Homage to Ebenezer Scrooge
Grant, James
We do well to remember that only one of the Antonines was sty4ed a philosopher. Unfortunately, Rakove seems to overlook this. In deference to his academic colleagues, he all too frequently...
...He was punctual...
...He could never bring himself to take down the name of Jacob Marley, his deceased partner, from the counting-house door...
...In deference to his academic colleagues, he all too frequently forgets that a philosopher and a successful ruler are seldom combined in a single body...
...Chicago, after all, would not become Erewhon or Utopia even if Edward Levi were its mayor...
...Attests Dickens: "He was an excellent man of business on the very day of the funeral [Marley's] and solemnized it with an undoubted bargain...
...Still he kept his wits about him...
...His credit was impeccable...
...Sanctity of contract cuts both ways, dammit...
...Madison, he tells us, would not have approved of Daley (maybe, maybe no0, but then Chicago is not plantation Virginia...
...I admire Ebenezer Scrooge...
...As m what became of Scrooge, we must take Dickens at his word...
...They are the checks and balances of the several constituencies which contend for power within the city, but which, under Daley's leadership, have been willing--in the most checked and balanced way--to postpone their hope of ultimate and lonely victory for the practical possibilities of present compromise...
...In 1943, 100 years after the publication of "A Christmas Carol," the world was convulsed by men and nations who insisted on doing precisely the opposite...
...But somewhere, I hope, perhaps in the wilds of Argentina, the real Scrooge lives, minding his own business and asking nothing of anyone else than that they do the same...
...In order to maintain his standing with his academic colleagues, Rakove loads himself down with paragraphs like the following: ...under Daley's rule, few ambitions have been able to counteract Daley's ambitions, and the constitutional rights of the place have been subordinated to the interests of the man...Because he has come to dominate the city, the normal checks and balances which are the built-in protections of it democratic political system have, to some extent, been compromised in Chicago...the Madisonian concept of safeguarding individual rights and the general welfare through checking power internally within a governmental system has not operated very well in Chicago either...
...This is as ludicrous a description of the possibilities of political bodies as of human bodies: none of us believes that the class klutz can be turned into the college quarterback by lifting weights, or, to make the analogy.more precise, by reading books about lifting weights...
...He became," the author vows, "as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town or borough, in the good old world...
...Of course, when a mortgage payment fell overdue, Scrooge promptly foreclosed...
...to himself and bade others do the same...
...James Grant Homage to Ebenezer Scrooge I f the twentieth century has a salient failing, it is that so few of us listened when Scrooge spoke...
...Scrooge wasn't your ordinary clubman, but he wasn't immune from the tugs of human sentiment...
...To start with, he was honest...
...Diligent to a fault, Scrooge perused the financial press over dinner on Christmas Eve and, records Dickens, "beguiled the rest of the evening with his banker's book...
...If the twentieth century has a salient failing, it is that so few of us listened when Scrooge spoke...
...Not the reconstituted Scrooge, whom everyone likes, the radiant, cloying Scrooge of Christmas morning...
...But ask yourself this, gentle reader: What is Christmas, a day given over to the celebration of objects, without bargains-without bankbooks...
...He has forgotten also that that government is best which is best suited to the real constitution of the governed...
...The major failings of the Daley regime have been revealed by external governments--in matters like checking the ballot boxes in the national election of 1960, or investigating the possible violation of the civil rights of Fred Hampton, or in helping to maintain order during the awful days of 1968, during which Daley felt threatened by the ideologies which his practical system must forever avoid...
...Give me the grasping Scrooge...
...Yes, yes, I know, shocking behavior...
...Small wonder, too, that at last he succumbed to the world...
...But the wisdom which Rakove respects so much is essentially trivial...
...Small wonder, then, that Scrooge offered himself to the world as he was...
...He has also forgotten that those who carry water on both shoulders must have a very narrow head, or wear a heavy slicker...
...Oi, professor, the checks and balances in Chicago have been working very weft indeed...
...Such an observation is unwelcome in academic circles, whose inhabitants expect to travel into power with wisdom as their passport...
...the academic wisdom in political matters is totally subsumed in the proposition that the body politic is capable of infinite perfectability...
...To Marley's ghost, he gamely rejoined: "You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato...
...The Alternative: An American Spectator December 1976 7...
...Scrooge was a wag and a phrase-maker, even in the face of supernatural terror...
...that Chicago would be diminished, perhaps to the level of Calcutta, if someone tried to govern it with a system that fits comfortably in the House of Burgesses of Williamsburg, Virginia...
...But Rakove burdens his left shoulder with a pail full of the quaint belief that Chicago could be improved if only the proper incantation were spoken, and the proper passing genuflection made towards the busts of the Founding Fathers...
...James Grant is a grouch who lives in Brooklyn...
...He was solvent...
...Mine occupies me constantly...
...There's more of gravy than of grave about you whoever you are...
...It's enough," he said, dismissing a pair of United Fund pests, "for a man to understand his own business, and not to interfere with other people's...
...I suspect that Rakove the professor forgets what Rakove the politician does not...
...Evil--or what passes for evil--would vanish from the face of the earth if only Jacob Marley and the Spirits of Christmas Past, Present and Future would consent to work the other 364 nights of the year...
...But I wander...
...Ite despised Christmas, but gave Bob Cratchit, his dimwitted clerk, the entire day off--with pay...
...A self-made man and individualist, Scrooge (the old Scrooge) kep...
...Who wouldn't recant following a nocturnal bout with three phantoms and the shade of one's late partner...
...Scrooge's name," Dickens concedes, "was good upon the 'Change for anything he chose to put his hand to...
Vol. 10 • December 1976 • No. 3
