Conservative Scrooge vs. Liberal Scrooge: who wins?

I guess the reason I’m so feeble with New Year’s resolutions is I lack resolve.

For instance, I’m about to demolish one of my 2012 resolutions and it’s still 2011.

Yes, I’m about to bash Republicans.

About two months ago I said to myself, “You know, I’m going to resolve to never get in another political argument. It gets everyone upset and is utterly pointless. And I will refrain from posting any blogs or tweets that might upset my Republican friends.”

I felt so pleased with my rationale I immediately began composing another resolution aimed at no longer talking to myself.

Yet, politics and politicians were providing too much compelling fodder to quit cold turkey even during a season renown for warm ham.

It happened on Christmas Eve. My thoughts were on the pending worship when I fired off the following tweet: “I'd like to be in church tonight when the pastor asks everyone to pray for peace on earth to see what happens after Dick Cheney stands up to object.”

It never occurred to me that this would be a violation of my new mindset restricting GOP-bashing.

In fact, it was sort of a Christmas wish, like a kid asking Santa for a new scooter.

Because it would, indeed, be electrifying. Imagine a reverend swept up in the spirit exhorting his flock to pray that wars cease, peace reigns and that goodwill toward all men prevails.

Then you’d see Cheney rise and say, “Now, hold on preacher,” and begin laying out the case for war, strategic bombings and Halliburton-boosting budgetary increases.

It happened again about three hours later during the annual telecast of “It’s a Wonderful Life.” I posted how meanie banker Henry Potter’s rhetoric sounded so in-tune with Tea Party stalwarts I kept expecting him to demand George produce a long-form birth certificate to prove he’s eligible to run the old Bailey Building & Loan.

The reaction was immediate: There was outrage. Umbrage was taken. Feelings were hurt.

Here it was Christmas Eve and I’d upset a bunch of GOP friends who, like me, couldn’t pry ourselves away from the social media on the holiest night of the year.

Now my feelings were hurt. It was a simple observation, the kind you see all over FaceBook -- “Yea! Almost Christmas!” -- and thin-skinned friends reacted as if I’d ruined the holiday.

It was as if I were some sort of Scrooge.

And, of course, I am some sort of Scrooge.

I’m the good one who wakes up in time for Christmas morning fired with inspiration to help the less fortunate.

Yes, I’m the liberal Scrooge. The one everyone loves.

The holiday-ruining miscreant Scrooge? He’d be leading the GOP race for president.

Check it out:

• Scrooge: “If they'd rather die, then they had better do it and decrease the surplus population.”

Wasn't that sort of line that drew raucous applause at the September Tea Party debate in South Carolina? Rick Perry also drew applause when he boasted about his state’s record of executions, even though Texas leads the nation in -- whoops! -- Death Row exonerations.

• Scrooge: “Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?"

Newt Gingrich enjoyed a surge in the polls when he said child labor laws are too restrictive.

• Scrooge on if he’ll donate to help the poor: “I wish to be left alone. Since you ask me what I wish sir, that is my answer. (My taxes) help to support the establishments I have named (prisons, workhouses, orphanages); those who are badly off must go there.”

So old Scrooge is a miserly Libertarian who believes charitable interventions are unnecessary.

And pointing this out to people who believe “The Muppet Movie” is an insidious indoctrination is some sort of affront.

One more from Scrooge: “Bob, I haven’t taken leave of my senses. I’ve come to them.”

This was the Scrooge who underwent a Christmas morning transformation so remarkable he extended universal health care of Tiny Tim, redistributed his hoarded wealth and became a man whose charitable heart will be revered throughout history.

The parallels are too obvious to ignore.

I say this with cheerful heart not to upset, but to like the Ghost of Christmas Past joyfully illuminate.

To prove it, I offer one more line from Dickens.

God bless us all! Everyone!

Even the thin-skinned Conservatives who forever fail to see the light.

Re-Run Sunday: Office Christmas party canceled!

For reasons that escape me, this is the most popular post I've ever done. I wrote it last Dec. 22 when all but a few bothered to read it. It never took off like a rocket, but I'll bet at least once a day someone clicked it on so it sort of took off like a golf cart. But other than this story about the Kinzua sky walk, one that benefitted from a flattering link on a state park website, no story has earned more readers than this one being disgruntled over the sorry state of the modern Christmas Party. So it's a no-brainer for Re-Run Sunday. It's becoming my, "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus."

Tear up your plane reservations. Unpack your suitcase. Tell the dog sitter never mind.

The world’s last, best office Christmas party is being canceled.

Why? It was a victim of its own success.

So who’s the Scrooge?

That would be me.

Those of you who were checking in last year have probably had Dec. 23 circled in red on your calendars for nearly a year. That’s the day I told readers from around the world they’d be welcome to jet into Latrobe to enjoy an old-fashioned Christmas office party with me in my shabby little one-man office above the town’s best bar.

In this recap of last year’s soiree, I admit to having been nervous about holding an office party.

After all, a traditional office party is supposed to involve just the people from the office. It’s an opportunity to unwind in an unrestrained environment where booze-loosened inhibitions are free to ramble.

This neatly describes every single day of my life, so I thought my gift would be to share it with the world.

And that’s just what I did. I printed up an invitation to friends and all honest strangers to come, smoke, swear, get loaded and enjoy my new haircut.

The ground rules were clear: there would be no rules.

The world is just so rife with rules -- even lousy party rules. You can’t smoke, drink too much or wantonly flirt without fear of getting slapped with a sexual harassment suit.

I was offering the last lawless Christmas party.

Here’s what I hoped would happen: I hoped everyone who entered would have one shot of high-test liquor and immediately start removing their clothes. Then, emboldened, they’d ask me to pour them another shot.

Nudity and drunkenness are still essential elements to any good time for me -- and I was eager to share those values with all my close friends.

Here’s what happened: Everyone came in and removed one item of clothing -- their winter coats (it was about 4 degrees that night). Then everyone began making polite small talk. Everyone seemed to be having a really nice time.

It was a crushing development.

I could have suggested we all hold hands and say a prayer for the less fortunate and it would have gone over well.

I know this is a contrary opinion, but I believe Christmas is the one time of year that could use a whole lot less peace on earth and goodwill toward men.

It just doesn’t rock like it used to.

As someone who’s only had three steady jobs his entire adult life (two newspapers/one Pizza Hut), I feel like I’ve missed out on so much.

I see people going to office parties and think, damn, they must be having so much fun. I miss the camaraderie, the shared mission and the reckless opportunity to cut loose on the boss’s tab.

Maybe I’m just conjuring visits from the Ghost of Christmases That Never Were.

Maybe the Christmas parties where wives were swapped, stupid bosses were told off and everyone spent the rest of the year pretending nothing happened are as illusory as Marley’s old ghost.

If that’s so, then it’s a shame.

We spend more time with our co-workers than we do with our spouses. People who endure the cauldron of trying to stay employed in a business that’s fighting just to stay above water ought to be entitled to cut loose at least once a year.

It’s only human.

Last year’s party ended with the refrigerator still full of beer, the ashtrays mostly empty and everyone’s underwear all in place and accounted for.

Only one noble soldier stayed too late, got too drunk and joined me in making complete asses of ourselves later on downstairs in the bar.

Of course, that was Paul, and we’ve been doing that about three nights a week since 1989 so it wasn’t really Christmas special.

Maybe next year I’ll try again. Maybe people will be more in the mood to celebrate the true meaning of an old-fashioned Christmas party -- getting drunk and having fun!

But I can’t do it myself.

I’m only human.

Re-run Sunday: Hooray for humbug, USA!

This December 2009 post features some dated references, but the point, a valid one, stands: humbug has nothing to do with a dislike of Christmas. It is, I think, a fun bit of word sleuthing that will allow you to be as annoying a smarty pants as me next time you hear anyone say, "Bah! Humbug!"

On U2’s 1988 album, “Rattle and Hum,” singer Bono intros “Helter Skelter” by saying, “This is a song Charles Manson stole from the Beatles. We’re stealing it back.”

Well, in 1843 Charles Dickens stole the word “humbug” from proper usage.

I’m stealing it back.

Contrary to seasonal custom, humbug has more to do with WMD, the Salahis and Bernie Madoff than it has to do with a dyspeptic dislike for Christmas.

In today’s tabloid saturated age of cheating golfers, straying politicians and silicone saturated Botox Barbies draped like tawdry tinsel across every front page, true American humbug reigns all year long.

Let’s start with the American Heritage Dictionary which defines humbug as: “1. A hoax, fake; 2. an impostor or charlatan; 3. Nonsense, rubbish.”

Of course, our dictionaries are compiled by -- and I’m making what may be a wild and unfair assumption here -- pointy-headed dorks whose cloistered existences allow no popular culture references to illuminate the inner walls of their ivory towers.

And pop culture is from whence the power of the humbug misusage stems.

“Bah Humbug” is the pejorative phrase most associated with our most powerful story of Christmas redemption. It first appears on the third page of “A Christmas Carol.” Here’s the passage (and note the exclamatory punctuation that deliberately separates what’s morphed into a non-sensical run-on phrase):

A merry Christmas, Uncle! God save you!” cried a cheerful voice. It was the voice of Scrooge’s nephew, who came upon him so quickly that this was the first intimation he had of his approach.

“Bah!” said Scrooge. “Humbug!”

He had so heated himself with rapid walking in the fog and frost, this nephew of Scrooge’s, that he was all in a glow; his face was ruddy and handsome; his eyes sparkled, and his breath smoked again.

“Christmas, a humbug, Uncle!” said Scrooge’s nephew. “You don’t mean that, I am sure?”

“I do,” said Scrooge. “Merry Christmas! What right have you to be merry? What reason have you to be merry? You’re poor enough.”

“Come, then,” returned the nephew gaily. “What right have you to be dismal? What reason have you to be morose? You’re rich enough.”

Scrooge, having no better answer ready on the spur of the moment said, “Bah!” again; and followed it up with “Humbug.”

Clearly, he’s referring in two distinct declarations that the idea of a happy holiday is an excessive hoax or fraud.

As the book progresses, each subsequent reference to humbuggery refers, not to seasonal Christmas elements, but to something that might be cooked up by the likes of Penn & Teller.

When apparitions of old Marley’s head replace those of Biblical figures depicted on artistic fire place tiles, Scrooge exclaims, “Humbug!”

Inexplicable banging from down the stairs? “It’s humbug still! I won’t believe it.”

As Marley’s ghost begins to diminish into the ether, Dickens writes, “He tried to say ‘Humbug!’ but stopped at the first syllable.”

Need more proof? When the wizard is revealed to be a phony in the 1939 classic, "Wizard of Oz," the enraged Scarecrow sputters to come up with the most devastating insult his straw noggin can conceive: "You! You . . . humbug!" he says, to which the fraudulent wizard confesses, "Yes, I am a humbug."

In fact, the misappropriation of the term must be infuriating to an egotistical Dickens contemporary who so reveled in the joy of artful humbug that he in his 1855 autobiography called himself “The Prince of the Humbugs.”

That would be P.T. Barnum.

The satirical fingerprints of America’s most authentic impresario are today on every reality TV program and tabloid news story.

Here’s some humbug, American-style.

Barnum enjoyed his first commercial success in 1835 by purchasing for $1,000 an elderly slave woman named Joice Heth, who he claimed to be the 161-year-old nurse to George Washington. Paying audiences sat in rapt attention as the blind, toothless and withered ancient spun religious and patriotic tales about being the de facto mother to the father of the country.

Days after her February 1836 demise, Barnum allowed newspaper skeptics to autopsy her brittle remains. Hired medical examiners cried fraud and said, humbug, she wasn’t a day over 80. Barnum then fueled the uproar by releasing a story to publisher James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald that said the autopsy was a fake and that the real Heth, now pushing 162 years old, was alive and well (and still drawing huge crowds) in Connecticut.

He then offered a third “real” story: that he’d found Heth in Kentucky, yanked all her teeth, taught her baby Gen. Washington anecdotes and that he’d capriciously increased her age by 10 years along the tour until she’d finally hit 161.

Barnum scholar Terence Whalen writes: “Every true story is rendered false by a succeeding explanation, and ultimately the various explanatory links seem to merge into a great chain of humbug.”

Today we are beseiged by humbug and the moralists decry that the decay is eating away at the soul of America’s character.

To that, I say, “Bah! Uh, hogwash!”

Roll with the punches, America. The hyperbole is a uniquely American phenomenon. Sit back and savor all the silliness.

And may each of you enjoy a warm and Happy Humbug this Christmas and all year long.

I've forgiven Ben Roethlisberger

“Good afternoon, Pittsburgh Steelers offices.”

Hi. Can I ask you some oddball questions?

“Sure! Go ahead.”

I’m trying to find out how many fans turned in their Ben Roethlisberger jerseys last summer when he had his personal trouble down in Georgia.

“I really don’t know.”

Well, was it dozens? Hundreds?

“I don’t know. That didn’t pertain to me.”

What happened to them?

“I don’t know. I believe they were donated. Why do you ask?”

Well, I turned mine in along with a letter to Art Rooney saying Roethlisberger had disgraced the team with his sexual assault in Georgia.

“Yes?”

And now I’d like to get the jersey back.

“You what?”

I’d like to have my Ben Roethlisberger jersey back in time for Saturday’s playoff game.

“You want it back?”

Exactly.

“Well, I’m sorry, but that’s impossible. They didn’t keep the jerseys. Thank you and goodbye.”

Will the Steelers replace the one I turned in?

“No. Goodbye.”

Of course, I knew the jersey I so sanctimoniously turned in to the Steeler headquarters last April was gone.

But I thought it would be fun to give the Steeler receptionist something to talk about when someone asked her how her day went.

Really, I’m surprised some lunatic fan hasn’t done that for real. There is no limit to excessive fan behavior and with the rival Baltimore Ravens in town things are at fever pitch here in the ‘burgh.

I don’t want his jersey back, but being a lunatic fan during playoff time I do have an announcement to make:

I forgive Ben. 

This is important because I consider myself a moral arbiter about all that’s right and good concerning the Steelers, Pittsburgh and, really, whatever else is going on in the universe.

It’s just what nosey guys like me do. It’s a pity the gig doesn’t pay squat.

But when a 20-year-old college student accused Ben of recreational rape in a club bathroom, I was outraged. Then came all the stories, ones we in Pittsburgh had heard for years, that he was just a total jerk.

He was never charged, everyone involved was drunk and no jury in the world would have convicted him, according to the country prosecutor who still gave him a good scolding.

I wrote that we needed to dump him, that Pittsburgh and the Rooney family needed to hold our players to a higher standard.

I still believe that.

And from everything I’ve heard, Ben is now living up to that standard so rarely applied in professional sports. Local reporters, many of whom are friends of mine, recently awarded him The Chief Award, named after beloved Steeler founder Art Rooney Sr.

The good-guy award goes to the player who is most cooperative with the press. For him, it’s a dramatic turnabout and an indication that his efforts to change are sincere.

I know a guy, too, who attends church with Roethlisberger. Of course, it’s difficult for anyone to seem like a jerk in a church pew, but my friend says he’s been a friendly and welcome addition to the congregation.

That’s all good.

For me, the tricky part is how would me and other forgiving fans feel if he was playing lousy.

Yes, he’s been great. We are a society that overlooks a lot of flaws if they come with a lot of wins.

I don’t think that’s entering into my thinking.

But I’m a big second chance guy. I was very happy to see Michael Vick emerge from a long prison sentence for dog fighting and to have a fantastic year.

I love to see guys like him turn their lives around. It’s why what happens to Ebenezer Scrooge will always resonate.

So Ben seems to have made the most of his second chance.

I won’t rush out and buy another Ben jersey and am relieved the receptionist at the Steeler HQ didn’t call my bluff and tell me to come on down and pick one up.

But as we’re nearing kickoff, I can feel comfortable about rooting for Ben.

I guess I’m like a lot of people in Pittsburgh.

We want our Steelers to kick ass, not prowl around in dingy bathrooms trying to snag pieces of it.