Of all our holidays, Halloween is arguably the most fun, least controversial and most widely celebrated by Americans, regardless of race, creed, color, gender, sexual orientation, Democrat or Republican, natural or brazilian.
Some argue Thanksgiving is more universally treasured, but that’s far from certain. For many, Thanksgiving is the dreaded annual Gathering of the Clan, likely as not to turn into a drunken shouting match between Uncle Tremain and Aunt Vicki about that time in high school when she caught him under the bleachers with that floosie who, after all these years, is now texting him!
Halloween has none of the family tensions of Thanksgiving or the community angst of Christmas, a holiday redolent with evergreen religious implications that each year drives Muslims, Atheists and the entire Jewish diaspora into Chinese restaurants in search of sanctuary. Many complain that its hero is a crassly commercial red-suited, home-invading socialist, promoting an entitlement culture by giving stuff to Takers, and who reportedly drinks to excess. Historians say early Christians, desperate to anchor their shopping season, hijacked the pagan holiday of Winter Solstice, tree and all. But merely saying so can trigger angry accusations of a “War on Christmas!”
Halloween, however, is a chance for Americans to have fun and pretend – if only for a few hours – to be someone else, to conceal dismally ordinary lives behind masks and costumes and sally forth into nighttime mischief as mythical creatures, powerful villains or brave superheroes.
For decades, their costumes have included ghosts, skeletons, vampires, chainsaw killers, witches and such. But those frights are now so tame and Old School.
When it comes to scaring the bejeezus out of us, they can’t hold a dripping candle to America’s real-life terrors: Gunmen who stalk the land slaughtering 30,000 people every year and who have their very own lobbying organization; parents who drown their kids; and local twisteds who cripple puppies and strangle cats for fun. Like the soul-sucking Pod People of horror movies past, such outwardly normal individuals walk among us; one may be reading over your shoulder now.
And what costume-maker trying to frighten little children can possibly outdo millions of Americans already sporting steel-pierced noses, eyebrows and foreheads, earlobe expanders and bizarre tattoo tapestries on arms, faces and the darnedest places?
Certainly the possibility of one’s trick-or-treating pre-teen being snatched off the street and sex-trafficked to Bangkok is far scarier to many Americans than any ghost. And these days, what parent lets a child go outside with a mask and toy gun, perhaps to be shot dead by an officer ‘in fear of his life’ who mistakes Trick-or-Treat for a robbery-in-progress? To this day, in parts of rural America, no one ever – ever — opens the door to people dressed in white hoods and sheets.
But perhaps just as scary this Halloween is the looming spectre of the Republican Tea Party/Freedom Caucas in the House of Representatives. Faceless, hollow-skulled spirits long ago laid to rest in the 19th century, their bony hands have burst through their rotting coffins in the graveyard of History.
One by one they have staggered erect, stalking the Halls of Congress, eyeless sockets seeking their long-lost heritage in an America they no longer recognize or comprehend, but one they are determined to seize and drag with them, kicking and screaming — back into Time and the Grave. (Quick — Cue the Evil Laugh machine).
— Bob Edwards
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