Interview with Environmental Activist and Consumer Advocate Mr. Grinch: On the Christmas Story and the Post-consumer era

For this interview, journalist Sasha Viasasha traveled three thousand miles up the snowy slope of Mount Crumpit to visit Mr. Grinch in his environmentally-friendly, carbon-neutral eco-dwelling, where Mr. Grinch lives with his dog Max.  Mr. Grinch is currently penning his memoir.  

SVS:  Thank you so much for having me, Mr. Grinch.  I must say it is quite an honor to actually be here, after such a long and arduous journey.  Thank you for the hot chocolate, it’s really quite wonderful.  It is so cozy and comfortable in here, not at all what I expected. 

Mr. Grinch:  Yes, Max and I have made ourselves quite at home over the years. 

SVS:  You have such a reputation as a recluse, and of living a severely spartan existence, that I did not expect to find it so warm and inviting in here.  And what are all these drawing on the wall?  

Mr Grinch:  Ah, yes, from the children, the children.  The children, you know, really do understand.  Yes, I have lived a life apart, I’ve lived in exile, and it has been at times a difficult choice, but the only one for me.  Not having children has often pained me, you know.  But the choices I have made for myself have been so agonizing that I did not think I could make them for others.  Not because I doubted, you know.   It was only a question of will.  It has taken every ounce of my strength to live as I have.   I do not call myself an exceptional man. 

SVS:  And yet you’ve lived an exceptional life.      

Mr. Grinch:  An exceptional life, yes.  And only when the exceptional become unexceptional will we have successfully returned to a simpler way of living.  You see a lot of young people now trying to return, and their attempts are energized by a sense of novelty, with the thrill of their own exceptionalness.  You get this, too, reading Thoreau, who was still quite a young man, I think just twenty-seven years old, when he went to Walden, and you can easily see, reading his writings, how positively exhilarated he was by his own exceptionalness.  It has taken all of these many years for my own sense of novelty to fade, for the wonderfulness of it all to diminish, many years of solitude and simple living.   

SVS:    Do you think, then, that the movement to live simpler, to live in harmony with our environment, to decrease our impact on the planet, is just a fad? 

Mr. Grinch:  Just a fad?  A fad, certainly, but whether just a fad, I couldn’t say.  I know the market is acutely attuned to any impulse that arises in the public psyche; and it will systematically assimilate any movement that the counter-culture can generate.  If we succeed it will be disorganized, spontaneous, private and apolitical.    

SVS:  If this is true, then what is the future of activism? What kind of activity is useful?

Mr. Grinch:  What kind of activity is useful?  Any activity that is consciousness-raising.  That is all.         

SVS:   But as far as organizing?  You are opposed to it?

Mr. Grinch:  Not so much opposed as indifferent. 

SVS:   And you’ve also stated many times that you are not opposed to Christmas, but merely indifferent to it.   Yet I think many would describe your activities as fervently oppositional.  In Dr. Seuss’ work, for example—

Mr. Grinch:   I tell you that if Ted Geisel had anticipated the popular interpretation of his work that has most recently found expression in a movie by the same name as his poem, he would never have lifted a pen!  I do not wish to discuss his work, which relates to my life only incidentally.  It is only in contrast to the fanatical fervor of the pro-Christmas lobby that my indifference seems like opposition.  That is their genius.

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