This Saturday, Dec. 7, if you’re in the vicinity of the Georgetown Park Mall around 5 p.m., you might be in for a treat, as Santa Claus is scheduled to pay a visit. Actually, about 40 Santas should be around, but they won’t be handing out any sugar plums or candy canes.
Santa is instead likely to be drunk, foul-smelling and making a lewd ruckus while helping shoppers make critical Christmas shopping decisions. Santarchy 2002 will be marching it’s way across D.C. in a day-and-night-long orgy of tarnishing the good name and rosy countenance of America’s favorite consumer icon.
Santarchy began in 1994 when several dozen Santas paid a visit to downtown San Francisco for a night of Yuletide blasphemy. Since then, the Santarchists have expanded their operations, with naughty Santas in upwards of a dozen cities, even as far afield as London since 2001. Santarchy is an annual episode of cultural terrorism enacted by members of the Cacophony Society, a secretive underground organization of self-styled social misfits with chapters in cities all around the United States. Past Cacophony feats, or fetes, include the execution-style killing of Frosty the Snowman, the defenestration of an entire suite-full of contemporary chic home furnishing solutions and the accreditation of the apocryphal Institute of Sociometry. If this sounds a lot like Fight Club, that’s because it is … sort of.
Chuck Palahniuk, author of the book from which the film was adapted, is a member of the Portland, Ore. chapter of Cacophony. Much of his fictional “fight club” is based on the sort of culture jamming activities that he and his friends in the group actually pulled off.
While most chapters aren’t as active as Palahniuk’s-the West Coast societies are generally larger and more apt to engage in illegal activities than those back East-pretty much every major city participates in Santarchy. It’s Cacophony’s biggest event of the year. In the past, San Francisco Santarchists numbering in the hundreds have vandalized and looted stores on the city’s posh Market Street, blocked downtown traffic for hours and treated shoppers to their own reappropriated versions of popular holiday songs. Here is but a sampling:
We wish you a merry Christmas,
We wish you a merry Christmas,
We with you a merry Christmas,
Now bring us some beer.
We won’t go until we get some,
We won’t go until we get some,
We won’t go until we get some,
So bring some right here.
Nothing brings holiday cheer like a gaggle of drunken, bawdy and marauding Santas. If you want to join in, bring your Santa costume, a belligerent demeanor and some cheap vodka to the American History Museum on the Mall, Saturday at 1 p.m., and be prepared to make some children cry. Just keep your filthy paws off ours.
