November 2, 2015--Hallowgreen

The boys at the U.S. Department of Energy have been having some fun.

It's pretty grim business having responsibility for our nation's nuclear arsenal so who can blame them for fooling around come Halloween time.

On their official website last week, they posted ideas for what they considered some pretty hip costumes for (groan) Energy-ween.

While folks you know dressed up like pirates, zombies, and Donald TRUMP, DOE staff suggested going trick-or-treating as the Energy Vampire, who "drains the power of the unwary; a Particle Accelerator (all your nuclear-physics-minded friends will know about that); Ernest Moniz (the "classically coifed" Secretary of Energy, last seen negotiating the nuclear deal with Iran. To get his hair right they recommended buying a "Founding Father wig").

If you have even one friend who could recognize Moniz or Thomas Jefferson, consider yourself fortunate, though I worry that you might be leading a boring life.

I have a young friend who went to an early Halloween party as Annie Hall and was not entirely surprised that none of the partygoers knew who that was. As she explained with a sigh, "The party after all was in New Jersey."

Also, the Energy Department  pushed hard to get kids to dress up as Solar Panels. To make that seem cool, they suggested wearing sunglasses for "added sustainable swagger." But called for "resisting the urge to climb on rooftops." I assume their liability lawyers weighed in on that one.

This wouldn't have been more amusing, I assume, if they had called this Hallow-green?

Even less amusing was what was happening last week on campuses around the country--directives to students about how to dress up politically correctly.

This all came to the fore when James Ramsey, the president of the University of Louisville, was severely criticized for appearing in a Mariachi outfit. He's not Mexican American and so it was considered insensitive and even offensive to do something so stereotypical. By implication I suppose it would have been all right for him to do so if he was a Chicano.

Making it worse to the campus PC Police was the fact that he had his staff dress accordingly since Mariachi musicians typically perform in groups.

Check out the picture below and come to your own conclusion. He appears at the lower right.

According to an article in the New York Times, many colleges struggled with where to draw the line between costuming free speech and not wanting to upset anyone.

I, on the other hand, think one aspect of free speech is the freedom to offend. That may not always be pretty, but it is one of our cherished freedoms.

And I'm not even sure it is one essential aspect of a college education to "teach" sensitivity and tolerance. Shouldn't that be one of the hoped-for consequences of a good, well-rounded education rather than something built into the curriculum much less the extra curriculum?

People sensitive about their identity need to figure out how to struggle with and overcome that, not be overly protected from offense.

If someone wants to dress up like Pocahontas or Pancho Villa or Caitlyn Jenner should't they be allowed to make fools of themselves?

As my young "Annie Hall" friend also said when asked about personal happiness, "I don't want to be happy. I want to be uncomfortable." This suggested to me that a good education was not wasted on her.

October 31, 2014--Best of Behind: Take Back Halloween

This is a reprise of my first Halloween posting from back in 2007. It's rough around the rhetorical edges but, I think, still pertinent--

Not too many years ago when we first moved to Greenwich Village, the Halloween parade was called the Children’s Parade and all who marched down Fifth Avenue into Washington Square Park were children in costumes accompanied by parents in regular clothes. Now, no right-thinking parent would bring a small child out into the current mayhem. Yes, there is a separate rump event for kids, but it’s a sideshow. The real action now goes on for miles up and down Sixth Avenue and it is pretty much for adults-only raunchy affair.

Crank back in time some more, as I am quite capable of doing since I have a few years on me, and Halloween in the city and suburbs was totally for and about children. We even made our own costumes (see below). Tricking and Treating went on in a serious way with the emphasis on the tricks. Kids carried on on their own—parents stayed home. Some of the tricks were ashamedly rough and even violent. Since no one was interested in gathering candy treats we set off stink bombs on people’s doorsteps even before they could answer the doorbell.

Accuse me of indulging in nostalgia, but isn’t there also some sort of cultural shift reflected in adults purloining this formerly kids-only day?

The first evidence of this takeover was adults attempting to turn the treating into something benevolent—to defang it, taking all the perverse pleasure out of the soft-core wilding. They did this by pressuring kids to collect money for UNICEF rather than scrambling after Hershey’s Kisses and mini Three Musketeers bars. Then, either out of fear that their kids would be molested, poisoned, or kidnapped they began to accompany them as they made their rounds.

We now live in a doorman-protected apartment house and you would think parents who live here would be comfortable tonight turning their tikes loose in the hallways. But no, when our doorbell rings, 100 percent of the time the children will have parents tagging along with them. Parents, by the way, frequently in costumes more elaborate than their sons’ and daughters’.

You tell me what this all means. I suspect it has something to do with adults feeling the need to escape adulthood, or their current identity, by reliving childhood—this time as they wished they had lived it back then.

Me? I’m going out tonight as Alex Rodriguez in an LA Dodgers uniform. And, like A-Rod, I’ll be collecting money for myself.