Amidst all the rejoicing that Star Wars: The Force Awakens didn't suck (even if it did feel more like a Star Wars highlight real than a stand-alone film, but more on that later), it may be helpful to remember what caused that palpable sense of relief to build up in the first place.
Last summer marked 10 years since some friends and I, on a lark, decided to attend a Monday midnight viewing of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith at the dollar theater; all of us had already seen it, we fully knew what we were in for. I guess we all just assumed that the prequel trilogy couldn't possibly disappoint us anymore, it's ability to hurt us was officially over--and thus to celebrate our liberation from its treachery, I suppose we thought we were just going to mock it all movie long, Mystery Science Theater 3000 style, riffing on the scenes and on each other, and have a rollicking good time doing so.
Within 15 minutes, we all realized we'd made a terrible mistake. Some movies aren't just so-bad-their-good, they're just plain bad, and actively resist your ability to make fun of them. It wasn't a good-natured levity we were feeling while reliving this cinematic abortion, but a deep and abiding loathing for a film franchise that had burned so tirelessly through our last remaining shreds of goodwill. It was with a profound disgust--with George Lucas, with Star Wars generally, and with ourselves for wasting one last dollar and 2 hours of our finite lives on them--that we exited that theater 'round 2am. Duly chastened, we haven't rewatched the prequels since.
I bring this up because it has apparently become fashionable among some modern-day revisionists to claim that Revenge of the Sith was actually some sort of underappreciated blockbuster, its reputation unfairly dragged down by the two turds that preceded it, that in fact, though by no means perfect, it was still well paced and nuanced and "dark" enough to merit mention in the same breath as the original trilogy, to in fact even be considered better than Return of the Jedi--to which I can only say, NO. Just, NO.
Revenge of the Sith really is as bad as you remember. Return of the Jedi ain't perfect either, but its worst parts--the mawkish cutesiness of the Ewoks--come nowhere close to plumbing the same depths of asinine idiocy as any of the prequels; while its best parts--Luke Skywalker's temptations to the Dark Side by the Emperor--are possessed of a feverish intensity and frightening plausibility that are utterly unparalleled by the contrived clumsiness of Revenge of the Sith. For in Luke's rage-fueled final showdown with Vader, you are filled with a very real dread that Luke could actually turn; while in Anakin's final CGI battle with Obi Wan, you only tap your watch impatiently for Anakin to complete his preprogrammed costume change.
There's simply no rationalizing it: the Star Wars prequels were awful. Never in film history has there been a greater disparity between expectation and execution--Lucas didn't just miss the target, but shot his own foot off.
Now, The Force Awakens, while easily better than the prequels (though talk about a low bar to clear!), still has some flaws: it was not only a predictable point-by-point rehash of the original Star Wars, but its two main story threads--the search for Luke Skywalker and the destruction of yet another Death Star--both oddly felt like afterthoughts of each other. For in the original Star Wars, the Death Star is the single largest threat the liberty of the galaxy has ever faced, and all events and plot points continually relate directly back to its destruction. But in The Force Awakens, the Star Killer's destruction is just another nostalgic box to check off, a weirdly beside-the-point side-quest in the search for Luke--which in turn felt largely inconsequential to the broader Star Killer plot. I don't know whether or not to actually be impressed by how the movie's two main threads managed to feel weirdly beside the point (the point of course being to sell merchandise, not dramatize the archetypal struggle between life and death).
Overall, the film felt less like a passion-project (like the first one was for a younger, more vivacious George Lucas, who suffered a full-on heart-attack to bring it to fruition), than a carefully calculated corporate marketing venture--which, given Disney, is exactly what The Force Awakens is.
Don't get me wrong, I still enjoyed The Force Awakens, I liked it just fine, even as it still has not quite burrowed its way into my imagination like the originals did. But I also fully get the great groundswell of joy that has greeted Episode VII as well: it's not just happiness but relief that another Star Wars has been made that doesn't completely suck! In the dark days of the prequel trilogies, we could only dream of such basic competency! With Revenge of the Sith still lingering like a bad taste in our mouth over a decade later, The Force Awakens has been a welcome draught indeed.
So this year, as part of my continuing quest to find Christmas music I don't hate, I stumbled upon this hidden gem:
Harvey Danger's "Sometimes You Have To Work On Christmas" just nails the feeling of abject melancholy that comes from, well, having to work on Christmas, a severely under-represented element of the whole Holiday experience (and really, if you're thinking of going to see a movie on Christmas day, please think twice; it's bad enough that the police, EMTs, and other essential services workers have to be on call that day, without a spoiled middle-class compounding the yuletide misery of an overworked underclass). In the song, the narrator notes the irony of serving movie patrons who come to "spend Christmas alone together"--not to mention the agony of his family being "two time zones away," while his "vodka and snow is melting/the alcohol isn't helping."
That is, I guess he could say that "the agony and irony are killing me."
Wait, where have we heard that line before?
Don't even pretend you don't know the words to Harvey Danger's "Flagpole Sitta," the perennial late-90s one-hit-wonder to end all late-90s one-hit-wonders--a song that still gets overplayed on the radio to this day. It has featured in multiple film soundtracks, British TV shows, Edward Snowden clips, videos of bicyclists beating a minivan, countless karaoke nights, and whatever station your manager tuned to in the background at work. At this point, the question of whether you love, hate, or even feel indifferent towards this song is largely irrelevant; it's just burrowed too deep into our common cultural consciousness, just another tiny part of the air we breath without thinking.
Much like Springsteen's "Born in the USA," Neil Young's "Keep on Rockin in the Free World," U2's "With or Without You," and The Police's "Every Breath You Take," "Flagpole Sitta" ranks among the most wildly misunderstood songs of the American Pop canon--in this case, a sarcastic screed against the empty pretensions of alternative culture ("I want to publish zines, and rage against machines, I wanna pierce my tongue, it doesn't hurt it feels fine...") that is persistently read as a sincere and unabashed homage to the same. Partly this is the band's own fault, inasmuch as they wrote an unapologetically joyous earworm of a melody that can't help but sound like a celebration of whatever it's mocking. Besides, such an ironic misreading seems apropos of a tune that finishes with "the agony and irony are killing me (whoa!)".
But enough on a song we've all heard a million times already! For my stumbling upon of "Sometimes You Have to Work on Christmas" didn't just reveal to me that '90s-trivia-question Harvey Danger actually wrote another song worth listening to (or even another song period), but tripped me down a rabbit hole to discover that, guys--Harvey Danger was actually really good.
For after discovering "Sometimes You Have to Work on Christmas" and determining that it needed to be on my Navidad playlist, I quickly learned that the track is available for free download on the band's own website, as part of a 2009 B-Side collection called Dead Sea Scrolls (the fact that it wasn't available for sale anywhere else tells you all you need to know about Harvey Danger's non-Flagpole-Sitta popularity--though unjustifiably, as you may soon see). I downloaded the whole album a month ago just to get the one Christmas song; nevertheless, it wasn't long till my idle curiosity got the best of me, and I gave the other 13 tracks a cursory listen.
How do I describe what happened next? Did they benefit from my utter lack of expectations? Or does that mean I engaged them with a mind open and free of hype? In any case, from that cursory listen, I suddenly found myself listening to Dead Sea Scrolls with rapt attention from beginning to end--and then again--and again--and again. It sure didn't sound like a B-Sides collection, no--it sounded like the best album I'd heard in years.
This is especially important, because just last Spring, I was catching up with an old college buddy, wherein we
lamented about how the perennial experience of our early-20s--that of
discovering a gorgeous new album that transports you outside of
yourself--was one that neither of us had had in several years. Oh sure, we still kept up plenty with contemporary music, but though we enjoyed much of it, little of it swept us off our feet like when we were just a little younger. Indeed,
we quietly worried that we would never have that experience again, that
maybe we couldn't have it again. (Studies have shown that
most people won't get into anymore new music after the age of 34).
Maybe, sadly, we had finally outgrown the possibility of having that experience with music, as our brains slowly calcified into old age.
I hope that gives some context to my hyperbolic statement
that to finally have that experience again with Dead Sea Scrolls has been a bona fide Christmas miracle for me.
The lyrics are clever yet soulful, the musicianship in turns subdued and ecstatic. It's another mark of the inherent injustice of the universe that The Shins are renowned for lesser-examples of the same while Harvey Danger has been otherwise forgotten.
Intrigued at this incredible find, I quickly dug deeper. On the same free download page, I learned that in 2005, five years after the utter flop of their second album King James Version had sealed their place in the dubious pantheon of one-hit-wonders, Harvey Danger had attempted to embrace this whole newfangled file-sharing thing by offering their third album Little by Little for free online. Wilco had similarly revived their flagging career in 2001 with the much more renowned Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, and Radiohead would do the same to even greater acclaim just two years later with 2007's In Rainbows; by contrast, Harvey Danger's much more modest success with "over 100,000 downloads" and selling "most of" the ensuing physical copies with bonus tracks, gets understandably overlooked in the history of internet-only releases--which is a shame, because this really is a great album.
I don't want to oversell this one, it takes at least a couple listens for it to get under your skin; but once it does, you'll find that "Little Round Mirrors" and "Incommunicado" both sound like songs you've always known, that have always existed, and you will be perpetually surprised to realize that they were only ever released on a largely-forgotten one-hit-wonder's online crapshoot. You'll wonder not only how you ever got along without the de ja vu of these dispatches from some alternate universe Billy Joel, but why on earth they aren't as much a part of the cultural air we breathe as "Flagpole Sitta".
Granted, I'm biased; I went to High School in Centralia, WA, my family moved their when I was 9. My mother is buried there. I got an Associates degree there. That town is a part of me. But I moved away from there 10 years ago, and my family moved to Vancouver a few years ago, thus ensuring that I'll never live in Centralia again; really, I haven't given that rundown town much thought since. But this song has revived Centralia within me something fierce; for what Seattle-based Harvey Danger has done is perfectly capture the uncanny feeling that comes from living in a place that is exactly half-way between Seattle and Portland on the I-5--that is, it is both in the middle of everything and in the middle of nothing; it is both equally close and equally far from the two most important cities in the Pacific Northwest; the whole world moves right through you while you feel stuck going nowhere when you live in Centralia.
I had never thought of it this way before, but the town really is the perfect metaphor for that infernal feeling of limbo you feel after a breakup, which Harvey Danger must have felt each time they stopped in Centralia for gas and the bathroom on their way down to Oregon. "When wicked thoughts come inter alia/You wind up in Centralia, morally" they sing, and that is not a place you want to wind up, I assure you!
I now had two full albums by a band I thought I would never listen to more than one song by. I hadn't felt obsessed, truly and really obsessed, by a band in too long, so I decided it was time to go all in with Harvey Danger. It won't surprise you to learn that their "Flagpole Sitta"-featuring debut Where Have All the Merrymakers Gone? is available for only a penny on Amazon, and their flopping follow-up King James Version for not much more, so I easily got my hands on both.
First KJV: it didn't take me much googling to find that I of course was never alone in realizing that Harvey Danger was amazing, nor that they had a cult following as passionate as it was small--and that among the faithful, KJV is considered their magnum opus. The band clearly desired it to be understood that way--like the Bible translation it is named for, KJV is a self-conscious attempt to present the Authoritative Version of the band's sound.
I have now given several listens to KJV and I can now say with deep conviction that...it's fine. Not bad. But here I'm gonna have to break with all the other budding Harvey Danger enthusiasts out there and say that it makes sense why this album never capitalized on the success "Flagpole Sitta", for the songs don't quite stick their claws into you the same way Where Have All The Merrymakers Gone and Little by Little do.
That's not to say that KJV isn't an achievement; it has far more ambition than Where Have..., and far more fully develops their aesthetic that was first introduced by "Flagpole Sitta": what has often been labeled as the Post-Ironic.
Perhaps KJV's "Sad Sweet Heart of the Rodeo"might help illustrate what is meant by Post-Ironic: the lyrics and video tell the story of a city-girl who pines for the wild-life of the rodeo. The topic of many of Country song, for sure, but this is a punk anthem by a leftist Seattle-based Indie band, and thus that yearning is written from that distinct perspective--it is a reexamination of rodeo culture by those who are otherwise most suspicious of it. In the song, she is mockingly lectured by her boyfriend that "The Marlboro Man died of cancer/And he wasn't a rocket science when he was alive", to which she responds with a derisive "ha-ha-ha." That is, the ironic deconstruction of the rodeo mythos is in turn ironically deconstructed with that laugh. The irony has been ironized. She craves the rodeo life not because she doesn't understand the irony of it, but precisely because she does, and is tired of it. In the smug "soft city condescension" of the Postmodern, she is seeking the Post-Ironic.
For the Post-Modern is absolutely drenched in irony; self-awareness and deconstruction are the names of the game. Simply put, the world is awful and impossible, and with the failure and complicity of most religion in its awfulness, along with all other institutions, counter-cultures, and belief systems, the lone salvation that the Post-Modern can turn towards is ironic self-detachment. By the early '90s, Post-Modern irony's cultural supremacy was complete.
Which of course meant that now irony itself had to be interrogated and deconstructed. Not surprisingly, irony was found wanting; in literature, David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen lead the charge to reject irony and cynicism, to find a new sincerity that could somehow move us past the anesthetizing numbness and meaninglessness of the ironic. 9/11 would exasperate this trend, as ironic self-detachment and a casual, cynical shrug were now luxuries we could no longer afford, anyways. We had to start believing in things again, or the fundamentalists (both at home and abroad) would start believing in things for us. In music, Arcade Fire helped lead the charge for this new Post-Ironic sincerity in the 21st century; mid-'00s Emo, for all its other flaws, was likewise an expression of this Post-Ironic sensibility; Harvey Danger's KJV then, released in the halcyon days of 2000, was arguably ahead of its time.
For as much as Harvey Danger sang that "irony is killing me," they fully understood why irony was so desperately needed in the first place. KJV's opener "Meetings With Remarkable Men" describes a dinner with Jesus himself, who had "two words about inanity: fundamental Christianity," which was an alarmingly prescient prediction of the havoc that fundamentalist evangelism would wreck upon the U.S. electorate over the course of the new millennium. That is, Harvey Danger understood the danger of fundamentalism that irony needed to deconstruct, even as they likewise recognized that irony alone is insufficient to create new meaning.
Besides religion, the other recurring theme in their oeuvre is cinema: the very first track on their very first album, "Carlotta Valdez", is a retelling of Hitchcock's Vertigo, a film about deconstructing (and then reconstructing) false appearances; on KJV's gorgeous "Pike St./Park Slope" (a piano ballad that presages Little by Little), the singer asks his crush "Maybe we could run away and start a little repertory movie house or something"; and of course on "Sometimes You Have to Work on Christmas", the narrator is opening that very repertory movie house on Christmas day. Like irony, cinema is both the solution (wherein you can self-detach from life by rendering it all just a show) and the fresh problem (now you are trapped by the very shows you tried to self-detach with)--just as Christmas is both what you need and what hurts you all at once.
But just where does one find the Post-Ironic, the new sincerity? I am willing to make the argument that in their very last single, released in 2010 on their free download page a full year after their final show, they find a hard-won resolution. Almost too on the nose, it is entitled "The Show Must Not Go On".
This song, by the way, is their best one, and that's saying something. For when I pooh-pooh KJV a bit by saying, though more ambitious than Where Have...,it is not as good as Little by Little or the masterpiece Dead Sea Scrolls, what am I really saying? That their 4th album was better than their 3rd than their 2nd than their 1st? That they just kept getting better and better? That if they had enjoyed even just a little more commercial support, they could have just kept up that trajectory and churned out ever more shining masterpieces, and that it is to our condemnation that we never encouraged them so?
But I worry that if they had had the success they needed to keep growing artistically, they never would have produced this one remarkable song; though obviously a final kiss-off to the music industry (if they couldn't succeed on their own terms, they determined to at least end it on their own), the lyric's are about finally getting over a long-lost crush--and my goodness, that is a song I could have really used multiple times throughout my 20s. Even as I am now happily engaged and my torrential 20s are fading into the rear-view mirror, this song can't help but conjure up those old feelings once more. "You can bash your head against a wall for years/The wall is not impressed", "It's not hard to see a beautiful girl/And imagine the life that you could have with her", "So much of what we so grandly call love, is simply in our heads", and "You can try, try, you'll never read her mind/Which is fine, fine, cause she cannot read yours", are all lines I fully plan on using with other troubled young men I will doubtless meet throughout my life--as I wish someone had once said to me.
Moreover, that song, I think, is the purest expression of the Post-Ironic ethos: wherein you use irony not to deconstruct others' illusions, but your own; not to self-detach from life, but to finally reintegrate into it again; not to mock or parody the performance (as they unsuccessfully tried to do in "Flagpole Sitta"), but to end it. This is not finding escape in either the empty spectacle of rote religious observance or of cinema, but in getting up and leaving the theater altogether for the fresh light of day. That is how you make it so that "the agony and irony" are no longer killing you.
And that is how you find meaning again, even if you have to work on Christmas--not by ironically mocking or self-detaching from the holiday, but by letting Christmas be meaningful enough to hurt you when you don't get it. And because missing Christmas can wound your soul, you now know that you have one, and you can feel again, and be passionate and ecstatic and free again--as we behold in that wild, wonderful second-half and outro to "Sometimes You Have to Work On Christmas"...
It is entirely likely that Daniel Craig's latest round of declamations that he is "through with Bond" are just a strategy for strengthening his salary-negotiation position before the next film (he claimed he was through before Skyfall made him an obscene gob of money, too). But I vote that we treat his claims as entirely sincere this time around, and bid him, in all sincerity, a grateful adieu, for it is high time to reboot the series once more.
For the same pattern happened when Pierce Brosnan was Bond, if you recall--strong out the gate with the surprisingly refreshing and rejuvenating Goldeneye, which successfully transitioned Bond into a post-Cold War world, followed by rapidly diminishing returns.
Then Daniel Craig repeated the cycle--strong out the gate with the surprisingly refreshing and rejuvenating Casino Royale, which successfully transitioned Bond into a post-9/11 world...followed yet again with rapidly diminishing returns. Now, the Craig Bonds never quite plumbed the same absurd depths of campiness as Brosnan, which pushed straight through so-bad-it's-good to just plain bad; nevertheless, there's this distinct feeling of once again scraping the bottom of the barrel and already recycling ideas.
For just as Brosnan twice battled a laser-satellite (the second time as farce, to quote Marx), Craig in SPECTRE has now twice uncovered a dastardly evil organization who's reach goes far wider than any guessed (didn't they just introduce--and promptly drop--Quantum a couple movies ago?), and twice dealt with the hauntings of his childhood past (didn't Skyfall supposedly but the kibitz on that?). And for the third time in a row he has had to go rogue. What'll happen next film, will he go rogue yet again to uncover an even bigger evil organization that goes even deeper than Quantum and SPECTRE combined? A Pentaverate, perhaps, made up of the Queen, the Vatican, the Gettys, the Rothchilds, and Colonel Sanders? Will he encounter yet another ghost from his childhood? A second step-brother, perhaps? Or a nanny? A drunk uncle? We are now scraping not just the wood but the splinters at the bottom of the barrel.
What's more is how the last couple Bond flicks have cribbed so shamelessly from other, better movies, rather than forge their own path--SPECTRE's whole new-surveillance-system-turns-out-to-be-secretly-run-by-the-bad-guys plot-twist was already used by Captain America: The Winter Soldier scarcely a summer ago; the rather-pointless revival of SPECTRE and Ernst Stavro Blofield can only remind one how much more vital-feeling the old Sean Connery Bonds were; the evil former agent from Skyfall is just a repeat of 006 from Goldeneye; and the-bad-guy-wanted-to-get-caught trope comes from almost every summer blockbuster of the past 10 years.
Now, this is not to claim that Skyfall and SPECTRE are exactly awful--they're middlingly, passably alright I guess. But that's just it, I almost would have preferred them to be flat-out, Brosnan-level terrible,because that at least would have provoked another full Spring-cleaning of the franchise. But right now MGM has no incentive to break formula, to do anything more than to just keep pedaling along with the same forgettable status quo, all about as exciting as printing money--like, literally, about as fun as running a monotonous printing machine all day.
This mediocrity is so tragic because (and this is difficult for me to overstate) Casino Royale was just such a revelation! Clearly do I remember Summer '06, my girlfriend at the time dragging me to the Rexburg dollar theater to see Casino Royale--at the time, the whole idea of "rebooting" James Bond (and this even before the whole "gritty reboot" schtick had been worn to death by Hollywood) seemed patently ridiculous to me. You just get a new actor guys, literally no one was asking for a James Bond origin story! C'mon. So I went in skeptical...but came out converted. It was a breath of fresh air! James Bond had not felt this vital in a decade. I easily consider it one of the best films of the 2000s. The acting, pacing, plotting, dialogue, action, chemistry, humor--the film just hit the right balance between all of it, and what's more, made it look easy!
The humor especially--I bring this up because all subsequent directors of the Craig films have learned the exact wrong lessons from Casino Royale, and doubled down on the brooding grimness, failing to recognize that that was only one part of what made the film work, a constellation of factors, rather than the chief element. And with each new release, as fans and critics have loudly lamented the absence of the suave, good-humored, fun Bond of years of yore, these various directors have defended their plodding darkness with something along the lines of, "Well you see, these films are about how Bond becomes Bond; he must work through his demons until he gets his sense of humor"--all while utterly eliding the fact that Bond's sense of humor was already present in Casino Royale!
Now, Casino Royale's humor was certainly a more muted, gallows humor than that of the Brosnan or Moore, but it was still there. Remember that fantastic opening scene, wherein after this vicious, extended build-up that involves Bond brutally beating a man to death for the first time in a public bathroom, the villain somberly observes, "Made you feel it, did he? Well, you needn't worry. The second is..." at which Bond promptly shoots him and quips, "Yes, considerably." Recall Bond being asked if he wants his Martini shaken or stirred, to which he mutters, "Does it look like I give a damn?" Or when he suffers cardiac arrest in his car, is shocked back to life by Vesper Lynn, and he just glances up to her and says, "You OK?" He then returns to the poker table and tells Le Chiffre, "That last hand almost killed me." When Le Chiffre later tortures him for the money, Bond, bloodied and traumatized, just cracks a joke about how Le Chiffre has now scratched his balls.
Now, none of these moments are funny "ha-ha", so to speak, but they did exactly what jokes need to do in an action movie--break up the tension at just the right-timed moments, so that the audience doesn't get overwhelmed, exhausted, and finally bored by the action. But if you have too many jokes, then the film devolves into a dull parody of itself--as the Brosnan ones ultimately did. Casino Royale hit that balance just right in a way no Bond film has since.
And then there's that wonderful final scene, wherein the nefarious Mr. White, looking over the calm, bright lake of his Swiss estate, having apparently gotten away with the money, answers his phone with "Who is this?", only to be immediately shot in the leg. As he crawls away in the same writhing pain he has inflicted upon others all movie long, Daniel Craig, in an impeccable 3-piece suit, a sniper-rifle held aloft in one hand and cell-phone in the other, struts up casually and says, for the first time all movie, "The name's Bond, James Bond." It's not a joke per se, but it is such a perfect climax, one that signals that the suave, fun-loving, self-possessed Bond of years gone by has finally arrived!
In terms of perfect endings, I can only compare itto the first Matrix, when Neo flies straight into the sky. In that moment, anything and everything feels possible; sudden new vistas have opened up; you are filled with the elated feeling that this franchise can now go anywhere!
And like The Matrix, the series went on to utterly squander the promise of that perfect ending. Rather than follow Bond's progression post-Casino Royale, the series has just reset him, over and over and over. Each film ends with the implicit promise that Bond has at last arrived,
that his transformation is now finally, finally, for-realsy-this-time,complete--only for the gloomy machine to
reset itself, yet again, once more, for the next rendition. In fact, they've done worse than reset--they've actively regressed, because the incipient humor of Casino Royale has vanished, and he has made no moves to recover it since. Casino Royale was about the redemption of a sociopath; but every subsequent one has been about the same redemption of the same sociopath. They just keep spinning their wheels, and I fear they've now ran out of traction.
So yes, it's time to start all over again. Get a new actor, start a new reboot. I will always be grateful for Casino Royale (just as I once was for Goldeneye), but it is sadly plain now thatDaniel Craig's Bond is never going to become the joie de vivre Bond of days past, at least not with the current crop of writers and directors. So give me a fresh faced Bond, one to breath new life into the series--and then go ahead and give me 3 subsequent disappointments again, til we doubtless start the cycle fresh anew once more, or at least till we learn the right lessons from Casino Royale.
So a few Decembers ago, I suddenly decided that Dickens' A Christmas Carol was a thing I should own. It was an impulse buy--I was just hanging around some mall Barnes & Noble while waiting for someone (the only reason anyone seems to enter a Barnes & Noble anymore), when I spied this ornate little copy sitting on the shelf, claiming to be a facsimile reproduction of the original 1843 edition.
Which turned out to be a bit of false-advertising--what Barns & Noble actually had on display was a facsimile of the 1922 facsimile of the 1843. It wasn't till I was home that I realized the subterfuge. Very clever, Barnes & Noble! I should've known that $12.95 was too good to be true.
But whatever minor feelings of being ripped off I might have harbored were quickly dispelled by 1) the fact that it really is a handsome little volume, 2) the delightful text is the same no matter what year it's reproducing, and 3) it contains a most excellent introduction written by G.K. Chesterton, celebrated frenemy of no less than George Bernard Shaw himself, such that I now actually prefer the 1922 facsimile!
What is so refreshing about Chesterton is that he eschews the standard sentimentalist "what a treat to have this holiday classic for new generations to cherish!" type intro that plagues us like a Hallmark ad to this day. No, Chesterton has far bigger fish to fry--for given how he was writing in 1922, with all those sundry Eugenicists, social Darwinists, Nietzscheans, and nascent-fascists making the rounds and laying the groundwork for WWII and the Holocaust, Chesterton finds nothing quaint or classic about A Christmas Carol at all. On the contrary, he finds its message more urgent than ever, and it's worth interrogating whether we can still say the same today.
For after spending the first couple pages repeating the party-line of how Dickens "saved Christmas" before it was too late, Chesterton makes clear his real target: "Scrooge is a utilitarian and an individualist; that is, he is a miser in theory as well as in practice. He utters all the sophistries by which the age of machinery has tried to turn the virtue of charity into a vice...Many amiable sociologists will say, as he said, 'Let them die and decrease the surplus population'...
"It is notable also that Dickens gives the right reply...The answer to anyone who talks about the surplus population is to ask him whether he is the surplus population...That is the answer which the Spirit of Christmas gives to Scrooge...Scrooge is exactly the sort of man who would really talk of the superfluous poor as of something dim and distant; and yet he is also exactly the sort of man whom others might regard as sufficiently dim, not to say dingy, to be himself superfluous...the miser who himself looks so like a pauper, confidently ordering the massacre of paupers. This is true enough even to more modern life; and we have all met mental defectives in the comfortable classes who are humoured, as with a kind of hobby, by being allowed to go about lecturing on the mental deficiency of poor people. We have all met professors, of stunted figure and the most startling ugliness, who explain that all save the strong and beautiful should be painlessly extinguished in the interests of the race. We have all seen the most sedentary scholars proving on paper that none should survive save the victors of aggressive war and physical struggle of life; we have all heard the idle rich explaining why the idle poor deserve to be left to die of hunger. In all the spirit of Scrooge survives".
Tell me: do we still have the ugly rhapsodizing the beautiful? (I seem to recall the CEO of Abercrombie & Fitch doing just that recently). Do we still have the wealthy showing off how poor they can dress? (I'm looking at you Mark Zuckerberg). Do we still have the flabby, obese, and sedentary preaching the virtue of strength and aggression? (Such is the stereotype of your average NFL fan--or of your overweight talk-show hosts demanding shows of military strength). And most of all, do we still have the idle rich lecturing the idle poor--all while their mouths are full of produce picked by migrants working 98 cents an hour, their clothing sewn by sweatshop children, their Holiday chocolate harvested from African plantations, their diamonds collected through blood and horror? My my my, how the spirit of Scrooge not only survives but thrives into the 21st century. But Chesterton ain't through with us yet, and saves his most biting commentary for last:
"But in justice to Scrooge, we must admit that in some respects the later developments of his heathen philosophy have gone beyond him. If Scrooge was an individualists, he had something of the good as well as the evil of individualism. He believed at least in the negative liberty of the Utilitarians. He was ready to live and let live, even if the standard of living was very near to that of dying and letting die. He partook of gruel while his nephew partook of punch; but it never occurred to him that he should forcible forbid a grown man like his nephew to consume punch, or coerce him into eating gruel. In that he was far behind the ferocity and tyranny of the social reformers of our own day. If he refused to subscribe to a scheme for giving people Christmas dinners, at least he did not subscribe (as the reformers do) to a scheme for taking away the Christmas dinners they have already got...Doubtless he would have regarded charity as folly, but he would also have regarded the forcible reversal as theft. He would not have thought it natural to pursue Bob Cratchit to his own home, to spy on him, to steal his turkey, to run away with his punch-bowl, to kidnap his crippled child, and put him in prison as a defective...These antics were far beyond the activities of poor Scrooge, whose figure shines by comparison with something of humour and humanity."
Ouch.
Perhaps, upon further reflection, it is a mistake to purchase facsimile reproductions of A Christmas Carol, for that implies that this is an artifact from some other time, with concerns irrelevant to our own--if anything, the things that worried Dickens are even more cutting-edge now.
And yet again, there has been another mass-shooting--this one hit especially close to home, because my fiance was raised in the San Bernadino mountains. Her family has been following the details especially closely. Somehow we never seem to get desensitized to these, as each just feels more horrible than the last--for this comes scarce a couple months after Umpqua Community College, which in turn came on the heels of Coral Ridge Mall, Charleston, UC Santa Barbara, Sandy Hooks, Aurora, Fort Hood, Virginia Tech, and doubtless a hundred others I can't even remember off the top of my head, they're just all getting to be so many, too many...
But here's the strange thing (there are many horrifying things here, but this is the strange one): though we have so many to choose from, the standard by which all my freshmen continue to gauge mass-shootings remains Columbine.
Just to put that in perspective: my students were 2 when Columbine happened. 2. Literally still in diapers. They have no possible memories of the event. Yet when Umpqua happened two months ago, the first thing my students breathlessly asked was whether this was worse than Columbine. Not Sandy Hooks, not Virginia Tech, but Columbine.
It's an odd sort of time-warp; one would expect my generation to be the ones constantly referring back to Columbine, since it happened when we were in High School. Well do I remember the lock-down drills, the backpack searches, the bomb-squads, the expulsions of unpopular kids in trench-coats--right up until 9/11 happened and we all decided we had far worse things to worry about now. Shouldn't we be the ones constantly harping on Columbine, annoying these young teenagers who have far more recent rampages seared into their collective consciousness? Yet I think I would have forgotten about Columbine by now, if it hadn't been that my students keep bringing it up. What gives?
My best guess is the fact that Columbine remains the biggest High School shooting ever--and these kids just got out of High School. For the vast majority of them, shootings in malls, churches, military bases, hospitals, even other colleges, still feel too abstract and distant to fully process. But a High School--now that's something they know, something that has defined a solid fifth of their life. Classes, sports, extracurriculars--the super-majority of their waking hours revolved around High School. It's an intimate space, a Holy one, Great and Terrible--when a shooting happens there, they feel it in their bones, even if it happened 16 years ago.
But even deeper than that, these kids can still kind of understand a High School shooter. By contrast, some psychopath shooting up a theater, a Church, a mall, is just too opaque, too inscrutable to really resonate. But a High School shooter, well...none of them will admit it, but every teenager's thought of doing it, haven't they. Even the so-called "popular" kids have experience being bullied, while the most-bullied still have experience dealing it out, too. To be an American High Schooler is to be constantly caught between rage and guilt, between an intense desire to avenge yourself upon your tormentors and a deep fear that you deserve it if it happens to you. Everyone who survives adolescence merits a medal.
Most teenagers, in their deepest, darkest moments, have all fantasized about blowing up the school. But (as these things usually are), fantasies become horrifying in real life. What I suspect continues to trouble American High Schoolers about Columbine is the fact that those two teenagers actually carried out what the rest of them have secretly considered. The fact that the rest of them would never indulge in the awful fantasy is of no avail: they feel complicit, because they are able to imagine the unimaginable, to sympathize with the unsympathizable. Unlike other massacres, teenagers can actually understand the horror of Columbine, they are able to stare into the abyss and it stares right back--and that is what frightens them more than any other shooting you could name. Those other rampages don't belong to them; but Columbine still belongs to the teenagers.
And this all feels directly relevant to our most recent and endless bout of mass shootings: they are fantasies brought horribly to life, aren't they. Most of us manage the impulse towards total violence in more constructive manners, or at least try to--action movies, video games, sports, etc. The violence is carefully regulated, as in football, or it is somehow justified in a sort of ethically-definsible framework, as with action heroes. We create "good-guys with guns."
But the problem is that everyone thinks they're a good-guy with guns--yes, even the mad-men in Charleston, or Umpqua, or now San Bernadino. That they obviously weren't scarcely needs to be stated; that many really can wield firearms responsibly is likewise self-evident; rather, what makes these mass-shootings so horrifying is that they represent the awful fantasy brought to life, carried to its absolute extreme. For I dare speculate that people who purchase weapons typically don't just do so for self-defense or for sports-shooting--no, it's with the secret hope of wielding them in righteous fury.
But now some maniacs have actually done so. It is too horrible to contemplate, that we might have anything in common with these killers. So we must loudly disavow these shooters, declare we are nothing like them, blame their religion, their mental health, their troubled childhood, and R-rated movies and music and videogames and gun-laws and everything else except their very humanity which drove them to be so characteristically inhumane. We wish to keep them inscrutable, lest we recognize the same abyss within ourselves.
So hence we treat each new mass-shooting like it were some strange new thing, as though it had never happened before; perhaps that is why the horror never seems to go away, why we never get desensitized, each time it happens.
But the teenagers have been wiser; Columbine still scares them like nothing else from 1999 does anymore, precisely because they are keenly aware of the possibility for Columbine within themselves, and worse. But the rest of us adults still stubbornly, petulantly refuse to see the same within us, so we are continually blindsided by it, and that with every increasing velocity.
