On Descriptive Writing: Part 2

The Zeitgeist

I’m going to be using the word “zeitgeist” a lot to make this particular point because it’s the most concise way to explain what I’m talking about.  “Zeitgeist” is a German word that when directly translated means something akin to “time ghost”, and that’s a good lesson on why localization is more important than direct translation.  The term could more correctly be defined as “spirit of a culture” or “spirit of a specific time”.  Basically, the zeitgeist is a collection of all the unified beliefs held by a particular culture at a particular point in time, that everyone in that culture pulls from.  If something is in the zeitgeist, everyone understands it and more or less accepts it as true.  If a work can make it into the zeitgeist, that is a HUGE accomplishment.

I’ll be talking more or less exclusively about the current zeitgeist in the United States, the one I pull from as an American living in 2019.  So let me give an example from our zeitgeist.  If I was to say to you, fellow contemporary American, “May the Force be with you.”  You would know what I meant.  You would understand that phrase, even if you had never seen Star Wars because that film series is part of the zeitgeist- that work of fiction was so important to our culture that it became part of it.  Hell, you may even respond with, “And also with you.”

The zeitgeist is important, because it forms a sort of cultural language shorthand that all members of a certain culture can share, and therefore helps to form a certain cultural identity.  It’s a continuous gathering of shared experiences that helps us identify and connect with other members of our culture.  Some of the things in one culture’s zeitgeist may even seem strange and offputting to those outside of it.

Say this with me.  You know the words.

“I pledge allegiance, to the flag,
Of the United States of America,
And to the republic for which it stands,
One nation, under god, indivisible,
With liberty and justice for all.”

Now go tell somebody in Europe that you pledged your loyalty to a flag every day for 12 years from the time you were four or five and listen to them tell you how goddamn weird that is.  That’s part of our zeitgeist, but not part of theirs.  I get that that’s a controversial one and around middle school, even us Americans are like, “You know that’s kinda weird,” but my point is that its part of our culture, and we all know what I’m talking about here.  Every American, regardless of race, creed, socioeconomic status, gender, etc, knows what the pledge of allegiance is.  Just like we know what the Force is.  That’s the zeitgeist.

I argue that, as a creator, when you put out work, you have to be aware that it can become part of the zeitgeist.  It can become something that everyone accepts, without question, that everyone understands.  You hear creators often remark that they were unaware, when they made their creation, that it would become part of the zeitgeist.  I’ll use another example from Star Wars, just because it is such a huge part of the American zeitgeist.

James Earl Jones, the famed actor perhaps most well known for his portrayal of the character Darth Vader in the Star Wars franchise, has gone on record expressing his trepidation about the character.  He was nervous that he was a poor casting choice and he would not resonate well with audiences in the 1970s, because it was rare to see African American actors with redneck accents and issues with stuttering in space operas.

Mr. Jones was completely wrong to think his race, place of birth (Mississippi), or speech impediment (to be completely honest, I’ve never heard him stutter) would hold him back in his ability to portray the character.  He’s an amazing actor who gives heart and soul to every character he portrays (I would argue that he also greatly influenced the zeitgeist with the character Mufasa, and Disney seems to agree because they recast pretty much everyone except Jones for the remake).  But when he breathed life into the character of Darth Vader, he could not predict the huge cultural impact his brilliant acting would have.  There was no way for him to know that even now, a good thirty to forty years after he took the role, it would have a huge cultural impact, but it has.  Darth Vader is part of the American zeitgeist.

This just goes to prove the old Hollywood adage, “Everyone is replaceable except for James Earl Jones.  Hakuna fucking Matata.”

Now that we’ve seen the good the zeitgeist can do in uniting a culture, it’s time to remind everyone that every single thing is a double-edged sword, and no one thing is all good.  The zeitgeist can also do horrible damage because though people within the culture generally accept the zeitgeist as objectively true, that’s often not the case.  And when that happens, you get an entire culture believing a lie.

Let’s use an example.  Hey y’all, what’s Saint Nicolas look like?  What’s the first image that pops into your head?

This is the first thing that pops into Google’s Head.

And I would say that is pretty accurate in portraying what the zeitgeist believes St. Nicolas is.  He’s commonly referred to as Santa Clause, for a number of reasons that I’ll go into, and we all know who this is.  Even those of us who were not raised in a religion that would permit saintly apprations on holy days know who this gentleman is.  We see him in even secular media.

And every single one of us is dead wrong.

Saint Nicolas was a real person.  He was a 4th-century bishop who famously fought against the practice of forced child marriages and sex slavery, and thus became a patron saint of children.  He was from what is now eastern Turkey and apparently had a rather impressive physique because legend has it that he once bitch slapped a dude in the face so hard Jesus Christ himself had to show up to get him out jail.

Now.  Why is it important that the zeitgeist changed an elderly lythe-muscled Asian man into a fat white guy?  Also, how the hell did that happen?  Like that’s about as wrong as you could get a thing and then have everybody believe it.

Let’s answer the last question first, and then get around to why it’s not cool to just be wrong about a thing.  Because I imagine a lot of people are reading this example and thinking, “Ok but when I think of Santa Clause I’m not thinking of Saint Nicolas the person, I’m thinking of Santa Clause the fictional character.”  Yeah, and that’s a major problem.

So how’d Santa become white, gain all that weight, and move from a saint fighting sexual abuse to a dude who works with elves?

It’s a long-haul.  Settle in.  I get that this is a question nobody asked, but I promise it’s going to tie into why descriptive writing is not only bad, but also dangerous, but this is a complex topic, so you really do have to stick with me for multiple posts.  And remember that Saint Nick is not the only person this has happened to.

So Saint Nicholas died on December 6th, and after he attained sainthood, this became a Saint’s Day in his honor.  This is FREAKY close to the winter solstice, so when the various “pagan” people of Europe began “converting” to Christianity, Saint Nicholas became intertwined with the solstice, which also became intertwined with Christ’s mass, until the two became intrinsically linked.  He was especially popular in Holland, where his name was kinda sorta bastardized because the Turkish name was difficult to pronounce in Dutch, so they called him “Sinter Klass”.  You’re with me so far, right?  They basically shortened “Nicholas” to “Cholas” which pronounced in Dutch is “Klass”.

While that was happening in Holland, Germans went the other route and figured it was probably Jesus himself who was delivering gifts to children, so they called the same figure, with the same accompany mythology, “Christ Child” or “ChristKindl”.  Somebody eventually told them they were wrong, so they decided “ChristKindl” was an angel who accompanied Saint Nicholas on his journey because at the time nobody had internet so this was a game of telephone.  As ChristKindl morphed into this secondary angelic figure, they were just like, “An Angel is just a German kid with wings, right?”  So we got this white kid who followed Santa around with a name that, when spoken to somebody who speaks English and doesn’t speak German, sounds like, “Kris Kringle.”

Also, Santa wears green but I’ll get to that.

Y’all with me so far?  Because we’re moving on, but I do want to mention that this kid is still a thing in Germany, but the gender doesn’t really matter and the girls look like the angels that you put on top of Christmas trees, and Christmas trees are a German thing, and that’s why angel toppers are a thing.  Doesn’t have anything to do with this conversation, but that’s just a fun fact.  MOVING ON.

So meanwhile meanwhile, a lot of the pagan traditions already had this guy, the “Guy who brings presents to kids on the solstice” guy, because most cultures where it gets cold have a holiday in the middle of winter so everyone doesn’t get so depressed they lose their goddamn minds.  So a lot of places, for whatever reason, already had an old dude associated with gift-giving who kinda reminds me of the ghost of Christmas present in A Christmas Carol.  So I’m actually pretty sure that’s who that is.  Anyway, there was a time AFTER conversion but BEFORE Santa Clause where this dude existed and was called “Father Christmas” just because a lot of the time after conversion to a new religion they take old elements and slap a new name of them.  Because of the pagan nature of this dude, half the time he was an elf or giant or someshit, some kind of European fairy tale bullshit, so it’s not that Santa hangs out with elves, it’s that Santa WAS an elf, himself, pointy ears, scrawny body, out of Tolkien kinda elf, with magic and shit, which is why he could go down chimneys and whatnot.  You can shove an elf down a chimney, them fuckers are tiny.  Just grab Legolas and throw him down there.  He’ll fit.  Look how skinny he is.

He actually retained the elvish connotations way up into the 1800s, when an American poet who apparently had no idea what an elf actually was, combined the elvish pagan Father Christmas with the human Saint Nicolas, by then bastardized into Santa Clause here in the states.  Talking about Washington Irving here, but I’m gonna get to the poem you’re thinking about in a minute because it came out just a little bit later and the fact that EVERYONE was doing this is actually what cemented it in the zeitgeist.  See, a LOT of kid’s books, newspaper, and other mass media were coming out in the 1800s because that was prime steampunk era- I mean, the Industrial Revolution part…  what?  2?  2 or 3.  Anyway, people wanted to sell these new mass-market printed media, and around Christmas folks figured out that parents would buy shit for their kids to get them to be quiet for five goddamn minutes, so a shitton of authors started writing about Santa Clause, using everything I’ve told you so far in this game of telephone.

The most famous of these kid’s poems to survive is actually called by the author, Clement Moore, A Visit From Saint Nicholas but today we traditionally call it A Night Before Christmas because that tested better with kids and the marketing department does not give a flying fuck what the author thinks about titles.  Moore added even more pagan elements and mixed the bag of Santa-related bullshit with Oden of the Norse pantheon because we were kind of like, “Eh, fuck it, whatever” by that point.

He describes Santa thusly:

“Down the chimney St. Nicholas came with a bound.
He was dressed all in fur, from his head to his foot,
And his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot;
A bundle of toys he had flung on his back,
And he looked like a pedler just opening his pack.
His eyes—how they twinkled! his dimples, how merry!
His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry!
His droll little mouth was drawn up like a bow,
And the beard on his chin was as white as the snow;
The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth,
And the smoke, it encircled his head like a wreath;
He had a broad face and a little round belly
That shook when he laughed, like a bowl full of jelly.
He was chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf,”

So here we’ve gone more Keebler elf than fantasy elf, which is a new thing.  And we’ve smashed in a LOT of human aspects.  So that’s…  Jesus Christ let’s look at what the dude actually looks like again.

Yeah, we are officially off the fucking rails and it’s only the 1800s.  But it is irrevocably fucked at this point.

So by the 1840s, Santa Clause was so popular malls starting doing the mall Santa thing trying to get parents to come in with their kids, still with the green-suited elven\human Santa, sometimes called Kris Kringle, sometimes called Saint Nicholas, sometimes called Santa Clause- there was absolutely no consistency.  What you got was what you got.  But to be fair, there were fucking cowboys running wild and factories blowing up crushing kids to death, lost of folks saying that maybe we oughta do something about this slavery thing that we’ve just been letting go on in the south, and whatnot so this was not the first thing on anybody’s mind.

In 1902, the dude who wrote the Wizard of Oz was fucking flush with Oz fame thought, “I’m an authority now on children’s stories.  I’m gonna solidify this Santa bullshit into one cohesive character.  And everyone will read it because they love the shit out of Oz.”  And he was correct.  He published “The Life and Adventures of Santa Clause” and tried his goddamndest to make everyone forget this was an actual human person, made up a BUNCH of bullshit about him living at the North Pole for no goddamn reason, but because he wrote Oz everyone was like, “Yeah, that’s probably true.”

“You can’t prove it didn’t happen.” L. Frank Baum

So that’s how Baum’s ass fucked up a Saint’s legacy and we just all kinda let him do it.  Not gonna dwell on it because I’ll get pissed but this is exactly what I’m talking about with authors and responsibility for what you put into the zeitgeist.

Now, because Baum was allowed to just do whatever the fuck he wanted and rewrite this character from scratch, everyone realized they could just do that and make a fuckton of money.  We saw several other folks pull the same goddamn thing, and once again, no one stopped them.

Robert L May was a dude who worked as a copywriter for the Montgomery Ward department store who wrote an advertisement jingle called, “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” in 1939 because why the hell not?  Let’s make Santa a shallow asshole now who judges people for birth defects- you know, the dude who in real life fought for children not to be sold into slavery.  Let’s make him an asshole who thinks deviation from the norm is punishable unless it’s exploitable.  Let’s just do that.  Nobody’s gonna stop you.  You can just do.  Just put it into the zeitgeist and it’ll get so popular you’ll get a goddamn movie deal.  Let’s taint this legacy further to get people into your store.  Let’s just do that, I guess.  Fuck it.  Nothing is sacred anymore, not even LITERAL SAINTS.

Sold 2 and a half million copies at launch.

We’d see this commercialization of Santa clause continue, but it was still this nebulous, half-human, half-elven idea cobbled together from various sources until one brave company took it upon themselves to solidify that image and plaster it absolutely everywhere.  Coca Cola had been running Santa ads since the 1920s, but then came an artist named Sundblom, who was apparently divinely inspired because his paintings of Santa were so well received you couldn’t step outside without seeing one.  He managed to hit every button, and his ads, which he created between 1931 and 1964, and created what we now know as Santa Clause.  He lost his elven parts and became wholly human in appearance, but kept the immortality and was still on good terms with them.  And out of all the colors available to him from all the cultures he was part of, he conveniently decided to dress in Coca Cola red.

What exists in the American zeitgeist is not Saint Nicholas.  It’s not Kris Kringle.  It’s Santa Clause: Brought to you by Coca Cola.

I argue this is a major problem, for a lot of reasons.

The first is obvious: It’s simply not ok for a large group of people to be this goddamn wrong about something.  Objective truth is a thing.  It is.  This is just an example, but there are numerous other examples I could have pulled from our current cultural zeitgeist.  When the zeitgeist gets something wrong, most of the people in the culture believe the lie.  And that’s not ok.  It’s not alright to just be this wrong about anything.

The second reason that this example is particularly grievous is that this is a real person we’re talking about, who’s been warped and distorted to the point that he isn’t even recognizable.  If you saw the real Saint Nicholas in your house, it’s likely you wouldn’t recognize him.  He’s NOT a fictional character, he’s a real person, and this bastardization of his life is disrespectful to the dead.  Which is not ok.

Thirdly, it is worth noting that his race was changed from Asian to white, gradually as it became less important to the representation of the saint in Europe.  This has become a whole huge thing because people who believe the zeitgeist truly, in their heart of hearts, believe that Santa is white, and will absolutely tear their ass if he’s portrayed as any other race.  This is a conversation I feel like we wouldn’t have to have if we didn’t whitewash every-goddamn-body.  Like we know for a fact that Santa was Asian, so why can’t Santa just be Asian?  And if we’re going to pretend that he doesn’t have to be the race he was, then he can just be any race.

I want to make it clear that Saint Nicholas is just an example.  There are countless others and I could do an entire series of posts about each one.  I was just using an example to explain the concept of how the zeitgeist can be negative.

When an artist, writer, filmmaker, or any content creator puts something into the zeitgeist, it has the potential to become part of it.  And because that is true, the creator has an ethical obligation not to do harm to the culture.  This sort of thing can be tricky and difficult to predict, but if you don’t want to do the job then go the hell home.  Lots of jobs are tricky and difficult.  This is the creators’ cross to bear.

What does this have to do with descriptive writing?  Stay tuned to find out!  Part 3 is coming soon!

Further reading:

https://publicdomainreview.org/collections/a-pictorial-history-of-santa-claus/

https://www.history.com/topics/christmas/santa-claus

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43171/a-visit-from-st-nicholas

https://www.coca-colacompany.com/stories/coke-lore-santa-claus