On Halloween

Fear and trembling

By Moristotle

Daily walks for days now in my neighborhood have made me witness to blow-up ghosts, goblins, ghouls (and cartoon Goofy’s) that neighbors paid hard-earned dollars for at Target or wherever these flimsy, quickly deflating toy balloons can be found. Are they competing with each other for ghouliest, or gaudiest?

From the Scratching Post:Fear and trembling

By Ken Marks

[Originally posted on The Scratching Post one month ago today, on October 23, 2021. Extracted here by permission of the author.]

Now and then I’m accused, usually for goods reasons, of being insensitive. At the year’s end, when the subject of new year’s resolutions comes up, I don’t write anything down, but I remind myself that insensitivity is a demon I haven’t exorcised. It’s a lifelong struggle.

Putting on a show

    So I counted it a personal victory when I realized how insensitively we celebrate Halloween. Of all our yearly observances, it’s the cruelest and most misguided. Millions of adults annually go out of their way to scare the bejesus out of little kids. They delude themselves by imagining that kids enjoy it, but the small fry have misled them. To save face, they’ll tell you, “Yow! I think my heart stopped! Ha ha ha!” Fright is supposedly fun. Just ask any roller coaster junky.
    I sense you doubting me....

[Read the whole thing on The Scratching Post.]

Copyright © 2021 by Ken Marks Ken Marks was a contributing editor with Paul Clark & Tom Lowe when “Moristotle” became “Moristotle & Co.” A brilliant photographer, witty conversationalist, and elegant writer, Ken contributed photographs, essays, and commentaries from mid-2008 through 2012. Late in 2013, Ken birthed the blog The Scratching Post. He also posts albums of his photos on Flickr.

Eight Years Ago Today: Of ghoulies and ghosties

By Tom Lowe

[Originally appeared on October 30, 2012.]

From ghoulies and ghosties
And long-leggedy beasties
And things that go bump in the night,
Good Lord, deliver us!

Goines On: Stand by for Halloween

Click image for more vignettes

Goines’ went to sleep Thursday night with some lines of limerick about the end of Trump bouncing around in his head. Once or twice, while peeing, he toyed with the wording, but nothing was clicking.
    He was heartened, then, upon arising on Friday, when Mrs. Goines rushed back into the bedroom with her iPhone raised. “Look at this! Trump has contracted Covid-19!”
    Goines’ first thought was that he could comment on Moristotle’s “Four Years Ago Today” column – another malady:

Correspondence: Trying to understand the US Presidential election

Edited by Moristotle

Is evil really the human default? And good a hard, civilized choice? “Why Trump Is Different—and Must Be Repelled” [Adam Gopnik, New Yorker, November 3]. Excerpt:

Correspondence: Post-Halloween horrors

Edited by Moristotle

“Hillary’s Male Tormentors ” [Frank Bruni, NY Times, November 2]. Excerpt:

Tuesday with Another Voice

Today's voice belongs to
Contributing Editor
Tom Lowe

Of ghoulies and ghosties

From ghoulies and ghosties
And long-leggedy beasties
And things that go bump in the night,
Good Lord, deliver us!

No gata do it, no haeftu

Traditional Irish
Turnip Halloween Lantern

While fiddling around with an interesting if trivial idea for today's post—the question how the verb to have to (or have got to) came to be used to mean to be made or required to: Wikipedia's article on modal verbs suggests that have to and have got to developed in Hawaiian Creole English, in which "modality is typically indicated by the use of invariant pre-verbal auxiliaries...gata 'have got to,' haeftu 'have to,' baeta 'had better,' sapostu 'am/is/are supposed to'"—

While I was fiddling around with that, I realized that I hadn't paid enough (or any) critical attention to the reasons my friend gave who gently suggested it was because I had become a grumpy old man that I had dumped on Halloween. He had written to me:

This Halloween, I was reflecting on the fact that it's nice that our most celebrated Holidays (Halloween, Christmas, Thanksgiving, Valentine's Day) all revolve around giving gifts and appreciating the company of others. Rather than abstain, I think it better to put your own twist on the holiday, because God knows, they've been twisted plenty over the millennia for a million different reasons.

    I think I gave this a bye because it's so hopeful and positive-seeming, and my friend has two young daughters, on whose behalf he and his wife have to make difficult parental choices.
    But do these holidays really revolve around sweetness and light? I've already examined Halloween a bit, as well, actually, as Christmas and Thanksgiving. They don't come off well. Christmas and Thanksgiving, in particular, promote an orgy of animal slaughter.
    On Thanksgiving, people go about giving thanks—some of it, admittedly, to the animals they're about to eat, but more of it to their Heavenly Father for "providing" it. Thank you, God, for putting me atop the Great Food Chain of Being. Second only to him.
    During Christmas, people pray for peace on Earth (but not in the abattoirs) and love one another, while participating in the culture of violence toward other animals. Clement Clark Moore's poem needs updating:

'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the slaughterhouse....

    And do you need reminding that the man whose birthday is associated with Christmas was put on Earth by a "loving" God, according to the pagan myth that came to ennoble it¹, in order to be cruelly tortured and executed? But we get to celebrate that on another holiday.

I think that these second thoughts on grumpiness were sparked by a recent interchange with Motomynd. We were talking about the grand-opening video shown on the Crystal Bridges website for its collection of American art. Among the images the video features are two eighteen-wheelers (like the rigs my Bentonville brother-in-law used to drive for WalMart); one sports a photograph of cooked cow on its side, and the other heralds the logo of one of the world's biggest factory animal farms.
    Motomynd commented:

Did you notice how the camera lens lingered noticeably on each of the logos on the trucks? It struck me as odd to be watching a video I assumed was in some way going to celebrate the grand opening of a wonderful new art museum, but in reality turned out to be mainly a commercial for WalMart and some of its favored vendors. Given the nature of the video, one has to wonder what is in store for visitors to the museum.

    The values embodied in the video clip seem to me to contradict art's essential role in challenging tradition, however useful the WalMart money may have been for the acquisition of Alice Walton's collection and the construction of a museum to show it to a public all too reluctant to be challenged.

I have one of those decorative calendars that comes with a frame in which, month-to-month, you switch to a new placard. The placard for this month features the image of a turkey. I display November with the same spiritual sorrow I feel when I eat "meat" because I'm served it by a host whom I choose not to offend or conflict with.
_______________

1. Another related myth is cited in a letter Thomas Paine wrote to President Thomas Jefferson on Christmas Day 1802: "I congratulate you on the birthday of the New Sun, now called Christmas-Day, and I make you a present of a thought on Louisiana.²"
   
   –Thomas Paine's Rights of Man: A Biography, by Christopher Hitchens, 2006, p. 138
2. Paine had in the preceding paragraph suggested that Jefferson, to help France out of her financial straits, purchase the Louisiana Territory, which Spain had just ceded to France. Jefferson did so the following year, for four or ten cents an acre, depending on the source.

What was that about Halloween?

On October 31, I proposed that participating in trick-or-treating has no sound basis, and that's why "it's silly." Well, what is the basis of Halloween, and how is it unsound?
    The holiday's tap root is pagan (i.e., from pre-Abrahamic religions), in primitive man's harvest festivals and festivals remembering the dead.
    The Abrahamic (monotheistic) religion Christianity adopted elements of the practice for its evening before All Saints' Day. Halloween is short for "All Hallows' Evening." The verb to hallow means to make or set apart as holy, or to respect or honor greatly, to revere. And a hallower is one who hallows.
    Little hallowing happens on Halloween. Anyway, hallowing would better be done continually throughout the year. To relegate reverence to one day out of 365 leads to neglecting the other 365, same as remembering the planet on Earth Day forgets it the rest of the year.

Typical Halloween activities include carving pumpkins and trick-or-treating. I used to participate in them myself, but then I realized that doing so was...silly. And having realized that much, I also realized that to continue to participate would be to disrespect myself. The time had come for some public reflection.

Trick-or-treating, according to Wikipedia, "already existed in Great Britain and Ireland in the form of souling, where children and poor people would sing and say prayers for the dead in return for cakes."
    How much less sound can you get? What could a "prayer for the dead" possibly do, seeing as how there is not a single, corroborable instance of a prayer's ever having been answered?
    Anyway, if that's the original reason for kids going around in costumes to collect candy (cakes), why aren't they dropping down on their knees to merit the treats?
    No, they're not learning anything about reverence; they're just out for some free loot and a bit of fun. To do what everybody does.
    For the loot, let them ask their parents to pick up some candy for them at the supermarket, which their parents might do many times a year, rather than wait for the one night when they're permitted, by unthinking custom, to go out and bother their neighbors (some of whom, admittedly, get into the spirit of the thing and don't mind terribly—everyone gives candy to trick-or-treaters, you know?).
    As for reverence...good luck. America may be "religious," but its daily practice doesn't seem to have much to do with reverence. And Halloween is its once-a-year big betrayal.
_______________

November 6 misgivings; yes, I've been back to the post above quite a few times...

Halloween: the silliest holiday?

Halloween is perhaps the silliest of our holidays, a good example of following tradition just because it's tradition, like the woman who always cut her turkey in half for Thanksgiving baking.
    One day her daughter asked her, "Mom, why do you cut the turkey in half?"
    Her mom said, "Hmm, I don't really know, that's just what my mother always did."
    So her daughter called her grandmother: "Grandma, why do we cut the turkey in half?
    "Lands, dear, I don't know. You'd have to ask my mother."
    So her granddaughter wrote to her great grandmother: "Great Gran, why do we cut the turkey in half?"
    And her great grandmother replied: "Oh, sweetie, our oven wasn't big enough for the whole bird."

That's my treat for readers today. And you didn't even have to put on a witch's costume and come out in the dark to knock on my door.

November 4: Follow-up on the silliness of Halloween
_______________
Thanks to William B. Ross, MD, for the anecdote, which he told me in about 1973 in order to illustrate that just because something is a tradition doesn't mean there's a sound basis for continuing to observe it. It has continued to instruct and guide, reminding me to look for reasons for doing things rather than to follow unsound habits.

Courtesy's dilemma

Alec Baldwin narrates
"Meet Your Meat"

Letters to local editors have been unremarkable lately. But in Durham's Herald-Sun this morning, under a title that "quoted" a yard sign I saw in Mountain View a couple of weeks ago, was a letter from Heather Moore of the PETA Foundation¹.
    "PETA" stands for "People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals." I'm not a member of PETA, but I am a person for the ethical treatment of animals.
    Or am I?
    Ms. Moore's letter asks whether we "want to be truly horrified this Halloween?" Assuming we do, she suggests that we "forget Friday the 13th and watch 'Meet Your Meat'—frightening footage from factory farms and slaughterhouses, chilling places full of panic and bloodshed...."

In writing to commend her, I came to an unexpected, and self-challenging, conclusion:

Thanks to Heather Moore of PETA for reminding us how horribly we human animals treat other animals, many of whom have sufficient intelligence and consciousness to suffer terribly in the process of being fed and slaughtered for our unnecessary culinary pleasure.
    Ms. Moore asks whether we "want to be truly horrified this Halloween." The answer, of course, is that we do not. We'll not spend a second longer on this topic than we need to realize that we must change the subject to preserve our peace of mind.
    We won't stop eating animals, however beneficial to our health, or however much they suffer. Just don't make us think about it.
    Philosophically, I'm not one of the "we" or the "us," but out of courtesy to my host I will eat animal flesh if it's served. Ms. Moore prompts me to reconsider whether that courtesy is morally justified.²

I like it that there's a religious angle to all of this. If God wrote the Bible (and God were ethical), there'd be no animal sacrifice in it, Old or New.
_______________

1. The full text of Ms. Moore's letter, which may not be available on the web for long:
   

   Want to be truly horrified this Halloween? Then forget Friday the 13th and watch "Meet Your Meat"—frightening footage from factory farms and slaughterhouses, chilling places full of panic and bloodshed. Nearly 10 billion terrified animals are killed in slaughterhouses every year. They bellow in pain and agony and fight for their lives, but they are no match for the knife-wielding killers who string them up, slice their throats, and often dump then in scalding water to soften their skin and remove their hair or feathers. Many are boiled alive or dismembered while they're still conscious.
       This eerie scene plays out not just on Halloween, but 365 days a year. See it for yourself at www.PETA.org. But I warn you: It will give you nightmares. The only way to make the horror stop is by switching to a vegan diet.

2. The Herald-Sun ran my letter on October 25, under the title, neither reviewed nor approved by me, "Is there a moral way to eat meat?"