This moral decay has been around for a really long time. Ideas have consequences. How’d we get “drag queen story hour,” or boys in girls’ bathrooms, or nearly a million abortions a year, or the trafficking and abuse of children, or the reckless damage to our water, soil, and air? Same.

What if there were a quiet empire, secret agents of the Resurrected Man, a quiet empire that muddled along, often just below the radar, amid the rising and falling of louder empires, of which the USA will certainly someday be one, proposing a countercultural message which over time has led to the end of slavery, rights for all, and the emergence of modern science.

The Christmas Story is about an unmarried, pregnant teenager from the projects, and shepherds who in those days were only a short step from gangbangers and thieves. It is about undocumented foreigners and their wild astrology, who gave a false address to the authorities, and escaped the armed agents of the state who were looking for them. It is about corrupt and paranoid leaders, and uncontrolled violence in poor neighborhoods, where children were the principal victims.