George Takei has been a US national treasure for 50 years. The man who played Sulu on Star Trek has, in later years, campaigned furiously on gay rights and become a first-rate wag on social media. This week he excelled himself.
The context is so gruesome I am forced to insert nose plugs and pull on surgical gloves before telling you about it. Obviously, there are worse things than fatheads complaining about a department store Santa Claus being black.
But the pettiness, the meanness, the insincere tendentiousness of it all . . . Sorry, I was hammering so furiously I dislodged the “s” key on my keyboard. Where was I? Oh yeah. These people are pigs. At least Ebenezer Scrooge had the decency to hate all manifestations of Christmas without any further prejudice.
Larry Jefferson-Gamble sounds like a stand-up guy. The Arkansan, a member of the US army reserves for 25 years, is a graduate in sociology and a veteran of the first Gulf War. More significantly, he has attended the International University of Santa Claus at Denver. We have no information as to whether he excelled at Elf Studies or Aerial Reindeer husbandry.
But there could be no arguing with his qualifications when the Mall of America in Minnesota hired him as this year’s Father Christmas. He looks pretty darned jolly in the photos. He’d need to be. The thugs were circling.
Abusive comments
I won’t repeat the abusive comments that flooded into the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, but, among the bile, there were the expected feeble attempts to justify objections on historical grounds: Santa Claus is actually a German invention, so he must be a pure Aryan.
The temptation to point out that Saint Nicholas, inspiration for the seasonal chimney fetishist, was actually Turkish is best resisted. This version isn’t real. He’s an imaginary construct that successive generations have moulded to meet their own needs. We’re not arguing about the facts. We’re resisting poorly concealed prejudice.
Here is where George Takei comes into it. “Watching people meltdown over a Black Santa in the Mall of America. ‘Santa is white!’” the great man tweeted. “Well, in our internment camp he was Asian. So there.” It’s hard to imagine a more satisfactory response.
During the second World War Takei, whose parents were born in Japan, was interned with his family in California. The detention of blameless Japanese-Americans during that period led to a belated apology from the Reagan administration and the payment of compensation. The relevant legislation admitted that the government’s actions were triggered by “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership”.
Seventy years after the exercise of that “prejudice” meatheads are complaining about an African-American daring to accept Christmas lists from infant Minnesotans.
This sort of mid-level racism is much on display when film-makers or TV producers dare to cast a person of colour in a role that was hitherto associated with a white person. We saw a particularly barmy example this summer when a rumour (subsequently debunked) emerged that Zendaya, an African-American star of the Disney Channel, was to play Mary Jane Watson in the latest Spider-Man reboot.
Red hair
No prejudice was at play, you understand. The problem was simply one of accuracy. Peter Parker’s girlfriend had famously red hair and African-American people always have black hair. What? They don’t? Well, then . . . Erm . . . Something else to conceal the fact that I just don’t like the idea.
“Since Mary Jane is being played by a Black woman, can MLK be played by a White man in a next movie about him?” somebody with a frog beside his handle actually tweeted. So did many others. No sane person dignified the query with a response.
A double whammy is at work here. Mr Jefferson-Gamble has also found himself caught up in the continuing right-wing paranoia about a supposed “war on Christmas”. Eric Trump, progeny of the Orange Toxic Event, claimed that the current president-elect finally decided to run for office when he read that the White House had replaced the Christmas tree with a “holiday tree”. This didn’t happen.
Just this week, Corey Lewandowski, former Trump campaign manager, told Fox News: “You can say again, ‘Merry Christmas’, because Donald Trump is now the president.” The campaign is over. Maybe he actually believes this stuff.
If only it were so. Nowhere groans more heavily beneath Christmas decorations than the average American city. We’re deep into an orgy of tinsel, forced comingling and unavoidable good cheer. I wish the supposed secularist anti-Christmas tendency would get its collective finger out and do its bleeding job.
Still, if we must have Christmas then we may as well honour the notion that it fosters social harmony. George Takei gets that. So do the people who hired Mr Jefferson-Gamble. I’d wish them Merry Christmas if I were allowed.
