Happy Halloween!!!

Okay, only in America can an obscure Celtic-Druidic harvest festival and excuse to rape and drink and sacrifice newborns and goats become a multi-billion dollar consumer orgy. Bandy-legged pie-faced Papists known as the Irish ;-) brought it here in the 1820s along with the concept of street gangs and an aversion to birth control, but it truly wasn't until the late 1970s-early 80s that it became a "holiday" commandeered from children by bored, craven adults. Perhaps it was the masterpiece 1978 film Halloween? Don't get me wrong, for movie lovers this is the best time of year thanks to AMC's "Monsterfest" and various documentaries, creature feature marathons, etc. Some say it was Reaganomics, the rise of the religious right. Some say it was the concomitant fear-mongering regarding serial killers and devilish pedophiles and black folks in masks burglaring homes? Or possibly economic dislocations and migrations and developer- and S & L-led building booms and busts, or people waiting to have to kids? This utterly skews the demographics of so-called stable neigborhoods. Hard to let kids trick or treat when you don't know or trust your neighbor...or you don't have kids!

Or maybe it was we baby-boomers (andI'm the young side of the post-war deluge, OK!) recalling the heyday of Halloween, now having the income to indulge their bullshit narcissism? BINGO!
See, we remember the "Ben Garrison"-brand flammable non-reflective cheesy costumes and plastic or paperboard masks. We remember when tribes of kids would roam neighborhoods en masse, in the DARK, and even get cooked food as treats! Schools had MASSIVE Halloween parties--no one gave a damn about Holy Rollers who thought it was demonic or left wing weenies who didn't want their kids "left out" if they didn't have a costume...

We, in turn, were soon running firms and businesses which might make a buck off Halloween. So we peddled this prurience to the masses et voila...now you have little girls wanting the same sex-charged costumes as their moms, and boys wanting to dress like the latest movie or computer game hero--duly licensed so everyone can make money. You can see it in the evolution of creatures like "Pinhead," or Michael Myers, Freddie Kruger, Jason Vorhees (who wasn't even in the first two Friday the 13ths--and didn't get the hockey mask till the third). They started as truly terrifying, fresh and original creations. Now milked to death and brand name pop icons. My generation has ruined this country...

My favorite hypocrisy is that of so-called pious black folks who associate Halloween with the Devil. Huh? Nothing is worse than talking to brothers and sister who I presume are educated, make a decent living and have some sense of history or perspective--and then they go and spout nonsense. One such fool, father of two, an attorney, upright brother, told he learned at Morehouse never to lower your dignity by putting on a costume! Interesting...considering his family's from the Caribbean and Catholic and this whole concept of Carnivale and communing with the dead and pre-Lenten festival attire was pretty much born there! But no--he became a Baptist at "The House" and told me his pastor had forbidden any mention of Halloween (they call it "Fall Party Night" for the kids, something silly like that). His wife--a former social worker and once a sharp, sexy woman, keeps her mouth shut and enables this crap. She's damn happy just to have a stable black man and "trophy" kids in BabyGap clothes and the huge pre-fab home of her dreams whilst her single girlfriends troll for the same. Mindlessly, she nodded in approval at hubby; she's told me many times her husband's full of shit. [They've moved back to the Atlanta area from DC so I don't much care if they read this and get offended Ha!] Wish I could say they were a minority within the minority, or there are pastors out there chuckling at Halloween and fighting the true evils out there: ignorance, poverty, war, crime, exploitation. Ahhhh...who am I kidding?
On the other side of the Bill Cosby-esque fence...while having coffee Monday and fresh from the trauma of another death in our extended family, I spied on a woman interviewed for a local newspaper. She was maybe in her early forties, obese (and I don't mean pleasantly thick) cigarette viced between two stubby fingers and corralling a horde of own kids, step-stair in age from toddler to possibly less than twenty years younger than she. Oh no, Halloween's for "them other folks," and she doesn't let her kids trick or treat, and she even told the school attended by two of her daughters not to have any Halloween celebration or allow any costumes. Her son looked to be a full foot taller than me, and was swathed in a black tall tee, black baggy jeans and his head squeezed into a tight wave cap, so tight that his short braids stuck out and ithad the look of a small black octopus sucking on the boy's head. He smirked and said he "di'n't need no Halloween to go out an' do what I [he] do," and the mom prompty told him to shut up (as the smarmy reporter and goth-looking photography chuckled nervously). But oh no--Halloween's demonic. Please.

So I'm going to enjoy the irony and stupidity and drive my wife nuts singing the annoying theme-song from Halloween 3: Season of the Witch (nothing to do with Michael Myers)...so now's the time for all you kiddies to put on your Silver Shamrock special mask...and DIE!!! AH-HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA AH-HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.