Santa Claus

I have a problem with Santa Claus. He’s part feel-good legend, part commercial salesman, and all lie, and we all play along. I never saw the point of Santa, but maybe that’s because I’m some kind of horrible soulless Grinch that doesn’t enjoy lying to children. Regardless, Santa Claus is culturally pervasive to the point of international, inter generational obsession with a commercial presence surpassing George Foreman and Billy Mays combined and a staying power topped only by world religions, despite the fact that Santa as we understand him does not now and never did actually exist. He sells Coca-Cola and diamond necklaces and Norelco razors. We wear Santa clothes and watch Santa movies and write on Santa stationary, singing Santa songs. He’s featured on everything from Broadway shows to Pez dispensers and of course, if you have kids the annual Santa Claus photo op is irresistible which is really weird when you think about it. I’m pretty sure most parents discourage their kids from sitting in stranger’s laps unless they are rocking pillows underneath red velour.

The whole situation appears suspect, but kids will go along with it not because they are dumb, but because they are naïve. No matter what age, people measure everything we experience against everything else that we have experienced all of the time. As new information trickles down through our neurons we unconsciously determine whether that information is consistent with what we have come to expect, or if it is different enough that we can note it and act upon it. Kids, however, do not have a fraction of the information cataloged that adults do. They think just as much as adults, but they are not yet able to determine whether the new information is a deviation or the norm. Since they have such a narrow scope of life experience they will tend to believe you no matter what kinds of ridiculous things you say. Giant lizards the size of busses and houses used to run around eating each other? That’s awesome, why not? The world is round so people on the opposite side are upside down or wait a minute, maybe we are the ones who are upside down? That’s awesome, why not!? There’s a diabetic elf who lives in the North Pole and travels via flying reindeer on Christmas Eve to deliver presents to all well behaved children? That’s awesome! Why not!?! This is why kids believe in stupid things like Santa and the Easter Bunny; it’s the same reason that they believe in other magical beings like the President or Justin Bieber. There are pictures of Santa everywhere, he hangs out at the mall, and the real lynchpin is that Mommy said he was the real deal and why would she lie? Fast forward to the time when the kid finally has enough information about the real world to determine that Santa must be, has to be, a load of crock. Otherwise a whole lot of other things don’t make sense, and the easiest way to make the world consistent is to reject the fat elf theory and adopt a new hypothesis; “I have been lied to.” Now the kid has to reconcile, whether consciously or subconsciously, the lie in light of their parents’ direct orders not to lie.

Kids are not stupid. The epiphany that they have been lied to will not break their fragile little brains, but they will learn several things. First, they will learn that Mommy and Daddy are no longer completely trustworthy. Most of the time they are, but they have pulled my leg before and maybe they will do it again. Second, they learn that there are exceptions to the rule about lying. The kid’s brain starts to work overtime figuring out why this lie was ok, but the others aren’t. Is it a special exception in cases of magical creatures that break into our houses and win our trust by offering presents and/or giant rabbits that crap out candy eggs? Or does the acceptable lie have a broader justification, permitted only when it is deemed “harmless?” What constitutes “harmless?” Is it just physical harm? What about material harm or psychological harm? These are not questions that they are going to ask out loud because half the time they don’t know that they are asking them, and the other half they are trying so hard to appear grown up and convince you that they already know, so they are trying to figure it out on their own.

Maybe I’m being a little too dramatic. Smarter people than me have addressed this issue, and research has indicated that childhood belief in Santa is not detrimental. Instead, discovery of his non existence is a rite of passage that makes youngsters feel more like adults when they are in the know. Only six percent of the kids studied felt betrayed, and when you think about it, when it comes to sacrificing the innocence of children on the altar of traditional nostalgia, six percent is more than reasonable. Unless, of course, adults aren’t the only liars in this ugly situation. It is possible that the children surveyed were lying to the adults, but why would they do that?

Children are like little prisoners with their parents as wardens. Seriously, kids are not allowed to go anywhere or do anything without their handlers being close by, ensuring that they don’t eat bugs or poke out eyeballs (theirs own or someone elses') or build a bomb out of fertilizer and household cleaning products. Everything they do is either permitted or mandated by Mommy, Daddy, or a State approved educational instructor. No, you can’t have ice cream and a brownie, pick one, you’re lucky you get either. No, we’re drawing hand turkeys, not samurai yetis. No you can’t play video games, you have to play outside, or read a book, or take a nap. Get over here right now and get dressed, we need to go to your older sibling’s play. Stand there and be quiet, keep your hands to yourself, ok you can be a dinosaur as long as you are a quiet one. Stand still, I’m trying to take your picture! Get your finger out of your nose, hold still, now hug your creepy uncle Harvey, he misses you. What are you doing, stop bouncing! Eat your peas, stand up straight, some other time honey, you’re still too little for that. Are you beginning to remember how difficult this was to put up with? As little prisoners they quickly learn to read the nonverbal signals of their wardens, and indeed, all adults. Their happiness depends on it, because if they haven’t properly interpreted the mood of their parent and ask to sleep over at the Mitchells’ when Mom was grumpy she’ll say no and then they can’t go, whereas if they had waited an hour or so Mom may have been in a more genial disposition and said yes. Smart kids learn to read adults, and are also inclined to earn their approval. Therefore, when the nice research person asks them if they feel betrayed and lied to upon the discovery that there is no Santa, they are intensely scrutinizing that adult’s face and tone and body language, instinctually interpreting all to determine what that researcher wants to hear. If the kid believes that the researcher wants to hear something specific, they will provide that answer. “Do you feel betrayed?” can be interpreted as, “You don’t feel betrayed, do you?” Even if the researcher asks “How do you feel?” the kid is going to be thinking, “What does this adult think I should be feeling right now? Because they are an adult, and whatever they think I should feel, that’s probably what I should feel. If I’m not feeling what she wants me to feel she will be disappointed, and then Mommy will be disappointed. I’m not going to disappoint them. Even if I really feel one thing, I’m going to act like I feel the way I am supposed to.”

All of this answers why kids go along with the myth, even after they learn that Santa Claus is a myth, but it doesn’t explain why we keep him around. Beyond corporations using him as an unpaid yet credible spokesman for product endorsement, I really can’t see a good reason. Tradition is a reason, but doing something just for tradition’s sake, especially lying to children, is a terrible idea. We have to understand why the tradition exists. Maybe some people do it because it’s funny, but getting away with lying to a kid is like making a Lindsay Lohan joke; it’s too easy to be truly funny. Maybe we do it for behavior coercion, but telling kids that Santa only gives gifts to good children and coal to bad ones works for maybe one year, maybe. The day junior discovers that little Scottie Schmidt who is such a poop head got more and better presents than he did, the game is up. They quickly understand that Santas' version of “naughty” must only register when you do something really crazy like steal a bajillion dollars and “nice” means “didn’t set the dog on fire.” Personally, I think that the real reason we keep Santa alive is found in our own inadequacies.

The ultimate nostalgic fantasy is to go to sleep on a dull, brown Christmas Eve, and to wake up to a brilliant white Christmas day surrounded by everyone you love the most, laughing and playing together in blissful, perfect harmony. No capriciousness, no avarice, no hurtful words or selfishness, Christmas is a day where love supersedes disappointment and bitterness. Faced with explaining why we can’t treat one another like this every day, it’s easier to give Santa Claus the credit.

There’s a problem with Santa and the magic of Christmastime; it ends. Department stores box up the decorations, the background crooning of Bing Crosby and Louis Armstrong get replaced by Nickleback and John Mayer, and the Salvation Army pack in their kettles and bells for another eleven months. We go back to the old routine which is only practical. We can’t afford to travel across half the country to see Grandma and Grandpa every month, with or without presents and besides, it wouldn’t be special if we did it all the time. There are other things about Christmas that we could stand to keep all year round, though. If we all do our part to promote peace on earth every day we won’t have to use Santa as a crutch when we do it in December. Christmas won’t be quite so different from other days, so it won’t seem quite so magical, but that, I think, would be a change for the better.

Adaptation

I recently turned in my paper final for my class in literary analysis. It was about adapting a scrapbook into an e-book format and how it would be difficult to preserve the original artistic function of said scrapbook in electronic form. It was approximately 30% fluff,  80% bovine  excrement (from a male, not castrated) and 100% boring so I won't afflict you with it, but it did get me thinking about adaptation.

We've been seeing a lot of adapting recently, mostly switching books into movies. Twilight wrapped its big screen series this year while The Hunger Games debuted, we got a one off appearance from Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, and I am personally eagerly awaiting Peter Jackson's The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, due out Thursday at midnight (I will not be going because I am an adult with responsibilities). Some of the old faces from Lord of the Rings are back along with some new ones, most notably Martin Freeman in the role of Bilbo Baggins. You might recognize him from his role as Dr. John Watson in the BBC's Sherlock, which adapts Sir Arthur Conan Doyles' famous characters from the written word into 90 minute TV episodes. Doyle has been getting the full media treatment recently as a much different interpretation of the same characters came up on the big screen in Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, not to be confused with the HBO TV series Game of Thrones which has been adapted from George R.R. Martin's excellent Song of Ice and Fire books. These are just a sampling. I could belabor the point that books are being adapted a lot, but I won't.

Every time these adaptations hit the market the age old debate flares anew; which is better, the book or the movie? Most of the argument boils down to personal preference, but I find that oftentimes movie people are dissatisfied with the characters, find multiple plot holes, and openly wonder what the big deal is. Even when they are impressed you can hear the book nerds commiserating on how much the director shortened, altered, or just plain left out, and how one of the minor characters just wasn't right. This is because you can put down a book and pick it up the next day; they have time to flesh out the details, but movies need to be consumed in a single sitting. The story has to be stripped down to the most important parts, but this has usually already been done in the books' editing process. Any stripping down for the movie leaves gaps, and it's up to the director to hide them as best as he can. That's one of the reasons that movies have started splitting single books into multiple films; they simply cannot cram all of the nuance and character development into three and a half hours. Of course we put up with it because we are either too lazy to read the book, we genuinely want to see the characters we love come to life on the big screen, or we genuinely want to give detailed complaints about how the movie was done wrong.

I do love a good movie, but when it comes down to it I think that books almost always tell the better story. They take a lot of time, it's true, but good stories are worth investing in. It's really more of a draw to me that books take longer to read because I can enjoy it longer. It is more about the journey than the destination, after all, otherwise all we'd have is "happily ever after," or if you're a Tarantino fan, "everybody's dead."

(The contents of this blog post are an adaptation of a Broadway musical based on a movie based on a book based on real life events)

Non Controversial Causes Part II: Pound It

You have decided that there is a profound lack of teethmarks in your furniture and you hate your clean carpet; it is clearly time to get a dog. What kind of canine pal should you introduce to your home? A hard working retriever? A fluffy Husky? Possibly a "so ugly its cu- now wait, its still ugly" rodent style model? How about a mutt?

There are so many good dogs out there without papers. What were you going to use that pedigree for anyway? A dog is for digging holes, catching frisbees, and holding the floor down. They play with you, drool on you, forgive you for being a jerk and let you know when you scratch the right spot. They teach a kid about responsibility and unconditional love, and sadly but necessarily, about death and how to mourn. Dogs do not need papers to be dogs.

Some people use dogs for functionality and I can respect that. They need an animal to retrieve their dead ducks, or be their eyes, or sniff out drugs and explosives. I am glad that these kinds of dogs exist and I realize that some of these require specific breeds. That's great. Are you one of these people? Do you need a specific breed?

Maybe you don't buy it. Maybe you are thinking, "sure, but I want a smart dog or a high energy dog or a loyal dog." Let me assure you, collies don't have a corner on intelligence, labs don't have a monopoly on ADD, and goldens aren't the only dogs that will dote on your kids and stick with you to the bitter end. Mutts can be all of these things, sometimes at the same time.

Here's the deal; go to the local shelter and tell the people working there what you want in a dog, and they will probably give you a handful of candidates that they have on hand. Spend a little time with the mutt in the play yard or take her on a walk, pet her, feed her, give yourselves time to feel each other out. Trust me, dogs are not complicated. You will know just about everything you need about that animal within thirty minutes, and then you can make a decision. If you make a mistake and the relationship doesn't work out, take it back. If you don't find one that you like just wait a few weeks, there will be more. If this sounds like too much time to invest in purchasing a dog, you probably aren't ready to own one. Get yourself a hamster instead.

Shelter dogs are cheaper than purebreds. Maybe it's just me projecting onto them, but I think they have more personality and less pretension. They can have better health in the long run (careful on this one), and they are more grateful to be in your home. If you remain unconvinced and must have a purebred dog, at least get in contact with a local rescue group. There are too many unwanted animals out there already, please do not create demand for new ones.

A Cause Without Controversy

Last week I lamented that the noble causes of the world tend to be bogged down in complications and controversy, and that I was unwilling to get involved. I now must confess that I jumped the gun on that. While there are many, many complex issues that I don’t want to touch, there are a few causes out there for which I do feel comfortable with typing my full unabashed support, with no qualms about who might be offended.

The first issue I thought of was sex trafficking. My sister’s father-in-law’s daughter (would that make her my sister-in-law?) actively combats sex trafficking, but she does that in the Philippines.  I’m pretty sure that it isn’t a problem here and that none of the twelve people who read this blog are involved, so my harangue would be irrelevant but just in case: If you are involved in the sex trafficking business then SHAME ON YOU. Death by ruptured spleen is too good for you. In lieu of said trafficking, I have to fall to my next worthy and non-controversial cause: organ donation.

Contributing to medical causes can be a pain. Not as much pain as that poor kid suffering from MS mind you, but still a pain. Let them guilt you into sacrificing your five dollar footlong (and your address, you fool) for one day and you are plagued with a growling stomach for an afternoon and donation request junk mail for a lifetime and for what? Is five bucks seriously going to make a dent on the breast cancer front? Is five hundred? Five thousand? Cancer research can spend five thousand dollars in less time than it takes to eat that footlong. On the other hand, the returns with organ donation are amazing; you can save as many as eight lives and improve up to 50 for the sweet, sweet cost of zero dollars. On your part. The hospital staff has to get paid to harvest your guts, transport, and install them in someone else, but other people foot that bill so your family doesn’t have to worry about a thing. As for you, you’re dead, you have bigger concerns or none at all, depending.

The question isn’t so much of why you would want to be an organ donor as why would you not? In the sorrowful, regrettable event of your untimely demise, you will not be using those parts. If you do not donate they will literally rot. Are you afraid that the E.R. docs won’t work as hard to save your life if they know you are a donor? The E.R. is not responsible for anything donor related (thank your lucky stars for that). All they do is notify the people that are responsible once they have some viable parts. How about pain concerns? Do you think there’s a chance that you will still be alive when they start plucking your innards from your warm, bleeding corpse? I love Edgar Allen Poe too, but be realistic here; this is the 21^st century. We pretty much know whether someone is mostly dead or all dead.

Are you afraid that you won’t be able to have an open casket? First off, what kind of narcissist thinks that everyone wants one last look at his hauntingly cadaverous face? Second off, donation doesn’t alter the funeral plans. They dress you up like some macabre Barbie, replace the bones with metal rods and don’t take any skin off your face. Your eyes are sewn shut so no one can tell that your corneas are gone, so as far as dear aunt Milly is concerned you look perfectly normal, for a dead person anyway.

Are you under 18 and think this disqualifies you? Get your parents to sign off on it, it’ll make them proud to know that even if you cause a horrible traffic accident and die, you can give the guy you T-boned some of your viscera. Are you old, and think that no one will possibly want your crusty innards? Why don’t you be a donor anyway and let the folks with decades of medical training and practice make that call?

Some people claim that organs only go to the rich and/or famous. Allow me to congratulate those individuals for successfully dwelling in a magical, paranoid fantasy land parallel to the real one. I can think of about four different watchdog organizations off the top of my head that would be all over UNOS like plaid on a bad tie if that were the case but even if it were how cool would it be for Bruce Willis to have your kidney? That is quite literally the closest a person could ever be to a celebrity. He shook your hand once? Brilliant. Part of me lives inside him. Boom. You just became the coolest person at the afterlife party. At least the one your were invited to, anyway.

The last and final reason I can think of is the religion complaint, which I can understand, but I vehemently disagree. Christianity and Islam both believe in the resurrection of the dead, and wouldn’t it be confusing if you got raised but your guts were in someone else’s body? What zany hijinks! However, if you think that God has the power to raise the people who have been buried and rotted down into icky, icky goo before drying up into dust, but not the peeps who drowned in the ocean and whose bodies were nibbled away by fish, or the people who have been burned and their ashes blown away in the wind, or the people who thoughtfully checked “organ donor” on their driver’s licenses, you believe in a weak God. Seriously, you can do better. Besides that, most major religions check off on it. If it is that much of a concern to you go ahead and ask your priest/imam/Xenu, and they’ll give you the scoop.

Don’t be a selfish stiff. Be an organ donor.

Don't You Know There's a War On?!?

…And we have so many wars to choose from: the war on terror, the war on cancer, the war against marriage, against women, against poverty. We have race wars and culture wars and class wars, on drugs, on kids, and on insulin, of all things. If you want to fight for something bigger than yourself there are no lack for noble causes.

I worked in a real war once, or maybe it was just a conflict or police action? Congress kept changing its mind about that. Whatever it was I won’t say fought in it because I never pulled a trigger, but I did get up every morning (except the ones where I had worked through the night), pick up my wrenches and fix broken vehicles. I felt good about it, too. I never had to question my value to my country or my world, I was contributing to the nebulous Good and I felt good about it. I was helping to protect the white hats while they went out to capture the black hats, and even though the war could have been fought just as well without me, it would have been completely stagnant without people like me and that justified my existence for the day.

Now it’s different. I dropped my wrenches and picked up a word processor, and this question nags me; what have I done to contribute the nebulous Good today? I have become the American dream that I once swore to protect which is kind of noble I suppose, but I feel like I should be doing more. I should join another war, but which one?

Wars, it turns out, are more complicated than they seem. Take the right to life vs. the right to choose, for example. A pregnant girl should be able to unpregnify herself, right? Unless that squiggly thing inside her counts as human person, of course, then that would be state sanctioned murder. On the other hand, it seems that crime has taken a dramatic dip since Roe v. Wade. As it turns out, the kind of girl that has impulsive unprotected sex resulting in an unplanned child is not the kind that makes a great mother, so giving her the option to preemptively “take care” of her little bundle of joy means that those children never grow up to do crime. Back to the original hand, are we willing to go ahead and kill people before they are born for the crimes that they may or may not commit in the future? So we are back on the pro life side again, but then you see that if an impoverished woman has a baby, she not only has to pay out the nose for food, clothing and care for the bugger, she also isn’t able to work or finish school or whatever. Her opportunities are limited, and she stays poor. And then there is the bit that African Americans terminate their pregnancies more per capita than whites, and you have racial complications added to class complications.

This confusion is not unique to the right to life debate. The same can be said for the war on marriage, or the war on drugs, or the war on women, of which the war on babies is apparently a part. They are all miserable balls of guilt and vitriol, and I’m not interested in jumping in the middle of it.

Maybe I should ply my pen in a more neutral cause. Danielle Steele won’t be winning any humanitarian awards, but at least she is a stalwart heroine in the War on Boredom and that counts for something.

What is Real?

In Plato’s Cave, slaves are chained to a wall. They see shadows cast on the opposite wall, and debate among themselves concerning their meaning, purpose, and nature. These slaves are meant to represent us now on earth, with our limited understanding, trying to grasp high concepts such as the nature of love, justice, honor, truth, pain, and hope, among others.

We experience these things in our lives, but we do not understand them. We don’t know what it is that makes people love us, or why we love others, so we fantasize about it in bodice rippers and chick flicks, Twilight and Sex in the City and Romeo and Juliet. We instinctively know about justice. We know when it has been violated, particularly when we are on the losing end of it, but can we define it? Plato himself tries, albeit imperfectly. Why does pain exist? What purpose does it serve? We rebel from the idea that we should accept it, avoiding it at great cost. We rail against God and the fates when we experience it.

We are slaves, chained in place, seeing the shadows of these things thrown against the wall, enduring the assault of these things on our psyche and struggling to know what they are and what they mean. We understand only in part. If we could slip the chains and turn around to see the things that cast these shadows, perhaps when we are recaptured and returned to our place we will be better comforted, having known the true form of what these things are.

I am currently working on a book called First Monday Park. The bulk of this story takes place in a world where these things are more knowable. Postmodernism, the worldview that embraces the shadows and says, “These flickering forms are whatever you want them to be,” does not exist. It is a place where people know what justice is, know what pain is for, and know how to hope without foolishness.

My problem is that I am a slave that is still chained. I certainly have no hope of escaping myself, for I do not believe in transcendentalism on earth. The best I can do is inquire of other slaves who are also chained to the wall. I have to try to understand justice as Plato understood it before I can render it properly in the book. I have to know pain as Lewis believed it to be before I can show it in the real world. I have to seek out the sophists and philosophers, the askers and the thinkers, and consider what they say. I must discover if there is a consensus on these issues, and if there is good reason behind them. I must not bend to majority, but to truth, and place that in my book.

            In the interests of answering these questions, I am putting together a reading list of books that deal with the high minded, difficult questions. I want to cut underneath appearances and understand what things truly are. I am willing to stretch the limits on this. I will read philosophical essays and thought exercises, theology books, novels and quotes, anything that might help clarify what things are, how they present and why me might be confused when we see them, and how these things work together and support one another into a comprehensive picture. If you know of any, please send me authors and titles.
Some of the ones I already have on the list are 

“The Republic” by Plato, “The Problem of Pain” by C.S. Lewis, “Wild at Heart” and “Captivating” by John and Stasi Edlridge, “I, Robot” by Isaac Asimov and “The Upanishads.” 

Thanks for the feedback.