"Gimme a treat, Swaim, or I'll TP yer house!
The inimitable WSJ op-ed hack Barton Swaim is at it again, this time taking shots at Halloween ('Down With Halloween's Ironic Death Cult.') arguably the only secular holiday of the fall-winter season. Swaim opens his screed with the following babble:
"I’ve never been a fan of Halloween. In recent years, as
celebrations have become darker and more gruesome, I’ve started to dread its
onset.
Part of my aversion arises from my own hidebound premodern Calvinist outlook, in which death is no laughing matter and necromancy is forbidden by God (see Deuteronomy 18:9-13). Forgive my Puritan sensibility, but I find the whole spectacle ugly and offensive and vaguely sinister. What sort of “holiday” deliberately terrifies children with images of murder and ruin and treats torture and death as a joke? "
Sheesh! Give it a rest, boy. It's fantasy, get it? Kids are releasing their inner terrors via publicly sanctioned cosplay, and it serves powerful purposes. As my tenured psychology prof niece put it when I asked her about Swaim's objections:
"Kids exposing themselves to a nonexistent
fear object and making fun of their fears by cosplay in Halloween, allows them to simulate their fears, or
reenact them by pretending. This entails enjoying the sensation of fear based on a sense of safety. To put it another way, it is 'a way to play with emotions
and fears without risking any real cost'. Especially in this era of insanity and mass school shootings it provides
a powerful release mechanism – which only a scold or puritan would deny."
So can we conclude Swaim is a scold? Yes, we can, and also a confirmed ideologue and theocratic -leaning, Calvinist-style drudge. As when he goes on:
"I grew up in the 1970s and ’80s, when Halloween consisted of trick-or-treating, jack-o’-lanterns, apple-bobbing and maybe a viewing of “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. Halloween has since become a kind of industrial cartoon death cult. Its appurtenances—candy, costumes and yard ornamentation, including giant skeletons and faux cobwebs for the shrubbery.."
So what, son? I grew up in the 50s, and relished many of those same things as well as wearing my favorite red devil mask - which I must have put on for 3-4 years while collecting pillowcases full of candy. In all the intervening decades I have not seen Halloween become an "industrial cartoon death cult" but rather a rationally understood public holiday in which participants can let off steam and politics, religion don't enter. No squabbles with Uncle Boris about Trump like at the turkey day table, or arguments about what Christmas means with ornery Christian nationalists. Hence, its saving grace is as the only major secular holiday that has the added benefit of discharging fears vicariously. Capitalist ideologues need not apply unless of course they are Barton Swaim - as when he writes:
"Not being a Marxist, I’m reluctant to engage in class analysis. But it’s impossible not to notice that Big Halloween is a bourgeois phenomenon. Maybe it’s a matter of income, but I wonder if it’s also an expression of religious indifference."
Huh? What manner of monkey pissed in your brew, Barton? Marxism? Class analysis? Bourgeois phenomenon? You're overthinking Halloween and making yourself miserable while doing it. It's a welcome secular celebration predicated on spontaneous cosplay and a beneficial vicarious discharge of fears. Which literally glut the nation at the moment making its importance even greater. An expression of religious difference? Yes, dummy, because the very essence is secular - not religious!
But leave it to Calvinist scold Swaim to take exactly that route as when he fulminates:
"Lower-income homes are far likelier to be observant, and religious people tend not to find amusement in images of hell, torment and butchery. An adjacent point: For the working poor—those struggling to pay their bills and hold their lives together—death isn’t so far away as it often seems to the well-off. In poor neighborhoods, people die younger. Experiencing so often the aftereffects of death makes one, perhaps, less inclined to celebrate it in an amusing communal ritual."
In fact in my observations lower income homes have been least observant and actually relished the opportunity presented by Halloween to stack up on candy goodies that otherwise weren't affordable. Also, none of these lower class folk obsessed over "hell" or images of it, only the chance to collect large bags of tasty goodies that otherwise would have stretched budgets beyond repair. Yes, in many poor neighborhoods people die younger, but it's not because of Halloween skylarking and candy collecting - but inadequate medical care. Especially, in the red states Swaim adulates so much in his pathetic columns, which have pulled back on Medicaid benefits since the pandemic slowed. Doing this by lowering the eligibility qualifications so that once a poor earner gets two jobs (or a better job) she is disallowed by making $16 an hour as opposed to $14.50 to qualify.
Swaim displays a further loss of his rational functions with the following blather:
"Halloween, in its present iteration, is the perfect holiday for secularized and affluent sophisticates: The supernatural isn’t real. Evil isn’t a lurking spiritual force but the consequence of bad societal arrangements or an underfunded education system."
Here again we see why Swaim is such a boring pain in the ass, interjecting his pseudo-religious bunkum into the tapestry of a secular holiday. This capitalist Trumper freak can't tolerate the fact so many Americans love Halloween for being what it is - basically a safe holiday minus the freight of religiosity or politics - so he feels it's incumbent on himself to inject it. And he's relentless in doing so.
There is also an inescapable irony here in a guy who isn't scared shitless of Trump - who has vowed to end American democracy if he ever attains power again - and fantasy Halloween images on the tube. As when he writes:
"As I watched a National
Football League game, one ad after another appeared for Halloween-themed horror
shows. Images flashed across the television screen of a screaming little girl,
an ominous figure with a long knife emerging from the dark, a man staring
petrified at something out of sight. These scenes would have terrified me as a
child. Why are we allowing little eyes to see them?"
Obviously, he forgot - or never processed - the endless similar TV ads that appeared in the 70s-80s or even the 50s-60s (though he can be excused for not recalling the latter as he didn't live then.) But I recall in the lead up to Halloween every year in Miami, "The Dungeon" coming on WCKT with its macabre host, M.T. Graves. Who would unravel kids' brains with his tales of blood while showing images too - of Dracula rising from his grave, of Frankenstein etc.
But Swaim writes such scenes would have "terrified him as child", yet now as an adult he's quite ok with a serial traitor who's already incited an insurrection, e.g.
And has now vowed to butcher what's left of democracy in this country. Indeed in my Nov. 23, 2021 post I skewered Swaim's WSJ piece ('The Impossible Insurrection', p. A13, Nov. 21-22), wherein he actually wrote this debased twaddle:
"Trump won the nomination in 2016, and even more his election to the presidency, was an anguished outcry against decades of aggressions. It wasn’t wise or sensible, but it was understandable as a frantic attempt to stay the hand of an uncompromising cultural leftism. The leftward-inclining elites who dominate American institutions didn’t interpret it that way. They classified it, as they had classified the tea-party revolt of 2009–10, as an expression of racism and hatred,"
In an earlier iteration ('Trump and the Expert Class', Jan. 22-23, 2021) Swaim was just as clueless, claiming that Trump "never praised Nazis", while seeming to forget or dismiss the extremist protest in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, when Trump said there were “very fine people on both sides.”
His blather here shows why no one should take his yammering about Halloween fears seriously. Certainly not if - even today with a presumably more functional brain- he treats a veritable existential threat to our democracy so frivolously.
Finally, at the end of his kvetching - realizing he's sounding like a Puritan school marm - we behold:
"Nobody likes a scold.....But the yearly observance that used to be Halloween has taken a
dark and unwholesome turn."
Sorry, Barton, you're still a scold. And the worst kind: One who picks the wrong target at which to direct his officious opprobrium.
See Also:
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An illustrated guide to surviving an attack by Dracula, the Mummy and other monsters
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