New York. In the west, Seattle, Portland, San Diego, Sacramento and Oakland all reported surges of varying sizes. Most of the increase across the country is driven by people living in doorways, tents and RVs as opposed to in shelters. People of color are dramatically overrepresented: African Americans make up over one-third of the number.
In one sense the prevalence of homelessness seems odd, because the national poverty rate has fallen to around the same level as before the recession. Yet homelessness is linked to economic growth. In some of the nation’s more desirable major cities, housing is rapidly appreciating to a point where it is out of reach for lower earners.
Median hourly wages in the US have barely budged for decades, from $16.74 in 1973 to $17.86 in 2016, in terms of 2016 dollars, according to the Economic Policy Institute. But in New York, for instance, the hourly wage required to comfortably rent a one-bedroom is $27.29. In Los Angeles, it is $22.98.

But to make Ben Carson, and actually all of us, feel somewhat guilty about our own less-bad lives, The Guardian is also running a companion piece about how individual homeless people are bravely (or maybe just cynically) counting their meager blessings this year.

Many are grateful just to have their own tents to live in. Others are going the nostalgic Charlie Brown Christmas route and decorating their pathetic shedding rejected trees with a few donated plastic ornaments. "My boyfriend wants to just put it in a milk crate with a paper bag, but I’m going to make a proper stand for it," one woman said. "I have some fake Christmas presents that I’ll put under it. And if I can somehow manage to make about $10, I can get four strings of battery-operated lights to put around it."

***

Paul Krugman, one of my favorite New York Times pundits, has, for at least the thousandth time, announced that only the Republican side of the Duopoly despises the working class.

Like Rip Van Winkle, he seems to have been asleep during the Age of Obama, in which under a Democratic majority, the top One Percent reaped fully 94% of all the household wealth lost during the 2008 financial collapse. But neoliberal propaganda needs must, so Krugman restricts his class war angst to the GOP's newly-enacted tax bill. He was apparently napping during Obama's own quiet parting gift to America in December 2016: a bailout of Wall Street foreclosure kings turned high-rent private equity landlords.

Krugman fumes:

How did they [the GOP] manage to produce this political lemon? Josh Barro argues that Republicans have forgotten how to talk about tax cuts. But I think it runs deeper: Republicans have developed a deep disdain for people who just work for a living, and this disdain shines through everything they do. This is true both on substance – the tax bill heavily favors owners over workers – and in the way they talk about it.

My published response:

 In a 2011 "Meet the Press," David Gregory gently and gingerly confronted Paul Ryan about his sick desire to cut Medicare, even though 80% of Americans don't want it touched. Then as now, Ryan scoffed in that slimy, earnest way of his.

"Leaders are expected to lead and are expected to change the polls, because that's what the country wants," he actually said.

"Country" and "America" are of course GOP-speak for the top 1%, a/k/a the Donor Class, a/k/a the Owner Class. And Trump goes them one better. "L'Amerique, C'est Moi!" is what he actually means when he says the tax bill is a giant Christmas present to America. That is, if he could speak French - or even English above a fourth grade level.

His pathological greed has made him so ignorant that he probably thinks Noblesse Oblige is one of those foreign terrorist organizations gathering at our precious borders.

When Ryan says the reverse Robin Hood tax package will become more popular over time, what he's really saying is that the actual population will become so demoralized and so weak over time that they won't even have the energy to get mad, let alone respond to polls. Another metaphor for this phenomenon is the frogs slowly dying in a pot of simmering water - although the GOP's culinary method is to set the burner up to an immediate furious boil before they dump us all in for the quickest possible kill.

Joyeux Noel, everybody!