Good morning. Rub that tinsel out of...

Good morning. Rub that tinsel out of your eyes. It’s Dec. 26. There goes Santa Claus, and here comes the tax man.

As the nation’s surviving mail carriers are delivering a few laggardly Christmas cards, they’ll be bringing greetings from your Uncle Sam, green eyeshade division: the 1040 tax form.

The panic that precedes Dec. 25 is as nothing compared to the panic before Dec. 31, when the tax ax falls with the last hour of the old year. Squeeze in those final doctor visits now that you’ve met your deductible. Open that IRA. Even--a friend did this, truly--induce labor a day early to get that $2,650 dependent deduction.

And, as the radio ads clamor with rising shrillness, there’s still time for that last-minute lagniappe to charity. Give your old car or truck as a tax deduction to some good cause.

Yet the hook in these donate-a-car ads is how much it will benefit you. Oh sure, you’ll aid the poor and benighted, but hey--you may get more for your car as a deduction than you would by selling it! Why invoke the better angels in the city of same, when you can do better by the Angel of the Bottom Line?

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L.A.’s notoriety is not limited to City of Riots or City of O.J. or City Where Women Use Preparation H for Temporary Tightening of Crow’s Feet.

A 1994 study by the Chronicle of Philanthropy branded us with the scarlet letter C, for cheap (like we’d notice it, among all those tattoos.) Out of 50 cities, we came in 48th for per capita generosity. Miserliness loves company; six of the bottom 10 cities were in California.

Now comes the consoling revisionism. A Field Research Group study this very month says that Angelenos give 5% more to charity than the national average, that the 1994 study damned us on the basis of figures from 10 of the largest national charities, and that we give to many off-the-big-screen, bona fide groups, from local ethnic charities to neighborhood animal benefactors.

This I know to be true, especially for in-kind contributions. How do I itemize buying food for the banjo-playing homeless guy outside the market, who, as long as I was asking what I could get him, would love the spinach tortellini salad and carrot juice?

The United Way--one of the Big 10 charities--has been trying to needle our collective conscience with some wowser double-take billboards and bus bench ads. Enough with the hand-wringing, the begging, the big-eyed kid to tear at your heart. This campaign is about putting up or shutting up:

“You’re an actor. Act like you care.”

“What this town needs are compassion implants.”

“Forget your triceps, give your conscience a good workout.”

“One nonfat double latte could buy a toddler milk for a month.”

“You’re a writer. How about writing a check.”

Yet Hollywood’s money seems to flow east, in defiance of the watershed. In five years, Hollywood wrote out $23 million in checks--not tax-deductible--to politics. All it got them was a TV rating system, a Clinton cameo on a made-for-TV movie and grief from Tipper Gore.

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There are other tools than guilt, other emotions to play to than greed. Mall Santas could raise millions just by offering to take that bell elsewhere in exchange for a hundred bucks.

But vanity--now, there’s a deadly sin that could work miracles. America’s robber barons displayed their status with big yachts, big mansions, big diamonds. This year, Ted Turner gave away a billion dollars, and challenged the remaining Fortune 499 to do the same.

He’s almost put charity on a par with macho, and from there it’s only one step to . . .

Size.

The UCLA physiologist Jared Diamond, who writes sagely about biology, evolution and society, notes this disparity in his latest book: The gorilla has a penis only about 1 1/4 inches long (and has sex on the average for 15 minutes and can do so hanging from a tree), while the much smaller human (average copulation time four minutes, with or without trees) has a penis of about five inches long, much more than is necessary to get the job done. Why, Diamond wonders, would nature squander biosynthetic energy that might otherwise go to, say, brainpower?

Diamond postulates that the human penis size does not represent wasted energy. Rather, it could be a kind of boast: “I’m already so smart and superior that I don’t need to devote more ounces of protoplasm to my brain, but I can instead afford the handicap of packing the ounces uselessly into my penis.” And as zoologists in the forests and behaviorists in the locker room can attest, a chief purpose of sexual apparatus is “to establish dominance over rivals of the same sex.”

If the United Way or the Salvation Army could ever devise a means to make that connection, every charity would, like the Getty, have more money than it knows what to do with, and donors would be able to signal to the rest of the world: I gave at the office--and I gave BIG.