Every year around this time I get upset about Rudolph. Here is this year’s rant.

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You know Dasher and Dancer and Prancer and Vixen
Comet and Cupid and Donner and Blitzen
But do you recall
The most famous reindeer of all?

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This is marketing, by the way. Rudolph was born in 1939. His identified “father” was a fellow called Robert L. May who wrote a booklet about him for Montgomery Ward. I do not know whether any other “parents” were involved in his (asexual) creation.

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The song was an adaptation daring to 1949, written by Rudolph’s “uncle,” Robert L. May’s brother-in-law Johnny Marks, and performed by Gene Autry. So the claim that Rudolph was the most famous reindeer and, in particular, elevated above Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donner and Blitzen, was solidly in place by 1949.

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But Dasher and his compatriots were already very famous by Rudolph’s birth, having showed up in 1823. (Their “parenthood” is slightly murky but most people accept Clement C. Moore’s 1837 claim to “paternity” — the poem that introduced them had originally been published anonymously.

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Anyway, this is all kind of a digression, but while Rudolph is the most famous reindeer now, that’s in part because excellent public relations work was done on his behalf.

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But also think about it: for those kids who don’t have solid role models for how to live well, and that includes many kids who grow up with a marginalization their parents, teachers, etc., don’t share, the cultural artifacts, like books for me or TV shows for kids today or songs like “Rudolph”, that offer us models of how to navigate in the world can be very powerful. I learned a lot about how to navigate in the world from Rudolph, and all of it was very destructive.

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That’s marketing too, even if it is not intentional. This song sells a particular understanding of how the world works, and part of that is this claim that “Everybody knows about this.” Art is a personal expression of the artist in response to the world, so it tells you something about the world — the chaos and suffering in Picasso’s painting “Guernica” and the arcane and repressive structure in Kafka’s novel “The Trial” are two powerful examples, but this is true of “Rudolph as well — and if the story is that famous and goes unchallenged and you, the child listener, are suspected of being one of the few people not “in the know,” then you should probably accept the truth of it. I’m not suggesting, of course, that this is intentional messaging. I’m just reporting on the effect it had on me as I tried to sort out the confusing allistic world I had been dumped into without any guide.

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Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer
Had a very shiny nose
And if you ever saw it
You would even say it glows

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Now, today, this is seen as a pretty neutral trait. But while I was reading Wikepedia to get my facts right for the last section, I came upon a really good point. In the thirties, a bulbous red nose was part of the stereotype for alcoholism. And people with alcoholism were deeply devalued. They were largely considered irredeemably bad people.

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In 1935, stockbroker Bill W. and surgeon Dr. Bob S., two members of the Oxford group, a fellowship emphasizing spiritual values in daily life, met. Bill had managed to achieve a tenuous sobriety and was trying to help other alcoholics. Bob was still drinking. Bill persuaded Bob that alcoholism should be viewed as a disease, and Bob subsequently managed to stop drinking as well. The two men founded Alcoholics Anonymous.

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Today, there are a lot of valid criticisms of A.A. We challenge the religious and cultural underpinnings. We look at how many people do not find the model successful. We address the way the emphasis on abstinence undercuts the very positive effects of medication-assisted treatment and harm reduction, and the effect on people with significant pain who benefit from certain kinds of uses of medications which can also be abused.

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But at the time of its creation and for a long time thereafter, A.A. was an enormous step forward. Many people have benefited tremendously from working the program — including people who had no other place to turn.

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The point is that although Wikipedia doesn’t suggest this was in any way intentional, Rudolph’s initial devaluation may have made a lot more intuitive “sense” back then.

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It is also worth acknowledging that in the 1930’s “feeblemindedness” was thought to be connected to all kinds of deviance (disapproved-of behavior), including alcoholism, so my childhood identification with Rudolph may have been more on point than I could have guessed.

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But whether we see the red nose as a possible indicator of “poor character” (for the record, I do not agree with the assessment that alcohol abuse is a moral failing; I’m talking about societal attitudes at a particular point in history) or intellectual/developmental disability or just some utterly irrelevant feature of his, it clearly marks Rudolph out as “different” and makes this song an instruction manual for those struggling with few adult resources for coping with differences.

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All of the other reindeer
Used to laugh and call him names
They never let poor Rudolph
Join in any reindeer games

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Rudolph is teased, bullied, and ostracized, a pretty common pattern for children and adults who are marked as different.

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Then one foggy Christmas Eve
Santa came to say
“Rudolph, with your nose so bright
Won’t you guide my sleigh tonight?”

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And this, of course, was the point of Rudolph’s atypicality. More trivia from Wikipedia: apparently Robert L. May was in Chicago attempting to look through the fog at Lake Michigan when the idea of a reindeer who could help Santa navigate through the fog occurred to him.

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How many of us have been encouraged to work twice as hard, to be twice as good at things, as the other kids, in order to be accepted? This is the myth. If you are useful enough to people in power (and Santa has a lot of power, even in the sanitized American version where St. Nicholas may not be accompanied in his travels by the Devil but does manage to run the most extensive surveillance network in existence), you will matter.

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It’s a deeply capitalist myth. It aligns itself with the idea that the dignity of work consists not in the value of identifying something meaningful to do and being enabled to do it, but to participating in the creation of wealth, which you won’t necessarily get a share of. It aligns with the idea that 14(c) subminimum wage should not be repealed (it was enacted in 1938, by the way, a year before Rudolph’s “birth”) because there is value to the individual in being placed by service providers into a segregated “workshop” where they do whatever work they are assigned for sometimes pennies an hour.

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Disabled children are urged in so many ways to fit into social, educational, economic and sometimes even familial structures that were never designed for them. The idea that your utility to others is a measure of your value has a role in a community where everyone works together towards common goals. When the others in question are powerful people whose goals do not include your well-being, the idea is extremely destructive.

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Rudolph is now useful to Santa, who previously had seen no need to interrupt what the others were doing to him. And we are led to believe that this change, the change in Santa’s conception of him from irrelevant red-nosed fawn to potential tool, is supposed to signal a change in his fortunes.

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Then how the reindeer loved him
As they shouted out with glee
“Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer
You’ll go down in history”

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And here is his reward. With Santa’s approval on one night of the year, Rudolph wins over his bullies and they welcome him.

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This is not how the world works.

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Authority figures most certainly can have an impact in bullying. This is not how.

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First, if Santa cared nothing for Rudolph at any time before 24th December, he won’t care about Rudolph from 26th December until he begins to plan for his next run. Rudolph is a means to Santa, a tool to help Santa achieve his own ends — and only as a means — and not an end in himself. To put it another way, Santa is not treating Rudolph as a person, but as an object. He is observing the forms of interacting with him as a person, but that is only because just as you turn a knob to operate a stove or push some buttons to operate a microwave, you say things like “You are so talented. Won’t you join my team?” to operate a sentient non-persons whom you desire to use as a tool.

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Second, once an outcast achieves approval from someone whose approval matters to their bullies, the resulting envy may become a new “reason” for bullying, just as soon as the authority figure looks away. If Rudolph were useful every day Santa’s approval might protect him from the other reindeer every day. But his approval one day a year (and only if that one day is foggy) will not drive a significant change in Rudolph’s standing with the other reindeer. This is why “teacher’s pet” is not a compliment.

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Rudolph, people experienced with bullies know, is about to get clobbered.  But the little child hearing this song, letting it sink into them and affect their worldview, looking for constructive ways to handle being laughed at and called names and left out of the group, may not. I did not. I believed this story about how the world works, in the many explicit and implicit ways it was taught to me as a child. And it sank so deeply into me that when I am not paying attention, I still act according to its guidance. I try to buy belonging with usefulness.

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But belonging is not earned. It’s either the default state or it isn’t. All that usefulness gets me is willingness to endure my presence, if that. And offering a child — or anyone — the chance to belong but delivering only the opportunity to be present is a cruel bait-and-switch.

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Moreover, unless belonging is conceived of as automatic, unless we cannot lose the relationship with our communities (even though it may change), then we are forever trying to justify something that we desperately need to be able to take for granted. And Rudolph is a symbol not of a community where everyone is embraced, but of the tenuous nature of that embrace, how hard it can be to win (which shows how easily it can be lost). That is not how we need to be educating children.

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We all deserve to belong.