tmas Eve On Bullshit Mountain---
Copyright 2014 Steve Kenny
Cover Art Copyright 2014 Steve Kenny
---Christmas Eve On Bullshit Mountain---
The Party, as a whole, as an idea, as a movement, lost, to begin with. There was no doubt whatever about that.
The caller mentioned the word 'liberality'.
Scrooge shook his head.
"Are there no prisons?"
"Plenty of prisons."
"And the Union workhouses? Are they still in operation?"
"They are. Still."
"The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour, then?"
"Both very busy, sir. Under the impression that that they scarcely furnish Christian cheer of mind or body to the multitude, a few of us are endeavouring to raise a fund to buy the Poor some meat and drink, and means of warmth. What shall I put you down for?"
"Nothing! It's not my business. It's enough for a man to understand his own business, and not interefere with other people's."
The fog and the darkness thickened. Bob Marley was dead. John Lennon was dead. Frank Zappa was dead. FDR was dead; Martin Luther King and Bobby and Jack Kennedy were all dead. And so, too, was Lincoln.
So, long ago, he decided to make his move, and under cover of darkness, and unheeding of Dicken's cautionary tale, the communications towers went up, and while we slept, and our heroes slept their cold sleep, Rush Limbaugh reared his head high atop Bullshit Mountain, and began broadcasting his shadow far and wide. And in the darkness, to the minds of the many, Rush Limbaugh looked an awful lot like Joseph McCarthy, but in that same darkness, we could still see the burning ember of Edward R. Murrow's cigarette, which gave us hope, and, as anyone that I know would tell you, we would rather breathe the second hand smoke of Edward R. Murrow than read a book by Bill O'Reilley.
And Dickens let the Christmas Carolers sing:
"God Bless You, Merry Gentlemen,
let nothing you dismay..."
And I saw an old water tower in the distance, at the foot of Bullshit Mountain, standing in the darkness, and saw that on its face, somebody had painted a Jasper Johns American Flag, and on its back, somebody had painted a Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post cover. But the paint was old, and was cracked, chipped, and faded. Having been forewarned that the water had been poisoned, we did not drink it, and instead, watched, as it bubbled up and sent an acrid odor out into the night. And we drank our beer instead, and smoked our pot, and listened to John Prine sing about Paradise, and how Paradise had been wiped from the map. And The Spirit of Martin Luther King came down from a mountain, crossed the old railroad tracks, and lead a coalition of voters, a new generation of voters. And I saw the Train Of Gold pass them, and, although I fully realize that probably most of the 1% are, in reality, good people, I still cannot but help think, every time I hear about the philanthropic works of foundations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, how it had been possible that one man, or one family, had been allowed, are allowed, to amass fifty billion dollars in personal worth. Was it, is it possible because their employees had been grossly underpaid? Was it possible because their products had been grossly overpriced? Is it healthy for the American Economy, or any Economy so conceived, to let a few amass such fortunes at the expense of the many? And I saw that the voters paid no attention to the Train of Gold, and the Forty Seven Percent had cast their ballots, and the Electoral College heard the mighty voices of the Many; the Majority. We walked, we passed the signage of Corporate America. We walked, and came across an old white-haired man standing alone and laughing, and he was facing a stageset cemetery, and we all looked at him in wonder, and he heard us, and turned, and it was George Carlin, and he said, "Carry on. These tombstones now represent political ideas whose time has come and gone; and nobody should ever believe that a mind, once changed by an idea, can ever go back to its original dimensions, and nobody should believe that the disenfranchised can be shut out forever."
And as we walked, we brought along The Spirit of Franklin Roosevelt, in his wheelchair, up the Boulevard Of Broken Dreams, and as I breathed his second hand smoke, I breathed it in deeply, and considered it sweeter than any Wal-Mart Gift Card. And even though I've heard that no Bob Dylan song ever changed the course of history, and although Dickens wrote cautionary tales, and once wrote that "'Change could happen to anything that Scrooge put his name to", we saw that the Elephants that had lived on the animal farm, but now ruled the place from a distance, were blind, and deaf, and never heard us sing dirges in the dark, and never heard Billie Holliday sing the blues, and never saw Gearge Carlin point his finger at the Republican Party's Belief System.
But the Times, They Were A' Changin', and Change was coming.
"Can you sit down?" asked Scrooge, looking doubtfully at them, the Spirits of the Republican Party that haunted America like a bad dream..
"We can."
"Do it, then."
Scrooge asked the question, because he didn't know whether ghosts so transparent might find themselves in a condition to take a chair; and felt that in the event of it being impossible, it might involve the necessity of an embarrassing explanation.
The chain Jacob Marley drew was clasped about the middle, and it was made of cashboxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers, deeds, and heavy purses wrought in steel.
"You were always a good man of Business, Jacob."
"Business!" cried the Ghost. "Mankind was my business; charity, mercy, forebearance, and benevolence, were all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!"
"You are fettered. Tell me why."
"I wear the chain I forged in life," replied the Ghost. "I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it. Is its pattern strange to you? Or would you know the weight and length of the strong coil you bear yourself? It was as heavy and as long as this fifty Christmas Eves' ago. You have laboured on it, since. It is a ponderous chain!"
He held the chain high and rattled it, then dropped his arms, as if defeated.
"You will be haunted," continued the Ghost, "by Three Spirits. Without their visits, you cannot hope to shun the path."
But, slut is now a Republican word. And legitimate rape is now a Republican phrase; and the female body has ways to shut that whole thing down is now Republican owned; and shuck and jive is now a Republican phrase, and we own this place is now seen as representative of Republican thought. And self-deportation is now a concept owned by the Republican Party.
And George Bush now supports the Dream Act, and some Republicans now support the Dream Act, but it is too late; in the future, and for a long time to come, The Spirit in and of the Mexican American Community will be to make their pinatas only into likenesses of little elephants, representative of the Republican Party, and smack them with a stick, which will look an awful lot like the stick used by Uncle Theodore Roosevelt so long ago.
And I drank my beer, and thought about This Town.
This Town.
This Town...
Wasn't it This Town that ripped the bones from my back? Wasn't it This Town that said shut the fuck up and sing? Wasn't it This Town that booed Michael Moore off the stage? Wasn't it This Town that made the sweet back room deals with Wal-Mart that turned Main Street into Mean Street, and put the Mom and Pops businesses under? Wasn't it This Town?
You need to feel a sense of outrage, that comes from a place pretty close to the survival instinct to feel like this. You need to feel a sense of outrage that comes from a place pretty close to the survival instinct to finally get up off your ass and say something; do something; Vote. And you need to be motivated b
y something more tangible than greed and paid profesional consultant's carefully considered opinions. You need to be motivated by something closer to fear, and you need to be able to feel. You need to be able to feel. It's not that hard, really; even the blind can feel; all they need do is reach out; even the deaf can feel; all they need do is listen.
The good news is that in This Town, we have begun to learn how to learn again, and have taken our first steps. And from where we stand, on the right side of history, we know that the most important thing, when learning, is to choose the right teachers; not everyone does; look: John Lennon once sat down with Buddy Holly and learned; Ronald Reagan once sat down with Richard Nixon and learned; Barack Obama once sat down with Abraham Lincoln and learned; Bob Dylan sat down with Woody Guthrie, in Woody's hospital room, and learned; Alan Greenspan sat at the feet of Ayn Rand and learned; Richard Nixon sat down with Edgar Kaiser and learned; I sat down with Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell, and my father and mother, and my family, and learned.
And just as every attempt at learning is meaureable, immeasureable, successful, unsuccessful, we will learn something, if we try. What we do, we do for the future; and whose right and whose wrong and who will be remembered and who will be forgotten, we shall leave to the future generations to sort out. But all things are related:
And Al Green sang:
"I...
I'm So In Love With You...""
And President Obama sang:
"I...
I'm So In Love With You..."
And President Lincoln shouted out the chorus for anybody willing to listen:
"Let's Stay Together!"
And the Tweets on Election Night read: "Let's Stay In Line!" And I drank another beer, and in the background I heard Don Henley sing, "We haven't had this spirit here since 1969..."
And in the darkness, as clearly as if it happened yesterday, I heard George Washington say, "Shift your fat ass, Henry," Then I heard a Moderate Republican tell Rush Limbaugh, "Shift your fat ass, Rush." And in the cold darkness, the fog, and even in the fuzzy math, as in the light, all things are related to everything else. Yet Rush Limbaugh has never seen it that way, and so, even as Bullshit Mountain shook, he gave the Country the full measure of his derision.
I slowly pulled out of the tent city, I saw a coffee can with somebody's picture on it; probably yours; and it was empty, and tumbling down Wall Street. Then I saw another. And another. And then there were forty five millions; and the earth trembled under Bullshit Mountain. Then I saw the homeless, the uninsured; they lined Main Street, and they were all holding coffee cans with their pictures on them, whether they knew it or not, and they stood beneath billboards, whose faces stared, sightless, down and out, from their rusting metal homes; happy faces; smiling faces, peeling and battered. And in the darkness, I saw an old man, a very untelegenic old man with an eleven o'clock shadow and a checkered dog; he went from can to can, and reached in and took whatever little insurance money there was, but I never did see his face.
And Woody Guthrie sang This Land Is Your Land.
And Bruce Springsteen sang This Land Is Your Land.
You need to have compassion. You need to have empathy. You need to be able to feel the Other's pain.
And during the Bush Years, I became filled with despair, and felt it down to the bone. And I became incredibly self-destructive. But somehow, as I now look around me now, I see that I'm still here, and that I have survived.
And from my experience, I can tell you that I feel your pain.
I'm just hoping to reach you.
We are all just hoping to reach you.
And Bob Dylan sang, almost in a whisper now, for he was now an old man, and his voice was mostly gone:
"Mama take this badge off of me.
I can't use it any more..."
And I ended up drunk with happiness, the way a condemned man might feel who has just gotten news of an eleventh hour reprieve, and I fell asleep, and slept very, very well.
And when I opened my eyes in the morning and looked up, I smiled; Uncle Sam was standing over my bed.
He looked hard at me.
"Where did you go, my blue-eyed son?"
And I said, "I went to the polling booth and voted for a black man for President of the United States of America."
And in the night, in a bunker somewhere, in some 'secret location', perhaps under Bullshit Mountain, Rush Limbaugh heard the bells ringing, was jolted from his sleep by his personal idea of a nightmare, and ascribed it to a bit of undigested beef.
And for the first time in a very, very long time, he was right.
----
Excerpts from Charles Dickens' 'A Christmas Carol' were used for this piece; Dickens' 'A Christmas Carol' is in the Public Domain, and can be found at the Guttenburg Project.