PC Cola

Sitting beside me on the couch is a can of Coca-Cola, bravely liberated from Costco last night in torrential rain. On the side of the can is a huge, bright-red bauble. On the side of the huge, bright-red bauble, as if reflected in its perfect shininess, is the face of a jolly old man, with round, ruddy cheeks, and a full white beard. He’s beaming, and holding a bottle of the very same syrupy stuff that’s inside the can.

Hang on, you might say, that’s Santa Claus, isn’t it? And, usually, I’d have to agree that he looks awfully like the very same gent — the one whose Coca-Cola image became lodged in the public consciousness in decades past. And yet there’s no mention of Christmas here. Sure, there’s some gaily curlicued script above his head which announces the can as celebrating something, but that something seems to be a mysterious new holiday called, with devastating tautology, ‘Holiday 2004’.

I realise that I’d have to return my Card-Carrying Liberal card if I took this as the starting point for some scattershot rant against political correctness, but, damnit, there is something that I find dishonest about the can’s juxtaposition. It wants to have its Coke and drink it; it wants to load the packaging with overtly Christmassy — and specifically Christmassy — iconography, but then to play a timid multicultural card at the last minute and back out of actually mentioning Christmas at all, lest — what? — lest any potential customer feel excluded?

There are classes of political correctness. Some are the setting right of decades-old wrongs. Some are an enlightened inclusiveness of reference. Others are a defensive bland-out, a kind of pre-emptive self-censorship which strips language of any real inclusion at all — because without any inclusion, there can’t possibly be any exclusion. (And others still are the apocryphal or just plain fictional ones that lazy comedians shoehorn into lame reactionary routines. No, there never was a ‘person hole‘. Plenty of arseholes, though.)

Though I suspect the Coca-Cola company’s intentions are to be applauded, I find the effect to be that of an almost insultingly token gesture, and that’s without considering the damage to the language that’s done by promulgating the vague-to-the-point-of-meaninglessness ‘Holiday 2004’. If what they mean is ‘Christmas 2004’ — and their iconography would seem to suggest that’s exactly what they do mean — then they should say that. If, on the other hand, what they mean is ‘Christmas 2004’, and ‘Hanukkah 2004’, and ‘Kwanzaa 2004’, and ‘Saturnalia 2004’, and also to wish everyone a ‘Yolly Yule 2004’, then there are far better ways to do that than to splash Father Christmas’s beaming face across the packaging and then to somehow pretend that he’s representative of anything other than a western, Christian celebration.

No-one celebrates ‘The Holidays’. They celebrate Christmas, or Hanukkah, or whatever. Even if it’s just getting together with their family or friends to pig out on rich food and doze off in front of the television, that’s still not ‘The Holidays’. To wish someone ‘Happy Holidays’ is to admit that one is too lazy or indifferent to actually find out what they do at this time and then wish that it be happy. It’s not an actual wish. It’s the verbal equivalent of a pro-forma letter with an empty box marked ‘[Insert here the actual holiday you celebrate]’. It’s language at its most meek, defensive, and dishonest.