For a liberal, Scrooge is supposed to be the ultimate corporate villain.
After all, the tight-fisted codger insisted that poor Tiny Tim’s Dad slave away at the office when he should have been conducting winter tests for global warming. At the start of A Christmas Carol, old Ebenezer believes firmly that his fellow man should be exploited for every penny.
Christmas, Ebenezer complains, is “a time for finding yourself a year older, and not an hour richer.”
And yet, it seems to me that Ebenezer—before his transformation into a turkey-loving philanthropist—is really the model for modern liberalism.
How can that possibly be? Isn’t Scrooge the poster-boy for corporate greed, for the fallen Enron executives of our time? Doesn’t he represent everything that makes capitalism distasteful to the Utopian theorists of the 21st century?
To answer these burning yuletide questions, let’s draw a sketch of the average American liberal.
To begin with, he’ll be the first to raise an objection to the mention of the word “Christmas”—even by a clergyman. He’ll file suit to prevent Nativity scenes from being placed in front of City Hall…Christmas carols from being sung at school concerts…the Salvation Army from taking up Christmas collections outside discount department stores.
He says “bah, humbug” to anything that reminds us of the miracle of Christ’s birth. He complains that the Virgin Mary is anti-feminist and that the whole Nativity story is paternalistic.
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