This year's coin toss came up George C. Scott in "A Christmas Carol" (rather than Alistair Sim in 1951's "Scrooge"). The script follows the work by Dickens. Also, the story gives on the feeling one is watching Fox or people who otherwise spew out GOP talking points:

   1)Jacob Marley was as dead as a doornail...And thank goodness there was no mention of a "death tax"---a/k/a inheritance tax. Otherwise, Scrooge would have had to part with all that wealth he obtained from his deceased partner (as well as the nifty, big, drafty house.)

   2) The workhouses, the treadmill, debtors' prison... When poverty is viewed as a sin, punishment for that wretched state is deserved. Scrooge managed all right. He took the modest inheritance he obtained from his father and, instead of spending it on a marriage with that silly girl Alice who had no dowry, invested it and built his fortune. (Meanwhile, in the Scott version, she married another former clerk who became wealthy, but that was luck.)

   3) Scrooge does business to better society and has succeeded on some Darwinian basis... On the eve of the big holiday, Scrooge agrees to ship corn if the buyers pay five percent more than the rate Scrooge quoted the previous day. If they do not buy now, tomorrow's price will be five percent more again. He might be left with a warehouse full of grain, but that is business. Society benefits from such market strategies. Sure, the poor, without food, might die, but that rids us of surplus population.

   4) His sister Alice died as a result of child birth...And probably because she was not rich. If she had been rich, she could have afforded better health care. And where was her husband? In the 1951 version, he only stands off to the side. This sounds to me like he was a ne'er-do-well and she merely was a sponge on society.

   5) Tiny Tim suffers from an undisclosed illness and will die, if he is not first saved by the wealthy Scrooge...And well Tiny Tim should die, if he has no education (couldn't have afforded it/wasn't available to the poor then but they are poor and that is their lot), no marketable job skills (except to wait outside his father's place of business for his father to get off work, and that's loitering), and bad orthdonture. That last bit he could address if he only made it over to the island of misfit toys, but that's a different movie.

   6) Nephew Fred must have obtained a government contract from someplace...There is no mention in the movie of where Fred got all his money. I know many households had servants in that period, but really---Fred has a really nice house, is able to employ Bob Cratchitt's oldest son Peter for a high wage---he got the money someplace. That smells like government largesse to me.

   7) Scrooge "comes to his senses" after a night of what one only can characterize as hallucinations...Scrooge wakens the next morning and goes on a quasi-Marxist binge. Everyone likes him after that---at least until the end of the credits. Two years later, Scrooge probably was alongside his nephew in debtors' prison, because he gave away all his money.

   The lines in the movie sound a lot like what some people say today. Perhaps those people need to have a drink---or, more likely, a "hit"--- from a good holiday "bowl" and see what the World could be.