You'd Better Not Pout, I'm Telling You Lies
By Carrington Vanston // 2004 Dec 30
Some people believe oil companies are surpressing cars that run on banana peels. Some people believe aliens travel hundreds of billions of miles to gang-probe rural bumpkins. It occurs to me that some people believe a whole hell of a lot of nonsense, and I blame Santa.
The people who believe these things call them hidden truths. The rest of us call them conspiracy theories. (Or "the latest one from that nutbar in accounting," depending on whether they're in the room with us when we're talking about them.)
There are actually people who believe such theories. We encounter them all the time: some of them post grainy photos of UFOs on their all-lowercase blogs, some of them write books called things like Licorice: The Hidden Confectionary Power Behind 9/11 and/or JFK, and some of them stand in front of you at the grocery store buying a remarkable quantity of tinfoil. Or sprouts. I'm always suspicious of the ones with the sprouts.
But when does it all start? Do these people ease into these things, first believing they share a special bond with their cat and then slowly over the years coming around to the opinion that Mr. Buttons is telling them to climb up a bell tower and start thinning out the neighborhood? Or maybe it's a sudden thing, like going to bed one evening thinking about tomorrow's bank loan application and waking up the next morning as the Venusian Ambassador to Planet 3.
I have a theory. I call it the "It's All Santa's Fault, That Fat Fucker" theory. I'm still working on the title.
My theory goes something like this: it's all Santa's fault, that fat fucker. There's a little more to it than that, but I wanted to get the basics out of the way quickly in case my computer is being tapped and this transmission gets cut short by Them.
Before I get to the details of the IASFTFF theory, let's discuss the lie of Santa. We know that Santa does not exist. His supposed feats are provably impossible according to the laws of physics, just as they are provably false by objective observation.
So the facts are these: Santa does not exist, we know this, and yet we tell our children that he does exist. We lie to our kids, just as our parents lied to us. It's a seasonal, festive falsehood.
Some things are so pervasive that they become invisible. Calling Santa a lie might sound harsh, but that's only because in our society Santa is a shared concept that runs so deep most of us never bother to think about its effects.
The guy on the evening news was in on it even going as far as fabricating radar reports of a flying sleigh.
Take the movie Miracle on 34th Street for instance. Reducing it to its essentials, this is a film about a lady who tells her child an unpopular truth and then is vilified for doing so. All the people around her share a secret lie and they persecute her into becoming One Of Us. In the end her resistance is broken and she embraces the lie, seeking comfortable social acceptance at the expense of deceiving her own daughter.
It's a message movie. Nice family stuff.
This definition of the film might seem extreme, but that's only because the lie of Santa is part of our culture. It would be different if the movie was not about the Santa but instead about some other lie. What if it was about a small town in which everyone "sees" a dragon that doesn't actually exist? In this version, the mother might tell her daughter that the dragon isn't real, much to the chagrin of the town elders who see the dragon as an important tradition and cultural bond.
Imagine the final scene in which the wearied mom finally gives in after weeks of aggressive social pressure, and she tells her own daughter that she sees the dragon.
What would we be expected to feel when her little girl points at thin air and says, "yes, mommy, I can see it, too. I can see the dragon." Fade out, scroll credits, dry your eyes and think about how lucky we are that we don't live in a town like that.
Oh, except we do. But since it's just Santa, we say it's all harmless fun.
But how harmless is it, really? I think perhaps the lie of Santa is what causes a certain percentage of western society to believe in vast governmental coverups and X-Files plotlines.
You see, it's no use arguing with these people about the unlikelihood of government conspiracies that require hundreds or even thousands of people to be in on them. It's no use pointing out the odds against any conspiracy succeeding when it requires complicity by a huge number of people. And the reason it's no use is because back when they were kids there really was a time when everybody was in on it.
To these people Santa wasn't just a lie, it was a conspiracy. Mom and dad were in on it. The teachers were in on it. The guy on the evening news was in on it, even going so far as to fabricate radar reports of a flying sleigh. The TV and the radio and the newspapers were all in on it. The people who make movies were in on it. The people who make toys were in on it, deeply. Hell, somebody even arranged for actors to dress up like Santa and then hired them to wait in conspicuous places to reinforce the lie.
Everybody was in on it. Absolutely everybody. Every trusted authority figure, every person lining the street, all the media...everybody. It was a real live worldwide conspiracy that cost billions of marketing dollars, the coordinated efforts of tens of thousands of people, and the complicity of every single person in a position of authority.
So it's no use telling conspiracy theorists that their ideas about government coverups and alien invasions are ridiculous due to the number of people who'd have to be involved to make them work. The kids might be alright, but they won't get fooled again.
You say it's all harmless fun? You say there's no danger in having a shared conspiracy to lie to our own children? You say nothing bad can come from yanking the rug out from under our wide-eyed, foolishly trusting kids?
Don't make me ho ho ho.
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Carrington Vanston is a humorist and atheist. Or vice versa. He wrote and directed the long forthcoming feature film Duck Duck Goose. He has written two tiny plays which had two tiny productions: The Sound Of Two Hands Typing and Stark Raving Happy. He speaks three languages fluently, but two of them are English with a silly accent. The third is English with a slightly less silly accent. He can pronounce his full name backwards, he has a favorite mathematical equation, and he wants that $2 you owe him. Carrington should be stored in a cool, dry place, and may explode if heated.