As we approach the Christmas season, we once again brace ourselves for screenings of Frank Capra’s film It’s a Wonderful Life, and being told, again and again, what a lovely and moving film it is. Luckily, we are all so familiar with it that I don’t need to waste anyone’s time by summarising the plot. This is, however, a very useful film to contemplate from the viewpoint of decadence. The whole work promotes the model of a wholesome life: hard work, decency, consideration for one’s fellows, continence, sentimentality, and, above all, NO SUICIDE.

Like a wholesome life, the film is itself both incredibly long and incredibly boring. (People forget that it bombed when it was released; Capra was considered to have lost his touch. Only when it was released into the public domain did people start getting brainwashed.) But there is one section where it perks up: and that’s in the alternative timeline, where Bedford Falls, the town that James Stewart’s character now never graced, becomes Pottersville.

Pottersville is meant to be the worst that a town can be. As a child, I assented to this view. As an adult, not so much. On a more mature watching of the movie, it became clear that while Pottersville may have had one or two minor faults, it was, by some margin, very much more the kind of town it would be fun to live in. There is drunkenness, gambling, and prostitution: but instead of it all taking place behind closed doors, away from the sight and minds of people who prefer their lives to be led in holiness, it’s right there in plain sight. It is, in fact, for Americans, the ultimate Decadent Town.

Americans have a very strange relationship to morality, and this has been exploited by politicians for generations. I think this is all down to the Puritan mindset which saw the nation colonised in the first place: remember, England weren’t persecuting the Founding Fathers when they set off in the Mayflower. The Puritans had decided that England was too lax, not stifling and rule-bound enough.

One upshot of this is the way that the average American, even in the 21^st Century, cannot conceive of an innate morality. If you don’t believe in God, they ask, what prevents you from committing murder?

At which point it begins to look as though Decadence is not a signal of the corruption into which people and societies fall when they are left to their own devices: it looks like common bloody sense. One of its earliest iterations comes from the sixteenth century, in the form of Rabelais’s Abbey of the Thélèmites, in his novel Gargantua.

I sometimes wonder how long Rabelais would have lived in modern America before some religious nut job offed him. Here are the rules he set out to be carved above the doorway of his imaginary (alas!) Abbey:

DO WHAT THOU WILT.

That’s it. There are some sub-clauses, such as “be good-looking”, which is a bit unfair on some but remember, this was a period when people’s characters were said to be expressed in their faces. If you were ugly outside it was probably because you were ugly inside. But otherwise: no one gets told to do anything; you can stay in bed all day long; fuck who you want (this is very much not a single-sex monastery); eat and drink what you want. People banned from the site incliude (I use Soir Thomas Urquhat’s 17th-Century translation):

Vile bigots, hypocrites, Externally devoted apes, base snites, Puffed-up, wry-necked beasts, worse than the Huns, Or Ostrogoths, forerunners of baboons: Cursed snakes, dissembled varlets, seeming sancts, Slipshod caffards, beggars pretending wants, Fat chuffcats, smell-feast knockers, doltish gulls, Out-strouting cluster-fists, contentious bulls, Fomenters of divisions and debates, Elsewhere, not here, make sale of your deceits. … Usurers, Pelf-lickers, everlasting gatherers, Gold-graspers, coin-gripers,…

You get the idea. There’s much more, which basically boils down to “assorted wankers”.

The problem is that we now live in an age where it is the hypocrites and the money-grubbers who run the show. And boy, are they running it. Every election cycle we have to endure the phrase “hard-working families” being spouted by politicians anxious to seek election. I’d like to know what’s so good about a hard-working family. First, is everyone in it meant to be hard-working? Even the children? The pets? And when I think of American labor laws, something inside me dies, Ten days holiday a year – if that? No employment rights? Or, if you wait tables, a wage so tiny you starve without tips? And look at the people who are comfortable. Hoarders of more than a human being could spend in a thousand lifetimes, they certainly wouldn’t be allowed into Rabelais’s Abbey.

Decadence has always flown in the face of the conservative, respectable lifestyle. Or rather, to put it the other way round: the conservative, respectable lifestyle has always had a fit of the vapours at decadence. It exposes their lifestyles as a kind of exploitation. Sure, if you’re the kind of person who likes getting up at six in the morning and working yourself to the bone just so you can keep a roof over your head, then go nuts. Just don’t think society has arranged this for your benefit. And please don’t go around insisting that just because it works for you, that everyone else should have to endure it too. I, however, prefer to think that six in the morning is closer to my bed-time than my getting-up time. If you think that’s decadent, then off you go and sing hymns in Bedford Falls. I, however, will be carousing the night away in Pottersville, where people know how to have a good time.

Nicholas Lezard is an indigent but well-respected writer who has not had a proper job, in an office, like almost everyone else, since 1989. He has reviewed books for the Guardian newspaper for 25 years or so; was a radio critic for the Independent on Sunday for ten years; and for the last fourteen, has been writing the “Down and Out” column for an otherwise respectable magazine, the New Statesman. He has lived in a hovel in central London, a castle in Scotland, and now lives in Brighton, a coastal town filled to bursting with degenerates, which he loves with a love that is deep and fierce.

A novelist and columnist, he is also a contributing writer for Decadent. When he can be bothered that is.