Going on a rampage in a Santa suit with a hundred others dressed
in the same will grant you special powers that you don’t have
in everyday life.
With the unquestioning openness that people have toward their
childhood icons comes the power to have strangers willingly greet
you with open arms.
With the beard and hat comes the invincibility of anonymity. But
will it grant the power to deconstruct a cultural icon?
As the festive season approaches ““ and along with it, the
ninth annual Los Angeles Santacon, which is
“unofficially” scheduled for Dec. 17 ““ the
rationale behind what has become a widespread trend of santarchist
mobs should be scrutinized.
Santarchy began in San Francisco in 1994, when Cacophony Society
members (a group of nihilists and anarchists seeking experiences
outside the mainstream) took to the streets begging for change,
singing dirty Christmas carols and visiting pubs and strip
clubs.
By 2004, the santarchists had spread to more than 23 cities all
around the world.
A coordinator for the Los Angeles event who calls himself Santa
Squid told Wired magazine, “Starting after Thanksgiving,
Christmas is just all about selling stuff. … We’re taking
back Santa, we’re making Christmas fun again.”
The event is largely a protest against Santa Claus as a cultural
icon, popularized by the Coca-Cola company in a Christmas
advertising campaign in the 1930s.
In fact, many of today’s Christmas symbols originate from
the advertising industry.
Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer, for example, was created by a
New York advertiser in 1939 as part of a marketing scheme for the
Montgomery Ward department store.
These figures have now become prompts for countless department
stores to remind parents that it’s time to buy presents for
their little ones.
Certainly in the month leading up to Christmas, the vast
majority of Christmas imagery that we are exposed to is not from
homes.
It is from shops and malls, where Christmas carols and
decorations prematurely start the festive season.
However, the question remains as to whether walking through busy
cities with a flock of santarchists denouncing consumerism in cheap
red-and-white cotton suits is an effective way of dismantling Santa
Claus as a figure who encourages consumption.
Perhaps the main problem is clarity.
Even though having more than one Santa in the same place at the
same time is like a rip in the space-time continuum, the link
between multiple badly behaved Santas and protesting consumerism is
not transparent.
The goal of dismantling Santa’s influential status leaves
many bystanders dumbfounded, questioning whether the santarchists
are part of a union of mall Santa workers on their way to the shops
to have children sit on their knees.
Some of the methods of the santarchists are not particularly
focused in terms of the message they are trying to communicate.
Many participants wear sexualized Santa suits.
Such suits are advertised in Playboy and Hustler lingerie
catalogs to promote, rather than demote consumption.
That said, there are moments of political coherence that are not
so ambiguous.
For example, santarchists can be found chanting “Merry
consumerfest” to visitors in shopping malls, offering
passersby material goods that they don’t need from a sack of
trash and protesting against elf sweatshops in Antarctica and the
Philippines.
If the santarchist mob is able to generate media attention and
there is a spokesperson who is able to communicate the philosophy
of the event coherently in an interview, then the event can be
somewhat successful in its goal.
In the end, it’s probably true that “no force on
Earth can stop one hundred Santas,” as written on the
Santarchy Web site.
But it is probably also true that there is no force on Earth
that a hundred Santas can stop.
Send all Christmas requests to Marshall (courtesy of
Coca-Cola) at jmarshall@media.ucla.edu. Send general comments to
viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.