SCROOGED


or, chestnuts roasting on an op-ed page.

I have noticed, of late, a rather unfortunate and precipitous decline in the quality of writing that appears in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's opinions and perspectives pieces. (Nowhere is this more obvious than in the news that an entire page of next Sunday's Forum section will be devoted to my writing. But I digress.) The in-house folks and syndicated regulars have been as great (or as galling) as usual, and the reprints from Slate or the L.A. Times or other major publications have been typically strong. But the at-large submissions have become, at least to my eye and ear, increasingly banal or pointless or both. For a guy who likes the PG and loves to begin his day with some good, synapse-crackling prose, this trend has been as depressing as it is distressing. This morning, it was just plain dumbfounding.

Robert Biller's Explaining Scrooge represents either a new high or a new low -- I'm still trying to figure out which -- for the trend. The writing is so awful, the detail so embarrassing, the point so oddly inscrutable, that it almost beggars description. I read it the way you might look at a traffic accident. Or a really bad baserunning error. Or someone lifting up his shirt to reveal a third nipple. I couldn't quite believe what I was seeing, I felt compelled to turn away, and yet, even as I pitied the sight and the poor, naked indignity of it all, I could not turn away until I'd first tried my best truly to comprehend what I was seeing. Alas, woefully incapable of comprehending it, here I am still looking. And inviting you to look and gawk and marvel along with me...

We walk among you -- silently and often in anguish.

A good grabber. Brisk, dramatic, with a nice sense of rhythm. You are tempted to think that some fine writing will follow. But you are wrong. It is, in fact, the last good sentence you'll read.

Just as deciduous trees shedding variegated leaves presage winter and the holidays, the impending arrival of Christmas swells our ranks.

See what I mean?

Relax, this is not another ubiquitous holiday diatribe bemoaning the triumph of consumerism over Christianity.

A few paragraphs from now, you'll be yearning for one of those.

My motivation is ameliorating the darkness and stigma of depression for my fellow holiday pariahs and enlightening those whose paths we cross.

See what I mean?

Obese people justifiably claim they are the last target the politically correct can attack with impunity; however, the depressed fly under the radar because we view our condition as a personality flaw that "normal" humans eschew.

Obtuse writers justifiably claim they are the first target the dictionally precise will attack with impunity; and they're correct, because we view their condition -- in which they use words like eschew instead of avoid or elude or lack -- as a compositional flaw that "good" writers eschew avoid.

Realizing you have a problem is the first step on this thousand-mile journey.

This is good advice for alcoholics, the depressed, and writers who, two sentences before churning out sentences like this, produce clauses like My motivation is ameliorating the darkness and stigma of depression for my fellow holiday pariahs. For those people, the journey can not begin soon enough.

I am not a role model. Take my odyssey through the darkness as you will: It is both a catharsis and a revelation.

Not terribly cathartic but surely revelatory is a man who refuses to consider himself a role model but figures himself an epic hero. He may have battled depression with all the courage of Odysseus, but he writes with all the vision and humility of Oedipus.

Women are twice as likely as men to battle depression. This proclivity has more to do with the plethora of responsibilities they shoulder than with hormones.

You have to admire, however grudgingly, a man who works both proclivity and plethora into the same sentence. If only he'd managed to unleash proselytizing or maybe parsimonious, he'd have hit the trifecta of pretentious and prattling Ps.

And this is especially true during the holidays, when unrealistic expectations and unavoidable social interactions can produce anxiety, even dread.

It's not one of those consumerism-over-Christianity diatribes, but it does manage to work in a little bit of the oh-the-holidays-are-so-stressful lament. Oh, joy.

My dysfunctional tendencies minimally affected our family because my wife was always a rock and assumed the obligations I could not. If our roles had been reversed, the family might have dissolved.

I imagine his wife is a better writer too.

My childhood was happy and uneventful. I cherished Christmas; Mom and Dad always put their love into the season and stressed its religious elements while they conservatively fulfilled my materialistic cravings.

And, perhaps, while they unfortunately encouraged his excessive modifyings.

Therapists try to uncover childhood traumas that underlie adult depression, but I remember only one: Mom always took the kids on her annual Christmas shopping trip to Pittsburgh. I loved riding the "clickity" narrow escalators in the department stores until a loose shoelace got entangled in the contraption and ate my shoe shortly after I extracted my foot.

After this incident, I repeatedly dreamed that I awakened on Christmas Eve in Children's Hospital as Bill Burns was pointing to my bandaged, blood- oozing stumps and asking for telethon donations. Emotionally scarring? Who knows?

At this point, I decided this was a joke. A great big jaggin, leg-pullin', chain-yankin' of a piece that's been intended as comedy all along. I was just a little slow on the uptake, too distracted by The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron in the background and vanilla creme cookies in the foreground to realize that this was not supposed to be taken seriously. Shoe-eating escalators? Bill Burns pointing at bandaged, blood-oozing stumps? This was all wink-wink and tongue-in-cheek, A Christmas Story meets Twin Peaks with a payoff still to come. I went back and re-read from the beginning. And was even more confused than before.

The first signs of trouble surfaced in my early 30s.

And in your second sentence.

Loved ones always viewed me as an eccentric clown, so most of my incipient foibles were ignored;

I am disappointed by incipient. If he really wanted to take his writing to the next level of bombast, he'd have used inchoate.

however, when I refused to open my Christmas presents and hid in the basement during holiday visitations, concern mounted. Soon, I tried to ignore the season completely, and my wife gently hinted I needed professional help.

After reading his work, I'd like to gently hint that he needs professional writing help. I know a guy who could help. But it might kill them both.

Machismo trumped common sense and I blindly struggled against this amorphous enemy for more than a dozen years.

Depression is, clinically at least, quite clearly defined. And understood. And categorized. Which makes it decidedly morphous.

I won't bore you with most of the details,...

Which is good, because he's already doing it with his diction.

... but during this period I seemed detached from my own reality and watched (from a distance) as an evil doppelganger usurped my life over the holidays.

Important, I think, to distinguish his evil doppelganger from all the usual benevolent ones.

If this statement is not enigmatic because you identify with it, you probably are suffering depression and not just the "Christmas Blues" -- please seek competent professional help.

If that sentence is not enigmatic because you understand it, you are probably suffering dyslexia. Or hallucinations. Or illiteracy. Please seek competent medical and psychological and grammatical help. Immediately.

Seeking guidance is not a sign of weakness; it is a sign of lucidity.

And that's just about the only sign of lucidity you'll find in the whole essay.

The holiday season after I began therapy was tolerable but not happy. My therapist's ministrations were palliative and through the use of photo-therapy to counteract seasonal affective disorder and vigorous exercise I improved.

I should be bothered by the cult of confession, by self-indulgent memoir masquerading as thoughtful, universal narrative. But I'm too busy being bothered by the projectile word-vomit. My therapists ministrations were palliative? Who writes like that? Who talks like that? Who even thinks like that? People who write about depression, apparently. And also academics.

My therapist eventually suggested antidepressants, but I resisted because I feared a castrated libido more than a mirthless yuletide.

Far more frightening, I think, would be a mirthless libido or a castrated yuletide. But to each his own melodrama.

Then serendipity intervened.

And I gagged.

I was walking inside Ross Park Mall while my wife was returning a few Christmas presents. Suddenly, I noticed a bigger-than-life stuffed Santa Claus for sale in Spencer Gifts at a fraction of its pre-Christmas price. My bemused wife eventually helped me stuff it into the backseat of our car, and we took him home.

I'll bet the people at Spencer Gifts would be interested to know that he didn't buy it first.

Henceforth, my buddy has happily occupied the same easy chair in the den, and stoically listens to my daily prattle as I read or fool around with the computer. I don't expect him to answer me, and he rarely does.

Okay. At this point, I decided the whole essay was some sort of Borat-style put-on that I wasn't in-on. I felt like one of the yokels down at the rodeo, listening to Sacha Baron Cohen drone on and on about his stuffed Santa Claus, and how he keeps it in his room, and how it occasionally talks back to him, and about how its favorite movie is Magic, with Anthony Hopkins and Ann-Margret and that scary ventriloquist's dummy, and I was convinced that one day soon, footage of me reading this thing and trying to figure it out would be playing in every multiplex in America. Because, I mean, really. This guy couldn't possibly be serious. Could he?

Thanks to therapy, I realized Santa was diffusing the anxiety the holiday season packs into a few weeks over the entire year.

Maybe he could. At least in an Oprah, Dr. Phil, self-actualizing sort of way.

I took this concept one step further by decorating the entire house for Christmas in September. By November, I am so conditioned to the decorations that I barely notice pre-Christmas hype in the world around me. Normalcy finally has returned to the Biller household.

That the last sentence exists in concert with the rest of this essay, much less with the first two sentences of that paragraph, is perhaps my favorite part of the whole, sad text.

Every Halloween, I take out my copy of "A Christmas Carol" and read it to Santa.

Here, for perhaps the second or third time in my life, I am without retort. I have nothing. Absolutely nothing. I have tried to wrap my head around this idea, around this sentence, around this whole damned piece. And I just don't know what to do with any of it. I honestly don't know if this guy is serious or joking or mock-serious or mock-joking. I'd like to believe he's pulling an Alan Sokal here, that he's written a piece so linguistically over-the-top for the sole purpose of getting it published in a major newspaper so he can later expose it as a fraud an example of everything that's wrong with what's being published in major newspapers. Except that I've never before read anything like this in a major newspaper. Or a minor one. Or even a student one. These are dark and uncharted waters, and my odyssey through them has produced neither a catharsis nor a revelation. Just confusion. And this post. And one whopper of a headache.

I see Scrooge not as a parsimonious misanthrope, but rather as a victim of profound hallucinogenic holiday depression.

I think, perhaps, that this piece is a product of a profound hallucinogenic. But unless Mr. Biller shared it also with an editor at the PG -- perhaps in his den, with the stuffed Santa, while listening to The Doors -- that still doesn't explain everything.

His triumph is my triumph.

And our confusion.

So this holiday season, if you have a relative, or a friend, or a neighbor who doesn't celebrate and decorate, please don't assume they are curmudgeons or worse. Equanimity is the best response. Most people who suffer from depression eventually are cured.

And go on to write stultifying prose.

In the final analysis, all we really want for Christmas is for it to be over.

In the final analysis -- and in case you were overcome by the syntactical vapors sometime between the first and last sentences -- I am compelled to note that this piece, in the tortured and tortuous course of only 812 words, somehow managed to unleash deciduous, variegated, presage, ubiquitous, ameliorating, pariahs, eschew, catharsis, proclivity, plethora, incipient, foibles, machismo, doppelganger, usurped, ministrations, palliative, serendipity, parsimonious, and equanimity. It's as if a bunch of my BusComm students got together on a Saturday night, had a few beers, took a few bong hits, and dedicated themselves to writing the essay most likely to make my head explode. How they could have come up with this topic or this tone, I do not know. How they -- or Mr. Biller -- could have gotten it published, I do not want to know. What the hell is going on in this piece, I imagine I will never know.

What I do know is that all I really want for Christmas, or at least for today, is to never again read anything like this in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Or anywhere else.

Posted: Sat - December 9, 2006 at 07:20 PM          

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