Once upon a time, Republicans at least pretended to care about the bottom 99.9%. Even Reagan justified the massive tax breaks he enacted for the rich on the grounds that what the rich enjoyed today would "trickle down" to the workers who generated that wealth in the first place. In other words, whether you agreed with him or not (most economists and historians don't), the GOP of 30 years ago felt compelled to make the case that their policies would affect all Americans, not just a tiny elite.
No longer. Today's emboldened GOP no longer even tries to court the middle and working classes, not to mention the unwashed masses who live below the poverty line, out of work and home and hope. Repealing the inheritance tax is justified not on how it might affect the country as a whole, perhaps stimulating business and lowering unemployment (whether this argument is evidence-based or not is irrelevant; what is important is that today's Republicans don't even bother to make it).
Instead, the party that eschewed pointy-headed academics and the reality-based community in general now wraps its policies in pseudo-intellectual philosophical obfuscations. Death, they say, should not be a taxable event (even though the survivors, who did nothing to generate the wealth in question, not the decedent is being taxed). What would have had to have been a pseudo-populist argument in the 1980s ("the estate tax is bad because it might break up some family businesses" (even though it doesn't and is very easy to avoid by visiting a financial planner and signing a few pieces of paper)) has now become an abstract philosophical argument. Regardless of societal or budgetary consequences, the estate tax should be repealed because taxing the children of very, very wealthy people is just not right.
So the gloves are off and the GOP is no longer pretending to care about the rest of us. Rick Perry was booed during a Republican debate for showing what seems to have become the ultimate Republican sin - compassion (the same audiences cheered executions and people being allowed to die for want of health insurance). As someone who voted Republican myself in the not-so-distant past, I never thought that the sorts of crass, often racist remarks conservatives would make to each other in private about the poor essentially deserving to be poor and the government having no role in helping them because the Law of Unintended Consequences (the only law Republicans seem to respect these days, except for the case of abortion prohibition (which, unlike firearm restrictions, would be universally obeyed) or invading other countries to make us safer.
Since the leading GOP presidential contenders seem to be competing with each other in a race to the bottom to see who can be the most cruel, I wondered how far we are from seeing a reinterpretation of some of our culture's favorite Christmas stories through a Republican point of view:
The GOP Christmas Carol retitled Scrooge, the Ultimate Job-Creator:
Scrooge is not cruel or misinformed, but a hard-nosed, realistic business man. Tiny Tim - whose illness makes him economically unproductive (this was the golden, pre-union age of child labor) - deserves no health care. Besides, he should have chosen his parents better. His father, Bob Cratchit, comes across as shiftless and manipulative, trying to cheat Scrooge out of a day's wages for doing no work at all. Even if it is one day a year, Christmas is viewed the same way the Puritans who landed on Plymouth Rock viewed it: as a decadent, pagan celebration that is invalid because it is not mentioned in the Bible.
The reader of Scrooge, the Ultimate Job-Creator would find it very difficult to like Cratchit or his whining little son, and could understand by the end of the novella why Scrooge deserves to accumulate so much wealth and why Cratchit has so little. The heartwarming GOP re-telling of this timeless tale will do for Charles Dickens what the far right evangelicals have already done for Jesus: make him appear to be telling a radically different tale than the one he actually told, with a radically new and improved message.
Cratchit, it turns out, makes far less than Scrooge and is unable to afford either a coat for himself or a doctor for his son, not because of bad luck, poor education, or widespread poverty at the time (that was far more likely in that pre-death tax era to be passed on from generation to generation), but because he really didn't want to work all that much, preferring instead to sneak off and waste time with his family. How Scrooge chooses to distribute it, if at all, is his business and his business alone. Scrooge has no moral obligation to provide anything - not healthcare, not even a coat - to his employees or his fellow citizens, and Cratchit should be lucky just to have a job. Scrooge is simply not his brother's (or his employee's) keeper.
Those who owe Ebenezer money are portrayed as thoughtless deadbeats, losers who never should have accepted the subprime loan Scrooge was so generous to make to such uncreditworthy people in the first place.
The men who visit Scrooge asking for money for charity will be given a lecture by Scrooge who shames them into seeing that the redistribution of wealth they are encouraging only worsens the poverty they are trying to alleviate by threatening the coal and textile and manufacturing industries that make life in Victorian England so wonderful (for the owners of the coal mines, textile mills, and factories at least). They declare By Jove! Scrooge has a point, and promise then and there to renounce charity work, instead becoming brokers on the Exchange or something far more useful to society.
Class warrior and socialist schemer George Bailey doesn't get away with it in the GOP version of It's a Wonderful Life.
The Republican remake of It's a Wonderful Life retitled Pottersville: How An Enterprising Businessman Saved Bedford Falls From the Socialist Bailey Cartel. In the Republican version, Henry F. Potter is shown as the true hero who manages to defeat a struggling, inbred family business, the Bailey Building and Loan Association, headed by George Bailey. Bailey comes across as a scheming socialist who only appears to be helping his community; in reality, this help comes at a terrible cost as those families who live in affordable homes financed with reasonable mortgages are made dependent on this generosity. Over time, Bailey managed to make the entire community dependent on him to the point he can manipulate and extort them not to withdraw all their money at once. He even infuses his own cash at one point to keep his bank solvent.
Bailey Park, a wasteful affordable housing project that builds houses for economically unsuccessful people who clearly do not deserve them, is ultimately so unprofitable that the Bailey Building and Loan Association goes bankrupt, helped along by the negligence of an incompetent employee that any self-respecting corporation would have fired decades ago (as indeed a triumphant Potter does at the end of the film when he refuses to hire Uncle Billy, who spends his final days wandering the streets of the town he once tried to subvert to his family's radical socialist agenda).
An angel appears in the GOP remake of this American socialist tale, but not the bumbling, New Age Clarence. The GOP angel is tough as nails, trim, and business-friendly. He respects profits as much as the prophets. He visits George not to save him, but to taunt him with the fact he is already lost and forsake. George is shown visions of the living hell that Bedford Falls could continue to be if he continues to resist a hostile takeover by Potter.
The angel (who looks like Jesus with a neatly trimmed beard and a pinstripe suit) explains the importance of maximizng revenues and minimizing costs, patiently showing the dim-witted do-gooder the extraordinary profit opportunities he had passed up. On the back of a napkin in the bar Bailey visits after his plunge in the river, Clarence draws a supply-demand curve and shows George how he could bundle all the mortgages together and sell them at a significant markup to Wall Street investors, perhaps even offer derivatives based on the value of these mortgages. If most of the people taking out the mortgages foreclosed, it would no longer be his problem, since he had long since collateralized and sold them.
Shaking his head at how he could have been so foolish, a contrite George Bailey presents himself to Potter and begs to become his junior partner. Potter, who is portrayed as a stern but wise father-like figure, whose cruelty is actually kind in the very long term, believes Bailey is too compassionate (weak) and unreliable to be on his staff. Using contacts he has groomed over the years, he lobbies the state to launch a massive fraud investigation into the Bailey Building and Loan Association. Bailey is convicted, his wife divorces him and in a poignant scene reminiscent of "you had me at hello" in Jerry McGuire, Potter sweeps her off her feet, marrying her and moving her and her children into a far larger home in his gated community.
Although most of the original residents of what was once called Bedford Falls left for want of work (Bailey's Building and Loan Association was broken into pieces, its pension fund raided, and then what was left was sold to venture capitalists at a massive profit). What remains of Bedford Falls, now Pottersville, looks comfortably familiar: a Walmart, a Home Depot, a KFC, McDonald's, and Hardee's with acres of black asphalt parking lots now sprawl over where Bailey's affordable housing project once stood.
A cameo appearance by Sarah Palin as a happy McDonald's employee ("would you like fries with that? Gotcha!") underscores the importance of preserving America's true small town values: low prices that almost compensate for the even lower wages cheerfully accepted by a non-unionized, over-leveraged workforce whose lack of financial cushion or social security make them hustle all the harder to enrich the Potters of the world even more. Gathered around a Christmas tree, the newly constituted Potter family including Bailey's ex-wife and their children, hear a bell randomly tinkle. "Look, Mommy!" shouts Zuzu pointing. "A CEO just earned his annual bonus!" "That's right, dear!" beams Potter proudly. "That's just right!"
The GOP Grinch: Why Christmas Deserved to be Stolen. Grinch is presented as a thoughtful if eccentric class warrior trying to prevent that mass redistribution of wealth known as the Christmas gift exchange. As a freedom fighter launching daring midnight raids on the socialist collective of Whoville, he is misunderstood by everyone, even his dog, until the day after his great Roast Beast snatch, the Whos down in Whoville realize the anti-business, enabling message underlying gift-giving, and pour into the streets breaking into a spontaneous, joyful song of gratitude. The children, who are all unemployed and of no economic value, would only be enabled by handouts from their parents.
Grinch's increase in heart size is actually explained by severe Congestive Heart Failure which he was finally able to treat by liquidating the loot he had amassed from Whoville and paying a cardiologist in cash. In the final scenes of the movie, he visits a dermatologist to remove the green tint to his skin that has always put him at a competitive disadvantage in the corporate world.
Repeat liposuctions fail to remove his paunch completely and despite the dramatic improvement, he still looks strange. But in an attempt to make a new start as a respectable business man, he changes his name, adding a "Gin" to his surname and choosing the name of a lizard-like creature as his first name. Newt Gingrich dumps Max at the nearest pound and heads to Washington to start his lobbying and political career.
And now you know... the rest of the story.
No longer. Today's emboldened GOP no longer even tries to court the middle and working classes, not to mention the unwashed masses who live below the poverty line, out of work and home and hope. Repealing the inheritance tax is justified not on how it might affect the country as a whole, perhaps stimulating business and lowering unemployment (whether this argument is evidence-based or not is irrelevant; what is important is that today's Republicans don't even bother to make it).
Instead, the party that eschewed pointy-headed academics and the reality-based community in general now wraps its policies in pseudo-intellectual philosophical obfuscations. Death, they say, should not be a taxable event (even though the survivors, who did nothing to generate the wealth in question, not the decedent is being taxed). What would have had to have been a pseudo-populist argument in the 1980s ("the estate tax is bad because it might break up some family businesses" (even though it doesn't and is very easy to avoid by visiting a financial planner and signing a few pieces of paper)) has now become an abstract philosophical argument. Regardless of societal or budgetary consequences, the estate tax should be repealed because taxing the children of very, very wealthy people is just not right.
So the gloves are off and the GOP is no longer pretending to care about the rest of us. Rick Perry was booed during a Republican debate for showing what seems to have become the ultimate Republican sin - compassion (the same audiences cheered executions and people being allowed to die for want of health insurance). As someone who voted Republican myself in the not-so-distant past, I never thought that the sorts of crass, often racist remarks conservatives would make to each other in private about the poor essentially deserving to be poor and the government having no role in helping them because the Law of Unintended Consequences (the only law Republicans seem to respect these days, except for the case of abortion prohibition (which, unlike firearm restrictions, would be universally obeyed) or invading other countries to make us safer.
Since the leading GOP presidential contenders seem to be competing with each other in a race to the bottom to see who can be the most cruel, I wondered how far we are from seeing a reinterpretation of some of our culture's favorite Christmas stories through a Republican point of view:
The GOP Christmas Carol retitled Scrooge, the Ultimate Job-Creator:
Scrooge is not cruel or misinformed, but a hard-nosed, realistic business man. Tiny Tim - whose illness makes him economically unproductive (this was the golden, pre-union age of child labor) - deserves no health care. Besides, he should have chosen his parents better. His father, Bob Cratchit, comes across as shiftless and manipulative, trying to cheat Scrooge out of a day's wages for doing no work at all. Even if it is one day a year, Christmas is viewed the same way the Puritans who landed on Plymouth Rock viewed it: as a decadent, pagan celebration that is invalid because it is not mentioned in the Bible.
The reader of Scrooge, the Ultimate Job-Creator would find it very difficult to like Cratchit or his whining little son, and could understand by the end of the novella why Scrooge deserves to accumulate so much wealth and why Cratchit has so little. The heartwarming GOP re-telling of this timeless tale will do for Charles Dickens what the far right evangelicals have already done for Jesus: make him appear to be telling a radically different tale than the one he actually told, with a radically new and improved message.
Cratchit, it turns out, makes far less than Scrooge and is unable to afford either a coat for himself or a doctor for his son, not because of bad luck, poor education, or widespread poverty at the time (that was far more likely in that pre-death tax era to be passed on from generation to generation), but because he really didn't want to work all that much, preferring instead to sneak off and waste time with his family. How Scrooge chooses to distribute it, if at all, is his business and his business alone. Scrooge has no moral obligation to provide anything - not healthcare, not even a coat - to his employees or his fellow citizens, and Cratchit should be lucky just to have a job. Scrooge is simply not his brother's (or his employee's) keeper.
Those who owe Ebenezer money are portrayed as thoughtless deadbeats, losers who never should have accepted the subprime loan Scrooge was so generous to make to such uncreditworthy people in the first place.
The men who visit Scrooge asking for money for charity will be given a lecture by Scrooge who shames them into seeing that the redistribution of wealth they are encouraging only worsens the poverty they are trying to alleviate by threatening the coal and textile and manufacturing industries that make life in Victorian England so wonderful (for the owners of the coal mines, textile mills, and factories at least). They declare By Jove! Scrooge has a point, and promise then and there to renounce charity work, instead becoming brokers on the Exchange or something far more useful to society.
Class warrior and socialist schemer George Bailey doesn't get away with it in the GOP version of It's a Wonderful Life.
The Republican remake of It's a Wonderful Life retitled Pottersville: How An Enterprising Businessman Saved Bedford Falls From the Socialist Bailey Cartel. In the Republican version, Henry F. Potter is shown as the true hero who manages to defeat a struggling, inbred family business, the Bailey Building and Loan Association, headed by George Bailey. Bailey comes across as a scheming socialist who only appears to be helping his community; in reality, this help comes at a terrible cost as those families who live in affordable homes financed with reasonable mortgages are made dependent on this generosity. Over time, Bailey managed to make the entire community dependent on him to the point he can manipulate and extort them not to withdraw all their money at once. He even infuses his own cash at one point to keep his bank solvent.
Bailey Park, a wasteful affordable housing project that builds houses for economically unsuccessful people who clearly do not deserve them, is ultimately so unprofitable that the Bailey Building and Loan Association goes bankrupt, helped along by the negligence of an incompetent employee that any self-respecting corporation would have fired decades ago (as indeed a triumphant Potter does at the end of the film when he refuses to hire Uncle Billy, who spends his final days wandering the streets of the town he once tried to subvert to his family's radical socialist agenda).
An angel appears in the GOP remake of this American socialist tale, but not the bumbling, New Age Clarence. The GOP angel is tough as nails, trim, and business-friendly. He respects profits as much as the prophets. He visits George not to save him, but to taunt him with the fact he is already lost and forsake. George is shown visions of the living hell that Bedford Falls could continue to be if he continues to resist a hostile takeover by Potter.
The angel (who looks like Jesus with a neatly trimmed beard and a pinstripe suit) explains the importance of maximizng revenues and minimizing costs, patiently showing the dim-witted do-gooder the extraordinary profit opportunities he had passed up. On the back of a napkin in the bar Bailey visits after his plunge in the river, Clarence draws a supply-demand curve and shows George how he could bundle all the mortgages together and sell them at a significant markup to Wall Street investors, perhaps even offer derivatives based on the value of these mortgages. If most of the people taking out the mortgages foreclosed, it would no longer be his problem, since he had long since collateralized and sold them.
Shaking his head at how he could have been so foolish, a contrite George Bailey presents himself to Potter and begs to become his junior partner. Potter, who is portrayed as a stern but wise father-like figure, whose cruelty is actually kind in the very long term, believes Bailey is too compassionate (weak) and unreliable to be on his staff. Using contacts he has groomed over the years, he lobbies the state to launch a massive fraud investigation into the Bailey Building and Loan Association. Bailey is convicted, his wife divorces him and in a poignant scene reminiscent of "you had me at hello" in Jerry McGuire, Potter sweeps her off her feet, marrying her and moving her and her children into a far larger home in his gated community.
Although most of the original residents of what was once called Bedford Falls left for want of work (Bailey's Building and Loan Association was broken into pieces, its pension fund raided, and then what was left was sold to venture capitalists at a massive profit). What remains of Bedford Falls, now Pottersville, looks comfortably familiar: a Walmart, a Home Depot, a KFC, McDonald's, and Hardee's with acres of black asphalt parking lots now sprawl over where Bailey's affordable housing project once stood.
A cameo appearance by Sarah Palin as a happy McDonald's employee ("would you like fries with that? Gotcha!") underscores the importance of preserving America's true small town values: low prices that almost compensate for the even lower wages cheerfully accepted by a non-unionized, over-leveraged workforce whose lack of financial cushion or social security make them hustle all the harder to enrich the Potters of the world even more. Gathered around a Christmas tree, the newly constituted Potter family including Bailey's ex-wife and their children, hear a bell randomly tinkle. "Look, Mommy!" shouts Zuzu pointing. "A CEO just earned his annual bonus!" "That's right, dear!" beams Potter proudly. "That's just right!"
The GOP Grinch: Why Christmas Deserved to be Stolen. Grinch is presented as a thoughtful if eccentric class warrior trying to prevent that mass redistribution of wealth known as the Christmas gift exchange. As a freedom fighter launching daring midnight raids on the socialist collective of Whoville, he is misunderstood by everyone, even his dog, until the day after his great Roast Beast snatch, the Whos down in Whoville realize the anti-business, enabling message underlying gift-giving, and pour into the streets breaking into a spontaneous, joyful song of gratitude. The children, who are all unemployed and of no economic value, would only be enabled by handouts from their parents.
Grinch's increase in heart size is actually explained by severe Congestive Heart Failure which he was finally able to treat by liquidating the loot he had amassed from Whoville and paying a cardiologist in cash. In the final scenes of the movie, he visits a dermatologist to remove the green tint to his skin that has always put him at a competitive disadvantage in the corporate world.
Repeat liposuctions fail to remove his paunch completely and despite the dramatic improvement, he still looks strange. But in an attempt to make a new start as a respectable business man, he changes his name, adding a "Gin" to his surname and choosing the name of a lizard-like creature as his first name. Newt Gingrich dumps Max at the nearest pound and heads to Washington to start his lobbying and political career.
And now you know... the rest of the story.
