Santa Claus is Coming to... Wait, He's Here?

As I have a friend who has a modicum of disposable income and I’m sometimes able to afford bus fare, the time I spend with her allows me to go places I would not go on my own, like shopping malls. Of course, I don’t much care for the places, but I’ll take anything that’s outside the realm of my day-to-day experience. Poverty aside, I’m quite an anti-consumerist person, so I wouldn’t buy much even if I could, and I recoil at the insane ravenousness with which some people shop. I actually enjoy going to the mall for the sake of watching the passersby and speculating about their lives, exploring the cultural trends and modern fashions on display in storefronts, and generally observing everything at one step removed. But from time to time, some absurdly over-zealous advertisement or sudden mad dash of customers will tear me violently away from my enjoyment of the scenery and leave me burning with aggravation at the worst of my culture.

It’s the way that corporations and ad agencies and salesmen push us in certain directions, and it’s the way we happily and thoughtlessly run straight in the direction we’re being pushed. Nothing provides a more lasting impression of that than the way in which consumerism manipulates the very passage of the seasons. The calendar seems to run a little differently each year, though the change is unidirectional. And as obvious and discomforting as it is to me, I see no means of stopping it. Indeed, I see no one expressing interest in it stopping.

I went to the local area’s largest mall with my friend over the weekend. I’d hoped that I’d be able to lose myself in the crowd for a while and generally forget about the nature of the place, but about twenty feet from the door, I realized that there was no escaping the consequences of my stubborn non-conformity. For it was about twenty feet from the door that I saw Santa. A little further in, I could make out the Christmas music being piped across the mall concourse, and I tried to override Paul McCartney’s voice, changing the words to “simply having a wonderful nineteenth of November.”

I take it for granted that people are expected to start their Christmas shopping earlier each year, and that they tend to act in accordance with that expectation. It frustrates me to no end, but I take it for granted. When I worked in a wholesale club a few years ago, I was dismayed to see that our Christmas displays went up on September 17^th. This year, I saw autumn displays in a Rite-Aid in early August, and jokingly asked the employee working in that aisle how long it would be before all of that was cleared out to make way for the Christmas merchandise. He replied, “Actually, we got our first shipment this week.”

After Halloween was over, I was in a store that mostly sells seasonal merchandise and I saw that Christmas immediately sprang into full commercial blossom when October ended. I recall commenting that it now seems that from the point of view of retailers, Halloween ends in September and Thanksgiving simply doesn’t happen. How right I was, based on this weekend. And how unfortunate that the stores set the tone for everyone else. Two radio stations in my area began playing Christmas music 24/7 at the end of the first week of November.

I don’t like the emphasis on consumerism attached to all of our traditions. I make no secret of that. But what bugs me on a deeper level is way that this rampant commercialization of everything increasingly threatens to rob people of the actual experience of holidays and distinct seasons. I sometimes imagine that we’re spiraling towards a future in which citizens are constantly preparing for one upcoming holiday or another, but never pause to actually celebrate or enjoy any particular event. Perhaps someday the question “When is Christmas Day?” will be met with a quizzical look and the bemused response, “What are you talking about? Christmas goes from now until Valentines.”

The way I remember it, wasn’t the end of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade always the first appearance of Santa Claus? Weren’t we all supposed to have a collective feeling of warmth at that moment, knowing that the Christmas season began that moment? Even as a child and even living in the suburbs, I had a certain understanding that Thanksgiving marked the turning point at the end of harvest time, when the enjoyment of winter began. Because the parade was televised, all the children in America were able to enjoy the first glimpse of Santa together, and no one was able to lay first claim to the magic of the Christmas season the way they are able to lay first claim to a Blu-Ray player or laptop on Black Friday.

The only reason I can see for why a parent would take a child to see Santa Claus at a mall in the middle of November is out of a sense of opportunism. “Come on, Sally,” I imagine some young mom saying between gulping swills of coffee while holding out her watch, “let’s go see Santa now so we can beat the lines. This way he’ll know exactly what he needs to get when the stores open at eleven o’clock on Thanksgiving. So let’s go plop you on the man’s lap and get this shit over with.”

I think it’s awfully hard for adults to remember that the same things can be seen much differently through the eyes of children. Whereas standing in a line to declare your desires to a bearded fat man in a red suit may seem hellishly monotonous to many parents, for many children, though they may not be aware of it at the time, the prospect of having to wait with other children in order to talk to Santa makes the satisfaction of reaching him all that much more thrilling. And it’s a community experience, subtly reminding both parents and children that every reasonably fortunate family in the country will be getting much of what they want come December 25^th, and that it’s not just a private, one-household glut of loving avarice.

I guess what I’m saying is if we have to define our traditions by orgiastic consumption, can we at least do it in a way that encourages us to recognize that we’re part of a shared society? But make no mistake, I’d rather we tone the consumerism way, way down. I know that it’s unreasonable to expect our consumerist impulses to be overturned. I know that well enough to be okay with hanging out at malls. But I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect us to show capability for valuing something other than consumerism, as well.

Making our purchases and listing our material expectations in a more structured way may give us a chance at integrating the remnants of a few other traditions or experiences into our shopping. But no matter how we go about it, the more we shop, the less attention we’ll pay to the other elements of each season. Amidst the increasing primacy of money, it seems to me that the first thing we stand to lose is the seasonal benchmark of Thanksgiving. And with consumption as the defining characteristic of every celebration that surrounds it, it seems to me that a holiday of gratitude and remembrance is what we can least afford to lose.

The Simplest Explanation is Often the Tesh One

During a recent, lengthy conversation with my brother Brian, he brought up the John Tesh radio show so that we could badmouth the host’s daily contributions to the lives of his listeners. I don’t think all that badly of John Tesh, but the sentiment that my brother and I seem to share is that he takes a rather unquestioning attitude towards the information that he cites on his program, and tends to dispense, as if it is gospel, advice that needs to be context-dependent at best. Then again, sometimes it’s probably just wrong altogether.

Yesterday, I just happened to hear a bit of the John Tesh broadcast, and really got my dander up over his latest explanation of some academic study. To his credit, I’m sure that a lot of the fault lies with the researchers who are putting out this material in the first place, but again, it is Tesh’s unquestioning attitude in broadcasting the stuff that turns irresponsible reasoning from an academic footnote into a corruption of popular knowledge.

In this case, Tesh thought himself to be informing his audience that cultural and artistic activities improve people’s health. According to surveys of study participants in Norway, he says, those who reported going to museums on a regular basis or either participating in or watching things like ballet tended to be significantly healthier overall than people who didn’t take part in those activities.

And then, setting aside any possible questions as to the meaning of the data, Tesh asks what he apparently thinks is the only natural question: how does this work? He promptly answers his own question, apparently restating the opinions of the original researchers. Not knowing where to find the original reporting, I can’t say with certainty that that’s the case, but coverage of the story in the UK Daily Telegraph back in May made the same statements about a unidirectional, causal relationship between cultural activity and physical outcome, so that suggests that such statements are repetition of the claims of the researchers. Whatever their original language, Tesh puts it simply and stupidly: cultural activities engage us mentally, and that helps us to be able to deal with stress and keeps us healthier.

It is absolutely shocking to me that professional academics and paid researchers still sometimes use the most obvious kind of faulty reasoning and confuse correlation with causality. Observing that healthy people go to museums absolutely does not mean that going to museums makes people healthy. In fact, assuming that that’s the case strikes me as amazingly unimaginative and intellectually lazy. I recognize that one needs a hypothesis in order to make scientific progress, but in general I’d say that good advice for researchers would be unless you have a damn good scientific explanation for how two phenomena are linked, don’t guess. As near as I can tell, everyone who’s communicating the story of this culture-health connection, from the Nordic researchers to the staff of the Telegraph to John Tesh, is taking it for granted in exactly the same way. Do none of them consider that there might be other factors at play?

It’s not difficult to identify alternative explanations. Of course, any of them would need additional data in order to have sufficient support, just as the claim that cultural activities cause good health needs additional data as to exactly what the mechanism of that cause is. Without access to a university research staff or other such resources, I can only guess, but I’d be quite willing to bet that if you did a study of people’s social class as compared with their cultural engagement, you’d find that wealthier people participated in more activities.

Take the three data sets together, and you’ve got a picture of more affluent people who are healthier than poor people and go to museums more often. I don’t know what John Tesh or the Daily Telegraph would say, but I have a fairly clear sense of which of those is the more significant variable in determining the other two. And yet I still wouldn’t say that being rich makes you healthier, because that’s a stupid thing to say. What I would say is that being wealthy gives you greater access to a wide range of food options, and allows you to pay for health-enhancing luxuries like gym memberships and spa vacations, while still having enough left over to go to the opera. So being wealthy makes it easier to make both healthier and more culturally refined lifestyle choices. But unless someone gives me a thoroughly refined scientific explanation of newly discovered physical mechanisms, I’m fairly certain that the only things that have a direct impact on health are the things that interact with your body’s functioning, such as what you eat and how often you exercise.

Since the British newspapers covered this study, Britain’s National Health Service took it up and posted a thorough, reasonable discussion of it on their website, including the prominent image caption at the top of the page, “It’s hard to tell if culture affects health, or vice versa.” It also adds tremendously to my sense of frustration at this sort of study by pointing out that surveys of participants wasn’t only used to determine their level of cultural participation; the surveys were actually the gauges of participant health. Their actual health, as determined by medical indicators, remains completely unknown.

In the NHS’s conclusion, it reiterates that the direction of causality is difficult to determine, and adds:

For example, just as participating in cultural activities might cause people to report better physical and mental health, it is just as plausible that people who feel healthier were more likely to engage in cultural activities.

No kidding. All a person should have to do to come up with this alternative explanation for the data is to think for just one minute about their own experience. Surely even John Tesh has felt down in the dumps at one or two points in his life. I’d be surprised if he reported that he was especially well-traveled among his local cultural institutions during those periods.

For that matter, the curve for this study would be absolutely shattered by interviewing just a few people who are genuinely sick. The researchers did adjust for things like chronic disease, but presumably not for recent, persistent disease. If, say, you’ve gotten the flu in each season of this year and have been laid up in bed for weeks at a time, of course you’re not going to the symphony. But if the poll was worded with sufficient vagueness, anyone who was reviewing the data blind would just see that participant x reported being in somewhat poor health and was highly unlikely to go to the cinema, theater, or gallery. Such a researcher might easily conclude that participant x’s cultural disinterest was contributing negatively to his health, if that researcher didn’t think very hard about the different ways to interpret what he was reading.

The study also analyzed reports of satisfaction with life, anxiety, and depression, and found that particular activities, depending on the gender of the participant, were correlated to differing levels of each. I take it that the essential conclusion from this part of the research is “Doing stuff makes you feel better.” You don’t say! And yet here also, to claim a unidirectional relationship is to draw an illogical, indefensible, and irresponsible conclusion, because feeling better makes you do stuff, too.

It’s the irresponsibility of this kind of reporting that really drives me crazy and prompts me to write 1,500 word rants on the topic. And that is also why I focus my umbrage on John Tesh, because it’s his sort of highly digested, exceptionally simplistic, and frequently repeated iterations of this kind of terrible academic research that are especially poisonous. One-dimensional interpretations of correlation between behaviors and conditions send a clear message of blame to people experiencing the less favorable conditions.

I imagine John Tesh rhetorically asking his audience “worried about your health?” and then cheerfully explaining to them that “if you think the problem is that you don’t have insurance or you can’t afford anything but empty calories at the grocery store, you’re wrong! It turns out that you, listener, just fucked up by not attending enough literature readings.”

Sadly, I’m sure that John Tesh genuinely feels as though he’s helping out his audience by telling them about the little aspects of their day-to-day lives that can contribute to their lasting health. But the thing is that for those of them who really have to struggle with these issues, he’s just making it worse. Considering that that Nordic research group included anxiety as a factor in its calculations, you’d think that someone would have given some thought to the likely future effect of believing that your health is tied to the number of lectures you attend this year. If people of distinctly low socioeconomic class listen to Tesh on this one and come to believe that frequent participation in cultural activities is key to their physical and mental health, the actual effect may turn out to be the opposite of what Tesh intends. I say that based on experience; I know what severe anxiety can come of trying to be culturally engaged while knowing all along that you cannot actually afford it.

If this possible ill effect was the consequence of just some one-off comment from John Tesh, I could give him a pass, but from what I’ve heard of his show, this is part and parcel of his daily broadcast. The list of recent topics on his website at this moment includes “Loneliness is bad for your health,” and “Volunteering boosts your health.” Bullshit claims, both. There is almost no conceivable way that in either of those cases the two factors being linked aren’t just simultaneous effects of other causes. Yet somehow Tesh doesn’t know that. Tragically, the researchers who produced the original claims may not. And certainly, much of Tesh’s listenership doesn’t realize that, and will take the voice on the radio at its word.

And what will come of these claims? Well, sure, certain frequent volunteers will feel more confident that their next check-up is going to go just fine. But also, some people who don’t have the time to volunteer because they’re working three jobs and still can’t afford health insurance will have found a new source of stress, anxiety, and depression, while some of those who have the best health care money can buy will attribute its effects to that Thanksgiving they spent working at the soup kitchen downtown. And at the same time, John Tesh is telling his sick and lonely listeners that if they’re worried about their health they’d better make sure they aren’t lonely, and if they’re worried about their loneliness, they damn well should be because it’s going to keep them in poor health. That information is rather less than helpful unless you’re neither lonely nor afflicted.

But the simpler the explanations of everyone’s problems, the better it is for everyone who doesn’t suffer them.

So Long, Chris Collins

Well, I didn’t vote on Tuesday, but between then and now I’ve actually managed to gather enough information on the former and incoming Erie County executives to know that I should probably feel pretty good about the result. Even though I’ve still seen no evidence that Poloncarz has an actionable vision for improving Erie County, I can at least be confident that the candidate who was personally less deserving lost the seat.

I’ve gotten a clearer sense of Mr. Collins’ evident contempt for the poor, and I’ve heard valid criticisms of his duplicity in cutting government amidst pronouncements of urgency while also giving raises to his own staff. I’ve recently been reminded that he described New York Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver as the third anti-Christ after Napoleon and Hitler – comments which I find disturbing because they ideologically link him to a peculiar blend of evangelism and the New Age movement.

Since the election results came in, I’ve also gotten the definite impression that Chris Collins is a somewhat less than magnanimous human being. Now, I would never vote purely on the basis of personality, but I’m not above cheering somebody’s loss on that basis.

“The public has spoken,” Collins said in his concession speech on Tuesday night. “I don’t quite know what to make of that, but they did. So we accept that.”

He doesn’t quite know what to make of it? How many different ways are there to interpret the fact that he lost? I think what’s to be made of it is probably either that the people of Erie County didn’t like the job that Chris Collins was doing, or they liked the other guy better. “I don’t know what to make of this but I accept it” is the sort of statement a person makes when trying to deny personal responsibility for an outcome. In this case, that outcome belonged in equal measure to the Collins and Poloncarz campaigns, and to nobody else if you don’t conceive of the electorate as a separate part of the equation.

“We accept that” in this context doesn’t really sound like “I concede.” It sounds more like he’s implying that he acknowledges what the results claim, but has doubts about why he lost. Specifically, it sounds like his talking down to the electorate, and suggesting that they made an illogical, unintelligible choice. Such a concession speech is indicative of one hell of an ego.

I suppose his comment could have meant “I don’t know what I did wrong, but I know it was something, and I’m curious to figure it out.” But there’s something in his tone and in the personality that he put on display elsewhere that suggests that he simply doesn’t understand why Erie County doesn’t understand how great he is.

What really floored me, though, was his appearance before the cameras of WGRZ-TV. In covering the outcome of the election, the evening news says:

"I do wish him well, if he needs help in a transition I'd be more than happy to offer that," Collins said moments after conceding the race.

However, Collins also conceded, that at that point he'd yet to formally offer an olive branch to his foe.

"No, Mr. Poloncarz and I have not spoken really in four years...I see no reason to do that tonight either," Collins said.

They haven’t spoken? Have they literally just never run across each other’s paths in four years, or did one of them always duck into an open room when they were about to pass each other in the hall? Four years, incidentally, was the length of Mr. Collins’ term, so I can’t help but wonder whether he actually made a deliberate effort to sever ties with Mr. Poloncarz once he was elected to office. Did he feel that he suddenly outclassed Poloncarz afterwards and that to be seen talking to him would hurt his reputation? Was it pure pettiness?

Even if they started running with vividly incompatible crowds after Collins was sworn in, it can’t have come as a surprise when Poloncarz became his challenger. Wouldn’t speaking to the opposition have been not only civil but politically expedient to get a direct impression of what one is up against? What reason could there have been for not calling and having a word with the man in the run-up to election season? But now that the whole thing is over, does Collins really not see any reason to begin talking to Poloncarz? How about to determine whether there’s common ground shared by the two men’s policies, and thus to see how you can help to set the stage for those initiatives you agree with? How about for the sake of guaranteeing a smooth and beneficial transition, for the sake of the county you apparently just spent four years serving? Or how about just to be a civil human being?

But then, Poloncarz is the guy who made the good people of Erie County foolishly turn against an incumbent who totally had done everything right, he swears. Yeah, fuck that guy.

I recognize that both men are at fault if they have truly not spoken for the past four years, but it’s the self-righteous commitment to seeing that the streak is not broken that makes Collins especially despicable. So on that basis alone I’m glad that he’s out, but ultimately his comments remind me of what I find so frustrating about modern politics overall. It’s why I still don’t know what fifty-four percent of the county voted for, other than a Democrat.

It's Election Day!

My lack of enthusiasm about Election Day belies my faith in the electoral process. I hesitate to say this, but I may actually waive my right to participate in democracy this time around. Uninformed people are better off avoiding the polls, and frankly uninformed is just what I am with respect to local politics. In my defense, it’s not for lack of interest, or for a complete deficiency of effort. But since I don’t read local newspapers, don’t have television, don’t really associate with people, and can’t find any local campaign information online, I had actually found it impossible to get a complete account of who is running.

Of course, I have been aware of the major race, the one being discussed by anyone who’s talking about local politics. But I haven’t been able to discern any reason why I’m supposed to vote for one candidate or the other, other than on account of the parenthetical letters that follow their names on the ballot. I attended a terrible play in the last weekend of October, and before it began the director spoke to the audience about his company’s season and then brought up election season as a final comment, and instructed the small audience to “vote Poloncarz.” Most of those sitting around me applauded vigorously, and I felt sort of left out thinking that these people all shared some kind of firm opinion about the office of County Executive, the job that the incumbent has been doing, and the changes that the challenger could bring about.

Despising partisan politics, I was alienated by the tribalism surrounding me in that room. If a person on stage wants to turn the topic to politics, I think the least he can do is say something substantive. I would have actually been really happy with that bit of grandstanding if it hadn’t followed the formula: mention a popular personality; hold for applause; depart the stage. The assumption seems to have been that everyone in that crowd already agreed with him, and that the reason for mentioning it was just to reinforce how right everyone was. Of course, if they all have such a firm basis for confidence that theirs is the winning horse, surely it would have been pretty easy to mention any one particular thing that we could expect to actually change if Poloncarz takes over as County Executive. In absence of any such statement about the issues, I can only assume that they simply weren’t on the speaker’s mind.

His comment probably had about the political effectiveness of a campaign sign, which is a phenomenon I just don’t understand. I’d be all for campaign signs if there was implicit in them an invitation to knock on the door in front of which they’re displayed and ask, “Why?” But lawn signs are never an invitation to court discussion; they just stand there, broadcasting a name that is probably well familiar to all the passersby already, and conveying no information. Each one is purely a declaration of support – a function which I thought was already fulfilled by voting. Every election season in this area, in addition to the wide array of carbon-copied lawn signs, I encounter a handful that are something like six feet tall and eight feet wide. Are these, I wonder, more effective at their purpose than the normal, non-monstrous signs? I can’t help but look at them as an obnoxious testament to the idea that the physical dimensions of one’s political viewpoints are more important than what they are grounded in.

Since I think so much about the social significance of campaign styles and perspectives on electoral politics, I naturally feel bad about my civic engagement apparently being limited or only intermittent, but I think I ought to take ownership of that situation and allow myself a little pride at the fact that I’m not interested in voting for district judges or comptrollers unless I’m personally invested in or exceptionally well-informed about those races. I’m okay with it being a personal rule that I don’t participate in the elections that are based on nothing other than name recognition and party affiliation.

It seems explicit to me that that is the case with at least the current batch of Erie County elections. The term “negative campaign” is tossed around a great deal, so the deeper meanings that might be conveyed by it are sometimes lost. What little exposure I have had to the local elections has been negative campaigning through and through, and of an especially cynical sort. I’ve received a handful of robocalls over the last week or so, and I’ve found that they tend to place all of their focus on the mission of ousting an incumbent or repelling a challenger, to the extent that whom they are running against is presented as being irrelevant.

I’m not exaggerating. The last such call that I received actually discussed how important it was that we keep a particular candidate out of Erie County government and then ended without ever mentioning the name of a challenger. That was the most stunning example of this skewed emphasis, but it’s typical of what I’ve been subjected to during this election season. I receive these calls, listen carefully to them because I’m interested in the platforms (not to mention the damn names) of the persons on the ballot, and when the recorded voice says “thank you,” I’m left listening to silence for a few seconds, like an idiot, wondering “Is that it? Is there any reason why I should want candidate x other than because I’m supposed to hate candidate y?” The kind of negative campaigning that I remember from television ads for national campaigns at least tended to conclude with a statement about what the alternative was.

I’m curious as to whether the exclusive kind of negative campaigning is specifically designed to exploit the culture of Buffalo and its surrounding areas. I don’t see a lot of nuanced political or developmental thinking around here. Instead, the persistent attitudes of both politicians and their constituents appear to be based on the belief that each of the region’s myriad problems have one solitary cause, and that getting rid of it will in itself provide an all-encompassing solution. Is it any wonder that amidst this thinking our local political campaigns treat getting rid of the incumbent as important in its own right, regardless of whether the person who replaces him has any actual solutions?

Of course, my cynical attitude toward Buffalo is showing through, as I know it’s not fair to suggest that that’s any different from the logic that tends to operate on a national level. Whenever things seem bad, we figure we need to get rid of whoever is currently in charge, and when delivering the country from the hands of party A into the hands of party B doesn’t fix everything, we switch back to party A and apparently never collectively wonder if our limited choices or methods of selection are problematic.

Buffalo seems to be taking the myopia and present bias to another level, though, by only running challengers in cases where there is already enough preexisting public frustration. All eight of the district judges that are up for reelection in the region are running uncontested today, except for one who has to content with a challenge from a write-in campaign. There are also no challengers in the races for County Legislator, City Comptroller, and District Council Member. In the last mayoral election, Buffalo’s terrible, terrible Mayor Byron Brown won election at the point of the primary, because the Republican Party put forth no challenger, despite being petitioned for endorsement by at least one would-be candidate.

Call me naïve, but shouldn’t the opposition party at least put someone’s name on the freaking ballot, even if they have no interest in spending money on a campaign? Why not allow an ambitious member of the party, in this information age, put his platform up online, shake hands at a polling place, start a political career, and give people an opportunity to express their support for alternative ideas, even if by voting for a candidate that has no chance? I recognize that I am being presumptuous again, but the message that I get from this repeated agreement to not oppose incumbents is that if the person currently holding the job hasn’t caused outrage or demonstrated incompetence, there’s no point to trying to come up with better ideas.

If both politicians and constituents think that there’s no point to that and that there’s no point to campaigning on the basis of ideas in the first place, I just can’t see what the point is of voting today.