Doug Casey on What Really Happened in 2023 and What Comes Next

by Doug Casey

2023 in review
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International Man: As we approach the end of the year, let’s take a step back, look at the Big Picture, and put 2023 into perspective so we can better understand what may come next.

Significant financial, economic, political, cultural, and geopolitical developments occurred in 2023.

On the cultural front, 2023 may be the year that the tide started to shift against the woke insanity.

BlackRock’s Fink dropped ESG. Woke movies continue to bomb at theaters. Bud Light, Target, and Disney continue to feel the pain of deliberately alienating their customer base.

What’s your take on the cultural developments in 2023?

Doug Casey: There are always reactions to major trends. These things are worth noting, but considering the virulence of the woke movement, the reaction has been tepid. There’s always a rearguard fighting for things as they are. And that’s wonderful because the Wokesters want to overturn the entire culture much the same way as the Jacobins overturned it in revolutionary France, the Bolsheviks overturned the culture in Russia, the Red Guards in China, or Pol Pot did in Cambodia.

The Wokesters are potentially just as dangerous because their way of thinking is everywhere in the West. They’re similar to the movements I’ve just mentioned in that they’re stridently against free speech, free thought, free markets, tradition, and limited government—nothing new there. But they’ve weaponized gender and race as well. They’re virulent, humorless, and puritanical. They see themselves as the wave of the future, but they’ve only repackaged the notions of Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler.

My view is that the Wokesters hate humanity and hate themselves. They’re dishonest, arrogant, and entitled. Look at the current scandal involving the diversity-hire presidents at Harvard, Penn, and MIT. They’re shameful embarrassments. The fact their boards of trustees installed these fools shows how deep the rot goes.

The Woke have ingrained psychological/spiritual aberrations. They don’t just control academia, finance, entertainment, and the media. They also dominate the State’s apparatus. Which means they basically have the law on their side.

Perhaps ESG is being de-emphasized by Blackrock, the new vampire squid, but that’s only because they fear losing money more than they value their beliefs. The more pernicious DEI remains a major cultural trend.

Where will it end?

Wokism is more than a passing fad. There’s a good chance it will end with a violent confrontation between people who have culturally conservative views and those who want to destroy Western Civilization and upset the nature of society as we know it.

International Man: 2023 was a year of major geopolitical developments.

It became evident to even the mainstream media that the war in the Ukraine was not going well for NATO.

There was also the Hamas attack and the Israeli invasion of Gaza.

Azerbaijan defeated Armenia to reclaim a long-disputed territory.

Saudi Arabia welcomed Syria back into the Arab League, ended the war in Yemen, restored diplomatic relations with Iran, joined the BRICS countries, and expanded its economic ties with China.

These are just a few of the most prominent geopolitical events of 2023.

What do you make of the geopolitical situation and where things are heading?

Doug Casey: The end of US hegemony over the world in all areas is becoming obvious. The world resents being bullied and controlled by Washington, DC.

They realize that the US government is bankrupt and is living entirely on printed money. Its military is bloated and more expensive than the US can afford.

While it’s bloated, it’s also being gutted, unable to recruit new soldiers and sailors. It’s easy to see why that’s the case. They see pointless wars fomented everywhere. The type of people who traditionally join the military are disgusted by the woke memes circulating through the services. White males, who have always been the backbone of the military, are appalled at being actively discriminated against.

US hegemony is ending financially, economically, and militarily.

It’s obvious when you see that Biden and Harris, two utterly incompetent, ineffectual fools, are the nominal heads of the government. Not to mention all the degraded and psychologically damaged people in the cabinet. Of course, nobody has any respect for the US anymore.

The US hegemony of the last hundred years is on its way out. And as the old order changes, there are going to be upsets. The US will leave a vacuum that will be filled by other forces.

In fact, the US Government is the biggest danger to the world today. It’s not providing order. By sticking its nose into everyone else’s business everywhere, it’s promoting chaos. Its 800+ bases around the world are provocations. The carrier groups that it has wandering around are sitting ducks with today’s technology. The US is the main source of risk in the world, not safety.

US military spending is really just corporate welfare for the five big “defense” corporations, which build weapons suited for fighting the last war or maybe the war before the last war. For instance, a missile frigate or destroyer guarding a carrier might carry 100 vertically-launched anti-aircraft missiles at $2 million each. Each missile might succeed in shooting down a $10,000 drone. But what happens when the enemy launches 200 drones at once? The chances are the US loses a $2 billion destroyer, if not a carrier.

The US government is finding that they’re not only disliked but disrespected by countries and people all over the world. They’re increasingly viewed as a paper tiger. Or the Wizard of Oz. When they lose the fear factor, it’s game over.

International Man: In 2023, the US continued the trend of more political polarization.

What were the most consequential events on the US political front, and what do you think comes next?

Doug Casey: Let me reemphasize that the Jacobins who control Washington, DC, have the same psychological makeup as past revolutionaries I’ve mentioned. These people are incapable of changing their minds or reforming. I think they’ll do absolutely anything they can to retain power.

Meanwhile, traditional Americans in red states see that Trump is being railroaded with lawfare to derail his campaign. They’re angrier than ever, justifiably. The red people and the blue people really hate each other at this point—and can’t talk to each other.

The country has been completely demoralized as traditional values have been washed away. It’s now very unstable.

The coming election, should we actually have one, will be not just a political but a cultural contest. Culture wars are especially dangerous in the midst of a financial collapse and economic collapse.

International Man: The projected annual interest expense on the federal debt hit $1 trillion for the first time in 2023.

Americans are still paying for the rampant currency debasement during the Covid hysteria as the price of groceries, insurance, rent, and most other things continued to rise in 2023.

It looks like a recession is on the horizon.

What are your thoughts on economic developments in 2023 and your outlook for the months ahead?

Doug Casey: As an amateur student of history, it seems to me that the US has been moving away from the founding principles that made it unique for over a hundred years. I’m 77. I’ve watched it happen firsthand for much of that time.

The trend has been accelerating. The country is heading towards a massive crisis because it’s lost its philosophical footing. The result is going to be a really serious depression. I call it the Greater Depression.

The spread between the haves who live in multi-million dollar houses and the have-nots who live in tents isn’t new. After all, Jesus said, “The poor you will always have with you.” What’s new is that the middle class is being impoverished. What’s left of the middle class is deeply in debt—student debt, credit card debt, car loan debt, mortgage debt. And if they’re not lucky enough to have a house with mortgage debt, they’re renting. And rents have gone up so rapidly that if the average guy has an unforeseen $500 expense, he can’t pay it.

That augurs poorly for consumption. It’s said, idiotically, that the American economy rests on consumption. It’s idiotic because it should be said that it rests on production. But I’m not sure the US produces that much anymore. Most of the people who “work” basically sit at desks and shuffle papers. Few actively create real wealth.

On top of that, the country is vastly over-financialized.

The bond market has already largely collapsed, but it can get a lot worse as interest rates head back up to the levels that they were in the early 1980s and beyond.

Much lower stock prices are in the cards, both because of high interest rates and because people won’t be consuming such massive quantities of corporate produce.

The real estate market rests on a foundation of debt. It can easily go bust as interest rates go up. We’re already seeing this with office buildings across the country. And, of course, these office buildings are financed by banks. Banks are going to see a lot of defaults on loans they’ve made.

Meanwhile, bank capital invested in bonds has eroded because bond prices fall in proportion to the degree rise in interest rates, which have gone from close to zero to 5% or 6%. If banks had to mark their loans and capital investments to the market, most would already be bankrupt.

Can the government paper all these things over by printing yet more money? I suppose. But at some point very soon, the dollar will lose value very rapidly; it will be treated like a hot potato. They’re caught between a rock and a hard place.

International Man: This year, we saw the price of gold hit a record high, uranium reached $81.25 per pound, and Bitcoin more than doubled as it entered a new bull market. Meanwhile, the S&P 500 is up around 21% year to date as of writing.

What are your thoughts on what happened in the financial markets in 2023 and what could come next?

Doug Casey: Unfortunately, the US central bank, the Fed, has a gigantic amount of influence over the markets. They can employ “quantitative easing,” which means printing money—and “quantitative tightening,” which means decreasing the money and artificially raising interest rates.

They have many hundreds of Ph.D. economists on staff, but all these people operate on phony Keynesian theories of the way the world works. The consequences of building an economic system on a foundation of paper money and gigantic amounts of debt are potentially catastrophic.

At this point, the economy’s on the razor edge. If they push the print button and hold it down too long, we could go into a runaway inflation. Or, to tamp down inflation, they might raise interest rates and contract the money supply, which might set off a 1929-style credit collapse.

We’re caught between Scylla and Charybdis at this point. And I don’t believe it’s a question of a soft landing or a hard landing. It’s a question of how devastating the crash landing will be.

I hope they can wring one more cycle out of all this because I personally prefer good times to bad times, even if they’re artificial good times, because the bad times are going to be very real.

Editor’s Note: Doug Casey’s forecasts helped investors prepare and profit from: 1) the S&L blowup in the ’80s and ’90s, 2) the 2001 tech stock collapse, 3) the 2008 financial crisis, 4) and now… Doug’s sounding the alarms about a catastrophic event. One he believes could soon strike. To help you prepare and profit, Doug and his team have prepared a special video. Click here to watch now.

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General Washington's Christmas Message

General Washington’s Christmas Message for Those Complying with the Great Reset

By Joseph Sansone, PhD
Mind Matters and Everything Else

December 27, 2023

Keeping in mind the above, imagine sitting at a desk peering into a high powered microscope and discovering a universe, then as you adjust your lens you see this tiny planet. As you adjust further, you see this tiny little world with this thing we call civilization. The apparent infinite number of subatomic particles and infinite solar systems, galaxies, and so on, that exist to support this thing called life, is both a miracle and absurd at the same time. Yes, I know the Cosmos and the subatomic world can be considered alive too, but let’s not digress.

As you adjust your microscope further, you see a battle initiating on Christmas night 1776.

Why not? Why should you be bound by time in this thought exercise?

General George Washington was leading his troops undetected across the Delaware river launching a bold surprise attack on British occupied Trenton. This bold attack initiated on Christmas night was a deliberate attempt to catch the Hessians (German Mercenaries) off guard after a day of Christmas drinking and celebrating.

This bold attack on Christmas night was born out of necessity. British troops occupying America had reached 43,000 soldiers.  To make matters worse, a once 25,000 soldier strong Continental Army, had dwindled to 4,300. As if this was not bad enough, on December 31st most of the Continental Army’s enlistment terms would end. This would of course mean the end of the American Revolution and likely the end of a rope for Washington and the Patriots that were signatories to the July 4th Declaration of Independence.

Arguably the most underrated general in history, General Washington was an American Caesar, and as such, would not allow for failure. Delayed by weather, Washington led 2,300 men across the Delaware, and what was supposed to be a predawn invasion, occurred at 8 AM. Some American soldiers had no shoes and left a bloody trail as they marched through the snow on their way to the battle. An hour later, 900 of the 1500 unsuspecting, and mostly hung over, Hessians, were killed or captured on the morning of December 26th.

This was the first victory for the Americans and the turning point of the war. The Continental Army remained intact and eventually swelled again.  James Madison, John Marshall, Aaron Burr, Alexander Hamilton, and James Monroe, who was severely injured, all participated in the battle. Some of the Hessian prisoners were later paraded through the streets as evidence of the Continental Army’s victory.

George Washington was an indispensable man. General Washington did not win every battle and often his battle plans were too complex. He was no Napoleon. Napoleon, was also, no Washington. Our view of Washington is largely influenced and skewed by the aged portrait rescued by Dolley Madison. General Washington was a commanding figure at six foot four at a time when such a height was very uncommon. Washington formed a Continental Army when a continental government did not exist. He held this army together and eventually won the war. An American Caesar, Washington did what no other man has ever done, he denied the crown and retired from public life after two terms as president. We could attribute this to his old age at the time and no heir. Still, like winning the war, he did it. This too was a miracle.

In the current unrestricted war by globalists seeking to dismantle human civilization, there may be no indispensable men at this time. Or at least none has arisen. I’d have to imagine if Washington were alive today, he’d have organized a sort of Continental Army by now, and we’d know who he is. Soldiers marched barefoot and bloody, at the tail end of the mini ice age, into the battle of Trenton. We aren’t seeing that type of courage yet. Although, there have been some heroic medical doctors that have resisted at great expense.

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Harvard Board Of Overseers - With Eyes Wide Shut

And So Ends an Era


“The old politics of right versus left, and Republican opposed to Democrat have now given way to a new existential struggle: Americans must choose between civilization—or its destroyers.” –Victor Davis Hanson

Now that you, the lucky ones, are beyond your steaming platters of pancakes and mighty rashers of bacon, and perhaps even a dram or two of grog in your coffee. . . and clawed your way through the bales of presents. . . a merry Christmas to all. . . and here’s something else to think about this morning:

You may have noticed that our country, formerly a republic of sovereign individuals, has become one great big racketeering operation run by a mafia-like cabal with Marxist characteristics — or, at least, Marxist pretenses. That is, it seeks to profit by every avenue of dishonesty and coercion, under the guise of rescuing the “oppressed and marginalized” from their alleged tormenters. Apparently, half the country likes it that way.


Much of the on-the-ground action in this degenerate enterprise is produced by various hustles. A hustle is a particularly low-grade, insultingly obvious racket, such as Black Lives Matter, DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion), and “trans women” (i.e., men) in women’s sports. Some of the profit in any hustle is plain moneygrubbing, of course. But there’s also an emotional payoff.  Hustlers and racketeers are often sadists, so the gratification derived from snookering the credulous (feelings of power) gets amplified by the extra thrill of seeing the credulous suffer pain, humiliation, and personal ruin. (That’s what actual “oppressors” actually do.)

Categorically, anyone who operates a racket or a hustle is some sort of psychopath, a person with no moral or ethical guard-rails. Hustles are based on the belief that it is possible to get something for nothing, a notion at odds with everything known about the unforgiving laws of physics and also the principles of human relations in this universe. Even the unconditional love of a mother for her child is based on something: the amazing, generative act of creating new life, achieved through the travail of birth. Have you noticed, by the way, that the birth of human children is lately among the most denigrated acts on the American social landscape?

The flap over Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, is an instructive case in the governing psychopathies of the day. I wish I’d been a roach on the tray of petit fours and biscotti brought into the Harvard Overseers’ board-room when they met to consider the blowback from Ms. Gay’s unfortunate remarks in Congress, followed by revelations of her career-long plagiarisms. The acrid odor of self-conscious corruption in the room must have overwhelmed even the bouquet of Tanzanian Peaberry coffee a’brew, and not a few of the board members must have reached for the sherry decanter as their shame mounted, and the ancient radiators hissed, and their lame rationalizations started bouncing off the wainscoted walls.

Apparently, Ms. Gay did not miss an opportunity to cut-and-paste somebody else’s compositions into everything she published going back to her own student years in the 1990s. She even poached another writer’s acknowledgment page. This is apart from the self-reinforcing substance of her published “research” justifying the necessity for DEI activism, for which she has become first an avatar and now a goat. The dirty secret of this perturbation — and the whole Harvard Board knows it — is that Claudine Gay’s career has been about nothing but careerism, and that this is also true of so many on the faculty and administration at Harvard, and surely at every other self-styled elite school from the Charles River to Palo Alto that had joined in the DEI mind-fuck.

It’s all one big status-acquisition hustle, the seeking of hierarchical privilege by any means necessary, including especially deceit, the politics of middle-school girls. Thus, you see on display both the juvenility of elite higher ed and its use of the worst impulses that prevail in social media, stoking envy, hatred, avarice and vengeance as the currency for career advancement. Claudine Gay was notorious earlier, as Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, for wrecking the careers of faculty members (Ronald Sullivan, Stephanie Robinson, and Roland G. Fryer, Jr.) who refused to play the game like middle-school girls. She had no mercy.

The mental pain endured by the Harvard bigwigs must be excruciating, and of course they have themselves to blame because they walked right into the Woke hustle with their eyes wide shut. They bargained away their dignity, and the university’s honor, for mere brownie points in a fool’s game called Win big prizes pretending to care about your fellow man. The cognitive dissonance must be like little nuclear reactor meltdowns burning through the lobes of their brains. They’ve run out of a safe space to play “victim” in. The world sees them for the coddled, malicious fakes they are.

Cutting Claudine Gay loose is the unavoidable play now or Harvard will be stung by so many lawsuits from students previously punished for academic mischief that all the alumni lawfare attorneys in the cosmos standing snout to tail will not be able to staunch the hemorrhaging of the school’s endowment and then the fire sale of its chattels to satisfy the aggrieved plaintiffs’ pain and suffering. The Harvard board is just trying to ride out the holidays. Their prized participation trophy is coming off the mantlepiece. There really is no other way. Now, stand by and watch the rats rat each other out. And so ends the era of pretending about everything.

Reprinted with permission from Kunstler.com.

The Declaration of Independence - Two Versions

Writing the Declaration of Independence, 1776, a 1900 portrait by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris depicting Franklin, Adams, and Jefferson working on the Declaration[43]


Today's selection -- from American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence by Pauline Maier. In 1776, the delegates of the Second Continental Congress made a very large number of changes to Thomas Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration of Independence:


“The more alterations Congress made on his draft, the more miserable Jefferson became. He had forgotten, as has posterity, that a draftsman is not an author, and that the ‘declaration on independence,’ as Congress sometimes called it, was not a novel, or a poem, or even a political essay presented to the world as the work of a particular writer, but a public document, an authenticated expression of the American mind. Franklin, who was sitting nearby, ‘perceived that I was not insensible to these mutilations,’ Jefferson later recalled, and attempted to console him with the story of a young hatter, about to pen his own shop, who proposed to have a fine signboard made with he words ‘John Thompson, Hatter, makes and sells hats for ready

money’ and the figure of a hat. First, however, he asked his friends for their advice. One proposed taking out ‘hatter’ since it was redundant with ‘makes hats.’  Another recommended that ‘makes’ be removed since customers wouldn't care who exactly made the hats. A third said ‘for ready money’ was unnecessary since it was not the local custom to sell on credit. ‘Sells hats’" a fourth commented; did Thompson suppose people thought he meant to give them away? In the end, the sign said simply ‘John Thompson,’ with a picture of a hat, which probably served its function quite well. Franklin said, however, that he had learned from that anecdote to avoid, ‘whenever in my power, ... becoming the draughtsman of papers to be reviewed by a public body.’ Did Franklin understand how much Congress, like the relentless editors in his story, was practicing a technique that Jefferson had himself used to good effect when he compressed Mason's language until it gained in power far more than it lost in length?

“Others seem to have shared Jefferson's preference for the committee draft over the version Congress adopted. So strong was his conviction on that issue that Jefferson laboriously copied the earlier version several times over—by hand, of course, which made it a tedious, time consuming task—and sent those copies to friends so they could judge for themselves, as he wrote Richard Henry Lee, ‘whether it is the better or worse for the Critics.’ Lee responded that he ‘sincerely’ wished, ‘as well for the honor of Congress, as for that of the States, that the Manuscript had not been mangled as it is,’ and years later John Adams also said that Congress ‘obliterated some of the best’ of draft declaration ‘and left all that was exceptionable, if any thing in it was.’ Obviously the two versions were strikingly different in the opinion of contemporary observers. And what generations of Americans came to revere was not Jefferson's but Congress's Declaration, the work not of a single man, or even a committee, but of a larger body men with the good sense to recognize a ‘pretty good’ draft when they saw it, and who were able to identify and eliminate Jefferson's more outlandish assertions and unnecessary words. So successful an exercise of group editing probably demanded a text that required cutting, not extensive rewriting. Congress's achievement was remarkable nonetheless. By exercising their intelligence, political good sense, and a discerning sense of language, the delegates managed to make the Declaration at once more accurate and more consonant with the convictions of their constituents, and to enhance both its power and its eloquence.”

American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence
 

Of course, H.L. Mencken's version was the best of all!


When things get so balled up that the people of a country have to cut loose from some other country, and go it on their own hook, without asking no permission from nobody, excepting maybe God Almighty, then they ought to let everybody know why they done it, so that everybody can see they are on the level, and not trying to put nothing over on nobody. All we got to say on this proposition is this: first, you and me is as good as anybody else, and maybe a damn sight better; second, nobody ain't got no right to take away none of our rights; third, every man has got a right to live, to come and go as he pleases, and to have a good time however he likes, so long as he don't interfere with nobody else.

That any government that don't give a man these rights ain't worth a damn; also, people ought to choose the kind of government they want themselves, and nobody else ought to have no say in the matter. That whenever any government don't do this, then the people have got a right to can it and put in one that will take care of their interests. Of course, that don't mean having a revolution every day like them South American coons and yellow-bellies and Bolsheviki, or every time some job-holder does something he ain't got no business to do. It is better to stand a little graft, etc., than to have revolutions all the time, like them coons and Bolsheviki, and any man that wasn't a anarchist or one of them I. W. W.'s would say the same. But when things get so bad that a man ain't hardly got no rights at all no more, but you might almost call him a slave, then everybody ought to get together and throw the grafters out, and put in new ones who won't carry on so high and steal so much, and then watch them. This is the proposition the people of these Colonies is up against, and they have got tired of it, and won't stand it no more. The administration of the present King, George III, has been rotten from the start, and when anybody kicked about it he always tried to get away with it by strong-arm work. Here is some of the rough stuff he has pulled:

He vetoed bills in the Legislature that everybody was in favor of, and hardly nobody was against.

He wouldn't allow no law to be passed without it was first put up to him, and then he stuck it in his pocket and let on he forgot about it, and didn't pay no attention to no kicks.

When people went to work and gone to him and asked him to put through a law about this or that, he give them their choice: either they had to shut down the Legislature and let him pass it all by himself, or they couldn't have it at all. He made the Legislature meet at one-horse thank-towns out in the alfalfa belt, so that hardly nobody could get there and most of the leaders would stay home and let him go to work and do things as he pleased.

He give the Legislature the air, and sent the members home every time they stood up to him and give him a call-down.

When a Legislature was busted up he wouldn't allow no new one to be elected, so that there wasn't nobody left to run things, but anybody could walk in and do whatever they pleased.

He tried to scare people outen moving into these States, and made it so hard for a wop or one of them poor kikes to get his papers that he would rather stay home and not try it, and then, when he come in, he wouldn't let him have no land, and so he either went home again or never come.

He monkeyed with the courts, and didn't hire enough judges to do the work, and so a person had to wait so long for his case to come up that he got sick of waiting, and went home, and so never got what was coming to him.

He got the judges under his thumb by turning them out when they done anything he didn't like, or holding up their salaries, so that they had to cough up or not get no money.

He made a lot of new jobs, and give them to loafers that nobody knowed nothing about, and the poor people had to pay the bill, whether they wanted to or not.

Without no war going on, he kept an army loafing around the country, no matter how much people kicked about it.

He let the army run things to suit theirself and never paid no attention whatsoever to nobody which didn't wear no uniform.

He let grafters run loose, from God knows where, and give them the say in everything, and let them put over such things as the following: Making poor people board and lodge a lot of soldiers they ain't got no use for, and don't want to see loafing around.

When the soldiers kill a man, framing it up so that they would get off.

Interfering with business.

Making us pay taxes without asking us whether we thought the things we had to pay taxes for was something that was worth paying taxes for or not.

When a man was arrested and asked for a jury trial, not letting him have no jury trial.

Chasing men out of the country, without being guilty of nothing, and trying them somewheres else for what they done here.

In countries that border on us, he put in bum governments, and then tried to spread them out, so that by and by they would take in this country too, or make our own government as bum as they was. He never paid no attention whatever to the Constitution, but he went to work and repealed laws that everybody was satisfied with and hardly nobody was against, and tried to fix the government so that he could do whatever he pleased.

He busted up the Legislatures and let on he could do all the work better by himself. Now he washes his hands of us and even declares war on us, so we don't owe him nothing, and whatever authority he ever had he ain't got no more.

He has burned down towns, shot down people like dogs, and raised hell against us out on the ocean.

He hired whole regiments of Dutch, etc., to fight us, and told them they could have anything they wanted if they could take it away from us, and sicked these Dutch, etc., on us without paying no attention whatever to international law.

He grabbed our own people when he found them in ships on the ocean, and shoved guns into their hands, and made them fight against us, no matter how much they didn't want to.

He stirred up the Indians, and give them arms ammunition, and told them to go to it, and they have killed men, women and children, and don't care which.

Every time he has went to work and pulled any of these things, we have went to work and put in a kick, but every time we have went to work and put in a kick he has went to work and did it again. When a man keeps on handing out such rough stuff all the time, all you can say is that he ain't got no class and ain't fitten to have no authority over people who have got any rights, and he ought to be kicked out.

When we complained to the English we didn't get no more satisfaction. Almost every day we warned them that the politicians over there was doing things to us that they didn't have no right to do. We kept on reminding them who we were, and what we was doing here, and how we come to come here. We asked them to get us a square deal, and told them that if this thing kept on we'd have to do something about it and maybe they wouldn't like it. But the more we talked, the more they didn't pay no attention to us. Therefore, if they ain't for us they must be agin us, and we are ready to give them the fight of their lives, or to shake hands when it is over.

Therefore be it resolved, that we, the representatives of the people of the United States of America, in Congress assembled, hereby declare as follows: That the United States, which was the United Colonies in former times, is now free and independent, and ought to be; that we have throwed out the English King and don't want to have nothing to do with him no more, and are not in England no more; and that, being as we are now free and independent, we can do anything that free and independent parties can do, especially declare war, make peace, sign treaties, go into business, etc. And we swear on the Bible on this proposition, one and all, and agree to stick to it no matter what happens, whether we win or we lose, and whether we get away with it or get the worst of it, no matter whether we lose all our property by it or even get hung for it.

Irving Berlin and "White Christmas"

Today's encore selection -- from Irving Berlin by James Kaplan. The classic song “White Christmas”:

"The [Irving] Berlin song that would have the greatest impact on America and Americans as the United States entered [World War II] was one that, on the face of it, had nothing whatever to do with war: the great and strange holiday song he'd first con­ceived of years earlier and had been obsessing over ever since.

"What makes 'White Christmas' so great, and so strange? Dozens of writers have poured thousands of words into analyzing the bridgeless fifty-four-word chorus of this seemingly simple tune. 'People read a lot of things into that song,' Berlin himself said, 'that I didn't put there.'

"When the Washington Post asked him about the song's ori­gins in 1954, Berlin harked back nostalgically to his tenement past: 'I was a little Russian-born kid, son of an Orthodox rabbi, living on the lower East Side of New York City. I did not have a Christmas. But I bounded across the street to my friendly neighbors, the O'Haras, and shared their goodies. Not only that, this was my first sight of a Christmas tree. The O'Haras were very poor and later, as I grew used to their annual tree, I realized they had to buy one with broken branches and small height, but to me that first tree seemed to tower to heaven.'

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"Nostalgia is certainly essential to 'White Christmas' ­Jody Rosen links the tune to the great tradition of wistfully reminiscing songs such as Stephen Foster's 'The Old Folks at Home' -- as is something else: secularity. In the 1930s and 1940s, when the United States was unquestioningly a Christian nation, the vast majority of Christmas songs sung and heard by Americans, including the two Bing Crosby had recorded in 1935, 'Adeste Fideles' and 'Silent Night,' were, quite appro­priately, concerned with the essence of the holiday: the birth of Jesus Christ. (Three notable exceptions were 'Jingle Bells,' first published -- as a Thanksgiving song! -- in 1857, and 'Santa Claus Is Coming to Town' and 'Winter Wonderland,' both debuting in 1934. Strikingly, Tin Pan Alley had largely failed to capitalize on the holiday -- perhaps because so many of its songwriters and publishers were Jews.

"Irving Berlin clearly planned to redress this omission with 'the best song anybody ever wrote.' And since it wouldn't have been authentic for him as a Jew to write about Christ, he chose to universalize his lyric. And herein lies a first clue to the deep strangeness of 'White Christmas.' For what could be stranger than a Jew out of the shtetl and the Lower East Side creating what is arguably the most influential Christmas song of all time?

"No less an observer than Philip Roth considers the ques­tion (along with 'Easter Parade') in his brilliant dissection of antisemitism, the novel Operation Shylock:

The radio was playing 'Easter Parade' and I thought, But this is Jewish genius on a par with the Ten Commandments. God gave Moses the Ten Commandments and then He gave to Irving Berlin 'Easter Parade' and 'White Christmas.' The two holidays that celebrate the divinity of Christ ... and what does Irving Berlin brilliantly do? He de-Christs them both! ... Is anyone really dishonored by this? If schlockified Christianity is Christianity cleansed of Jew hatred, then three cheers for schlock. 

"The only person dishonored in the formulation is Berlin himself, with Roth's peremptory dismissal of 'White Christ­mas' as schlock. Is 'White Christmas' schlock? Even as fervent and articulate an admirer of the Berlin canon as Jody Rosen has his doubts. ''White Christmas" isn't my favorite song; it isn't even my favorite Irving Berlin song,' he writes. Rather, it is, he continues,

about as good a summary as we have of the contradictions that make pop music fascinating: it is beautiful and gro­tesque, tacky and transcendent. Revisiting the song's story, listening for the thousandth time to its maudlin, immemo­rial strains, we are reminded of a trick in which Berlin and Crosby both specialized: how, time and again, they proved that art and schlock could be one and the same.

"Of course, there are estimable commentators enough to certify 'White Christmas' as real art. Alec Wilder writes with a certain wonderment of 'the truly daring succession of notes in the chromatic phrase of the main strain' of the song. Philip Furia calls the tune 'the counterpart to Robert Frost's great modern poem, "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," which uses the simplest of rhymes and the barest of imagery to evoke a beautiful but melancholy scene.' And a year after America's entry into World War II, when the song had become a touchstone for hundreds of thousands of homesick U.S. sol­diers and sailors stationed overseas, Carl Sandburg would write:

Away down under, this latest hit of Irving Berlin catches us where we love peace. The Nazi theory and doctrine that man in his blood is naturally warlike, so much so that he should call war a blessing, we don't like it .... The hopes and prayers are that we will see the beginnings of a hundred years of white Christmases -- with no blood-spots of needless agony and death on the snow.

"But we are getting ahead of ourselves. When we left off, sometime in the last week of November or the first week of December 1941, Bing Crosby was headed out for [a] round of golf after prerecording 'White Christmas,' Fortress America was still secure, and only a handful of people connected profes­sionally or familially to Irving Berlin had ever heard the song.

"On Sunday morning, December 7, a lovely day in Los An­geles, Irving and Ellin were relaxing in Beverly Hills when the news from Pearl Harbor hit with the force of a bomb. Soon they would head back to New York to spend a more somber holiday than usual with their daughters. On the night of December 24, on his Kraft Music Hall broadcast, Crosby sang 'White Christ­mas' to America for the first time. Still staggered by the un­precedented surprise attack, America barely took notice."

James Kaplan
 
author: Irving Berlin  
title: James Kaplan  
publisher: Yale University Press  
date: Copyright 2019 James Kaplan  
page(s): 199-202