Christmas

Santa will not be pleased. Not to mention Jesus. That guy is gonna be pissed. When they find out what’s happened here, America is going to be in for a very dark Christmas indeed.I am not one of the unfortunates so poisoned by capitalism’s warped inhalation of the holiday season that they have grown cynical about the entire enterprise. My family takes Christmas very seriously. From a very young age I learned that this time of year was not about orgies of shopping or stewing in your contempt for your far-flung relatives, but rather about putting our dormant innate generosity into practice. The Christmas spirit is love. Our bitter cynicism should properly be oriented not at the Christmas spirit itself, but rather at those who corrupt it.Three hundred thousand Americans have died from Covid this year. Well over 200,000 of them died unnecessarily. Had our government managed this public health crisis in a mature and rational way, the deaths would be a fraction of what they are. Our government chose not to do so. Our leering and stupid leader chose to make the wearing of masks into a defining political issue – not out of necessity, or for any financial gain, or out of adherence to any philosophy, but out of aggressive stupidity, laziness and self-rationalization. Usually, the Republican party screws regular people because someone stands to get rich on it. In this case, it was only because they formed a coward’s puppet line behind an awful leader with a loud voice. In every community in America, there are people lying dead because their elected officials were scared of being tweeted at by a former reality show host.Merry Christmas, America.Tens of millions of Americans lost their jobs this year through no fault of their own. Tens of thousands of small businesses, each one representing the dreams and ambitions of a human being and the employment of many others, have failed this year through no fault of their own. The money that our government appropriated to carry all of these people and businesses through this natural disaster ran out months ago, and nothing more has been forthcoming, even as we watch our friends and neighbors sink into bankruptcy and food insecurity and desperation.Many other nations have paid workers to stay home, relieving financial pressures on employers and employees alike. Republicans in Congress have refused to do this, because the stock market has stayed high, and also because they don’t care. Our incompetent and callous Republican leaders have ordered shutdowns without providing an adequate safety net, thus causing predictable public backlash against the shutdowns, which Republicans have been happy to encourage, because it directs public ire away from them and onto public health professionals. Idiocy in the White House has combined with the wealth-worshiping Republican Senate to produce the worst of both worlds: a raging preventable public health disaster and an economic catastrophe from which the very rich have been insulated.Your loved ones can die, your business can collapse, your job can evaporate, your unemployment benefits can dry up, your stimulus checks can disappear, and in return your elected leaders will offer you sneering jokes about masks and lies about who won the election. The rest, they will mostly ignore.Merry Christmas, America.Donald Trump is a vapid and pathetic man controlled in every case by his own worst impulses, but he is not the biggest villain of 2020. Without the entire superstructure of the Republican party behind him – voting for him, campaigning for him, debasing themselves before him, praising his stupid ideas and supporting him politically – he would not be in a position to cause hundreds of thousands of deaths. There is a long, straight line that runs from the wink-and-nod racist Southern Strategy of Richard Nixon through the deregulation and union-busting of Reagan and up to the deadly narcissism of Trump. When a political party is willing to tell any lie and demonize anyone in order to protect the right of the rich to have everything, it will eventually find that it has become the home of cranks and fascists. The Republican party has spent decades stoking malignant ignorance in service of greed, and it has now been devoured by it. What afflicts us now is not just a virus, but a national philosophy lovingly tended by many generations of conquerors that prizes avarice and calls it individualism.We are all in this pandemic together. Sickness passes from person to person with no regard for identity. Economic decline seizes every city and state at once. Overwhelming crises like these can be catalysts for unity. Shared pain is also an opportunity for shared love. Suffering so widespread can open everyone’s eyes to the common fate of humanity, and our responsibility to support one another in good times and bad.But that is not what America is getting out of this crisis. We are getting the suffering without the sharing, and the pain without the promise of mutual support. Christmas celebrates the birth of Jesus, a man who told people to love their neighbors and give their wealth to the poor; it is embodied by Santa, a man who rewards generosity with more generosity, and vows to carry gifts to the homes of everyone no matter who they are. And yet the people who are loudest about Christmas – those showing off the biggest tree, carrying the most ostentatious Bible – are the same people who have chosen to allow hundreds of thousands of us to die, rather than do what needs to be done for public health, and have chosen to allow millions of us to sink into poverty, rather than do what needs to be done for public welfare. They have chosen this because they believe that this is the path that will maximize their own power. That is their present to you, and they really don’t care if you like it.Yes, Virginia, there is a “War on Christmas”. But the Republicans are the ones waging it. And the Christmas spirit, I’m sorry to say, is losing. More