Yet More Holiday Cheer with Roger Stone (E4):
A Potomac Christmas Carol: Stave 4, The Spirit of Christmas Present
Ignorance and Want
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Feb 1, 2019
Earlier this week, the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN)’s chief political analyst teed up a question for White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders.
“Does it kind of blow your mind that someone like Donald Trump, who is sitting in the Oval Office,” said CBN’s David Brody, “I know you can list the accomplishments, but at the same time just from a spiritual perspective, there are a lot of Christians who believe that for such a time as this …”
“For such a time as this” is the key phrase in that sentence. It’s a quotation from the Bible’s Book of Esther, in which an unlikely savior delivers the Jews from persecution.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/01/us/sanders-trump-god/index.html
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA): “Trump is joining some of the most incredible people in history being arrested today. Nelson Mandela was arrested, served time in prison. Jesus! Jesus was arrested and murdered.”
Dec. 5, 2023
The former president over the weekend said he only lost California because the election was “rigged.”
“If you had a real election and Jesus came down and God came down and said, ‘I’m gonna be the scorekeeper here,’ I think we’d win there, I think we’d win in Illinois and I think we’d win in New York,” Trump insisted.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/jimmy-kimmel-trump-jesus_n_656eacfbe4b0f3e5f44a8960
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The Persons of this Stave:
Our Narrator, Roger Stone
Spirit of Christmas Present
Stooge, former partner of Maralardo, deceased
A boy, Ignorance
A girl, Want
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Our Narrator: On arriving, the Spirit of Christmas Present transforms Stooge’s beachside Florida condo into something even more marvelous, a veritable horn of plenty, approaching the grand scale of ghostly Maralardo’s seaside Mar-a-Lago. Stooge is delighted.
It is a whimsical gesture on Dickens’ part, contrasting great wealth in a prosperous polity of commerce with the dire want of so many fellow travelers to the grave.
Stooge, like partner Maralardo, earlier declared that the poor and displaced are “rapists and murderers” who belong in prisons or simply should die in order to decrease the surplus population.
Stooge, observing the grateful poor heading to Sunday Christmas services, then adds insult to injury by callously criticizing the Spirit for imposing services celebrating Christmas, instead of allowing the ever-laboring poor the simple pleasures of a day off.
The Spirit responds sternly, admonishing Stooge for purporting to know anything at all about the eternal Spirit of Christmas, especially the Spirit’s primary and constant relationship with the poor and dispossessed.
“There are some upon this earth of yours, who claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill will, hatred, envy, bigotry and selfishness in our name, who are a strange to us and all our birth and kin, as they had never lived.”
“Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us.”
The Spirit then calls out names of many such false prophets, notably ghostly Maralardo, Sarah Huckabee Sanders and the most irreverent Majorie Taylor Greene.
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Our Narrator: The highest civic virtue, Dickens teaches, is the sacred sentiment of time immemorial - to be kind, generous, and always in sympathy with all people, none more so than those less fortunate.
And through rich imagery, Dickens leads readers, one-by-one, to see, household-by-household and neighborhood-by-neighborhood, the inescapable relationship between ignorance (our own) and want (the very consequences of our inaction).
This lesson hits us head-on when Stooge discovers two oddly disfigured children peering out from within the folds of the Spirit’s robe.
“. . . a boy and a girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds.”
“Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half so horrible and dread."
“Spirit! are they yours?” Stooge could say no more.
“They are Man’s,” said the Spirit, looking down upon them. “And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all, beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it!” cried the Spirit, stretching his hand out towards the city.
“Have they no refuge or resource?” cried Stooge.
“Are there no prisons?” said the Spirit, turning on him for the last time with these words. “Are there no workhouses?” The bell struck twelve.
Our Narrator: Dickens challenges us to embrace sympathy for the poor as the very cornerstone of individual and civic well-being; to see that, without this essential human link, we diminish our humanity and community, changing time and memory themselves: past, present and future.
What is ghostly Maralardo’s message? Sever our serpentine chains - of hate, envy, pride and avarice, treachery and life-threatening ways. Let the treasure we love be our fellow man, in the timeless here and now.
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Surely even tiny-hearted Roger Stone, lost boy of a PTA mom and volunteer fire department dad, has eyes to see, ears to hear, that timeless music?
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Next up? Roger’s Final Toast to Holiday Cheer
A Potomac Christmas Carol, Stave V: The Spirit of Christmas Future!
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Here’s your morning shot of Blackjack:
https://www.defendyourvotingrights.org/play-card-game/
Featuring a Card Deck of 54+ who would enable of our Republic’s demise
(including our most recent Joker, unctuously sanctimonious House Speaker Mike)
https://www.defendyourvotingrights.org/54-enablers-of-voter-suppression/