2013 Santa Article

NEW YORK  In light of President Obama’s comments comparing the activities of the NSA with those of Santa Claus, MR Claus agreed to an extraordinary interview with Oprah Winfrey, who hosted a popular talk show for many years.  Oprah has given interviews to a number of people in need of cleaning up their tarnished image.  She recently interviewed disgraced cyclist lance Armstrong.

A US Federal Judge recently ruled that the NSA’s spying activities on American soil, which included recording phone conversations and extracting internet usage data from Google, Microsoft and Apple,  were unconstitutional.  Many believe Obama’s comments were designed to deflect criticism away from his administration and put pressure on Santa Claus who has had tense relations with the United States ever since he was placed on the Terrorist Watch list in 2007 for possessing stealth technology which could be used in a hostile action against the United States. 

Below is the full transcript of Oprah Winfrey’s interview with Mr Claus, which will air on Christmas Eve across the nation, and which will be carried live in 38 countries.

Oprah: Mr Claus thank you very much for consenting to this interview.

SC: No problem Oprah, and please, just call me Santa.

Oprah: Ok Santa.  I’ll try.

SC:  You know my wife used to watch your show religiously.

Oprah:  Did she?  If you don’t mind me asking, what does Mrs Claus do?  I mean, you and the elves make toys and I assume you are involved with the general organization and administration of Christmas.

SC:  Yes that’s right.  Well, Mrs Claus does a lot of work with the reindeer.  You know, you have to train the little ones, teach them how to fly properly, take care of their medical needs.  So really there is plenty for her to do.  Plus she also organizes the housekeeping and keeps me fed.

Oprah:  Some might call that a bit too traditional.

SC:  Maybe, but we’ve been around for over 1700 years and we have always divided things this way.  Ho h oho, after all, there is no way Mrs Claus wants anything to do with my cooking?

Oprah:  So you are not a good cook?

SC:  Goodness no!  I’m lucky if I can turn on a microwave, let alone do any cooking.

Oprah:  That is very interesting.  What is your favorite food?

SC:  As you can see by my healthy paunch, I like all kinds of food.  You know when we first started out at the North Pole, our food was mostly highly salted fish and sea food, kind of like what is eaten in the traditional north.  But over time as we have been exposed to the world, other types of food came in slowly and ho ho ho thank goodness for that. 

Oprah:  And your favorite type?

SC:  probably Italian I’d say, that and Chinese.  You know, pretty much like everyone else.

Oprah:  and Mrs Claus cooks all those different types for you?

SC:  pretty much.  Ever since she has been able to get the life style channel, the sky’s the limit as you say.

Oprah:  Well this is very interesting and it is wonderful to get some insight into your private life, but you know we are here to deal with some very contentious issues.

SC:  Yes I know.

Oprah:  Let’s start with Barak Obama’s latest comments concerning what he termed “an invasion of privacy on a scale that dwarfs anything the NSA has ever done.”  How do you respond to that given how the revelations of NSA spying have angered the American people and indeed the people of the world?

SC:  Well I think Barak Obama is a good man and he is under a lot of pressure.  He knows the revelations of NSA spying has hurt his popularity and weakened his ability to get policies enacted so I think he is trying to deflect scrutiny off of himself and the NSA on to me.

Oprah:  This might be true, but, I mean, if you truly know when we’ve been sleeping, and know when we’re awake, doesn’t that constitute a massive invasion of privacy?

SC:  The answer here is complicated Oprah.  On the one hand, yes, the NSA are amateurs compared to me.  I’ve been able to see who has been naughty or nice for centuries, as well as know who is sleeping and who isn’t.  Even the NSA with their vast computing power can’t lay claim to that capability.

Oprah:  So you admit to spying.

SC:  yes I suppose speaking technically, I am guilty of spying, but as I said earlier, this is a more complicated issue than simply spying.  Look, the NSA justifies their spying by saying they are hunting for terrorists and only look at individual phone conversations, for example, when there is a high degree of suspicion.  We’re pretty much the same really.  But we’re not looking for terrorists, just little terrors, if you know what I mean.  Ho ho ho.

Oprah:  Well I think I know what you mean but puns aside, this isn’t really a laughing matter.

SC:  Perhaps not.  But you see, most children are not naughty, not really.  They might do naughty things once in a while, but they are not naughty per se.  So in actual fact, we really have very little need of individual data.  I mean, ask yourself, have you ever heard of a child who did not receive a Christmas gift because he was too naughty?

Oprah:  Well---

SC:  No, you never have. 

Oprah:  In that case, why keep tabs?  Why not give gifts to all of the children?

SC:  Well it’s becoming that way.  You see Oprah when I first started out, I was pretty much a Christian saint and my duties involved giving gifts to only Christian children.  At first that was pretty simple because the world was pretty much divided into religious sectors.  You had Christendom, and then you had the non-Christian areas of the world, what we called the Pagan world back in those days.  In those early days, if a child was baptized he was nice.  If not, he was naughty.  But then you see Islam came along and swept over areas which were once Christian.  Now you had Christians and Muslims living together, and sometimes even side by side.  You also had the spread of Buddhism in the east which in some parts of the world collided with Christianity.  Scholars are just now understanding this.  Thus, aside from Western Europe which remained predominantly Christian, the world ruled by Islam was not so simple to navigate.  In many cases, Islam tolerated diverse religions as did, by the way, the Mongols.  This made it necessary to start to keep tabs on individual children because children who were baptized lived next to children who were not, and in many cases, single families consisted of both types.

Oprah:  But surely it doesn’t matter what religion children are?

SC:  Well that is pretty much my thinking now, but back in Medieval times, we all were, well, you know, Medieval.  I remember having some discussions with St. Augustine about this but he insisted on the importance of baptism and he was the preeminent scholar of the church so I deferred to his wisdom.  And I admit I was also a product of Medieval times.  You realize though that we did not consider ourselves Medieval.  Medieval is a concept of historians.  Back then, that was our present.  We thought we were logical and pretty advanced.  Indeed, we considered ourselves the apex of God’s creation.

Oprah:  This is fascinating.  So you’re saying you didn’t snoop as it were until the geographical boundaries of religions became blurred.

SC:  Absolutely.  That’s right.  I mean, we could fly over France, for example and know they were all Christian children.  But when flying over Spain before 1492 before The Catholics drove out the Jews and Muslims,, you had Christian, Muslim and Jew pretty much coexisting together.  The situation in what you call Turkey was a mess because you had Orthodox Christianity everywhere mixed in with Islam and it was very difficult to sort out the naughty children from the nice ones.  And then, truth be told, Mrs Claus kept insisting that non-Christian children could be nice as well.

Oprah:  And what was your response?

SC:  Well after having given presents to children for centuries I agreed.  Then the Reformation came along and the one big church split up into lots of fragments and suddenly you had the idea of hundreds of true churches, and the invisible church which spanned multiple denominations and oh, it was a real mess.

Oprah:  Surely you could see that your criteria for naughtiness and niceness had to change.

SC:  Oh absolutely.  But don’t you see, this meant our criteria became much more subjective.  Before things were pretty binary.  You had Baptized Christian, not Baptized Christian.  It was basically on and off.  But with the breakdown of social and geographical boundaries to religion, we had to look at many factors such as behavior, attitude, whether someone had a good conscience, and we also had to take into consideration their environment and make projections.

Oprah:  Projections, what do you mean?

SC:  Well at first we still had the Christian or not Christian dynamic.  So if we examined a Muslim child, for instance, we had to observe his or her character and project what that child might have been like if the child had the opportunity to embrace Christianity.

Oprah:  I see, so this meant much more observation.

SC:  Exactly.  We couldn’t just rely on church records.  We had to observe and record information about each individual child.  As our criteria for determining naughtiness and niceness became more subjective, our need for data increased exponentially.

Oprah:  I must admit I am surprised to hear you say words like exponential and data.  Somehow I don’t associate you with high tech.

SC:  Ho ho ho!  Of course I’m high tech.  All of this increased observation meant terabytes of data storage.

Oprah:  Wait a minute.  Let’s back up a little.  How do you observe all the children?

SC:  Well since I’m here to clear up some misconceptions I might as well explain this as well as I can.  You see we use magic to observe the children.  This is why you do not see North Pole cameras everywhere.  But there is no magic that makes me remember all the children and the data associated with them.  so I need computing power for that?

Oprah:  So you’re saying you had computing power long before the rest of us?

SC:  Ho ho ho.  Yes of course.  Think of it like this.  We are often told to picture Judgment Day with God opening books and pouring through names.  But you wouldn’t rely on books of names to go through billions of people.  Well, neither does God.  But Daniel and John and those guys who wrote about Judgment Day did not know anything about computers, let alone what you call quantum computing so they spoke in terms of books.  With the changing criteria, I spoke to the Archangel Michael, no I think it was Gabriel.  Anyway, I spoke to one of them and even to Christ himself and they basically gave me some of their technology.

Oprah:  Wait, I mean wait.  Just wait a minute.  So you’re saying you spoke to angels and to Christ.  You mean they exist?

SC:  Ho ho ho.  Of course they exist.

Oprah:  But how, I mean, how is it that you can talk to them and can you prove this?

SC:  First of all, I’m a saint.  And being a saint, I get special access to the throne.  But as for proving anything, well I doubt I can prove anything to your satisfaction.  Even if God showed up and wrote I am the Lord your God in letters of gold across the sky, people might simply say she, oh wait, you insist on calling God he.  Well, uh, anyway, they would say she, sorry I meant he, was an advanced alien, not necessarily God.  I think the only proof I can offer is that I give presents to kids every year and have been doing so for over a millennium now and that is something outside of what you call normal experience.

Oprah:  Oh my goodness you have just opened yourself up to hundreds of questions, but sadly time is limited.  Can you briefly explain what you mean by what you just said, and is God a she!

SC:  Well God is above gender but she loves to be our Mother as much as he loves to be our Father.  I mean, just think of the trinity.  You have God the father, God the son, and whose missing?  Ask any six-year-old kid and they will immediately say “Mommy.”  But basically, I do this because Christ gave us the greatest gift of all, the gift of salvation, and while I could talk about this theologically until the reindeer come home, I’ll simply say that I give gifts to children because I myself received the greatest gift anyone could ever have, and I want children all over the world to know what it is like to receive a gift, because so many have no idea.  I want to give them a little ho ho ho in their lives.

Oprah:  That is very touching.  So then, given all this, how do you feel about being compared to the NSA and being accused of spying?

SC:  Well it is hurtful but I understand it.  But you see the problem is that all this fear about an invasion of privacy stems from mistrust and fear.  It hurts me that people are starting to fear me.  As I explained earlier, I needed a way to differentiate naughty and nice children.  You know I meant what I said before.  We don’t really look at individual children as much as hot spots of naughtiness to see if we can make any demographic correlations that will help us.

Oprah:  That sounds like NSA justification.

SC:  Yes I suppose it does.  But as I keep saying, things are more complicated than a black and white scenario.  You know children come into this world and generally accept others for what they are.  They only hate because they are taught to hate and I believe that where there is much hatred, there ought to be much kindness.

Oprah:  Explain.

SC:  What I am saying is that children who are, for example, forced into armies to fight and forced to kill their families in order to survive, well they are technically naughty, but they need extra niceness.  So we have to analyze the naughtiness of the children so we can target them with more gifts or with the right kind of gifts.

Oprah:  Surely you don’t expect us to believe all of those poor children in Africa are given nice presents at Christmas.

SC:  No they’re not because these war zones are too dangerous.  And sadly, if we dropped in presents of toys and food, the stronger would take them from the weaker.  Children have been killed for food they obtained.  But we would like to help.  This is why starting in the early 1920’s, we looked into automated sleighs which could pilot themselves.

Oprah:  What?  You mean like drone sleighs?

SC:  Yes.  We started the project to find a way to help the poor children who were stuck in war zones.  I admit I took things too slowly.  Then one foggy Christmas Eve, my mind changed.  It was ridiculous that we had to rely on a single red nosed reindeer to navigate, especially when you consider we’re in the North Pole and that is notorious for its poor weather.  Here we had terabytes of data capacity and computing power that makes your super computers look like an abacus, but we were relying on visual navigation.  So while I was grateful to Rudolph, I knew changes had to be made.

Oprah:  What did Rudolph think?

SC:  Well he got to play his reindeer games so he was cool with it.  He was young so didn’t understand the profound changes which were coming.  Rudolph was in the 40’s and we tried all manner of navigational technology.  There was no GPS system back then so we tried stuff Tesla theorized and other things as well.  Progress was slow.  In fact, it was one of our drone sleighs that crashed into what you call Area 51 and well, ho ho ho, I don’t need to go into that.

Oprah:  Wait.  Are you saying you are responsible for what happened in Area 51?

SC:  Yes, and some enterprising elves.  You see, my elves are artists, and it wasn’t enough for them to have a sleigh with no physical pilot. Also, we were having trouble with navigational technology.  So the engineers hit upon the idea of hooking up navigation to a reindeer through implants.  The reindeer brain is superior to any computer and we thought this would solve some of our technical problems.  Dancer’s grandfather was a test pilot and he volunteered.  We implanted sensors that could pick up small variations in earth’s magnetic field to navigate like we think some birds do, and things were going smoothly, but something went wrong and he and his drone sleigh prototype crashed.  Your US government had never seen a flying reindeer before and this combined with the implants led some to think there were aliens involved.  Then things just sort of snowballed from there.

Oprah:  And you only come clean now?

SC:  Sure now that Area 51 documents have been declassified.  I mean, ho ho ho, not that they tell you anything of substance.  But I kept quiet because your government classified everything and I did not want to alert anyone to our drone program just yet.  I knew that eventually someone would figure things out and drones would be used to kill, and I wanted to delay this as long as possible, so I did not say anything.

Oprah:  This is amazing stuff you are telling us.

SC:  Well I am here to clean up my image.  That’s why many people talk to you isn’t it?

Oprah:  Yes, I suppose so, and because people say I go soft on them.

SC:  yes, people say this.  But actually, I find I wish I had more time to talk more.  I want people, and especially children everywhere to know that someone is interested in their happiness.

Oprah:  I think we can all appreciate that, but there are still issues of privacy.

SC:  True.  But you know, humanity is entering a new age, an age in which information is not only abundant, but easily shared.  Privacy as you knew it is a thing of the past.  I’m not saying privacy isn’t important, but just as the train and plane transformed global communications and travel, this is transforming humanity.  You don’t know the right balance yet.  How could you?  When railroads began to dominate you had ruthless monopolies who controlled those railroads.  Germany used their superior railroads to nearly Conquer Europe in World War I.  But they also opened up vast new possibilities hitherto undreamed of for millions of people.  For the first time, supplies could be brought to remote places quickly.  Those railroads improved thousands upon thousands of lives.  So you have good internet and bad internet.  Good surveillance and bad surveillance and you are scared and frightened because you don’t know what to do with the bad, but you want the good.

Oprah:  So you’re saying we’ll figure it out?

SC:  yes, if you don’t blow yourselves up first you will eventually figure things out.  You know, people are becoming more and more connected with one another.  We’re striving to do with technology what we would have liked to have done with telepathy.  Of course, we are not telepathic and so we misunderstand one another, hurt one another and so on.  The Tower of Babel story, whether you believe it or not, has a lot of wisdom.  When the one language became many, we became confused.  Confusion breeds misunderstanding and that breeds hatred.  Sure there is a sinister side to all of this interconnection, but maybe, just maybe, the more connected humanity becomes with one another, the more empathy humanity will feel for one another.  And the more empathy we feel, the less likely we are to hurt one another.  So yes, there is good and bad and just like I changed my naughty and nice criteria over time, you will change your opinion of things over time and find the right balance.

Oprah:  I guess that is what we have always done.

SC:  Yes, eventually, humanity figures things out.

Oprah:  Santa, I wish we had more time, but I would like to thank you for taking the time with us this morning.  I suppose you are very busy now.

SC:  yes, very.  Mrs Claus has me doing hard exercise as well because of all those cookies I’ll get in a few days, but yes, I am very busy.

Oprah:  Well, thanks again.

SC:  Thank you.  Ho ho ho and Merry Christmas!