I wish I could wait until Christmas for this. But it’s gonna be old news by then. Aisha Harris over at Slate, proposed the very reasonable idea, Santa Claus Should Not Be a White Man Anymore. It’s pretty straightforward, actually. As our country becomes more and more diverse racially, we need to let go of the idea that “white” is the “default.”

Her idea: the Christmas Penguin! I am totally on board with this. I mean, it doesn’t have to be a penguin. But just think back to one of my favorite Christmas holiday shows, Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town. The first part of that story is just great. He lives in the hills and he comes down to give toys to the kids in town during a time when everyone has fireplaces. But as we say in the software biz, it don’t scale. There’s no way that Santa could bring all those presents to all those boys and girls—especially given that only a small percentage of them have fireplaces! This is just madness and I don’t dig it.

And by the way, what the fuck is going on with Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer? Why can’t Hermey be a dentist if he wants to be? Because the elves are slaves, that’s why! The whole Santa Claus myth has gotten to the point where we cannot deny some very creepy aspects of the whole story. Wizards lose their powers unless they are evil? What the fuck were those elves doing for food anyway? And most of all: you mean Don Adams wasn’t one of the voices in Rudolph?

Actually, I have a big problem with the Santa myth. It perpetuates the most pernicious myth in America: justice. Santa gives to good girls and boys. Except that he tends to give crummy gifts to poor ones and really great ones to rich ones. You don’t have to be Aristotle to figure out what that means: rich girls and boys and better girls and boys. So at least if it’s a penguin, you could say, “He checked the list many times, unfortunately, Santa Penguin can’t read, because, you know, he’s a fucking penguin!”

Well the Fox News crew got hold of this news and they were burning mad. The very idea! We all know that Santa is a white man, just like Jesus! Harris was kind enough to inform them that, hey guys, Santa isn’t real. She also provided a little history that I thought was very interesting:

Which, of course, is why Santa is so popular. He’s fun and advertising executives can do whatever the fuck they like with him. They can have him summer in Florida where he drinks Pepsi instead of Coke. Or he can be an evil robot in Futurama who guns down everyone but Zoidberg. Or he can be a penguin. In fact, how about an evil penguin? A reverse Robin Hood penguin who gives lots of toys to the kids who already have too many and little or no toys to those with few. What’s more, he doesn’t give half a shit about the kids around the world who are starving to death or dying of malaria.

Now that’s a kind of Santa I can believe in!

Corey Robin wrote an excellent article over at Jacobin, Socialism: Converting Hysterical Misery into Ordinary Unhappiness. Although short, it is a manifesto against neo-liberalism. The idea of our brilliant “liberal” leaders like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama is that by making people more involved with their economic decisions, they will make smarter economic decisions.

Let’s look at Obamacare, shall we. Instead of just having a single payer system where everyone has a base level of care, let’s give them a huge number of “choices” that they can sift through to find the perfect plan for themselves! I put “choices” is scare quotes because in the end the plans are all much the same and the only real differences are in what you will be able to afford. I remember going through this years ago when I worked in the corporate world. There for would be three or four healthcare options and my wife and I would go over them at the table and try to figure out what the best plan was.

Okay, that might be alright. We ended up getting a slightly better plan for us. And the people going through the exchanges will get slightly better plans. But it isn’t like we get this marginal improvement at no cost. It requires us to waste plenty of our time that we could be, you know, living our lives. We could be doing things that we want to do. As Robin puts it:

Instead, we are making economic choices, just like in the rational expectations models that the Chicago School economists so love. Maybe the idea is that since the models have been such an unmitigated failure, they can force the people to behave like the models. I don’t know. But the big problem is it isn’t just healthcare choices we’re talking about:

And note, we’re only talking about the poor here. The rich hire people to do all this bullshit so that they can live their own lives—to enjoy being rich. And this is why the neo-liberals, the New Democrats, are such a bad thing in a general sense. They are reducing us to cogs in the economic machine, just as much as the Soviets did to their people. Except here we call it “freedom.” But it is simply the freedom to select from a set of corporate offerings. It is most definitely not the freedom to live our lives as we wish on our own terms.

Fifty years ago today, Kenya became independent of the United Kingdom. So all you conservatives out there, don’t you see? Obama isn’t a Kenyan interloper, he’s a British spy. “Obama, Barack Obama.” By the way, what’s with that? Public Policy Polling found that 51% of Republican voters thought that Obama was born in Kenya (United Kingdom). A CBS News/ New York Times poll found that fully one-quarter of all Americans thought the same thing. You would think it would be like the family member who spent three years at Sing Sing for child molestation: something everyone knows but no one talks about. That’s why I don’t think these people actually think that Obama was born in Kenya (United Kingdom). It’s just a way of yelling at a president who pretty much agrees on policy with the vast majority of Republicans—at least until Fox News and Michael Savage get done with them.

On this day in 1745, the under-achiever of the Federalist Papers authors John Jay was born. An American aristocrat, he was good for sending over to Europe to talk to the aristocrats there. And he did write 5 of the 85 Federalist Papers, so that’s something. The thing is, the more you know about the Founding Fathers, the more they are like Jesus. I don’t mean great; I mean mythical. There isn’t a whole lot to like about them. It’s a pretty standard story: a bunch of rich men rebelling against a bunch of richer men. There are a few I like, but mostly it’s just Thomas Paine who rocks my world. But look at him today. Glenn Beck wrote his own version of Common Sense, and pretty much avoided Paine the whole time. Thomas Paine was too radical 200 years ago for conservatives (and many liberals) today. But John Jay would be welcome on Fox Businuess.

German expressionist Edvard Munch was born in 1863. He is best known for The Scream. Other than the fact that it has been really easy to parody, I’m not that fond of the painting. But Munch was a great painter. And he’s a lot more varied than people think. Sometimes his work reminds me of Gauguin. Others like Hopper. Still others like Magritte. But clearly his enduring style is seen in The Scream and my personal favorite: Madonna:

Frank Sinatra was born in 1915. In general, I’m not a fan of the man. I hate to see him in movies, where I think he is terrible. Except that he is great in The Man with the Golden Arm. And I love his singing. I don’t know what it is. Actually, I do: he totally ripped off his phrasing from Billie Holiday and it works perhaps better for him than it does for her. Here he is doing “Send In The Clowns” from A Little Night Music where it is sung by a woman. I very much like the payoff, “Don’t bother, they’re here.” Because they are always here. We are all clowns—especially about our love lives:

Other birthdays: abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison (1805); novelist Gustave Flaubert (1821); actor Edward G Robinson (1893); game show legend Bob Barker (90); Ed Koch (1924); one of the very best abstract expressionists Helen Frankenthaler (1928); singer Connie Francis (75); film producer Paula Wagner (67); actor Bill Nighy (64); and singer-songwriter Hank Williams III (41).

The day, however, belongs to the great playwright John Osborne who was born on this day in 1929. He pretty much invented the “angry young man” archetype in his play Look Back in Anger, he was capable of writing just about anything. I always found it amusing that he wrote the screenplay for the delightfully funny Tom Jones. Personally a bastard, he seemed to understand that fear and longing were the basis of anger. Here is a bit from Look Back in Anger starring Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson. It really does provide a whole (and I think more accurate) rendering of the play where Jimmy is quite sympathetic. The whole play is on YouTube if you wish to watch it.

Happy birthday John Osborne!

So there’s this squirrel and he’s talking to his wife. He says, “I really hate that cat that roams around here. He almost killed me the other day.”

“You mean the one who ate our little son Charlie?” his wife asks.

He says, “Yeah, that’s the one!”

“What about him?”

“Well, I was thinking,” he says. “The only one I hate more than that cat is Peter.”

“You mean the squirrel who lives on the other side of the tree?” she asks.

“Yeah! He’s always making a bunch of noise at night. I really hate that Peter!”

“So you hate Peter for making noise more than you hate the cat who ate our only son?” his wife asks.

“That’s right. Do you think that’s strange?”

“Not at all, dear,” she says. “That’s very normal.

Normally, I would be writing my birthday post now. In fact, normally, I would have already written it, but I just had to say something about the YouTube “conversation” I had, Racist Conservative Youth Complains About Racism. The truth is that the birthday posts take hours to write. I would really enjoy doing them if I didn’t feel under such time constraints. And this has been a bad morning. All night last night I dreamed that I was working at this gas station that I once worked at for about six months. It was not a pleasant experience. The way economics works in the real world is not the way it works in economic models. And it sure the hell isn’t the way that it works in the minds of conservatives.

At that time, I wanted to get a grunt job. I was working on my first novel then. My thinking was: get a minimum wage job—just enough to get by on—and I’d be free to do my real work in my spare time. Well, that didn’t work out exactly that way. Mostly, the job was exhausting from an emotional standpoint. The customers could be trying and I was often faced with situations where there was no “correct” way to act. But that wasn’t the biggest problem. What made the job almost debilitating was how management treated me and everyone else who worked there.

I thought it would be more like, “We don’t pay you much, but we don’t expect much of you either.” That wasn’t true at all. Instead, it was, “We are taking food right out of the mouths of our children to pay you, so you had better be busy all the time!” What’s more, if anything went wrong, it was always our fault. Management made snap judgments based upon no evidence. It must be the wage slave’s fault, otherwise, he’d have a good job. At that time, I made $9 per hour ($18,000 per year) and my immediate supervisor made something in excess of $50,000 per year.

Finally, I had had enough and I traded in my $9 per hour job for a $65,000 per year one at a start-up. And the wonderful thing about that change was that management treated me with respect and dignity. And the work was different, but certainly not harder and far less stressful. That’s when I realized that the more an employer pays you, the nicer they are to you. It’s a class thing. As a computer programmer, I was part of the educated class and thus I demanded to be treated with dignity. But the same person working in a gas station is just lowlife scum.

And indeed, there were some lowlifes who worked there. One woman had stolen $700, which was caught on video. Oh, didn’t I mention the video cameras? There were 26 of them, almost all of which were trained on the employees. The employers’ greatest concern was their employees, not their customers. But most of the employees were incredibly dedicated to the business. For example, they worked double shifts at a moments’ notice. They showed far more loyalty to the employer than the employer showed to them. But these older employees were not treated any better than the new hires that tried to steal from the company. Well, no different except that they were paid about one dollar more per hour.

In our culture, how an employee is treated and how he is paid is dependent upon what class he belongs to. For example, Scooter Libby is not only a convicted felon, he is also a traitor to this country. But he never spent a day in prison. He was disbarred, but he has likely gotten his license back by now, or at least is in the process. Not that he has to work. In 2004, his net worth was estimated to be $15 million. And if he had to work, there would have been people around to give him a “job” that would have paid the bills.

On the other hand, some poor kid who got nicked for selling cannabis will have a hard time finding any legitimate work after getting out of that prison that Libby never went into. It’s very simple: there are the right kind of people who may make “minor” mistakes by harming national security for political gain but really aren’t bad (e.g. Scooter Libby) and there are the wrong kind of people who may make “major” mistakes by ingesting prohibited vegetable substances (that is: drugs) and are really bad (e.g. basically any poor kid).

Inequality in America is about a lot more than money. I have no doubt that Bernard Madoff would have received a slap on the wrist if it weren’t for the fact that he defrauded other rich people—other of the “right” kind of people. As for the “wrong” kind of people: they just don’t matter. That’s one of the reasons that conservatives don’t care about getting them health insurance. The sooner they die, the better.

Welcome to the American Caste System. Where do you fit in?

Let’s leave Ross Douthat’s Catholicism aside for the moment. In his most recent column he is skeptical, Obamacare Turns a Corner? He has noticed that now that HealthCare.gov is working pretty well, liberals are optimistic about Obamacare’s future. Not so fast, says Douthat. The law still depends upon young and healthy people doing the “right thing” by buying health insurance to subsidize the old and sick. He says that this is what happened in Massachusetts, but they are a bunch of liberal people who want to “do the right thing.”

Douthat could not be more wrong. By his logic, young healthy people working for large corporations would not take the health insurance they are offered. After all, their premiums are exactly the same premiums as the old sick people who work there. There is far less unfairness in Obamacare. Young and healthy people want health insurance for the same reason that good drivers want auto insurance. We all want to feel safe. And just as a good driver can have his car totaled by a bad driver, a young and healthy person can go into bankruptcy because some idiot accidentally shot him.

Conservatives are irrationally obsessed with the cost benefit analysis of insurance. It’s as if before Obamacare came along, they’d never heard of insurance. If everyone got out of insurance exactly what they put it, there would be no point to having insurance. Insurance is a way of buying peace of mind. It is a way of paying a little constantly to avoid the possibility of having to pay a lot later. And with health insurance, it’s a win-win. Either you get more from your insurance than you paid in, or you are healthy. That’s a hell of a deal!

Douthat’s article is just seething with conservative anger and the hope that Obamacare will destroy itself. He’s talking to liberals and warning them that the game isn’t over yet. But he isn’t doing it as someone who’s on the team. He’s Tanner from the end of The Bad News Bears, “Just wait until next year!” He doesn’t want to provide healthcare for 50 million uninsured people. That would go against his idea of the American Way.

But would it go against the Roman Catholic way? Douthat is not a cultural Christian. He takes his faith very seriously as we saw in Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics, even if he was wrong about everything. So I find his clear distaste for Obamacare offensive. The healthcare law is, after all, a way to provide insurance to tens of millions of people with almost no social costs. But in as far as he can do it while retaining his pretense of being a “reasonable” conservative, he is cheering for its defeat.

A couple of months ago, Douthat wrote about Pope Francis. From his perspective, everything the new Pope is doing will be judged on the basis of whether it brings more people into the Church. In other words, to Douthat, it is all marketing and the Catholic Church is just a business. And that, I’m afraid is the edge of the water for Douthat’s Christianity. He’s not as bad as Stuart Varney, but his conservative politics come first. And he will tie up his religious beliefs in knots to justify whatever conservative policies he approves of.

I remember some time ago, Stuart Varney, the Fox News business guy, noting how he had to fight adversity. According to him, it is hard to become on-air talent with a British accent on American television. That’s like saying it is hard to become a world class sprinter because you run so fast. But Varney is an idiot—a very common idiot. I run into his type all the time. He understands economics entirely from a Chicago School standpoint. In his mind, economics is very simple. If you raise the minimum wage, there will be mass layoffs. If you increase the corporate tax rate, prices will go up. It’s very much like the logic of someone with a little physics education thinking that a penny dropped from the top of the Empire State Building will crush someone’s head. It’s strange that anyone could think that prices are set based upon how much something costs to make rather than how much people are willing to pay for it. But that’s what you get when all your knowledge comes out textbooks and an ideological desire to believe.

Most recently, Varney had some very harsh words for Pope Francis. He doesn’t like the fact that the Pope is discussing economic issues. Varney said, “I go to church to save my soul. It’s got nothing to do with my vote. Pope Francis has linked the two. He has offered direct criticism of a specific political system. He has characterized negatively that system. I think he wants to influence my politics.” Oh my God! Say it ain’t so!

Note that Varney never had anything to say about the far more political questions of marriage laws and family planning. While the last two popes went all around the world making the AIDS epidemic worse because nothing was so important to God than that people not us condoms, Varney thought nothing of it. That wasn’t political! It didn’t bother Varney, I suspect, because it didn’t affect Varney. Varney isn’t gay. Varney doesn’t have to listen to the Pope anyway, given that he is an Episcopalian. What’s more, Jesus didn’t say a single fucking thing about homosexuality and birth control. But when the popes who Varney liked focused on these very political issues that are at best on the periphery of Christianity, it was just fine.

But Stuart Varney has a net worth of about $10 million. So when the Pope starts talking about income inequality, well, them’s fightin’ words! Varney wants his soul saved—but on the cheap. The very cheap: the free. The truth is that our modern idea of the soul is very different than it used to be. Now we think of it as some kernel that’s inside us. The Greeks, for instance, thought of the soul as the essence of who we are “that which decides how we behave.” But Varney wants to divorce that from his soul. Like most thoughtless modern Christians, all he thinks he has to do is “believe” in Jesus and his soul is in perfect order. It’s like The Great Pumpkin, but less believable.

What Varney really wants is the good old corrupt Church. The Church that never does anything to offend those who have money or power. And that’s fine. It is clear that Varney’s true God is money. But it is offensive for him to claim to be a Christian. It is even more offensive for him to think that he has any right to lecture the Pope about what his job description is.