This is the most wonderful time of the year for those of us who toil in the vineyards of the editorial pages. Somebody always trots out Francis Pharcellus Church’s 1897 “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus” editorial in the New York Sun, and for a brief shining moment, people think, hey, maybe editorialists aren’t creeps after all.
In my experience, these sentiments do not last very long.
Church wrote anonymously, in the witness-protection-program tradition of most editorial pages. He didn’t get credit for the Santa Claus piece until after his death in 1906, perhaps because his sense of timing wasn’t that great. The “Yes, Virginia” editorial was published on Sept. 21, suggesting that Sept. 20, 1897, was a very slow news day.
I got to wondering what would happen today if some 8-year-old Virginia O’Hanlon asked her papa if there were a Santa Claus. He would have said, “I dunno. Google it.”
Little Virginia would type “Santa Claus” and “exist” into the search engine. Among the first things that pop up is an old Spy Magazine article that explains that the laws of physics would cause reindeer to vaporize if they attempted to fly fast enough to visit all the children in the world. Santa would be crushed by the G-forces. Virginia would be crushed at the news.
Or maybe little Virginia would have posed the question not in a letter to the editor, but on a newspaper blog. Within minutes, anonymous comments would appear ripping Barack Obama for thinking he was Santa Claus, or ripping Virginia for being a greedy welfare princess, or inviting her to meet the “real” Santa Claus, who is in fact a 38-year-old prevert living in his mother’s basement.
This is yet another reason why newspaper editorials are so much more reliable than the Internet. But I digress.
Virginia might find herself visiting santaisreal.com, a project of the KRS Media Group of Orlando, Fla., which promises to send 10 percent of its net proceeds to help orphans and children around the world. Virginia might think, “Ten percent? Santa’s a cheapskate.”
If little Virginia was like most people, eventually she would gravitate to Web sites that confirm her own suspicions. Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein, in a new book called “Rumors,” suggests that’s why so many people today believe patently absurd things: Because they seek out other people who believe the same things.
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Article courtesy of: cleveland.com
