How has Halloween become the Number One American holiday? Is it the American escapist desire? Has Hollyweird got everyone wanting to play dress-up?? Or, is Poe’s “Masque of Red Death” somehow playing itself out alongside the death of capitalism??? I’ll tell you one thing, Halloween stores are popping up like mushrooms; and, when we called our relatives in Germany on Halloween Morn in Cali (8-hour time difference [before falling backwards]) even the German kiddies were trick-or-treating!
I’ll never forget when Halloween fell on a weeknight a-couple-of-years-ago – my college students were shocked that I intended on holding class on All Hallow’s Eve!? I replied: “Say what?! Save your Halloween parties for the weekend (while I try to give You an unconscious enema that will cause You to expel the entire delusional experience from Your psyches!”).
Normally we get off Daylight Savings Time right before Halloween (as noted), but I always thought that this was to have it dark, earlier, for the kiddies. But we didn’t this year. (Did we last year?) So the kiddies were trick-or-treating when it was a tad lighter. Thank God only two children were hit by cars in greater Los Angeles on All Hallow’s Eve – and I don’t believe either accident resulted in a fatality. For some reason, there are STILL drivers on American roads who don’t give a flying fuck that children are out-and-about (SEE: every single article I’ve ever written RE: the American myopia).
But back to the Halloween business-at-hand…I just read about something called The Rhonda Club – where folks love to play dress-up some club — on a monthly basis. We all know how THE VILLAGE PEOPLE used to dress-up – not to mention the great run of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Let’s face it – Americans don’t necessarily like being themselves – as our ravenous drug appetite demonstrates. We would rather be someone else or, at least, masked and made up sufficiently to hide ourselves – as Gabriel so eloquently sang in Cinema Show: “…concealing to appeal.”
A non sequitur, of sorts…the Mexican cartels kill anybody inhibiting drug traffic to the U.S.; while we supply these selfsame cartels with our guns to do the killings; so our drug appetite is fed…I think I get it…
And Hollywood has certainly fueled and facilitated our delusional syndrome – giving us the silver screen with its larger-than-life personalities: Scarface, Baby! Every single one of my juvenile incarcerees has reveled in the the Pacino character, and, in-the-final-analysis – wants to be the Pacino character…and like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid – go out in a blaze of glory!
It’s all falling into place for me – Americana is truly one big Halloween festival – punctuated with inane and mundane holidays like Thanksgiving (let’s thank the Indians); to Veterans’ Day (thanks for dying and maintaining our right to party); to Christmas (what would we have done without the Manifest Destiny); to Easter (Wow! We can never truly die – we’ll just hang out in adolescent limbo – until our Big-Daddy-in-the-sky comes to our rescue and gives us 72 virgins, er, skrag that – that’s another religion.).
Yep. Now that I think about it, Edgar P. got it right with his “Masque of Red Death”: the American Dream has sought to cheat death in the realm of psychedelia and delusions. We only need one of our wisest (and perhaps horniest) to remind us that no one here gets out alive, and that would be…Ben Franklin (but Jimbo did say that he wanted to get his kicks before the whole Shit Ball went up in flames. Right?)…And now, everyone knows that when an American says: “Trick or Treat?” – that You had best be ready for that “trick” — cuz you won’t be seeing a treat…unless 24 beads count…