With the Holidays once again upon us, we are being bombarded with the annual rebroadcasts of Frank Capra’s classic, It’s a Wonderful Life.  The picture is regarded as an uplifting message of hope.  “No man is poor who has friends.”  Don’t get me wrong, I don’t dislike the movie, I have enjoyed it many times.  However, at first blush, you have to wonder just what’s so uplifting about it.  After all, look at the subjects the movie covers.  Death, bankruptcy, envy, frustration, embezzlement, clinical depression, and attempted suicide.  Holiday fun for the whole family.  In recent years, there was even talk of a sequel.  In the 1946 edition, the hero, George Bailey, endures continual adversity and comes out on top, but you have to wonder how things would be different if the incidents in the movie happened today.  George Bailey is the classic guy who never catches a break; we all know a George Bailey.  The Bailey family runs the Bailey Building & Loan, a business that builds low cost homes and provides financing to home buyers of modest means.  It is perpetually on the brink of insolvency.  Just as he’s about to leave for college, George’s father dies and he has to forego college to run the company.  George’s brother Harry and friend Sam Wainwright go to college and they become wealthy.  Bad luck for George.  A financial institution in the hands of a High School graduate?  Yeah, that could happen today.  George gets married to Mary.  The day he is to leave on his honeymoon, there’s a run on the bank, and he has to use his own vacation money to keep it from failing.  Bad luck for George.  George comes out with no honeymoon and $2 in his pocket.  He presses on.  Today, the Government would bail out the Building & Loan, then take it over, turning Bailey Park into Title VIII federal housing, complete with high-rise, and high-crime, housing projects.  In the depths of the Depression, George is making $45 a week ($2,300) a year.  Nasty Mr. Potter offers George $20,000 a year to go to work for him.  That’s the equivalent of $340,000 today.  George, the Schnook, turns Potter down.  Fast forward to today.  When Mary finds out George passed up his chance to enter the 1%, she divorces him and runs away with Sam Wainwright.  But in original movie, George presses on.  It all comes to a head on Christmas Eve 1945, when George’s Uncle Billy, a Building & Loan employee, manages to lose an $8,000 cash deposit by unwittingly handing it to Mr. Potter.  Just then, the bank examiner turns up and the missing funds are enough to bankrupt the Building & Loan and result in a prosecution for embezzlement.  In 1946, George takes the rap for his Uncle Billy, who everybody has always known is a bumbling, senile drunk.  In today’s world, things would be different.  George would throw Uncle Billy under the bus in a Seneca Falls, New York minute.   George would still be prosecuted, though, for permitting an incompetent to handle the firm’s money.  What about the missing $8,000?  Potter swears out a warrant against George for theft.  When George’s friends and neighbors raise the money and repay it, the warrant is torn up.  Maybe in Hollywood, but not in the real world.  If you rob the bank and your friends agree to repay the money, you’re still guilty of robbery, so you still get locked up.  Then, while George is locked up awaiting trial, Uncle Billy would sue George for failing to accommodate him under the ADA by sending him to rehab.  He then would testify against George at the trial.  On second thought, in today’s world, none of this would have happened.  A bank examiner, a government employee, working on Christmas Eve?  Not likely.   Anyhow, in the movie, faced with conviction for a crime he did not commit, and the embarrassment that would entail, George does what any reasonable, hard-working bank executive would do; he lashes out as his family, runs away, gets dead drunk, drives his car into a tree, and then attempts suicide.  Today things would be different.  First of all, embarrassment would not be a factor, as we have evolved (or is it devolved?)  into a society without morals or standards, and thus, without shame.  And $8,000?  What’s the big deal?  Michael Milkin got away with at least $400 million, and he’s redeemed himself.  Today, George Bailey’s bank shortage would be the least of his worries.  Nowadays, drunken driving, and leaving the scene of an accident with property damage is much more serious than a simple run of the mill embezzlement.  The Mother’s Against Drunk Driving would picket the Building & Loan.  Of course, once George reveals that Mr. Martini knew he was drunk and kept serving him drinks, and that he thinks he never was born and has been speaking to an angel, he’ll be well on his way to a successful defense of intoxication, diminished capacity, insanity, or all of the above.  Then he will sue Martini for serving him, thereby getting back the money he lost.  Now, you may consider my interpretation of It’s a Wonderful Life to be a bit cynical.  I cite you to the definition of a cynic from Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary.  According to Bierce, a cynic is “a blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be.”  I have always been so afflicted.  Merry Christmas to all.