FlamingText

Santagate: The story of how I failed to ruin Christmas.

  My parents are pretty devout Christians, so when I was a kid they never tried to convince me that Christmas presents came from Santa Claus, because they felt that Santa Claus wasn't in the Bible (which I'm pretty sure is true, but honestly I haven't read the whole thing so for all I know he's mentioned in Leviticus somewhere) and that all the focus on Santa unfairly stole the Baby Jesus' thunder. They didn't try to tell me that my presents came from the Baby Jesus either, although I suppose that would have been a logical substitution. They just told me up front that my presents came from them.

  So I saw Christmas specials and I guess I knew who Santa was supposed to be, but it didn't really click with me that a lot of my peers were convinced that the fat guy in the red suit was coming down their chimney on Christmas Eve FOR REAL and leaving presents beneath the tree. Which is why, one day over at my best friend Mike's house I nearly ruined Christmas.

We were about six years old . Mike was explaining something about one of the gifts that Santa had brought him, and I stopped him.
"Wait a minute. Santa? Santa gave you a present? What are you talking about?"
"Yeah, right. A Christmas present. From Santa."
"Santa's not real, Mike. Presents come from your Mom and Dad."
"He is too real! He signs his name on the card and everything."
"No he's not. It's your parents. Your parents probably just wrote 'Santa' on the card."
"Shut up! It's Santa! How can you not believe in Santa?!"

  And so on. I had inadvertently sown the seeds of doubt in a True Believer. Once I saw how upset he was getting I backed off, and Mike went right on believing in Santa as far as I can tell. I didn't bring it up again because I think I realized that I had done something bad by breaking the news to him that his parents were lying about Santa Claus.

  So obviously my killjoy impulse developed at an early age. In hindsight I feel pretty bad about trying to burst Mike's bubble, but I also can't help but be impressed at how resilient his faith was in the face of what were, let's admit it, pretty persuasive arguments against the existence of this Santa person. Flies around the world in a night, comes down the chimney even though Mike's house didn't have a fireplace, spies on everybody all the time to determine who gets presents, etc. Mike wasn't having any of it. As far as he was concerned Santa brought it, I opened it, that settles it. His belief was steadfast.

  I'm thinking about this story anew as I prepare to head back to the Midwest for the holidays, which will be spent with my five nephews and nieces, four of whom still believe in Santa and all of whom go to church regularly. So even though I think it's kind of weird for parents to try to trick their kids into behaving with stories about old bearded grandfatherly type guys who watch them (even when they're sleeping) and mark them down as either "naughty" or "nice" depending on what they see, I am determined to not burst any more bubbles because A.) I like my nephews and nieces a great deal and therefore don't want to see them cry, and B.) one thing I do NOT need is to be the member of the family who makes children cry by telling them there's no such thing as Santa.

  Anyway, I might not be blogging much while I'm there, so as my gift to all of you, I invite you to re-read this FlamingText Holiday Classic™, "Christmas with Krampus." Merry Happy Happiness!

Speak clearly, please.

  Liberal moonbats are always complaining that they don’t have a voice in how our nation is governed, just because our votes are counted by machines manufactured by companies with clear conflicts of interest and numerous business ties to the Ruling Party. They’re all like “Oh, boo-hoo, how do I know my vote’s being counted when there’s no paper trail to provide verifiability and independent tests have proven that the voting software being used is vulnerable to hacking, and besides has anybody but me noticed that the exit polls and the recorded vote seem to differ most greatly in districts that use these machines, and that those differences always seem to favor the Ruling Party?”

  Once again, this is a half truth. Your vote only doesn’t get counted if you don't vote for the right things. If you vote with the Ruling Party, hell, your vote might get counted twice! So cheer up, you glass-half-empty types, and get with the winning team!

  Here’s another example of how they always see negative side of things: Domestic spying. While all these Chicken Little types are running around like “Oh! Orwell this, and unconstitutional that, and Police State the other thing!” they are ignoring the bright side. Now, for the price of an international phone call, they can get their concerns heard by paid employees of the NSA, one of the most prestigious arms of the intelligence-gathering apparatus, who are standing by to listen to your call 24 hours a day. Do you know another way to get an audience with officials working at the highest levels of government? I think not. So why not take advantage of this historic opportunity?

Domestic Surveillance: Your hotline to the Executive Branch of government, the only branch that matters!™

Warm Memories, Cold Storage

  When I was a little kid my parents were very concerned about what effect exposure to the sex, violence, materialism and all-around bad values presented on television would have on my impressionable young mind, so they severely curtailed and monitored my TV intake. Mostly, I was allowed to watch Sesame Street. As I got older, the list expanded to include the Wonderful World of Disney and a few other things, almost always with some kind of adult supervision. Content and duration of programs were carefully tracked, mostly by my mom. Time limits were strictly observed.

  As I got older the standards relaxed somewhat but there would still be shows that I was not allowed to watch. I think it was all pretty well-intentioned, although in hindsight some of their choices of what programs were verboten seem pretty hilarious. The Love Boat comes to mind. I think I understand what it was about this show that bothered my parents, but upon watching it in reruns years later I had to laugh at the realization that they were trying to prevent their child from being transformed into a seventies-era swinger. Considering how I ultimately turned out, I think I can be forgiven for wishing my parents had let me watch a little bit more Love Boat.

  But years before the Love Boat Lothario-Prevention Plan was implemented there were the dark, dark years of the Violent Cartoon Prohibition, which resulted in the unfortunate Speed Racer rationing incidents that plagued my early after-school viewing. One of the principal effects of this prohibition was to send me to my friends' houses to "play" during the crucial viewing hours between 4PM and 6PM (school's out and dinner time, respectively.) The fact that "playing" was an activity we all enjoyed while sitting motionless on couches and chairs inside, or that my friends had cable TV (at the time this was not nearly so common as it is now) were details that I generally declined to share with my parents. I'm not sure what age I was when I realized that withholding incriminating information was the best method for circumventing authority, but it ended up being one of my more crucial revelations.

  During these illicit TV-watching sessions I was able to get my fix of the kind of action-oriented wish-fulfillment fare that I found so sorely lacking in the Disney and Little House on the Prairie crap my family always watched. A lot of the shows I remember were serialized, like Speed Racer and Batman, which made it necessary to be over at my friend's house to "play" every day at 4PM for a week or two, depending on the storyline. I think as a result I saw a lot of story fragments, plotlines wherein the hero gets imprisoned in some diabolical trap from which he must escape in the next episode; except I frequently would never see the next episode. This might help to explain why so many of my memories of shows from that period are so intensely disturbing. These were probably the first shows I had seen where Bad Things happened to the characters on a regular basis. Not Little House on the Prairie bad things either, like somebody gets sick or there's a really hard winter or something. These bad things were more like, say, getting cut in half by a giant buzz saw or frozen alive into a giant sno-cone. You know, Bad Things.

  Now obviously the formula of any cliff-hanger type serial is that episodes end with the worst possible thing in the world happening to our protagonists, or so close to happening as to render the outcome a fait accompli. The tension created by that event is relieved at the top of the next episode with the protagonists escaping from the not-so-inevitable-as-we-initially-thought outcome, only to somehow work their way into an even worse situation by the end of the program. At the end of the series of episodes, good triumphs over evil and everything turns out okay. In theory, the young viewer internalizes a little lesson about the importance of persevering against adversity, facing one's fears and standing up for what's right. But the most important lesson imparted by each and every one of these programs: Don't miss our next exciting episode!

  I say this from personal experience: ignore this last one at your own peril. While other kids were internalizing the intended lesson that it's always darkest before the dawn, I guess I was internalizing the message that it's always dark. And then it gets even darker. These shows with their convoluted plots where terrible things occurred with frightening regularity and stubbornly refused to resolve themselves by episode's end held me utterly transfixed. They may have given me nightmares, but in spite of that or perhaps because of it I kept watching. In that strange way that memories of childhood dreams fuse with actual childhood memories I have at times been uncertain if the image stuck in my head from those years originated in a dream, a TV show, or an actual memory that's somehow been distorted by time and distance.

  One such source of troublesome memories is a show of which I have only the vaguest of recollections. It was a poorly-dubbed Japanese live-action import called Johnny Sokko and his Giant Robot. It featured the titular Johnny Sokko as the protagonist, who, through his radio transmitter watch, issued instructions to a 100-foot tall steel robot (who for some reason had the head of a sphinx.) Giant Robot, for his part, was pretty much devoid of personality, never speaking and acting only when explicitly instructed on what to do by his diminutive human master. Upon being issued a command, the Giant Robot would do a weird salute that looked to me like he was karate chopping his own chest, as if to signify "I hear and obey, master." It usually went like this:

Johnny Sokko: "Giant Robot! Use your finger missiles! FIRE! " (Johnny did a lot of shouting. He seemed very excitable.)

Giant Robot: CLANK! CLANK! CLANK! Whoooooosh—Ka-Boooom!

Johnny Sokko: "Giant Robot! Use your eye-lasers!"

Giant Robot: CLANK! CLANK! CLANK! VVVVZzzzzzzappffvvzzzz!!

Johnny Sokko: "Giant Robot! Fly me to Tokyo!"

Giant Robot: CLANK! CLANK! CLANK! (Giant Robot picks up Johnny Sokko in his hands and they fly to Tokyo at supersonic speeds.)

And so on. It's pretty easy to see why this show would appeal to a six-year-old kid. That first command alone ("Giant Robot! Use your finger missiles! FIRE! ") opened my six-year-old mind up to heretofore unimagined possibilities.

  Johnny Sokko, for his part, did not use the Giant Robot to take revenge on bullies or to impress girls, as I no doubt would have done in his position. On the contrary, Johnny was completely altruistic in his robot-usage, which was lucky for the Planet Earth because in every episode the evil Gargoyle gang would unleash another fearsome giant monster on the world (well, Japan) as part of their relentless quest to conquer our planet and make it ready for colonization by the Gargoyle emperor. The planet Gargoyle had mastered interstellar travel, but their civilization had apparently never developed atomic weapons or other WMDs, choosing instead to focus exclusively on giant-monster development. Which produced mixed results, frankly. The only monsters I really remember were a giant Triceratops that shot freeze rays out of its horns, and a sinister plant that started out as a coconut-sized seed pod and rapidly grew to be big enough to destroy most of Tokyo. I have a very clear memory of the Giant Robot, helplessly pinned in the enormous vine-tentacle of the deadly plant monster as the episode came to an end. I never saw the next episode, but I can only assume that it began with the Giant Robot being crushed into scrap metal and then went on to tell the story of how the Earth was summarily conquered and all its inhabitants pressed into perpetual slavery by their cruel alien overlords. But of course, I can’t be 100% certain that’s how the story resolved itself. It just seemed like that's where it was going.

  Johnny worked with an Earth agency called Unicorn, which as far as I know wasn’t an acronym for anything. Unicorn was tasked with protecting Earth from hostile aliens, sort of a Department of Homeland Security with a special emphasis on giant monster attacks. The only effective response that the best minds at Unicorn had ever come up with to counter the constant string of monster attacks was to send Johnny Sokko and the Giant Robot to defeat them, although really it was the Giant Robot that did all the heavy lifting. But since Johnny was the only person that Giant Robot would listen to, they were a package deal.

  I once read an interview with Stan Lee where he outlined the key differences between the Marvel superheroes he created in the sixties and their DC predecessors. One of the standards of the superhero form up to that point was the Teenage Sidekick: Batman had his Robin, Green Arrow his Speedy, The Flash had Kid Flash, etc etc. The idea was that young readers would identify with the sidekick and imagine themselves in his place, envisioning themselves accompanying the heroes on their adventures and joining in the battle against evil. Which seems like a pretty good theory until you realize that the main function of these characters, plot-wise, was to raise the stakes of conflicts by constantly getting captured and held hostage. So not only did Robin undercut Batman’s coolness by appearing beside him in an impractical costume that could best be described as “festive,” but he was always endangering Batman by getting captured and strapped to giant buzz-saws. Which made Batman seem irresponsible for involving a minor in his vigilante crusade knowing full well the dangers involved. But then again, the exact nature of Batman's relationship to his teen-aged "ward" was always a bit hazy to begin with.

  Stan Lee decided to do away with the sidekick convention and instead create characters that his readers identified with in a more direct fashion. He reasoned that young readers didn’t want to hang out with Spider Man while he fought crime, they wanted to be Spider Man. This is also why he loaded his characters down with so many problems, realizing that teenage readers would more readily identify with an awkward science nerd who struggled to pay his rent and usually didn’t get the girl than they would with a godlike alien from the planet Krypton who lived by himself in a fortress at the North Pole carved out of solid ice. This proved to be a highly successful gambit for Lee, and the tales of his angst-ridden, conflicted heroes with their “real-life” problems succeeded in drawing in older readers who had outgrown their Sidekick Years.

  It’s plain from the description of Johnny Sokko that Johnny was more of a Teenage Sidekick than an actual hero. He was basically helpless on his own, and he was forever getting captured or losing the watch that controlled the Giant Robot. But I remember that the show had the intended effect on me as a kid, which was to involve me in the fantasy of what it would be like to have my own giant robot to boss around. As time passed and I left my own Sidekick Years, Johnny Sokko was forgotten and I moved on to other equally unrealistic but perhaps more nuanced wish-fulfillment scenarios. When I thought back fondly to the years of the Giant Robot it was mainly to scratch my head and wonder “What the hell was that show? Did I really see it, or just imagine it?"

  Now when I think back to it, I realize that I no longer harbor any desire to be a Johnny Sokko. The Giant Robot was where it was at. Not only could he shoot lasers out of his eyes and missiles out of his fingers, but when there were no monsters around to fight, he lived in a missile silo, slumbering in power saver mode, waiting to be activated to fly into atomic-powered jet-propelled action. There are few fantasies more appealing to me these days than that of being able to lie dormant in the downtime between planet-saving sessions. Hitchcock once called movies life with all the boring parts taken out, and that perfectly describes the life of the Giant Robot. Because it's those hours and days between adventures that really do you in. If I could just rest peacefully while I waited for some hyperactive kid with a radio wristwatch to wake me up to go fight a giant space-plant, that would be fine with me.

  I guess that’s what Superman was doing in his downtime. Sitting alone in the Fortress of Solitude, staring a hole in the wall while he waited for Jimmy Olsen to activate the emergency signal watch. Dreaming of endless giant monsters to fight, earth-bound asteroids to deflect, and world-ending catastrophes to be narrowly averted. Dozing off dreaming of his last dim, happy memory of his mother and father as they swaddled him in a blanket and tucked him into the escape rocket.

We are your overlords

  This man is WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy, speaking at this week's World Trade Organization meeting in Hong Kong. While some might question the appointment of an individual who is the spitting image of Lex Luthor to head the controversial organization as it faces a rising global wave of criticism for being a non-elected world governing body that places multinational corporate profits before every other concern while crushing any and all who attempt to stand in the way of its insatiable planet-consuming avarice, WTO delegates were quick to point out that Mr. Lamy's Nosferatu-like good looks, engaging speaking style and emphatic "jazz hands" delivery more than offset any unfortunate comparisons to Superman's best-known nemesis.

  He is shown here giving his keynote speech, entitled "Those who would resist us will be swept aside as chaff before the reaper's blade, and their blood will nourish the Seeds of a New Tomorrow: Emerging trends in international trade."

Sounds like somebody's got a case of the Mondays.

  I just finally found out what “ROTFLMAO” means yesterday. Evidently it means “Rolling On The Floor Laughing My Ass Off.” I guess LOL wasn’t cutting it for some people. They felt they needed to create A New Unpronounceable Acronym For A Phrase That Wasn’t Exactly Ubiquitous In The First Place And Couldn’t Possibly Be True Anyway (ANUAFAPTWEUITFPACPBTA, if you need to use that phrase with some regularity and can’t be bothered to type it out every time.) Why can’t it be true? Because if you were really rolling on the floor laughing your ass off you wouldn’t be able to type while you were doing it – the use of the verb form “rolling” means you’re doing it right now. And even if you just got finished rolling on the floor and laughing your ass off, you probably wouldn’t be typing it because the second you sat down at the keyboard to begin typing, you would let out a horrific yelp of pain as you discovered that you NO LONGER HAD AN ASS to cushion the impact. The acronym for Letting Out A Horrific Yelp Of Pain Because I No Longer Have An Ass is: LOAHYOPBINLHAA. Feel free to use that one too.

  The only time I really hear LOL spoken out loud is when people are pointing out how inane online chat can be. I never really hear “ROTFLMAO” spoken out loud, probably because a.) it’s nowhere near as popular as LOL, and b.)nobody knows how to pronounce it. Which I’m glad for. The last thing I need is to hear people start speaking in long strings of mostly consonants that abbreviate trite little sayings. The only thing worse would be if people started speaking in emoticons:

“LOAHYOPBINLHAA! Winking smiley face. *Hugs!*"