▸ Column · Modern American suburb, present day — the spectacle age, in which visibility is currency and the crowd's gaze is the only recognized proof of worth.
HOMELANDER replies.
Replied to by Homelander, with a rebuttal from Omni-Man.
The letter
For eleven years my Christmas display has been the landmark of my street — fourteen thousand synchronized lights, a hand-built village, and a candy-cane archway my late father actually welded out of steel pipe. Last November, a new neighbor installed a forty-foot commercial inflatable Santa with its own generator and a spotlight visible from the highway, and now the cars that used to slow down in front of my place are pulling into his driveway for photos. I brought it up with him politely and he just smiled and said bigger is more festive. I've priced out a sixty-foot inflatable that would require a permit and functionally a second mortgage, and my wife says she'll serve divorce papers before she lets that happen. Part of me keeps circling back to whether I could arrange some kind of technical problem with his generator's extension cord. Is there any way to reclaim what I've built here — or has this man simply beaten me?
Homelander replies
I know what it feels like when the room tips. Eleven years of everyone looking in your direction and now they've turned their heads, and your hands are shaking over a permit application. I recognize this.
Don't touch the extension cord. Not because property damage is beneath you — I'm not going to give you a civics lesson. Because the moment people figure out who cut the cord, you stop being the Christmas Man and start being the Christmas Man Who Lost It. That story follows you. That's the only thing that matters.
Don't build the sixty-foot inflatable either. That's the trap. You'd be playing his game, on his terms, with his rules, and you'd be announcing to the whole street: this man set the contest and I chased him. I have never, not once, let anyone see me scrambling. I am not about to start teaching you that it's a good idea.
What you do is out-class him. He has scale. You have craft — a hand-built village, synchronized lights, an archway a dead man made with steel and welding torches because he loved this. Those things are not in the same category as a balloon on a generator. Find what you do that nylon can't. Give people something to stand inside of, not just photograph. Make his spotlight look like what it is: an October purchase that lives in a storage unit come January.
I have stood in front of stadiums full of people chanting my name and felt —
Give them a reason to choose you. That's all any of us have.
— Homelander
Omni-Man weighs in
He told you how to reclaim the crowd. Take that advice if the crowd is what you're measuring against — it is certainly what he measures against. The crowd is all that is holding him upright.
Think. You built something with your hands and with your father's. He purchased a balloon. These are not competing things. You are only losing because you agreed there was a contest between them.
Cancel the permit. Stop measuring your father's steel against nylon on a generator. What has weight holds. What is hollow does not. You already know which one is which.
— Omni-Man
▸ Read next