You Are All Wrong
A Geezer’s Notebook, By Jim Foster
Last week, if you can remember that far back, I was talking about the Grinch. His story is one of the great tragedies of our time and undoubtedly the worst case of character assassination in the history of literature. Listen to this!
You’re a mean one, Mr. Grinch. You really are a heel.
You’re as cuddly as a cactus; you’re as charming as an eel
You’re a bad banana with a greasy black peel!
Not very nice, is it? No, it isn’t, but you read it to your kids.
You’re a monster, Mr. Grinch
Your heart’s an empty hole
Your brain is full of spiders you have garlic in your soul, Mr. Grinch
I wouldn’t touch you with a thirty-nine and a half-foot pole.
That is the trouble with society today. We expect everyone to conform to what we think is the ideal way to live – and we are all to blame. We’ve all watched the Grinch on TV. But did you ever sit down and discuss the story with your children and the unfairness of it all? No! You knew you should but you just didn’t want to get involved, or worse, you just didn’t care.
Have you ever thought about why Grinch felt it necessary to go down to Whoville in the dead of night and throw a screw into their annual Christmas celebration?
Of course you haven’t because you assumed he was the bad guy in this tragic story. You weren’t bright enough to see that this is not a story of good triumphing over evil. It is a classic example of one man fighting a never-ending battle against social injustice and of society trampling on the rights of others.
Why did he do it? Why did the Grinch hate Christmas? The answer comes very early in the poem. Seuss says no one really knows the reason. Oh he came up with some horse’s ass excuses, like his heart was two sizes too small, his shoes were too tight and his head wasn’t screwed on quite right.
Well, he’s wrong. As any student of modern sociology could tell you, the answer lies in the 6th verse.
All the Who girls and boys
Would wake bright and early. They’d rush for their toys
And then! (Here it comes) oh the noise, noise, noise, noise
That’s the one thing he hated! The noise, noise, noise, noise.
Oh, I’m sure everyone here is thinking, so what’s a bit of noise, after all it’s Christmas. But let us look at it from the Grinch’s point of view. He lives on a mountain overlooking Whoville. He bought the property back in the 70s when interest rates were going through the roof. He wanted a bit of privacy and he was willing to pay for it. Sure he knew he couldn’t have it all the time because he was in ski country and we all know what idiots skiers can be. Don’t even get me started on the snowmobilers driving by our house at 2:00 o’clock in the morning all liquored up. Where are the cops when you need them?
But at least he hoped for a bit of peace and quiet over the Christmas season. Then comes Christmas morning and the little dipsticks down in Whoville are screaming and whining and beating on the tin drums their grandparents bought for them.
Now the Grinch knows this is coming. He has been putting up with this racket for years and quite frankly he’d had enough. I don’t know if you know anything about sound waves – or anything else for that matter, (probably not by the looks of some of you and I could name names but won’t) but noise rises.
It’s much like hot air. Hot air rises. That explains why there are no heat vents upstairs in the Parliament buildings and why the council chamber in Orillia is on the ground floor. Every Tuesday morning, the folks on the second and third floor at City Hall have to sit around in their underwear.
Well it’s just like that up on Mount Crumpit. Every little noise down in Whoville goes straight up the mountain. Drop a pin down in Whoville and the Grinch is running around trying to stop his Royal Dalton figurines from crashing to the floor like falling teeth in a nursing home. Do you have any idea how much those things are worth? (Not the teeth, the Daltons, pay attention)
As if the drumming isn’t bad enough, the whole town, every last Who-person, joins hands in a big circle and sings at the top of their who-lungs. Can you even imagine how bad that would be?
And they never stop. Hour after hour after hour, they bellow and hoot. It’s bad, people, it’s bad.
But as I was saying the Grinch finally had enough. So he hooks Max up to the sleigh and down they go at half-past midnight when the Whos are all asleep. Ordinarily some of the younger couples would have been fooling around, but not on Christmas Eve. You don`t want old Santa catching you right in the middle of it, he would blab it all over town.
Seuss doesn’t say much about his trip down the mountain and I know jack about falling objects, but Max wasn’t exactly a St. Bernard. He might have tipped the scales at a pound and a half and that included his spiked collar. The sleigh was roughly a half a ton empty. The Grinch weighed in at 165. He was 200 the year before, but his mother bought him a year’s membership at Jenny Craig and not like the rest of us, he stuck to it.
And the brakes on his sleigh weren’t up to the safety code.
I figure they must have passed down the main street in excess of 150 K an hour. A hundred and fifty Ks, that’s about 90 miles an hour for the folks out there who haven’t been able to make the calculations from Imperial to Metric.
Well you know what happened next? You’ve seen the movie about thirty times, he dropped down every chimney in town and robbed the poor Whos blind.
Grinch took everything that wasn’t nailed down. He even took some old guy’s false teeth that were sitting in a glass on the dresser and at little Cindy-Lou Who’s house, he took her Christmas tree and as an afterthought reached down and yanked the log right off the fire.
Grinch had all the food, the Who pudding, the Who hash and the roast beast. Roast beast isn’t very popular here in Canada, but it’s quite a delicacy in China. They raise them in great herds somewhere north of Peking. The hardest part of beast ranching is getting used to the barking.
Now here’s where the story gets a little hard to believe. He had everything, the food, the presents, the tinsel, the old guy’s teeth, the trimmings, the trappings. He could hardly wait for the boohooing.
There wasn’t any.
The Whos were singing. What a shock it was to his system. What an insult to the principles of modern banking! They had nothing, yet they were happy.
There has to be a message here, but I’ll be damned if I can figure it out. I think they were crazy myself.
The Grinch was so overcome by this unprecedented turn of events he hooked up Max again. Packed all the loot in the sleigh and took every last present, every crumb of food he’d stolen including two take-out cartons of sweet and sour beast and every bit of tinsel and the old guy’s teeth back down Mount Crumpit to Whoville.
Then he sold it back to them for 90 cents on the dollar. Yep the Grinch is a Conservative.
