1. First a happy New Year to all!

2. I’m not going to bother with New Year predictions; I don’t have my finger on the pulse of anything enough for it to be worth it.

3. Well, I’ll do one: America will (yet again) not acquire Canada. Considering that the current Canadian government acquired and maintains its power by the votes of the Canadian people, I don’t see why we would want it anyway. A better strategy might be coaxing Mexico into agreeing to take back California.

4. I ended up revisiting some classic Addams Family episodes. I’ve said it before, but I think that, if there is any mainstream pop-culture franchise that Catholics should look to for inspiration, that’s one of them. Oh, not the surface-level macabre inversions, of course, but the core idea: a tight-knit, loving family who follow their traditions and way of doing things without giving a thought to what the rest of the world thinks about it, and yet without being the least bit defensive or stand-offish or bitter. The Addamses simply are who they are, they know what they know, and they like what they like. They don’t think about it; they just do it.

I think most people in the post counter-culture culture of the latter 20th century cling to the idea of being ‘different’ or ‘unique;’ marching to the beat of their own cheering section, and so on. The charming thing about the Addams Family is that, by any large, they never even consider the idea that they’re unusual. They don’t do the things they do for show or out of rebellion, they do them because they genuinely want to, and they would still live that way if everyone in the world did the same. That’s the kind of attitude I think we ought to cultivate in our own lives; that sort of carefree independence that doesn’t insist upon being independence.

5. I’m sure this wasn’t their intention, but it occurred to me after this year’s viewing of It’s a Wonderful Life that a superficially-respectable, but really ruthless old man in a wheelchair who tries to get control of every major service and enterprise in the community could be ready as an allegory of FDR and the New Deal (especially the bit where he takes over the bank by supplying them emergency funds and ordering a brief suspension of services to control a run). Since both Capra and Stewart were in favor of the New Deal (if I remember right), I’m pretty sure that wasn’t intentional, but I think the interpretation works.

6. By the way, one point about Wonderful Life that doesn’t get brought up very often is how it functions as something of a retrospective on the Greatest Generation: almost a more restrained Forrest Gump of its time as it integrates most of the cultural and historical touchstones of the era: the Spanish Flu, the Charleston, the development of the automobile, allusions to contemporary politics (e.g. Bert’s newspaper in an early scene reports Al Smith’s nomination for President), the Great Depression, and of course the War. There’s even something of a quick survey of shifting social mores in the way that Violet’s flapper-girl habits have fallen out of favor by the mid 1940s.

7. Dangerous homophones: the well-dressed gentleman is not, in fact, offering you a contract for unlimited earthly power in exchange for the bottom of your shoe.