Santa’s Workshop is a cultural symbol rivaled perhaps only by Cinderella's Castle and Hogwarts insofar as the deep longing and capitalistic awe its image invariably induces in the innocent child's soul. Its depiction within our captured media is always magical: a humming, colorful Christmas village garnished with intricate white snowflakes tumbling joyfully from the clouds. It is not a company town but a cultural capital, one in which good will and civility and industry flow freely alongside the Christmas spirit. Sadly—and perhaps unsurprisingly at this point—this standard, heartwarming depiction belies a bleaker reality transpiring atop the sea ice, one that finds our whole planet under siege.
The idea of the North Pole as Santa’s headquarters never made any sense. It’s zero degrees in the summer. It's covered in sea ice, often only accessible by helicopter or plane. It’s also totally dark for 11 weeks of the year. Sounds like quite the place for a global toy enterprise, doesn’t it—never mind elven and human flourishing.
It is the North Pole not because the white ice so nicely complements Santa’s carefully curated aesthetic, nor because its isolation allows him to work peacefully and productively, but because of both perverse economic incentive and the undeniable message that setting up shop in one of the world’s most fragile ecosystem sends. And that message is fuck you. Santa's Workshop is no little mom-and-pop shop but a full-fledged factory, and the belief that its operation in an already abused Arctic climate could be anything but destructive is simple fantasy.
Santa represents the apotheosis of the oligarch; his polar kingdom the climax of a Koch-induced wet dream. He sits atop vast oil reserves, close by to Russia and, most importantly, far from the reach of any overzealous government agency or tax authority. He answers to no FTC, no SEC, no IRS—obviously. No NPS, no DOI and certainly no meddling EPA and their stupid clean little acts. Far away from our suburban towns and cities he sits, administering to a wintry wasteland, pillaging his pole as he fattens his stomach and lines his pockets.
We know what is is we allow him to do. We understand the horrifying, unspeakable cost of this intoxicating industrial might and meaning we so fervently beseech. But we crave so deeply the hollow, insignificant serenity of that singular present shining under the tree that we watch Santa plunder the tundra and we shrug. He blackens the snowy owls with soot, he poisons the seals with microplastics in the sun-soaked ocean, he melts the glistening sea ice and reduces our once-proud polar bears to bones. And we all have a holly jolly Christmas.
He gets away with it because we let him, because he knows we need the rush, the dopamine, the main character energy of tearing into the red wrapping paper and emerging with the latest Stanley Mug more than we need any sense of moral duty or environmental stewardship. We crave this validation so deeply that we forgive an ecocide for it. That we can accept Santa and his factory means we can accept any injustice no matters its cost, so long as we can continue consuming: the bastardization of the dollar menu into the value; the social media algorithms rewiring and rotting our brains for a quick ad buck; the great extinction perpetrated upon us that they continue to deny in the name of diversified portfolios and private jets.
Yorumlar