BUZZFLASH READER COMMENTARY
Updated by Peter Hochstein
(With a slight bow to the late Francis P. Church)

We take pleasure in answering the communication below, expressing at the same time our great gratification that its faithful author is numbered among the friends of BuzzFlash.

Dear Buzzflash,

I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says, "If you see it on Buzzflash.com, it is so." Please tell me the truth, is there a Santa Claus?

-- Virginia O’Gullible.

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Dear Virginia,

Your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except what they see on the TV news. And the TV news shows nothing which is not comprehensible by their little minds.

All minds, Virginia, whether they be grownups’ or children’s, are little, and get befuddled by fuzzy math and other complicated stuff, with which they should not be troubling their tiny selves in the first place.

In this great universe of ours, man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge. We may yet get around to finding that intelligence, Virginia, as soon as we get around to fixing the CIA and the FBI and color coding as a substitute for competence, but meanwhile....

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.

He exists as certainly as vaporizing the inheritance tax by misnaming it the “death tax” enables a handful of billionaires to pass along all their megabucks and awesome power to their own little children like you. You must assuredly know that the benefits of no inheritance tax for multi-millionaires and billionaires will help you give your life its highest beauty and joy, provided you’re born loaded.

Alas! How dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus and therefore your Daddy could not save a fat seven figures from taxes on his income of $250 million last year!

It would be as dreary as if you were one of the millions of American children whose Daddies only got a piddling $300 tax cut while being told that although this wasn’t even enough to buy a shower curtain for a greedy CEO, it was as fair and generous and as good for the U.S. economy as giving a billionaire millions of the public’s dollars to help pay the upkeep on his ski chalet in Gstaad.

There would be no childlike faith, then, no confidence in our nation’s kleptocracy, no assurance that you could wake up in your other bedroom in the Hamptons and discover that Daddy had bought you a pony, to put romance in your life and make tolerable an existence already burdened by dreary days of private prep school, which you got into because your Daddy did a favor for an influential client and deliberately misled hordes of trusting investors into the land of poverty.

We should have no enjoyment then, except in sense and sight. The external light, with which the deserving children of parents who make or steal the big bucks fill the wealthiest corners of the world, would be extinguished like the running lights on a sinking yacht.

Speaking of yachts, we would not have the pleasure of telling ourselves that a rising tide at the dock in Palm Beach or Grosse Pointe Shores lifts all boats floating in the mountains of Appalachia.

Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe that Republican politics exists to reward those truly blessed by money and to punish the rest. We’ve come a long way, baby, since the Republicans championed two magnificent ideas — the abolition of slavery and the progressive income tax. Now they have nearly finished undoing the latter, and pretty soon we can expect them to attempt reinstating the former by economic means.

But not to worry. For most assuredly, those who will work for nothing except a few crusts of bread are only a bunch of slothful duffers anyway, or else why aren’t they rich, too?

Virginia, you might get your papa to hire private detectives, or even a private army, to watch in all the chimneys to catch Santa Claus, and lock him up without a court hearing, but what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but we can tell that he exists from the impressive lineup of Mercedes and Beamers and stretch limos at Republican fund raising dinners.

Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that’s no proof that they are not there. Similarly, there’s no proof that some tinpot despot in Iraq doesn’t have the atomic bomb, or is it a germ bomb, or maybe a hot air bomb? Well, like, umm, whatever.

Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world. And that’s a great basis for belief not only in Santa Claus, but also in equally unknowable things like our current foreign and economic policies.

You tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not even the Attorney General, or Harvey Pitt when he was down at the Securities and Exchange Commission, nor even the united strength of all the honest citizens who ever lived, railing together against official corruption, could tear apart. They tried it down in Florida and the U.S. Supreme court snuffed it with righteous zeal.

Only faith, poetry, love, romance and a really humongous pile of money can push aside that curtain and view the supernal beauty and glory of legally ripping off and impoverishing millions of pensioners, employees and stockholders, with the tacit blessing of a bought-and-paid-for government. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.

No Santa Claus? Thank God he lives and lives forever among the upper two percent of this great nation’s income earners at Enron, and Global Crossing, and Adelphia, and Halliburton, and Harkin Oil and the auditing departments at Big Five accounting firms and among the conglomerate banks and their analysts, and also among American companies that can pay no taxes because they have a mail drop in the Caribbean -- to name just some of the Republican campaign contributors and co-conspirators who get the big tax breaks while the rest of us can go suck our socks.

A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, 10 times 10,000 years from now, Santa will continue to make glad the hearts of those who steal their money fair and square.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year – if you can afford them.

Sincerely,

BuzzFlash.com

A BUZZFLASH READER COMMENTARY