Attack Of The Fifty Foot Santas

There are arms races everywhere you look. Forests are an evolutionary arms race. Suburban mothers in four wheel drives are in an arms race. I got caught in an auditory one last night.

The forest is a good example of how a natural arms race starts up, to no single organism’s advantage. Trees getting taller are using valuable resources to get tall, so that they can get more sunlight than their neighbour. Taller and taller they get, using up more and more resources on big, sturdy trunks. A forest all laid out at ground level would work just as well at catching the sun. Or would work just as well, of course, until the first little ground level collection of leaves disobeys the rules, gets a little taller than his neighbour and becomes more successful.

The mothers in their four-wheel drives are in an arms race that is actively harmful to the overall collective. It’s all about momentary individual advantage. Four-wheel drive cars are not actually safer, they just appear it, which in this instance is all that’s important when it comes to being attractive. The first person sees the vastly bigger car and gets it for its implied safety, others are now at more risk from the monster car and have to follow suit. Pretty soon, everyone is driving around in three tonne cars, chewing up resources and space, and they are now all in exactly the same amount of peril as they were when they were dropping the kids off in a Datsun 120Y.

(Actually, there’s more total peril. Crossing the road once, I was hit by a Datsun 120Y doing about 40 km/h. It ruined the ironed crease on the left leg of my pants and made a little bald patch just above my ankle. Some years later, in the same area, a four-wheel drive turned on its headlights, and because of the power and size of the thing, it left me with a tan and permanently blind in both eyes and one ear.)

The auditory arms race that I got caught in last night is one that would be so easy to avoid, I just can’t believe it still happens:

1. Public Room.
2. Slightly too many people.
3. Alcohol.
4. Music a bit loud.
5. People raise voice and glass.
6. Music increases in volume to be heard over talking.
7. People talk louder to be heard over alcohol induced deafness and music.
8. Music goes up.
9. Ad infinitum, ad clothearum

And pretty soon, you are actually yelling at the top of your lungs with your mouth three centimetres away from the ear of the person you are yelling at. Imagine taking that out of the room and putting it at a bus-stop. It’s assault.

This natural instinct to compete for local advantage will ensure that, no matter what they come up with at Copenhagen, my suburb is going to ignore it all. Every festive season my neighbours generate a footprint that can be seen from space.

The Christmas decoration arms race is on in earnest around my place, and some of the displays are so extravagant, I’m pretty sure I can hear backyard generators ticking over.

In her usual well balanced approach to these things, Emergency Contact was so impressed by one display (character snowmen riding a neon-illuminated ferris wheel next to life size neon reindeer) that she said,

“Cor. I can’t wait till we get a big house. Our display is going to black out the grid.”