Take a look at his 1942 New Year’s Resolution and see if it doesn’t bring a smile to your face, with cute cartoons and common sense goals. Seems to me that almost all his goals are really things that seem almost – dare I say it? – conservative in today’s world.

Keep clean. Save money. Work hard. Take care of your kids. Love your parents. Help the country win the war.

It’s really the opposite of how the Occupy movement thinks and acts, isn’t it?

h/t Boing Boing

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5. Johnny Mathis (b. 1935)

A host of other crooners fought tooth and nail for this fifth slot — Dean Martin, Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, Andy Williams, Jim Reeves, Gene Autry, Nat King Cole — but Mathis wins the day via an impressive five Christmas-themed albums, the best of which are immeasurably improved by the melodic mastery of maestro Percy Faith (1908-1976), whose inventive yet unashamedly unambiguous orchestrations make him my favorite instrumental interpreter of Christmas tunes.

The only one of our Top 5 who is still alive, Mathis made his Xmas bones by singing what is, for my money, the single most beautiful rendition of “Ave Maria” ever recorded — a feat accomplished when he was just twenty-two. Fifty years on, no one has matched the infectious, jingling energy Mathis and Faith brought to “Sleigh Ride.” And despite a good showing by Andy Williams, I daresay he takes the prize for “It’s The Most Wonderful Time of the Year” and “Winter Wonderland” as well.

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4. Louis Armstrong (1901-1971)

A national treasure and one of the twentieth-century’s premier musical icons, Pops’ affinity for Christmas stemmed from the fact that his poverty-stricken youth was utterly bereft of holiday cheer (his grandparents were slaves). Armstrong’s fourth wife once told of the childlike delight he expressed when she presented him, at the ripe old age of forty, with his first decorated tree. In the following decades, his many Xmas performances never failed to capture the singular joys of the season.

Many singers try to out-cool Satchmo in this arena — Dino, Elvis, Frank, et al. — but all of their “red-beaked reindeer” and “big black Cadillac” stuff, fun as it is, can’t match the authentic jazzy hipness of tunes like “Christmas in New Orleans,” “Christmas Night in Harlem,” “Cool Yule,” and “’Zat You, Santa Claus?” His live nightclub take on “Baby It’s Cold Outside,” accompanied by a game Velma Middleton, captures the humorous ribaldry at the heart of the song better than anyone else, making it the only “essential” variant to the classic Margaret Whiting/Johnny Mercer duet.

Even at the end of his life, wracked by failing health, Armstrong knocked several more Christmas standards out of the park, virtually whispering his way through “White Christmas” and “Winter Wonderland.” The way his weak, perilously quivering voice evinces holiday enthusiasm despite his palpable pain is quite moving. And in February, 1971 he gave us one last bit of holiday gold: a tender, intimate performance of “A Visit from St. Nicholas” (a.k.a. “’Twas the Night Before Christmas”) captured on tape at his home just a few months before his death.

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3. Burl Ives (1909-1995)

A young Boy Scout turned wandering itinerant folk-singer during the Great Depression, a veteran of World War II, a target of the House Un-American Activities Committee (who ticked off his commie folk-singing friends by cooperating with the investigation), and a powerful Academy Award-winning actor in the 1950s, Burl Ives had already led an eventful life before appearing in Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer in 1964. That stop-motion animated special singlehandedly cemented both his visage and voice in the Christmas pantheon, and his renditions of “Have a Holly Jolly Christmas,” “Silver and Gold,” and the show’s title tune are unlikely ever to be surpassed.

While not as prolific a Christmas crooner as some others, Ives followed up Rudolph with some wonderful songs both standard and new. His longstanding love of Christian-themed folk anthems served him in good stead, lending unparalleled emotional authenticity to pieces like “Christmas Child” (“Loo, loo, loo….”), “Christmas is a Birthday,” and “Happy Birthday Jesus,” all of which would have sounded hopelessly corny in other hands. “Snow for Johnny” is one of those songs that should be a popular standard but isn’t, and his “Christmas Can’t Be Far Away” is in my opinion the most underrated song in the entire holiday canon, deserving of a fame comparable to “White Christmas” and “Silver Bells.”

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2. Bing Crosby (1903-1977)

When we think of the classic Christmas sound, the one that conjures up thoughts of our grandparents decorating a tree by firelight in the wake of the Second World War while listening to the crackling radio, we think of Bing and his seemingly effortless warm and inviting baritone.

Whether solo or accompanied by the Andrews Sisters, from the staggeringly successful “White Christmas,” to holiday staples like “The Christmas Song (“Chestnuts Roasting….”), “Here Comes Santa Claus,” “A Marshmallow World,” and “Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town,” to unheralded gems like “The First Snowfall” “Little Jack Frost Get Lost,” and “The Secret of Christmas,” he’s one of those guys who couldn’t screw up a Christmas song if he tried. Add to that the respectful and reverent Father O’Malley aura gracing his readings of the overtly Christian lyrics of “Silent Night,” “The First Noel,” “Away in a Manger,” “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” and “Faith of Our Fathers,” and you have the quintessential sound of the season.

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1. Perry Como (1912-2001)

If you’re under forty, you likely don’t have a full appreciation of how central Perry Como is to Christmas. A baritone so influenced by Bing Crosby that the two are often confused, he nevertheless became immensely popular in his own right. Known far and wide as a devout family man (whose marriage lasted sixty-five years), he was also that precious rarity: one of the genuine class acts in show business. The rich, simple, honest voice that powers such perennial favorites as “O Holy Night,” “Do You Hear What I Hear?”, “Bless This House,” and “There’s No Place Like Home for the Holidays” resonates with the same eternal vibration that courses through our shared recollections of the holiday itself.

But it was his decades of televised Christmas specials that secured his place in the hearts of our parents and grandparents. From 1948 until 1994 — a span of almost fifty years! — he routinely warmed the wintry living rooms of America with his music and personality. That makes him the Iron Man of holiday crooning, hands down, the one singer who can purr “There is No Christmas Like a Home Christmas” and mean it.

I still remember the sparkle that would fill my late grandmother’s eyes whenever a Como tune would play. His was the voice of an era, her era. Her brood of youngsters were long grown and scattered across the country, her husband was dead and gone. But thanks to the miracle of sound recording, Perry Como’s voice remained as vibrant as ever, and his dulcet tones never failed to imbue ol’ Grandma with a deep comfort and satisfaction borne by memories of a life — and many, many Christmases — well-lived.

Barbara Billingsley, who died last Saturday, was June Cleaver, the wife of Ward Cleaver, played by Hugh Beaumont, and the mother of two boys, Wally (Tony Dow) and Theodore (Jerry Mathers), nicknamed “the Beaver.”

The Cleaver family on ‘Leave it to Beaver’: (from left) Wally, Mom, Dad and ‘The Beav’ (AP)

June Cleaver was a stay-at-home mom who was always there for her kids, with love, sage motherly advice, and good cooking. This model of motherhood was scorned by feminists in the decades to come as the product over oppressive, abusive men who wanted to keep their wives in the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant.

Like many obituaries, the NY Times obituary was a bit snarky:

“Along with the mothers played by Harriet Nelson (“The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet”), Donna Reed (“The Donna Reed Show”) and others, Ms. Billingsley’s role became a cultural standard, one that may have been too good to be true but produced fan mail and nostalgia for decades afterward, from the same generation whose counterculture derided the see-no-evil suburbia June’s character represented.”

However, as I said when I appeared in Stephen Bannon’s movie, Generation Zero, almost nobody today understands what was going on in the 1950s.

From the point of view of Generational Dynamics, the 1950s was a Recovery Era where the country was excitedly celebrating its victories over the Great Depression and the Nazis in World War II.

A 1950s mother would have grown up during the Great Depression, surrounded by homelessness, starvation and bankruptcy. If she herself hadn’t been forced to live under a bridge and depend on soup kitchens for food, then she undoubtedly had many friends who had been forced to do so.

Then, as the Great Depression ended, she saw her brothers, father and uncles tortured and maimed on the Bataan Death March, and then shot down like fish in a barrel on the beaches of Normandy. Out of patriotism, she had been forced to take “Rosie the Riveter” type jobs that she hated.

So when the 1950s arrived, a home with a white picket fence where a mother could stay at home with the kids and be safe and dry and warm and reliably supported by a working husband was a gift from heaven. This was a gift that mothers of the 1950s wanted to give to their daughters. They had suffered through starvation, homelessness and slaughter, and they had won, and they wanted to give their daughters the gift of the fruits of that victory.

Unfortunately, their daughters didn’t want those gifts. Their scorn and contempt for those gifts gave rise to the women’s lib and feminist movements of the 60s and beyond.

But there’s an ironic twist to all this. The pendulum is swinging back, and young women today are not only choosing to stay at home again with the kids (see “‘It’s going to be the 1950s all over again’”), but they’re also becoming much more reserved in terms of style and behavior (see “Victoria’s Secret changes from ‘too sexy’ to ‘ultra-feminine’”).

So Barbara Billingsley’s character, June Cleaver, did not represent an obsolete era after all. Don’t be surprised if, in the next decade, there’s a new “Leave it to Beaver” type show on, with mothers who are only too happy to stay at home and bake cookies for the kids.

Those are words spoken by a superstitious old woman to Jonathan Harker in Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula (1897). Fearing for the outsider’s safety, she gives him a crucifix. “I did not know what to do,” Harker writes, “for, as an English Churchman, I have been taught to regard such things as in some measure idolatrous, and yet it seemed so ungracious to refuse an old lady meaning so well and in such a state of mind.”

But later, overcome with terror in the bowels of the Count’s Transylvanian castle, he has reason to be most grateful:

Bless that good, good woman who hung the crucifix round my neck! For it is a comfort and a strength to me whenever I touch it. It is odd that a thing which I have been taught to regard with disfavour and as idolatrous should in a time of loneliness and trouble be of help. Is it that there is something in the essence of the thing itself, or that it is a medium, a tangible help, in conveying memories of sympathy and comfort? Some time, if it may be, I must examine this matter and try to make up my mind about it. In the meantime I must find out all I can about Count Dracula. . . .

Over a century later, Stephenie Meyer managed to write four bestselling books concerning vampires (later translated into a quartet of popular movies) without the word crucifix appearing even a single time in her hundreds of thousands of words. The toothsome undead in HBO’s True Blood (based off of Charlaine Harris’ popular, sex-drenched “Southern Vampire” novels) are similarly unconcerned with the possibility of their nocturnal bacchanalia being interrupted by the appearance of a cross. In these movies, it’s not God but other bloodsuckers who provide supernatural support for the good guys.

This godless trend isn’t limited to vampire movies. A few weeks ago I checked out The Last Exorcism at an upscale theater here in LA. Here’s a breakdown of the damage to my bank account:

Parking: $2
Ticket: $12.75 (plus a $1 “convenience charge” if you order it over the Net)
Popcorn: $8
Soda: $5.75

As I took my seat, I looked around and saw that a few dozen others had joined me, shelling out up to $30 each in the midst of the worst economy since the Great Depression, all in the hope that The Last Exorcism would prove an even remotely worthy successor to 1973’s The Exorcist, still widely hailed as one of the best horror movies of all time.

That older film was suffused with the quiet theological majesty and splendor I grew up with while attending Catholic grade school for eight years. It’s a movie that worked because it strove to portray the underlying tenets of the faith — the existence of God chief among them — as every bit as real as the demons tormenting the characters. The main characters were true heroes, powered by their imperfect but heartfelt faith, fighting in the name of God for the side of right.

As this new picture unwound up on the screen, however, we were treated to something quite different and (when you think about it) quite underhanded, regardless of your faith or lack thereof. The main character was an atheist evangelical preacher, which spiritually speaking makes him the Protestant equivalent of a homosexual priest — a walking contradiction in terms, a leftist charlatan masquerading in true believer’s clothing, a spiritual and moral eunuch. The other denizens in this bizarre portrayal of America’s deep South “fundie-land” were all unhinged weirdos (with the exception of the one character later revealed to be gay, natch).

As demonic horrors wreaked havoc on the protagonists, no countervailing otherworldly power of Good manifested itself. Unlike 1973’s The Exorcist (which, given Hollywood’s current state, may as well have been made a thousand years ago), faith in God was rendered impotent at best and utterly delusional at worst. At the end of The Last Exorcism, as the last scintilla of hope is drowned in scenes of gruesome murder and bleak nihilism (painfully, almost plagiaristically, reminiscent of 1999’s The Blair Witch Project), the audience I was with let out a collective groan, and I heard multiple variations of “Oh, come on!”, “You’ve gotta be kidding me!”, and (my favorite) “Awwwww, man. . . we shoulda seen Takers!”

Mind you, these reactions came not from a church group or an audience of young Republicans, but from the very kind of young, diverse, urban, opening-night audience that Hollywood claims is its key demographic. Even they appeared to sense, and be artistically disappointed by, the essential cheat at work: modern Hollywood wants us to believe that supernatural forces of Darkness are frighteningly real, even while they dismiss all supernatural forces of Light as laughable superstition.

Even more recently, still stinging from The Last Exorcism, I took yet another chance on the vampire genre in the form of Let Me In. The desolate, abused young boy in the film had a fundamentalist mother who — surprise! — was a divorced drunk incapable of keeping track of her youngster’s whereabouts, much less helping him in any way. The absent father, asked over the phone by his crying kid whether true evil really exists, assumes that the superstitious Christian nonsense force-fed by the boy’s mother is responsible for such strange questions.

But again, we are presented with a situation where the filmmakers want to drink their blood and have it, too. Despite the mother being portrayed as a Bible-thumper, we never see the vampire run into, for instance, any sort of cross hanging on the walls of the boy’s home. The boy seems to have no Biblically inspired moral base or code. God, once again, is conveniently MIA, even as his followers are portrayed in the crudest stereotypes as utter hypocrites powerless against the creatures of the night.

That creature, meanwhile, is lovingly brought to life with state-of-the-art special effects and all of the emotional empathy the director can conjure. We are meant to sympathize with the demonic succubus inhabiting a twelve-year-old girl’s body, even as we are revolted by the pile of mostly innocent victims left in her wake. The film ends with the little boy seduced down a road destined to lead to a life of serial killing on behalf of his new playmate. It’s the gruesome culmination of another lopsided Hollywood fight between good and evil, with evil walking away with another easy win (if the filmmakers had any guts, they would have had that little undead minx move in next to Sandra Bullock’s character from The Blind Side — then we’d see what she was really made of!)

Hollywood is cheating in the horror movie arena just as they do in the political and social arenas. They are, by turns, scaring us and seducing us with deeply anti-Christian mythological monsters, while simultaneously mocking anyone who believes in the corresponding existence and power of supernatural forces for good. It’s yet another attempt to scrub any trace of God from our popular culture, spitting in the faces of the upwards of eighty percent of Americans who identify as Christians, and in the process disappointing the near one-hundred percent of theatergoers who don’t want to drop thirty bucks on a movie where villains and nihilism conquer all.

The sad truth is that a group of Anton LaVey-lovin’ Satanists couldn’t have written horror scripts any more one-sided than the ones currently being green-lighted by modern Hollywood.

The program is just what one would expect from PBS: earnest, well-researched, skillfully presented, and eager to lick the boots of government while criticizing individual freedom for everything wrong in the world.

There are two important lessons to be learned from the Great Depression, in my view:

1. The government causes business cycles and downturns through its erratic, manipulative policies intended to benefit powerful voting blocs at the expense of those less able to fight back. The market works when left alone, and government interference should be limited to redressing actual harms done by one party to another. This includes combating fraud, enforcing valid contracts, and setting clear but liberal guidelines for transactions made across political borders. And nothing more.
2. The Great Depression brought on a cultural conservatism and moral regeneration of the American people. This is an aspect of the era which few people seem to understand. It was in the early ’30s, for example, that the movie industry was finally badgered into imposing a Production Code ensuring all widely distributed films would conform to a set of standard plot-lines, language restrictions, and limits on visual sensationalism (a move which undoubtedly had salubrious results but was probably unnecessary given the change of public taste in a more conservative direction; in addition, the movie studios engaged in it voluntarily, even if under the threat of state regulation; thus the Code was surely less drastic, damaging, arbitrary, and politically controlled than it would have been if imposed by government). During the 1930s the American people revolted against what they saw as the social and cultural excesses of the 1920s just as strongly as they did against what they saw as the economic excesses of the time. Earnestness and attention to the political, economic, and moral implications of human action were on the rise in all media. Breaking economic and political corruption was a major concern of the American culture.

The Great Depression was widely seen at the time as a punishment for the economic, social, and moral changes of the 1920s, when the nation had moved in a more classical-liberal direction affording greater economic, social, and personal freedom. The Roaring ’20s were seen in retrospect as a time of excessive license in all things (which they indeed were in some cases), and the Depression was viewed as an understandable payment that had to be made–the hangover after the party.

Thus the nation decided to swear off the booze of individual liberty altogether. As a cure, the people turned to government control of the economy and tighter moral strictures against individual freedom. If this sounds like today’s regnant political agenda, that’s because the two are indeed identical in means, motive, and opportunity. And they are both criminal in their stupidity.

I believe that both the moral reaction and economic impositions of the Depression era were overwrought and unnecessary, but the moral reaction was the more justifiable of the two because it largely avoided using government force for its implementation. As a result of its relatively voluntary, organic nature, the moral response to the Roaring ’20s managed to do some good, as noted above, while refraining from doing much harm.

Of the economic puritanism of the time, the very opposite was true. That is the way of government action.

Given PBS’s track record as a die-hard advocate of a statist, progressive agenda, it should surprise no one that the American Experience series refuses to incorporate liberal notions such as these, choosing instead to smother the truth in a miasma of irrelevant moralization.

Right at the beginning of episode 1, “The Crash of 1929,” the narrator refers to “the promise and the illusion of the 1920s,” setting the moralistic tone of the episode. Immediately thereafter, the noted statist economist the late John Kenneth Galbraith is shown saying, “Let us not think for a moment the illusion, the aberration of the 1920s is unique. It is intimately a part of the American character.”

In other words, people will go mad if not constrained by a gigantic, all-powerful benevolent government. We are undoubtedly supposed to be grateful for the warning.

Immediately thereafter, two commentators criticize the lovely Irving Berlin song “Blue Skies” as emblematic of the 1920s “illusion” that freedom was a good thing. The machinations of stock market manipulators in the decade are limned in some detail, and the commentators explicitly condemn the lack of government regulation.

What they do not note is that fraud of the sort described in this part of the program is illegal now and was illegal then. Thus while the perpetrators of such actions were morally responsible for their wrongs, from a social perspective the real culprit behind such market manipulation was in fact the government, in failing to perform its basic function of preventing fraud, enforcing valid contracts, and otherwise preventing people from harming one another.

Indeed, a commentator in the program explicitly states that such manipulation was legal at the time, which is quite wrong and would be deceptive even if true. Yes, it was the case that there were no specific laws explicitly criminalizing a variety of particular manipulative actions in the stock market, but those acts were fraud and could have–and should have–been prosecuted under existing laws. In addition, the failure to have laws preventing such fraud would be a failure of government criminal law, not of economic policy.

Economic regulation, however, is the agenda here, and every possible means is used to argue for it. The episode briefly criticizes New York Mayor Jimmy Walker for his fiscal imprudence, but the moment is conveyed as a critique of 1920s excessive exuberance and liberality, not as a matter of government corruption and a failure of government to do its duties.

Similarly, the role of the Fed in the 1920s bubble (which it fed by debauching the currency) and in the subsequent Depression (which it created and prolonged by tightening the currency far too much and excessively interfering in the markets, thus preventing the needed corrections from occurring) is alluded to but presented in moralistic terms, as another example of excessive liberality followed by a painful but necessary corrective action.

Individual investors are likewise presented in moralistic terms, depicted as greedily and foolishly chasing after “the one lucky break,” as one person puts it. One is given no understanding of how the investors’ actions could in fact have seemed at the time to be rational, not speculative. The reality is that, then as now, an individual must look at the possible returns and risks involved in investing one’s money and also in not doing so. If the government reduces apparent risk to zero–as the Fed did during the 1920s and 2000s–what on earth does one think investors will do but continue to invest in a wide variety of ventures based on increasingly risky foundations?

This is what happens in all bubbles, and it is what happened in the most recent one, but American Experience refuses to acknowledge this critical fact. Thus here too a failure of government is elided and its effects blamed on the allegedly free choices of individuals in an allegedly under-regulated market.

Tellingly, as the program describes the stock market crash of 1929 and the events that led up to it, nothing about Fed policy or the money supply is mentioned. Yet the Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman has convincingly argued that the manipulation of the money supply caused both the bubble and the bust. That particular truth, however, does not contribute to and in fact contradicts the program’s agenda for government power and against individual liberty. Thus it, too, is redacted from the story.

Near the end of the episode, Galbraith blames it all explicitly on the investors–the “suckers” as he crudely and callously calls them–and says that such crashes happen every twenty or thirty years because that’s how long it takes for the “suckers” to forget that their earlier greed and foolhardiness led to disaster. The alternative explanation–and the true one–is not given any attention: that every twenty or thirty years the government’s renewed manipulation of the economy as a means of buying votes results in disaster.

The program concludes with an argument that what the stock market crash taught Americans was a great lesson in humility. Certainly that was the lesson that the American people took from it. The real lesson, however, is that governments’ attempts to manipulate the economy always bring catastrophic consequences in time.

Of course it’s true that many people did many bad things both in the stock market and in other areas of human endeavor in the 1920s. But that’s always the case, human beings being what we are. What was different about the 1920s and ’30s was the choices government made, and the consequences were world-changing.

The real moral failure to be found in American Experience: The 1930s is in many people’s continual refusal to recognize that freedom of choice is a good, and coercion an evil, regardless of who is doing which.