It is the nature of capitalism that success breeds imitation. Imagine writing that one song that becomes a Christmas classic forever. The Christmas Song, by Mel Torme. Or Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas, made popular by Judy Garland. Or Sleigh Ride by Johnny Mathis. We know these songs by heart. And the people who wrote them were set for life. This success breeds imitation. Every songwriter has his own Christmas song. And much of it is drivel. But the best of the best makes the season worthwhile, even if you might be trampled to death at Wal-Mart.

The world of rock and roll is no stranger to Christmas songs. But it's hard to capture the spirit of Christmas with electric guitars. Somehow, the people below were able to accomplish this. Most of these songs are rock and roll. Some are jazz. All are great.

The Ronettes - Frosty the Snowman. This is from the Phil Spector Christmas Album, released in 1963 and featuring Spector's famous Wall of Sound. He used the best musicians in music, including Hal Blaine on drums, who played on many of the hits from Los Angeles in the 1960's. Some of the best drumming of that decade is featured on this song.

The Ronettes - Sleigh Ride. Another song from the Phil Spector album. Phil married the lead singer, Ronnie Bennett. She became Ronnie Spector. Which only proves that Jews sometimes give us the best sounds of the season. Phil Spector is now in jail, convicted of murder. Which proves that sometimes murderers give us the best Christmas music.

Vince Gauraldi Trio - Skating. This is from the Charlie Brown Christmas Special. Kids watching to TV show don't know that this is some of the best jazz of the 1960's. This is just a beautiful piece of music. The video shows people ice skating in Pittsburgh, for some reason.

Bruce Springsteen - Santa Claus is Coming to Town. Bruce is rock and roll's greatest live performer. This song is one of the few radio-friendly classic rock Christmas songs I can listen to without changing the station.

The Waitresses - Christmas Wrapping. This is a bona-fide original, not an interpretation of the same old Christmas classics. The lyrics tell a nice story.

John Lennon - Merry Christmas/The War is Over. As wonderful as the Beatles were, they did not produce any great Christmas songs. The solo Beatles tried to write good Christmas songs, but they couldn't cut it. Except for John Lennon. Most Christmas songs are not political. This one was. It is hard for us to imagine what it was like to live through the late 1960s and early 1970s. At least those of us who did not live through that period cannot imagine what it was like. Imagine being drafted to fight a war that you do not believe in. And being asked to kill and maim and possibly suffer the lost of a limb or post traumatic stress disorder. A very good argument can be made that for draft-age Americans during the Vietnam War, this country was a military dictatorship. Resist the draft, go to jail. Lennon was a little crazy, in my view. And he did contradict his humanitarian impulses on a regular basis. But this song truly captures his spirit. He may have been full of shit from time time, but he meant it on this song. Here we go, Johnny:

Barbra Streisand- Jingle Bells. Remember what I said about the Jews giving us the best Christmas songs? This is from her 1967 Christmas album. We blast this each and every year. Christmas on steroids, from Brooklyn, New York.

Beach Boys - Little Saint Nick. If you want to know what family dysfunction is like, read a book about the Beach Boys. The father was crazy, the drummer was crazy, Brian Wilson was crazy. They were all crazy, in a bad way. Not in a "cool" way. But this song is very pleasant, even if it was recorded in Southern California, where it is always warm and there is no snow at all.

Band Aid - Do They Know It's Christmas. In the 1980's rock stars decided to devote their talents for charity. In the U.S., the big hit was We Are The World by USA for Africa. We Are The World is one of the 10 worst songs in the history of rock music. Over in England, the charitable contribution for Africa was Do They Know It's Christmas. That's Bono on vocals, and Phil Collins on drums. The guy who looks like a woman (Boy George) is really a guy. I have no idea if any of the money went to Africa. The haircuts in the video are outrageous. Everyone looks super-serious, as if they knew they were being filmed. But I always liked this song, especially the fade-out. Some of you may say, "but Steve, you are better than this. This song is sappy, a true band-aid in every sense of the word, which does nothing to stop the stranglehold that international lending institutions like the IMF and World Bank have on the Third-World." You are right. But I will say this, and I will say this in the true spirit of Christmas: go screw yourself. I love this song.

Here's the paradox: we love the U.S. Constitution, but we hate prisoners and inmates. We love the guarantees provided in the Constitution, but we hate people who break the law. These contrasting impulses bob to the surface in litigation by inmates and their advocates in claiming that the conditions of their confinement violate the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution.

The Eighth Amendment says that the government cannot inflict cruel and unusual punishment against inmates and prisoners. I don't have any data on this, but I would bet that, if that language was put up for a public referendum, the Eighth Amendment would either fail to garner a majority vote or it would be pretty close. Thankfully, that Amendment (like the others) does not rest in the hands of the public but with judges who are able to resist the urge to let inmates suffer for no good reason.

I thought about this when I read the obituary of a federal judge, Morris Lasker, who served for 42 years in both New York City and Boston. His obituary in the New York Times focused on his role in ending the draconian jail conditions in New York City at a time when a new consciousness in the 1960s and 1970s raised questions about the treatment of society's most despised people. Here is an excerpt from the obituary:

Judge Lasker, a soft-spoken jurist who often found himself at the center of controversies, was best known for rulings in the 1970s and ’80s in the Southern District of New York that forced the city come to grips with horrendous conditions in its jails and violations of the constitutional rights of prisoners that, as he once put it, “would shock the conscience of any citizen who knew of them.�

The judge knew the conditions in jails not only from evidence in lawsuits, but also from his own visits to the Tombs, the notorious Manhattan House of Detention for Men, where he found overcrowding, noise, vermin and stench, and to Rikers Island, the city’s prison complex in the East River, which housed thousands of detainees awaiting trials or serving sentences of less than a year.

In 1970, when the Legal Aid Society filed the first of many class-action lawsuits on behalf of inmates, a prisoner entering the main detention center for men on Rikers Island faced a nightmare: locked in a filthy eight-foot cell with other inmates for 16 hours a day, with no easy access to telephones or medical care. Beatings by guards were common. Mental illness afflicted 25 percent of the inmates, and 75 percent were drug users. Cockroaches abounded. Toilets were foul. Meals were slop.

In the Tombs, a fortress in Lower Manhattan where suspects often waited up to a week to see a judge, the conditions were even worse. Cells and pens designed for 925 inmates were occupied by 2,000. Prisoners slept on concrete floors without blankets and contended with roaches, body lice and mice. Guards were frequently accused of brutality. A suicide was attempted every week.

Judge Lasker ordered the city to improve conditions. But after repeated warnings and hearings, in which the city pleaded for time and told of soaring prison populations and limited budgets, he ordered the Tombs closed in 1974. Over nine years, the Tombs was gutted and rebuilt at a cost of $42 million. When reopened in 1983, it resembled a school dormitory, with windowed, air-conditioned cells, a library, a commissary, a nurse’s station, a television area and other amenities.

The city spent $1 billion in the 1980s to expand and modernize jail facilities, but still had to house inmates on barges and in prefabricated structures. Judge Lasker ordered hundreds of inmates released or transferred to state prisons, and threatened officials with contempt when they resisted.

You may react to this with a shrug. Who cares about inmates? Here's my response. Some of these inmates are members of your family. They are our brothers and sisters. Some of them are losers, but they are family. Inmates look a lot different when you know them personally. Other inmates are allowed to go home years before their sentences run out because they are cleared by DNA evidence and the courts decide that they are innocent of rape or murder. Does that person deserve to live in roach-infested cells with disgusting toilets? Still other inmates are mentally-retarded and are not even fully responsible for their crimes. It's been said that we can judge society by how it treats its prisoners. Judge Lasker took that oft-quoted phrase seriously. God bless 'em.