It's the day after Christmas and a lot of us are in the same situation. We've eaten way too much and we're wearing new clothes. I sit here in a new flannel shirt, looking like a lazy lumberjack.Another thing many of us have in common is that we watched some version of A Christmas Carol in the near past. And, watching this, the same thought crossed many of our minds -- what the hell is wrong with Tiny Tim?
Is it polio, explaining the crutch? Is it TB, explaining his weakness? Dickens never really gets around to saying. Tiny Tim is just really, really sick with some undefined wasting disease.
Dickens' Britain was a lot like Mexico -- there was no middle class. You were either very rich or very poor. There were almost zero social programs and those that existed only existed to punish the poor for their poverty -- debtors' prisons and work houses. Health insurance, as far as I know, didn't exist. You could either afford health care or you couldn't. And most couldn't. There was child labor and children who's parents couldn't afford to feed them were put into orphanages (an idea that Newt Gingrich once suggested we bring back). There were no labor laws, no worker safety protections, and no environmental protections. There was very little regulation and social and economic darwinism ruled. There was no public education.
In short, Dickensian England was the modern conservative's wet dream. It just goes to prove something I've said more than once -- when a conservative talks about change, it means they want to change things back. It's never about progress, it's about undoing progress. Conservatives are defined by what they oppose, not what they stand for. This is because opposing things is pretty much all they stand for...
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