A Day of Licentious Benevolence

I once worked for a newspaper editor who decided that on each day between Thanksgiving and Christmas we would strive for a “Santa presence” in the paper.

Preferably, a picture of Santa. Or a story with a reference to Santa.

This idea was probably cooked up by somebody in advertising to appeal to the business community. It would promote spending – spending by consumers and spending by advertisers. (The wall that the news media claim exists between the news side and the advertising side of the business has always had holes in it.)

There came two days in a row, however, when Santa didn’t make the paper.

“What’s happened to Santa?” the editor asked.

I started to explain the demands of other news on the reporters. Then the photo editor rescued me: “This afternoon we’re gonna have a whole gang of Santas … on motorcycles!”

In the U.S., the news media have the luxury of pursuing Santa stories, while elsewhere at year’s end they tally the number of journalists killed in the line of duty.

Americans also have the luxury of complaining about too much commercialism at Christmas. Someday we may not have that luxury.

In the past year, commerce has come under attack by Occupy Wall Street, particularly by the 60’s throwbacks in Portland, Ore. They don’t realize how commerce and charity go together – kind of like Jesus and Santa. One preaches charity, and the other carries a sack of gifts.

Commerce makes genuine charity possible.

One of Occupy Wall Street’s easiest targets understood this. Ayn Rand loved Christmas – at least the pagan, American version. She would have loved Santas on motorcycles, the sort of only-in-America whimsy that captivated her.

Born a Russian Jew named Alice Rosenbaum, she grew up watching her pharmacist father reduced to poverty by state-mandated charity. (Bolshevik troops seized her father’s shop and nationalized it in the name of the people.)

When she came to America (through the help of others, which she readily acknowledged), Ayn Rand’s first impression of this country was formed by the sight of the Maxwell House Coffee sign in New York that lit up with the words, “good to the last drop,” accompanied by an animated, falling drop of coffee.

“I’ll never forget it,” she said. “It seemed so incredibly cheerful and frivolous, so non-Soviet!” (From “The Passion of Ayn Rand” by Barbara Branden.)

In her New York apartment building, had Ayn Rand encountered an elevator man like Charlie in John Cheever’s “Christmas is a Sad Season for the Poor,” she might have responded the way most of the well-heeled tenants do in that Christmas Day tale, when poor Charlie replies to their Christmas greetings with this lament:

“It isn’t much of a holiday for me. I think Christmas is a very sad season of the year. It isn’t that people around here ain’t generous – I mean, I got plenty of tips – but, you see, I live alone in a furnished room and I don’t have any family or anything, and Christmas isn’t much of a holiday for me.”

Charlie would tell variations on that story throughout Christmas morning. Eventually his story would expand to include a non-existent crippled wife and four living children, plus “two in the grave.”

By afternoon, the food, drinks and gifts pile up as first one sympathetic resident, then another and another ring for him. “Here’s a little Christmas cheer, Charlie.”

He doesn’t open any of the gifts for his imaginary children, but he drinks everything offered him – cocktails, Old-Fashioneds, eggnogs, Manhattans – and ends up taking one of the apartment residents on a wild elevator ride that gets him immediately fired.

Looking around at the spread of food and gifts, he feels remorseful until he remembers his landlady’s three skinny kids. “The realization that he was in a position to give, that he could bring happiness easily to someone else, sobered him,” Cheever writes.

Charlie rushes to his landlady’s gloomy apartment and unloads the gifts on her children, convinced he has brightened their day. After he leaves, the landlady considers how many gifts they had already received.

“You kids have had enough already. … Now a nice thing to do would be to take all this stuff … to those poor people on Hudson Street… .”

Cheever writes of the beatific light that comes to the landlady’s face when she realizes she could give, “that she could put a healing finger on a case needier than hers… . First love, then charity, and then a sense of power drove her. ‘Now, you kids help me get all this stuff together. Hurry, hurry, hurry,’ she said, for it was dark then, and she knew that we are bound, one to another in licentious benevolence for only a single day… .”

The sense of power that is benign in an individual act of generosity can turn to tyranny under state-run altruism as it did in Ayn Rand’s Russia.

“One cannot rule a nation of independent, self-reliant, self-supporting men; political power requires a class of beggars,” she wrote in 1969 in a review of a book about the War on Poverty called “Poverty is Where the Money Is,” by Shirley Scheibla.

It’s doubtful any of the Occupy Wall Streeters who have denounced Rand understand her philosophy or know that she wrote about hedge fund managers before they were called hedge fund managers; she called them moochers and second-handers.

She would hate to see what’s happening to America.

For Ayn Rand, a world without America would be like a world without Santa Claus.

– Pamela Fitzsimmons

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