Tag: social comment

Christmas: A TV Guide

To put it politely, network TV is a vast, vacuous wasteland.  For every good program, there are at least fifty stinkers.   And don’t let any TV buff (read trivia nerd) tell you any different; it’s always been this way.  If there ever was a Golden Age in television, it was heavily camouflaged.  Network TV has always followed a very simple system: find something that works and repackage the hell out of it.  Then, when, everybody is up to their eyeballs in bored, find something else, and do it all again.  For example, right now we’re in the midst of crime shows and insult comedies, but as the doctor said to the kid who swallowed the quarter: “This, too, shall pass.”  The problem is there is one theme that never gets old – Christmas – and network TV’s been working that dead pony since David Sarnoff met Milton Berle.  Don’t get me wrong: there must be some terrific Christmas television out there, but, like Santa’s elves, it’s almost impossible to find.  So, in the spirit of the season I’ve put together a bit of a guide to save you tons of time.

Right off the bat, Made for TV Christmas movies are crap.  These low budget formulas are always filmed in Toronto or Vancouver to save money.  They usually feature a never-was actor with name recognition (Tom Arnold comes to mind) and somebody who looks so remarkably like Mary Steenburgen that sometimes she is.  The characters are handpicked from the cliché basket.  They always amount to the usual suspects, with a few variations: the gruff but kindly old person, the nasty bastard, the cute kid who’s either losing or lost faith in Christmas, the parent too busy to notice and the love interest who pops in and out like a malfunctioning Christmas bulb.  The plot works these stereotypes unmercifully.  Normally, either Dad or Mom is dead — sometimes both — so the remaining parent or guardian can be either poor or overworked.  The kid is a misfit (either new school or bully bait.)  The old person’s life coach is Ebenezer Scrooge, and the love interest has been cloned from the world’s finest cardboard.  Of course, the Christmas crisis, whatever it is, (actually, by that time, nobody cares) is resolved in the end and the kid grows up to be the love interest in the sequel twelve years later.  Don’t bother with these wastes of digital space.  You’d be far better off getting your popcorn and Pepsi™ and watching the Holiday Fireplace.

In the same vein, every year there are a load of rerun Christmas TV specials.  The networks call them classics and play them over and over.  Keep hitting the remote because the only ones worth watching are How the Grinch Stole Christmas (the original from 1966, not Jim Carrey’s fiasco) A Charlie Brown Christmas and the ones you watched as a kid.  The rest were made at the high water mark of Pokey and Gumby fame.   And although claymation may stir the hearts of artistic aficionados everywhere, to ordinary folks it’s like encountering a mime.  Yeah, yeah, yeah!  We all know it’s an art form, but I don’t want it anywhere near me.  So just download the ones you like and forget the rest.  There is, however, one notable exception which isn’t strictly network TV (PBS via BBC, actually) and it stands head and turkey above the rest.  It’s Merry Christmas Mr. Bean, and if you don’t understand the previous reference, you have got to watch this.  It is hilarious!

Which brings us to the Christmas Special, itself.  Over the years, the network TV Christmas Special has lost all its appeal.  Way back in the day, once a year, Andy Williams or Bing Crosby would haul out the winter wonderland backdrops and tuck into a few Christmas carols.  There were fake snow and lame jokes and either a puppet or a longhaired singer “for you young people.”  There was a guest star, possibly a comedy skit and one sombre “Silent Night” or “Little Town of Bethlehem.”  Then everybody joined in at the end to sing “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” and wave goodbye as if you were the one who was leaving.  The thing was (and this is what made them brilliant) it looked like Andy or Bing or whoever was actually having a good time.  Even though they probably taped the thing in August, it seemed, for all the world, that those people were enjoying themselves at Christmas.  They allowed us the willing suspension of disbelief.  It was sugar plum television.

These days, there’s a sharp edge to the Christmas Special.  The comedy is just slightly cruel, and it doesn’t look like anybody’s having any fun.  They go through all the motions and sing the right songs, but somehow they never step out of their celebrity personas.  You know it’s a Christmas Special.

I suspect there are still some good Christmas Specials out there, but I no longer have the patience to sit through the mountains of junk to find them.  And that’s the problem with network TV.  It’s loaded up with junk, and by the time you hear about the good stuff, you’ve missed it.  In the end, if I’m going to spend time with my TV at Christmas, aside from the few, tried and true, I’ll probably just watch a movie.

Friday: Christmas: A Guide to the Movies

Santa Claus and Clausaphobia

Every December, the world is gripped in a pandemic of Clausaphobia – the irrational fear of Santa Claus.  Although this is a mental disorder, there is considerable evidence that it’s contagious.  First of all, it has a distinct season, roughly from American Thanksgiving until December 26th — when it suddenly disappears as if it was never there in the first place.  Secondly, people who get the condition are quite noticeably afflicted; they simply can’t shut up on the subject.  Finally, as fate would have it, it seems to be spread by word of mouth.  Over the years, there’s been a lot of claptrap written in defence of Clausaphobia — as though those who suffer from its debilitating effects are, in fact, quite normal.  These fables have been repeated, at concert pitch, for so long that many otherwise sane people are now in danger of contracting this condition.  However, a small group of learned men and women are fighting back.  Equipped with science and reason they are desperately holding this disease at bay.  In the interests of helping control a worldwide scourge, here is a brief synopsis of their findings.

First, the fables.  In almost every Christmas book ever written, the story of Santa Claus starts out in some godforsaken town in Turkey.  Apparently, there was a guy there named Nicholas.  He was a priest or something, and he was so generous the Church made him a saint.  Fine!  There are a few scraps of evidence that some of this might be true.  For example, this Nicholas could very well have been a real 4th century bishop named Nikolaos of Myra.  However, historians have never agreed on that or any other where, when or why of this little fairy tale.  In fact, there is no definitive evidence whatsoever that this (or any other) Nicholas has any historical connection to Santa Claus.  However, this hasn’t deterred the myth makers.  Invariably they go on to relate a number of tales about their various Nicholases (Nicholi?) to demonstrate a vague link to the common practices of our modern day Santa Claus.  Unfortunately, they are all different stories concerning shoes, stockings, children, lumps of coal and what-have-you (no two alike) and none of them is backed up with factual findings.  In place of hard evidence, anthropologists and social historians theorize that Santa Claus grew out of these improbable Nicholas legends. They maintain that quaint local folk traditions somehow not only survived the Dark Ages but actually thrived, spreading throughout Europe.  Again, without a lick of corroborating evidence!  What a crock!  This has led to modern confusion and frustration — the root cause of Clausaphobia.

Let’s set the record straight.  Here’s the real story of Santa Claus, based on historical fact.  Santa Claus has been around forever.  He’s known by a number of different names — Sinterklaas in Holland, Father Christmas in Britain, Pere Noel in France etc. etc. — but it’s all the same guy.  He lives at the North Pole with Mrs. Claus (who, oddly enough, doesn’t have a first name) a ton of elves and the reindeer.  All year long, the elves make toys in a gigantic workshop.  Then, once a year, Santa loads up his magic sleigh, hitches up the reindeer (who can fly, by the way) and goes around the world, delivering toys to good girls and boys.  How do I know this?  Documented proof!  Santa Claus has actually been seen – at least three times — once by Clement Moore in 1823, then again by Thomas Nast in the early 1860s and finally by Haddon Sundblom sometime in the late 1920s.  There are also a few secret contemporary photographs which haven’t been authenticated.  However let’s just stick to the facts.

In 1823, Clement Moore, a professor at Columbia College, woke up on Christmas Eve and witnessed Santa Claus delivering toys to his house.  He wrote a poem about his experience, called ‘Twas the Night before Christmas which was published in the Sentinel newspaper in Troy, New York.  In that poem, Moore describes Santa quite accurately.  He also describes the reindeer (miraculously remembering Santa’s names for them) and their ability to fly.  There is some controversy over Moore’s account, however, because he describes the scene as “a miniature sleigh, and eight tiny reindeer” and goes on to call Santa himself “a right jolly old elf.”  Since we know (from corroborating evidence) that Santa Claus is actually quite a large gentleman, we can only conclude that Clement either didn’t have his glasses on or suffered from an undiagnosed eye ailment.

Santa Claus was next seen by Thomas Nast, sometime in the 1860s.  Nast was a cartoonist and social commentator who gave us, among other things, Uncle Sam, the symbols of both the Republican and Democratic political parties and the term “nasty.”  Obviously, a witness to history like Nast would not let his encounter with Santa Claus go unrecorded.  In the January 3rd, 1863 issue of Harper’s Weekly, Nast drew an illustration of Santa Claus meeting Union troops and passing out gifts during the Civil War.  We know this portrayal to be accurate because Santa Claus appears exactly as Clement Moore described him!  Clearly, these two depictions are of the same person.  Nast seems to have developed a long-term relationship with Santa Claus, because, twenty years later, he drew him again in what looks like a seated portrait.

The next documented sighting of Santa Claus occurred sometime in the late 1920s.  Haddan Sundblom, an advertising artist, must have met Santa on several occasions or even convinced him to once again pose for a portrait.  In 1931, Sundblom painted a picture of Santa as an advertisement for the Coca Cola™ Company.  It appeared in the Saturday Evening Post.  Sundblom’s image was universally recognized as Santa Claus; there were no complaints, nor any suggestions of inaccuracy.  Not one single person in the entire world even hinted that this might not be Santa Claus.  In fact, Sundblom’s portrait was so accurate that over the last 80 years, it has been plagiarized unmercifully.

These are just three examples that document the truth about Santa Claus.  There are more.

This Christmas, as you celebrate the season of joy, remember that there are those among us who are frightened and confused.  And although education is our best defence against Clausaphobia, don’t confront those who suffer (clausaphobes get very agitated at the truth.)  Accept them.  They are poor unfortunates, and it’s not their fault.  Perhaps, you can make a difference if you just say in a kindly voice, “You don’t have to believe.  Just write to Santa.  He’ll answer.”
Santa Claus
North Pole
Canada
H0H 0H0

The Worthy Cause: A Contemporary Menace

I’m fed up with causes.  The next person who tells me I have to be aware of something is going to get kicked in his protruding parts. This isn’t my fault, either: for the last decade, I (and everybody else west of Warsaw) have been beaten over the head with Worthy Causes.  We’re numb.  We’ve been bludgeoned so many times that there’s simply no feeling left.  The nerves are dead.  The heart strings have all been plucked right out of their sockets.  Only jerks have any tears left to jerk.  Stop it!  If you have any mercy left in your soul, stop telling me how much I have to care.  I care, alright, but every second of every minute of every waking hour is just too much for any human being to endure.  Even Gandhi took a day off once in a while.

I don’t know where all this started.  I have a theory, however, that in the post-industrial world, we had a lump of semi-educated, middle management people who were facing permanent unemployment and rather than let them starve, we created the Worthy Cause industry.  I’m not talking about charity — although, I suppose, the ultimate goal of the Worthy Cause people is to make off with some of your money.  I’m talking about the relentless “Ain’t It Awful?” message that grinds holes in your soul.  Over the last generation, we have built a massive multi-national information infrastructure whose entire purpose is not to solve problems, but merely to tell the rest of us just how bad these bad things are.  Every single disease, social question or natural catastrophe has at least three different agencies bombarding us with that message.  And these agencies are flourishing because they have no natural enemies..d’uh…they represent a Worthy Cause.  It’s like being attacked by unicorns; you can’t fight back.  In fact, I can’t even give you any specific examples because, if I did, I’d get a barrage of “Tell that to the families of the victims” emails.

That’s the real problem.  The Worthy Cause has attached itself to our psyche like some kind of benevolent leech.  We think we get integrity points if we publicly support a Worthy Cause.  We don’t.  Every breathing human being, even serial killers on death row in Texas, is against debilitating diseases that kill millions.  It’s what you’re supposed to do; it’s not a moral choice.  When you join the fight against any disease, there’s nobody on the other team.  Yet, people are clicking the [name the cause] “Like” icon on Facebook like a bunch of Rhesus monkeys getting food pellets; it makes them feel good.  Walk down any street, and you’ll see a phalanx of people wearing awareness ribbons in every colour under the sun — including purple (which, I assume, has something to do with the British Royal family.)  Honestly, it’s impossible to keep up with which colour means what.  Young people are wearing so many of those plastic platitudes on their wrists it’s a wonder they aren’t all walking like Quasimodo going to the bell tower.  I don’t really care what people do (although I do worry that the cause-of-the-week wristbands aren’t biodegradable) but I’m concerned that the purpose is now part of the problem.  Stop any of those people sporting their symbols of solidarity and they’ll probably tell you that they are raising awareness for this, that or the other Worthy Cause.  The question is, however, how much awareness do we need?  More importantly, how many of those resources we’re channelling into raising awareness might not be better spent dealing with the original problem?

Awareness is a multi-billion dollar industry.  Although originally it served to educate and involve ordinary people in the serious problems that face our society, recently, it has taken on a life of its own.  At any given moment, you can find a dozen Worthy Causes, each with its own feel-good celebrity, elbowing one another for media position.  Disease and disaster are being marketed like soup and shampoo.  The problem is as the media onslaught gets louder — despite the ribbons, buttons and bracelets — I’m not the only one who’s become calloused over.  I’m just the one who will actually admit it.