Behold the incredibly evil Grinch!

“I know all about him,” you might think.  “He’s the guy who almost dumped Christmas over the cliff.  Thank goodness that he saw the light in the nick of time.”

In the classic Dr. Suess story, the Grinch’s heart grew three times right there by the edge of the cliff.  But it was at that same precise location that the true evil of the Grinch manifested itself.  How so?  Let me tell you!

It was at the edge of the cliff that the Grinch realized that Who villagers had just about learned a huge lesson that night.  They had almost learned that they did not need all those Christmas baubles.  They learned that forging a meaningful community didn’t require decorations, sugary treats or glittery whatnots. They realized that maintaining a strongly-knit community could be accomplished without the things money buys. 

As already mentioned, the residents of Who-ville held hands and sang together, their angelic voices drifted up to the precipice where the evil Grinch (small “e”) was disrupted in his evil (small “e”) quest to dump the Christmas kitsch where it actually belonged: into some far-away God-forsaken place. If the Grinch’s heart grew three sizes that day, though, his capacity for evil simultaneously grew tenfold. 

[This was predicted by Hannah Arendt’s concept of the “banality of evil.”  Arendt wrote that it was thoughtlessness, not intentional or premeditated acts, that predisposed people to engage in the greatest evils.]

The Grinch’s (capital “E”) evil impulses then took …