Some of us gray in the temple remember when the Christmas season represented a period when many of us – Christians and non-Christians alike – at least pretended to
put aside the ugliness of political and societal differences and display a
little compassion, charity and understanding of one another. Many of us, believers or not, did so
in recognition of Jesus’ teachings as outlined in the Gospel of Matthew as well
as the hopeful prospect of a better year to come. Yet in 2022 one could see how
far we’ve strayed from this custom in the very different social-media Christmas
greetings of the current president of the United States and his predecessor,
now a declared presidential candidate for 2024 and a still-bitter, flailing loser from 2020.
President Biden: “There is a certain stillness at the center of the Christmas
story: a silent night when all the world goes quiet. And all the clamor,
everything that divides us, fades away in the stillness of a winter’s evening.
I wish you that peace this Christmas Eve.”
Former President Trump: “Merry Christmas to EVERYONE, including the Radical Left
Marxists that are trying to destroy our Country, the Federal Bureau of
Investigation that is illegally coercing and paying Social and Lamestream Media
to push for a mentally disabled Democrat over the Brilliant, Clairvoyant and
USA LOVING Donald J. Trump and, of course, the Department of Injustice, which
appointed a Special “Prosecutor” who, together with his wife and family, HATES
“Trump” more than any other person on Earth. LOVE TO ALL!”
Well,
at least Trump made a stab at professing love for his adversaries and enemies
(who tend to be one and the same). That said, you wonder how clairvoyant the
former president is, given the assortment of investigations and allegations stacking
up against him. Maybe clairvoyance ain't what it used to be.
Son
Eric Trump’s Christian prophetess, Julie Green, informed the Trumpian faithful a few
days before Christmas 2022 that God was sending a huge storm to wipe out
President Trump’s enemies, specifically longtime (and long-beleaguered) public
health official Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Biden, former President Obama,
Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, vanquished 2016 presidential
candidate Hillary Clinton, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Facebook, Wall
Street, China and Democratic Congressman and perennial Trump nemesis Adam Schiff. Thus
far, all appear to have survived the very worst God could muster in terms of
Winter Storm Elliott – if indeed God was behind the crippling storm.
All of
which suggests we shouldn’t necessarily put politics aside during the Christmas
season but instead quietly and earnestly re-examine how our
professed religious, spiritual and philosophical tenets (assuming we claim
them) actually inform our politics, let alone our daily lives. In a delusional nation
where many of us now realize we would only recognize outright fascism if it
came goose-stepping into plain sight with a bad haircut and toothbrush mustache, we
must also now acknowledge we wouldn’t recognize and accept Christ’s presence
unless accompanied by a sufficient array of Hollywood-styled special-effect miracles.
My wife
and I have a Christmas Eve tradition of watching on television at least one of
the many cinematic versions of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” in which
crusty, miserly Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by four ghosts the night before
Christmas. The ghosts manage to enlighten Scrooge about the worth of all human
lives and the duty of better-off folks to dedicate themselves to helping
relieve the misery, neglect and want of the less fortunate, including the poor
and the meek. It’s not just a Christmas story but one that speaks of new
resolves, new outlooks and new beginnings with another year fast approaching.
My favorite version is an atmospheric 1984 production filmed in Shrewsbury, England,
bolstered by a blustery performance by George C. Scott, who seems to have
invested some of his “Patton” portrayal in old Scrooge.
This
year, however, we watched for the first time a truly formidable version of the Dickens novella – a
dark, angry Rod Serling twist on “A Christmas Carol.” Filmed in 1964 as a ghostly melodrama
encouraging American support for the United Nations and the broader goal of global
dialogue and international consensus, the production came about during a period of growing
distress across America over war abroad and civil strife at home. As seen in
his screenplay for the powerful 1964 Paramount film “Seven Days in May,” about a U.S. military
plot to overthrow the U.S. government, Serling was more and more worried about
the direction of the United States amid displays of intolerance, demagoguery,
indifference and homegrown fascism. (“The time is 1970 or 1980 or, possibly,
tomorrow,” the "Seven Days in May" movie poster warned.) “Seven Days in May” and the Fletcher
Knebel/Charles W. Bailey novel that spawned it were inspired by the antics of U.S. Army Gen. Edwin Walker, a white supremacist who repeatedly made clear his
extremist right-wing views while in uniform, leading to his resignation and decision
to settle in Dallas to continue his political agitation, helping create the volatile environment that greeted President John F. Kennedy during his November 22, 1963, visit. Among those Americans earlier hopeful for a film version of the popular novel: Kennedy, dead of
assassination in Dallas not even three months when the film was released in February 1964.
By
contrast, Serling’s subsequent “A Carol for Another Christmas” practically qualifies as an expanded episode of “The Twilight Zone,” which coincidentally
had ended its five-season run on CBS earlier in the year. The ghosts who come
to visit and enlighten hard-hearted American industrialist and isolationist
Daniel Grudge conjure up a realm not unfamiliar to those of us in 21st century
America with our strife over desperate immigrants seeking to work and breathe
free in the United States, anxiety over the imagined displacement of white
Americans in favor of people of color, suspicion of all foreigners and bleeding
hearts and, finally, the rapidity by many of us to embrace conspiratorial fantasies
rather than hard facts as legitimate new sources dwindle in size and impact.
The
Ghost of Christmas Past, portrayed by character actor Pat Hingle, showcases the
anguished and the dispossessed of the times, in this case pitiful and forgotten
behind barbed-wire fencing, exposed to the wintry elements, yet somehow finding
hope and comfort in singing Christmas songs alongside small makeshift fires.
The ghost poses damning questions to those among us forever rattling on about our individual
freedoms as sufficient reason to disregard the public welfare and ignore the
downtrodden, whether fellow citizens or those "unwashed masses" of other lands.
“If you
shared a loaf of bread with them, how would you be relinquishing your freedom?”
the Ghost of Christmas Present asks rhetorically. “Or if you joined other
nations to administer vaccinations to their children, how would you desecrate
your flag? Or if you had offered them solace and hope and comfort, how would
you have made yourself susceptible to tyranny?”
“What
are they singing?” Grudge asks the ghost, his concerns invigorated now
that he actually sees suffering behind the barbed-wire enclosure.
“Foreign
words – but not necessarily conspiracies to destroy you, Mr. Grudge,” the ghost
says. “Just Christmas songs – and of those who don’t celebrate Christmas, songs
of hope. They sang them in their language before you did in yours.”
The
Ghost of Christmas Future, played by British actor Robert Shaw with the same vigor he invested in his portrayal of an obsessive, war-addicted German tank
commander in “Battle of the Bulge” during this period, turns up in the
rubble of a bombed-out town hall that Grudge recognizes. A stained-glass
inscription at the front of the hall reads: “E Pluribus Unum.” The confused
industrialist asks what happened, only for the ghost to allude to what years of
failure to recognize and address social wrongs and press for constructive
dialogue have finally yielded – warfare and an apocalyptic society ripe for
tyranny and lawlessness. It’s a message worthy of our times when hatred and
vitriol have made a mockery of the promise that social media once offered. Even
now echo chambers in our civilization resound with threats against our once-sacred
constitutional principles if we must share our freedoms and hard-earned rights
with others with whom we disagree or whom we don’t accept as equals. So the
question arises: What need is there then for a town hall?
“Attrition,
neglect, misuse, a few passing catastrophes … time,” the ghost answers Grudge’s inquiry of what happened. “Of
little consequence, really. There grew to be less and less need for a meeting
place or a platform for debate. The American town hall, you will remember, Mr.
Grudge, was a microcosm of all the meeting halls of the world, places where men
could ‘talk it over.’ It seems we reached a moment in time where talk became
superfluous, so now your town hall is past tense.”
Most
disturbing is the arrival in the rubble of a clownish yet toxic character
played in repulsive fashion by Peter Sellers. The character is adorned in a ten-gallon
cowboy hat emblazoned with the word “Me.” He encourages his excitable, gullible followers assembled before him to recognize him as “the Imperial Me,”
to which his sycophants cry: “Hallelujah! Hallelujah!” He revels in this
near-religious adoration. And he warns of others from afar who want to
infiltrate their numbers and overwhelm them.
“Now,
then, they don’t come out in so many words and say that they want to take us
over – they’re too clever for that – but that’s what they want,” the demagogue
tells his mob of true believers. “They want to take over us Individual Me. And
if we let them seep in here from down yonder and across the river, if we let
these do-gooders, these bleeding hearts, propagate their insidious doctrine of
involvement among us, then, my dear friend, my Beloved Me, we’s in trouble –
deep, deep trouble!”
As
entertainment, “A Carol for Another Christmas” is tough to watch, owing to the long, preachy stretches of monologue Serling’s long-winded ghosts deliver when more incident
and exchanges of dialogue might have spurred the teleplay along its way. Nor does
Grudge turn into giddy humanitarian a la
Scrooge the following morning. Grudge seems more measured in what we can only
assume is some small change of heart, maybe just in disposition and tact.
Perhaps Serling intended his viewers to wonder and think further, but it’s
hardly the joyous transformation readers of “A Christmas Carol” have been
conditioned to expect.
Some
cast members are striking, including lanky Sterling Hayden as the grim,
uncompromising Daniel Grudge. In real life a decorated Marine in World War II who in 1964 gained newfound fame as an unhinged, commie-hating Air Force
general who ignites nuclear holocaust in “Dr. Strangelove,” Hayden had seen his acting career suffer earlier from post-war dalliances with the
Communist Party – some Americans briefly considered the Soviets our steadfast allies after the successful war against Nazi Germany. Other actors in the TV production never made the
final cut, including Peter Fonda as Grudge’s son, a World War II casualty who
was to function as a ghost on par with Scrooge partner Jacob Marley in “A
Christmas Carol.” In fact, the son here is named Marley. Alas, Fonda is
glimpsed only twice, and very briefly, as a voiceless apparition, then no more.
The ABC-TV production was deemed so bleak that it went nearly a half-century after its 1964 premiere (and, tellingly, three days after Christmas that year) before being revived by Turner Classic Movies in 2012. Outraged John Birchers conducted a massive right-wing write-in effort to protest the original broadcast. Yet today the teleplay proves that even as society and politics change, they remain the same, if not more so. “A Carol for Another Christmas” is, yes, very much a piece of its times – the Vietnam War and racial strife at home only worsened after its solitary broadcast, aggravated further by the assassinations of civil rights leader Martin Luther King and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. Yet the film resonates amid the madness of our own times, including the sorry spectacle of those willing to sacrifice neighbors, co-workers, even family members during a deadly pandemic by vilifying vaccinations, public health precautions, even doctors and nurses risking their lives to save infected patients. I remember a town-hall meeting in late 2021 conducted by Republican Congressman Pete Sessions in the University High School auditorium in Waco where resistance to President Biden included, amid a multitude of crackpot grievances and conspiracy theories and incomprehensible rants, one constituent’s insistence that Biden – "Brandon" – be tried Nuremberg-style for curtailing liberty and freedom through his administration’s zealous pro-vaccination efforts.
Plenty
of current events prove the continuing relevance of “A Carol for Another
Christmas” but one more will suffice for the moment: Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s deplorable decision to
caravan busloads of immigrants, including utterly blameless children, from Texas to
Washington, D.C., then dropping them off in front of Vice President Kamala Harris’
residence in 18-degree winter weather as an “own-the libs” political statement
about disputed federal immigration policies. Count me as a critic of the Biden
immigration policies. To me, they border on incoherence. Yet the answer is not Republicans' cheering on what constitutes human trafficking for political
ends. Steve Vladeck, the Charles Alan Wright Chair in Federal Courts at the
University of Texas Law School, correctly condemned this heartless gesture:
“What kind of leader thinks this is the right thing to do? What kind of
person?” Ana Navarro-Cárdenas, a former Republican consultant, expressed
outrage at the callousness and hypocrisy involved, especially given many
of the immigrants – asylum seekers from Ecuador, Cuba and Venezuela – lacked
even winter coats: “Don’t lecture me about a made-up ‘War on Christmas,’ or
tell me ‘Christ is the Reason for the Season,’ if you support staging this
cruel stunt on Christmas Eve, using human beings as political pawns, throwing
them out on the street in frigid weather.” Former Republican consultant Steve
Schmidt was perhaps most blistering in his criticism: “We need less evil in
America. We don’t need men like Greg Abbott. Worse, voters chose him [and just
two months ago]. Everyone that did got to carry a bit of his shame this
Christmas season. They get the satisfaction of knowing they made Christ weep on
his birthday.”
Ironically,
Abbott – a man who clearly envisions himself as a presidential prospect –
tweeted on Christmas Day his seasonal greetings, confirming to one and all the
transformation of so much of latter-day Christianity into a crucible of cruelty,
deceit and hollowness, given his political party’s claim as one of family
values and Christian nationalism: "May the joy of our Savior's birth fill
your hearts today and every day." Included in his post was a passage in Isaiah
9:6: "For a child has been born for us, a son given to us; authority rests
upon his shoulders; and he is named wonderful counselor, mighty God,
everlasting Father, prince of peace."
Abbott’s decision to play King Herod in a latter-day, real-life Twilight Zone scenario runs counter to his professed Catholicism, at least if Pope Francis’ own Christmas Day wishes are any indication. Apparently offered in a social-media post unrelated to Abbott's affront to Christian sensibilities, Francis reminds us of what increasingly confounds so many evangelicals today: “Today as then, Jesus comes into a world that does not welcome him, that rather rejects or ignores him, as we do so often with foreigners and with the poor. Let's not forget the refugees, the marginalized, people who are alone, orphans and the elderly, prisoners.”
Rod Serling’s Christmas ghosts couldn’t have said it better, but far more of us need to pick up the refrain.
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