Blame It All on Dickens

BLAME IT ALL ON DICKENS

           “Please, sir, I want some more.” This is the famous line from Charles Dickens’ novel Oliver Twist, which started it all. It was that poor, starving orphan boy who had the temerity to ask for a little more of the gruel being served to all of the children in that workhouse that pointed us in a wrong direction.

            Just as in our country today, in the 1830s England was wrestling with the problem of blending a free market economy with democracy. How does a democracy deal with the cycles of unemployment which are part and parcel of a free market economy? How does a society which is supposed to be responsive to the demands of the majority deal with chronic, long-term poverty?

            Well, good ole Charlie Dickens through his waif Oliver Twist made people feel sorry for those poor people. Then he threw Ebenezer Scrooge at us, trying to show how miserable a person could become if he thinks only about his own economic welfare.

            Recent comments in this newspaper, particularly some Letters of the Editor, some guest columnists, and some ads about the referendum on the sales tax for schools suggest that perhaps we need to dig up old Charlie’s bones so we can put him on trail for “crimes against self-interest.”

            After all, all those do-gooder liberals, bleeding heart socialists, and namby-pamby backers of social welfare programs got their start with Dickens. He made us feel guilty about how orphans were treated in those workhouses. He made us feel even guiltier when Ebenezer proclaimed that it would be better if the poor died off and thereby decreased the “surplus population.”

            Yes, my friends, when Dickens wrote that “mankind should be our business,” not making money, he set us on the slippery slope to the welfare state by making people, then and still today, think that they have some obligation to the fellow human beings. Bah, humbug!

            Let us forget Dickens, erase his nonsense from our collective minds, and return to those halcyon days of the Gilded Age when men like Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Mellon, and Schwab built huge fortunes while making America the world’s industrial colossus. Never mind the environment they polluted, the children forced into labor, their practice of firing anyone who missed work for any reason, and their total neglect of safety in the workplace.

            If we are ever again going to have any progress around here, we must ban Dickens from our schools and libraries, expunge the New Deal and the Great Society from our history books, forget Jane Addams, and march backward to a time when welfare was handed out only with a large dose of shame and humiliation.

            Let people like Rush Limbaugh read the names on radio and TV of those who get welfare, food stamps, and agricultural subsidies. Hang in the Post Office the faces of those who get disability, apply for unemployment, or file of an income tax refund. Anyone who takes any kind of money from the government takes money from all of us.

            It is no accident that the word “dickens” in phrases like “what the dickens?” and “it hurts like the dickens” are in our common speech. In these phrases, “the dickens” is a mild oath substituting for “the devil.” Yes, there it is the origin of all our woes is that devil of a man, Charles Dickens.

            We should have a “Rid Our Nation of Dickens Day.” Let us gather in Riverside Cemetery in Moline, Illinois to burn all our copies of books, movies, DVDs, VHS tapes—anything written by Dickens. We can burn them on the grave of Francis Dickens, son of the author of our nation—a Bleak House.