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last year i thought it would be funny to be santa claus.
so i mounted a campaign to become santa claus and it worked.
there is something deeply deeply strange about being santa claus: what kids believe, what they don't believe, which plays out across the kinda stupid matter of whether kid a is going to understand the costume and so you as santa claus (in marshall fields naturlich) or you, the guy inside the costume, as a guy inside a costume.
one little girl asked me as santa claus and not as the guy who was holding up the santa suit, who kept it from falling in a heap on the floor, to heal her little brother who was at the time in an oxygen tent.
that is what she wanted.
that is also the point at which it stopped being fun to be santa claus and became something else, something more surreal.
that santa claus is ideologically suspect is given: the spirit of nice capitalism, an index across which you get to see the extent to which kids measure themselves by indexing it to commodities they can imagine acquiring, so an index of socialization, of the internalization of norms that shape beliefs and so as a type of adjustment mechanism for operating in a capitalist context--santa claus is part of the mechanisms that enable folk to confuse market rationality and reason because santa claus is an element of projecting a sense of moral valuation onto commodity flows.
but santa claus is also an object of belief. like the oracle of delphi. kids want to get a secret message from santa claus, which enables them to understand themselves as special objects of attention.
thinking about santa claus runs in one direction
being santa claus in another.
thinking about santa claus i figure it's all a joke and the earlier kids know the better.
being santa claus, i figured that the kids i saw who took me to be the costume i was wearing, and so who took me to be santa claus, will find out all this soon enough.
and so i only mentioned the slogan
"when the revolution comes, all you'll probably do is squeal"
to myself.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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