Posted on: Monday, December 6, 2004

ABOUT MEN

By Michael Tsai
Advertiser Staff Writer

Word to all you lazy advertising weasels, hack screenwriters and cheap-shot comics: Enough with the Santa bashing!

I realize it's our obligation as post-counterculture Americans to prop up our weenie sense of irreverence by trashing our icons (usually in the most predictable ways possible) but this ongoing assault on the Big Jolly has gone on long enough.

If it isn't disgruntled elves talking Santa-smack on radio and TV commercials, it's one-note comedians microwaving the same lewd innuendos about, heh-heh, sitting on Santa's lap, wink-wink.

If it isn't Best Buy building an ad campaign around Kris Kringle's poor-loser brother, it's Hollywood churning out chimney swipe like "Silent Night, Deadly Night" or "Bad Santa."

Bop around the Internet long enough and you'll surely run across the "Anti-Santa" on scarysquirrel.org or the slanderous Shockwave games "The Wrath of Santa" and "Rebel Noel: Escape from the North Pole."

The P.C. crowd got a lot of mileage out of deconstructing the Santa myth in the '80s and 90s, painting the Man in Red as just another white male spreading his arbitrary value system by bribing children, all the while operating an off-shore sweat shop. Ho, ho, ho!

I suppose I can appreciate people's objection to the Santa figure as emblematic of the capitalist consumer co-opting of a religious and cultural holiday (our modern image of Santa was largely standardized by Coca-Cola, after all), but I probably wouldn't go as far as to call for a boycott of all things Santa, as German priest Eckhard Bieger did a couple of years ago.

I'd argue that our country's seemingly growing hostility toward Santa — anyone remember those sadistic Sony ads from a few years back? — is really a rejection of a particular antiquated male ideal.

To be sure, Santa is as old school as it gets. He believes in right and wrong. He's not big on working out. He probably lives in the North Pole because it's the last place on Earth where you can still smoke at work.

Most of all, Santa stands for kindness — and male kindness is increasingly suspect in our society.

Perhaps we've become too cynical to see the benevolent toy maker as anything but a retrograde symbol of Anglo paternalism.

Maybe Santa's "who's naughty/who's nice" system of meritocracy doesn't jive with our contemporary sense of entitlement. (Wouldn't you love to see Allen Iverson walking around with an "Only Santa Can Judge Me" tattoo?)

But how's about we let Santa off the hook for staying fat and squishy and jolly while the rest of American culture gets leaner and meaner and less willing to let mystical strangers fly down our chimney?

Hey, I've finally forgiven Santa for leaving me those camel-colored Famolares instead of an Imperial Death Star back on Christmas Day 1977. Can't we all just tap into that Christmas spirit this year and cut the old guy some slack?

Reach Michael Tsai at mtsai@honoluluadvertiser.com or 535-2461.