Santa's Dead | Long Live Santa
Imad Atalla
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SANTA'S DEAD, he committed suicide in protest. “My packaged identity has been your great escape from reality,” were his last words. “A dead Santa will piss you off, so you better damn well do something about the condition of your world.” Indeed Santa’s death holds up a mirror to human reality: violence, avarice, exploitation and a fabricated naturalization of the existing order by hegemonic market players. No doubt culture has been commodified for a long time, but today the market’s voracious appetite sees its rebellious detractors as delicacies to be simply acquired, not crushed. Cultural hegemony and counter-hegemony have become one and the same. Without threatening its own existence, a globalized market of the Disney variety absorbs and grabs an astonishing chunk of local culture—its themes, myths, bazaars, intellect, resistance and rebellions; the market repackages all things local in more tempting and commercially viable ways, then it exports them back as products. Thus local culture is redefined beyond recognition in the eyes of the local consumer whose sense of personal identity is changed by market spin—a form of self-alienation in progress. All defenses are down; no wonder traditional conservatives, north and south, are unhinged and frightened beyond their bejesus. But the market could not do it without the techies—the educated, trained, local and global functionaries and staffers on the market payroll, whose mind obliges to where the pocket is. Hegemonic culture infiltrates counter-hegemonic forces within academia and civil society to such a degree that the line is largely blurred between the two. A compromised Santa, as he appears on the cover of Publio, does not reflect traditional conceptions. His death is a flattening, liberating experience to himself and to some of us. He died for us, and with him he took the lazy habit of kowtowing to the established order. In his death Santa rises as a larger-than-life person, living on the fringes of culture in the domain of rare authentic rebels. “After I die, do not make the historical error of erecting a temple in my name,” he used to say in private. Santa took matters into his own hands, and so should we about the human condition, before December comes and the local mall pronounces LONG LIVE SANTA. Imad Atalla is editor of Publio magazine. |
