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After 1940, the program allowed charitable organizations, private firms, and laypeople to “adopt” the letters of kids living in poverty and fulfill their Christmas wishes. The film Miracle on 34th Street references the endeavor, and Johnny Carson made a habit of reading some of the letters on The Tonight Show. The program has grown to the point where it connected 13,000 children to donors, a total that may well be doubled in 2020. This year, the letters have been digitized, and if you’re interested in adopting a letter, you can go to the Operation Santa website and browse through the hopes and desires of thousands of children across the country.
But what these letters demonstrate, far better than any PSA or statistical model, is how violent American poverty truly is. They also provide a counterbalance to the ways childhood poverty is depicted in popular media, where poor kids often serve as a way for a protagonist to demonstrate their generosity, from Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol to the demented poverty porn of the holiday pop hit “Christmas Shoes.” […]
THREE OTHER ARTICLES WORTH READING
- Neocons want us to belly up for one more round of war, by Andrew J. Bacevich. An important debate awaits the incoming Biden administration, centered on the question of whether military activism informed by ideological narcissism can form the basis for sound policy — or whether the time has come for a wholesale reorientation of basic U.S. policy, abandoning self-destructive militarism in favor of pragmatism, prudence, and military restraint, combined with plenty of diplomatic, economic, and cultural engagement.
- Trump’s last gasp of authoritarianism tries to make US federal buildings classically “beautiful,” by Anne Quito. Trump’s 203rd executive order, titled “Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture,” seeks to establish “traditional architecture,” exemplified in Greek and Roman antiquity, as America’s official architectural brand. Backed by the National Civic Arts Society, a Washington-based group that promotes classical arts and architecture, executive order is a rebuke of modernism.
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What the Antebellum Abolitionists Can Teach Us about AOC and Medicare for All, by Corey Brooks. Should left-wing House members try to force action on Medicare for All by threatening to withhold their votes for Nancy Pelosi as House speaker? The idea has sparked controversy, but it’s nothing new. In the decades before the Civil War, it was a key tactic for antislavery radicals as they struggled to keep the slavery issue on the national agenda.
TOP COMMENTS • RESCUED DIARIES
QUOTATION
“Our favorite amusement during that winter was tobogganing. In places the shore of the lake rises abruptly from the water’s edge. Down these steep slopes we used to coast. We would get on our toboggan, a boy would give us a shove, and off we went! Plunging through drifts, leaping hollows, swooping down upon the lake, we would shoot across its gleaming surface to the opposite bank. What joy! What exhilarating madness! For one wild, glad moment we snapped the chain that binds us to earth, and joining hands with the winds we felt ourselves divine!”
~~Helen Keller, The Story of My Life, 1903
TWEET OF THE DAY
BLAST FROM THE PAST
At Daily Kos on this date in 2008:
The provocative Nobel laureate Harold Pinter died December 24. Although his work in the theater over the course of 32 plays was broadly praised, his political views drew savage attacks, including one from fellow Brit and neo-conservative Christopher Hitchens, who wrote in 2005 that giving the Swedish award “to someone who gave up literature for politics decades ago, and whose politics are primitive and hysterically anti-American and pro-dictatorial, is part of the almost complete degradation of the Nobel racket.”
Matt Schudel at The Washington Post writes:
Mr. Pinter’s works, which bore the influence of the existential dramatist Samuel Beckett and the modernist poet T.S. Eliot, explored such themes as sexual frustration, jealousy, loneliness and an overriding if indistinct sense of fear. The social or mental balance of his characters — and, by extension, society as a whole — was often undercut by a biting, sardonic humor.
“Words are weapons that the characters use to discomfort or destroy each other,” Peter Hall, who frequently directed Mr. Pinter’s plays, once said. …
… “I’ve never been able to sit down and say, ‘Now I’m going to write a play,’ ” he said in 1976. “I just have no alternative but to wait for the thing to be released within me.”
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