“car-ol n

1. a joyful religious song or hymn, especially a Christmas song celebrating Christmas

2. a dance in a circle, or the music accompanying it (archaic)

--Encarta World English Dictionary

Ebenezer Scrooge, Teapublican from Down There, tallied his books for 2010 with a self-satisfied smile. It had been a good year, a very good year. His disinformation business, funded by the Brothers Koch and popularized by his old pal Rupert Murdoch’s propaganda outlets had succeeded in convincing an increasingly docile electorate of many false things. That the world was not warming and those who said it was were dreaded socialists; that health care for all was really a liberal government takeover that would lead to—he licked his oversized lips—“death panels”; that increased regulation of the oil and food industries was further evidence of the government’s unwarranted intrusion into their lives and profits; and that lowering taxes for the rich—including himself, of course—was as important to the maintenance of democracy as slop was to the maintenance of pigs. Oink! He smiled. Yes, this had been a very good year!

The elegant digital clock on the mantel struck one but Ebenezer Scrooge was not asleep. He was considering his options, none of which looked promising. How could the ghost of dead John McCain have the nerve to interrupt his slumbers with political nonsense? What was his meaning about three visitors and their gifts? Or that if he failed to heed their warnings something very bad would happen to him? What could he do? There must be something!

He was, after all, Ebenezer Scrooge, Teapublican from Down There. He was a powerful man with enormous personal wealth, all ill-gotten, but whose enormous wealth isn’t? You can’t hold that against a man, not in America. He had seen to it, personally, that the narrative of the American Dream was all about the accumulation of wealth, and as a result most poor and working class people wanted nothing more than to be rich. So they voted against their own interests, and had over the years supported shipping their own jobs overseas and converting what had been a manufacturing nation (and the source of their growing middle class prosperity) into a lesser nation of something called “service providers.” They were, truth be told, little more than wage slaves, mortgaged to the teeth during the bubble he financially engineered so they would be further indebted to him, to the megabanks, and to Wall Street. He was their master. This ideological move alone had made him multiple fortunes, money he now counted in the hundreds of billions rather than mere tens of millions of dollars.

Ebenezer Scrooge pretended not to notice the time. He dreaded the impending hour and to yet another ghostly visitor. Two fifty-nine a.m. became three a.m. Nothing. Three oh-one, he groaned. Oh-two. Oh-three. “Drat,’ he said under his cold breath, whomever you are, please do not prolong my nightmare! Oh-four. Oh-five. Then, as suddenly as before, a ghostly specter appeared as if by magic by his bed. “Ohhhhh Scrooge …” another familiar voice beckoned. “Ohhhhh, Mr. Scrooge, wake up!”

He turned slowly to face … Ted Kennedy. No! This could not be happening to him! His face registered the horror. Kennedy was, or had been, his political nemesis! For years Scrooge had done everything he could do to undermine the progressive political work—even the very life—of the late Senator. It had been none other than Ebenezer Scrooge who had slipped the fateful Mickey to the then much younger Senator Kennedy’s drink at the reunion party, knowing that he would be driving back to the Cape on that moonless night, July 18, 1969. Scrooge had not known that Kennedy would be accompanied by Mary Jo Kopechne, poor child, but nevertheless the Chappaquiddick incident worked to Scrooge’s political advantage as the tragic death of Kopechne had successfully robbed America of yet another Kennedy who aspired to the presidency.

The thin darkly cloaked figure at the end of the bed did not arrive at a conveniently pre-determined hour. It was now just before dawn and Ebenezer Scrooge regarded his final visitor with one opened eye and terror in his heart. How long had this bleak apparition been there? Scrooge had no idea. “Are you the final visitor promised to me by John McCain?”

The figure in the cloak gave no answer but instead produced a hollow yowl and vile screech, an annoying sound somewhere between that of a rusty gate moved by an ill wind and the angry death rattle of murdered man. Yet within it Scrooge heard, or perhaps only hoped that he had heard, the “voice” of some uncertainty. There was no doubt whom this ghostly figure represented, for he was the Grim Reaper come for his soul. Scrooge trembled a meek protest: “No, Reaper, tell me there is still time! Tell me these visitors have been presented to me as lessons in the hope that I may mend my foul Republican ways?”

The figure offered only a skeletal hand and Scrooge understood that he should take it. He was hesitant but again there came a menacing yowl and screech. Scrooge reached for the hand. The hand was cold. Was this the ghost of Ernest Hemingway?

Last year at this most merry of holiday (holy-day) seasons, we were back in Alabama visiting our relatives and enjoying the hospitality of San’s folks, Martha and Clarence Bray. I was in high political mode, having just published a book Counter-Narrative to great reviews by progressives and predictably panned by right-wingers.

So, because one of my all-time favorite Christmas stories is Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, I then wrote a series of political blogs that brought Scrooge into the 21^stcentury as what in this year’s fashion we would call one of the 1%. My version begins:

Ebenezer Scrooge, Teapublican from Down There, tallied his books for 2010 with a self-satisfied smile.  It had been a good year, a very good year.  His disinformation business, funded by the Brothers Koch and popularized by his old pal Rupert Murdoch’s propaganda outlets had succeeded in convincing an increasingly docile electorate of many false things.  That the world was not warming and those who said it was were dreaded socialists; that health care for all was really a liberal government takeover that would lead to—he licked his oversized lips—“death panels”; that increased regulation of the oil and food industries was further evidence of the government’s unwarranted intrusion into their lives and profits; and that lowering taxes for the rich—including himself, of course—was as important to the maintenance of democracy as slop was to the maintenance of pigs.  Oink!  He smiled.  Yes, this had been a very good year!