Modern American Halloween is gross and bad
Plus: a broken view of foreign wars, lantern fly honey, and more
Good morning! It’s Wednesday, and here are this week’s five items for you. Before we get to that, though, last call on my giveaway of five signed copies of Untrustworthy. Extremely simple rules here; entry form here.
1. A take I haven’t written elsewhere
Modern American Halloween is gross and bad
Halloween is still two weeks out, but, in my neighborhood, we’re at least three weeks into the decorations. They seem to increase every year: not just the jack-o-lanterns and scarecrows but large spiders and spiderwebs, zombies, witches, werewolves, various corpse-like figures with joints bent the wrong way, fake police tape, punny tombstones, string lights in orange and purple, and skeletons of every size.
Not to put too fine a point on it—and recognizing that this is a literal get off my lawn take—this is gross, and modern American Halloween is bad.
Let me be a bit more specific. I have no objection to the older celebration of All Hallows’ Eve, the night before All Saints’ Day. It’s not part of the tradition in any church where I’ve been a member—Protestants have downplayed or abandoned this day due to its historic connection to the doctrine of purgatory—but I’m certainly not opposed to remembering martyrs and our own mortality, giving food to the poor and doing an extra church service.
Nor am I opposed to Reformation Day, which marks the day Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the church door in Wittenberg, starting the Protestant Reformation. Again, not really a thing in my churches—more of a Lutheran and Presbyterian affair. But have at it.
Nor yet am I opposed to “harvest festivals.” This seems a bit contrived, frankly. We don’t organically celebrate the harvest anymore because we live in an industrialized, globalized society with year-round bounty, and it strikes me as a bit silly to cosplay our premodern ancestors’ hardship. But whatever, apple cider is tasty.
And I’m not even opposed to a little trick-or-treating. Well, I am—it’s all flimsy plastic costumes and the same dozen kinds of mini chocolate bars over and over and over and seriously why do we have a holiday where the primary ritual is giving small children 40+ pieces of candy? But I’m not opposed enough to actually oppose it. Neighbors hang out. You meet people. Kids have fun. There are upsides.
No, what I oppose is modern American Halloween in its apparent ascendance (if the increasing decoration is any measure) to rival Christmas as our chief secular holiday—but a markedly worse one.
Secular Christmas has plenty of problems, of course, most of them related to commercialism and our easy acquisition of absolute hoards of cheap plastic crap. But it’s also a celebration of generosity, beauty, community, and even craftsmanship: We give gifts, make our homes lovely, gather together, and cook one of the most involved and elaborate meals of the year.
Modern American Halloween is celebration of making your house hideous and giving children stomachaches. Craftsmanship is actually discouraged: You’re a health-nut killjoy if you hand out anything homemade, and your handiwork will go straight in the trash.
It’s the decorations that really bother me, though, in two senses. One is that they are literally ugly, and I deeply object to making houses ugly on purpose. Pumpkins and wreaths of straw or dried corn are nice. Festooning every square inch of your yard with faux decay is tacky and disgusting.
The fake police tape is what really gets me, especially when the condition of the house raises the question of whether the tape is real and the house has been condemned as structurally unsound. (This is not outside the realm of possibility in here post-industrial Pittsburgh; I’ve seen real tape in real estate photos and know of at least two condemned houses within half a mile of mine. Just … take a step back and assess the overall effect of this choice.)
The second sense is that we’ve jettisoned all the spiritual elements of All Hallows’ Eve—the 12-foot-skeleton is not a memento mori; hardly anyone goes to church; handing out small Snickers is a far cry from giving alms—and kept only a deliberately shallow fascination with evil and death.
Modern American Halloween does not take death seriously, but it’s not lighthearted because of hope of the resurrection or anything similarly transcendent. It’s not even the pressure-release transgression of the old celebration of Carnival, undertaken with knowledge of its gravity and full intent to repent. It’s flippant, foolish, the sort of holiday that would only develop in a society in which death and violence feel like remote possibilities for most of us most of the time.
It reminds me of the part in The Screwtape Letters about picturing the devil as a comic figure, “something in red tights,” and thereby making the very idea unbelievable. But it’s worse than that, I think—not a case of laughing at evil, death, and decay but laughing with them, not understanding that they’re entirely real and laughing at you.
2. What I'm reading this week
“America’s broken, lurid view of foreign wars,” by Matthew Petti for Reason last week. This is one of the best things I’ve read on the war in Israel and Gaza so far:
All this debate around beheadings seemed to miss a more fundamental point: that children were killed. The existence of a massacre should be enough to shock and horrify. Hamas killed or took hostage hundreds of Israelis. (Clearly frustrated with media skepticism, the Israeli government posted pictures of burned Israeli children to social media.) The Israeli military has killed hundreds of Palestinians with bombs in retaliation. The intense focus on one gruesome detail amid a pile of dead and maimed bodies shows there is something fundamentally wrong with the way American society approaches war in foreign countries.
On one hand, Americans are not confronted with the horror that "normal" weapons of war—bullets, bombs, and hunger—inflict on a human body. On the other hand, American media likes to fixate on specific atrocity stories, repeating the most ugly details as if the news were a carnival of horror. Neither approach helps Americans appreciate the tragedy of war nor gives the dead the dignity they deserve. Their main accomplishment is to normalize the idea of endless conflict.
Read the rest here.
3. A recommendation
Doom Bloom honey. Ok, I’ve just ordered this and haven’t actually tried it yet, so maybe I’ll hate it and have to retract this recommendation. But for now, check out this honey.
Here in Pennsylvania, like a number of states, we are overrun with spotted lantern flies. This is bad in many ways, but it might be good for bees, who have started making a new kind of honey using this sugary honeydew (it’s basically lantern fly pee) the bugs excrete after eating tree sap.
The whole concept is kind of gross, but honey is already insect regurgitation, so I figured I’d give it a try. Apparently it tastes kind of smoky, so my plan is to do a variation of the Penicillin cocktail.
4. Recent work
Blaming Hamas shouldn’t mean ignoring Palestinians’ plight | Reason
The obscenity of war in this present evil age | Christianity Today
Why is one Jewish family the subject of so many conspiracy theories? | Christianity Today
Biden’s strangest U-turn | Defense Priorities (newsletter)
5. Miscellaneous
The Catholic patriarch of Jerusalem has offered himself in exchange for the freedom of child hostages in Gaza:
Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Patriarch of Jerusalem, made his comment in response to a question during a video conference with journalists in Italy.
"I am ready for an exchange, anything, if this can lead to freedom, to bring the children home. No problem. There is total willingness on my part," he said.
"The first thing to do is to try to win the release of the hostages, otherwise there will be no way of stopping (an escalation). We are willing to help, even me personally," he said.
My objections to modern-day Halloween are that A) a kids' holiday has been wholeheartedly embraced by adults B) for a good bleeping six weeks before the holiday.
It's for kids. And it should be, at best, something you decorate for a week ahead of time. No earlier. But Halloween's expanding reach just seems like more infantilization of American society.