Trick or Treat! The Scary, Wild Ride From Halloween to Election Day!
Halloween may have originated with the Celtic autumnal festival of Samhain that marked the transition between the end of the harvest season and the beginning of the darkness of winter.
During Samhain, the boundaries were blurred between the secular and the profane, between this civilized, well-ordered world and "the other world" of decay, death and disorder. Ergo, all the skeletons, goblins, ghouls and zombies who on Halloween go door to door extorting the living to exorcise the dead.
Many cultures have festivals like this. Halloween resembles the Shrovetide festivities of Mardi Gras in New Orleans, Fasching and Rosenmontag in Germany, Carnival in Rio de Janeiro, and even the western world's secular equivalent - New Year's Eve. These are wild, uninhibited public celebrations. The essence of all of them is that the usual boundaries of identity, attire, custom and behavior are suspended, inverted or erased, if only for a day.
Kids love Halloween because, as kids, they are not yet fully acculturated into the highly structured and hierarchical society of adults. Adults, too, love Halloween precisely because they have been fully acculturated into the highly structured and hierarchical society of adults and, for at least this one day, the adults want out of their shackles.
Decades and decades ago, my family lived for a few years in a row house in a borough near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I remember one Halloween when my normally taciturn father - unleashing, perhaps, the impishness he repressed within him - devised a prank to spook the trick-or-treaters who mobbed the houses on our street.
In those days, everyone had fresh milk delivered door to door. Schneider's Dairy trucks meandered through the neighborhood before sunrise delivering milk in glass bottles, along with butter, cream and cheese, as one liked. The milk bottles were deposited into a small wood box outside everyone's door, and the washed empties were also put there for pick up. This was the original and, in my opinion, superior system of recycling where heavy glass containers were not smashed and melted down, but returned, washed and reused over and over and over again.
My father's Halloween prank was to put a carved pumpkin into our door stoop milk box. He then placed a small paper cone speaker and a low voltage DC red light bulb inside the pumpkin. The red bulb was powered by hidden batteries and was activated by a simple push button switch when the top of the milk box was opened. Within the house, beside the door, my father placed his luggable (as contrasted with portable) "high tech" (well, high tech for those days!) Grundig reel-to-reel monaural tape recorder that included a low wattage tube amplifier. He connected a microphone to the tape recorder and fed a throughput line from the amplifier to the small speaker in the pumpkin in the milk box.
Then, on Halloween, when the kids banged on the front door demanding candy, my father cackled through the amplifier into the pumpkin inside the milk box and scared the bejesus out of them! I was too young back then to partake of the prank itself, but I was an accomplice. My adolescent job was simply to dole out the goodies once the kids had recovered… after carefully, gingerly lifting the milk box lid and finding... a red-illuminated pumpkin head… that suddenly SHRIEKED at the top of my father's lungs!
Low tech stuff, I know; but it was the 1960s and our sense of good-natured jests was different than it is today.
No, I don't do things like that anymore. Besides, Halloween feels different these days. Fewer kids come door to door, probably because of the genuine fear of bad people playing really mean tricks on them. The older kids -- by which I mean twelve and up, by the standards of Big City juvenile crime statistics -- dress in their usual urban garb: dark hoodies, face masks and sunglasses. They also forgo the trick-or-treating at the door and go straight for the money till as they smash through the front entries of convenience stores with a stolen Kia or Hyundai, snatch beer and cigarettes and rob at gunpoint all the customers within. As for the "younger kids," they mostly stick to begging candy and wearing store-bought, plasticky, Hollywood or Disneyland-themed costumes.
Boring.
Why don’t I see any juniors scarily masquerading as Donald Trump, Kamala Harris, Justin Trudeau, Lindsey Graham, Ursula von der Leyen, Benjamin Netanyahu, Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron or Volodymyr Zelensky?
Unlike when I lived in Pittsburgh, eons ago, parents now chaperone the munchkins. Their cries for tricks or treats seem, somehow, mechanical and subdued.
So, no, I don't do pranks like my father did.
Instead... I pretend that I cannot hear what the kids are saying.
"Eh? What's that? I can't hear you!"
And I insist that they shout louder! AND LOUDER! AND LOUDER until they are jumping up and down screaming:
TRICK OR TREAT!!!
TRICK OR TREAT!!!
TRICK OR TREAT!!!
... and they truly hurt my eardrums and their parent chaperones out on the street are wondering WTF is going on... !!!??? Well, I do this because acting wildly out of character is good for people of all ages and it's what Halloween is all about... before everything returns to "normal" adult-like behavior the following day.
During the Halloweens of yore, the sharp lines between Life and Death were blurred for one day a year.
Now, in the third decade of the 21st Century, the lines between Life and Death are blurred all the time.
Some adult "leaders," for example, cosplay all the time as though they are comic book super-heroes (or villains, as the case may be). Unfortunately, they toy violently with other peoples' lives, other peoples' economies, other peoples' cultures, other peoples' politics, and other peoples' hopes. They demand that we revel in militant bullying like a gladiatorial blood sport, insist that we cheer the obliteration of "terrorists" (who are but martyrs to their own causes of freedom), and lead us to gloat over the slaughter of anyone who resists the "rules based order." These cosplayers - politicians, diplomats, generals, media moguls, trend-setters, financiers, plutocrats - live in a make-believe world and demand that all of us pretend that we, too, believe in it. And like it.
Some of us, however few we might be, don't believe and don't like it.
But. At least we have elections. So we are told.
It might not be a coincidence that less than a week passes from the frightfulness of Halloween to the frightfulness of Election Day. This year, we can choose between two parties' candidates for president, both of whom have the depth and stability of shallow draft boats with no keels. Although Ms. Harris and Mr. Trump have very different personas, apart from incendiary social and cultural issues designed to excite us, it is clear that both candidates are role-playing. Neither one has the will, the intention nor the power to actually change anything of substance. The rule of the imperial mafiosi and the Praetorian Guard will continue unabated no matter who is elected in November and the vast majority of us, no matter where you live in the world, will not have much to say about it.
Nevertheless, I am merely feeling sobered, not defeated, precisely because only by getting beyond passive electoral politics can people actually make a difference.
The sermon of impotence is beaten into us and we would be reduced to mere voting spectators without agency. But it's a false sermon. We are neither impotent nor mere spectators, if we don't want to be.
Halloween is a time of possibilities, a time for acting wildly out of character for people of all ages. It's a time of participation and a time to suspend the deliberately inculcated attitudes of insouciance, disillusionment and decrepitude.
I invite you to scroll back to the top of this essay. The headpiece illustration is not really about Halloween. The original 1843 caption for Arnold Ferdinand Ewald's etching reads:
"Es ist nicht schwerer, auf einem Besen zum Blocksberg als auf dem Pegasus zum Parnass hinauf zu reiten.“
Loosely translated from German - with a great deal of poetic license - it says:
“You can fly to the mountaintops on a broom as easily as on a winged horse.”
Well what is that supposed to mean?
In 1843, the world was still experiencing the catharsis of the Enlightenment. It was a time of human potential. Its mantra was that everyone was capable, regardless of race, religion, nationality, sex, ethnicity or class. Its creed was that knowledge was both possible and knowable to all; and, through knowledge, the shackles of darker ages could be thrown off. The Earth was not the center of the Universe and the Universe was infinitely huge! There were microscopic worlds, scientific worlds, and astronomical worlds beyond any that humankind had so far imagined. The science and technologies and socialized civilization of the future beckoned. The Internet, as it once was - and yet could still be if the Inquisition censors will stop trying to emasculate it - was a natural extension of the Enlightenment philosophy of an open, accessible culture of understanding. That culture of understanding, in turn, leads to real Democracy, within and without, beyond the passivity of merely voting for preselected candidates.
The original etching at the top of this essay is from the estate of Marina Ewald.
Marina Ewald was a prime example of one who could fly to the mountaintops through sheer will, determination and imagination. She was one of the founders of ZIS Stiftung für Studienreisen, a tax-exempt foundation located at the Schule Schloss Salem in Baden-Württemberg. The ZIS foundation provides travel scholarships to enable young people to voyage solo to parts unknown and to learn to understand people and cultures of the world that are new to them. It encourages young solo adventurers to set and achieve goals that they might grasp only by extending themselves, by reaching further and flying to the mountaintops in ways that they never imagined that they could. Not surprisingly, Marina Ewald was also the first person - let alone the first woman - to lead an Outward Bound expedition anywhere in the world.
Rainer Linke sent me the image of the etching at the top of this essay. He sits on the Board of Directors for ZIS Stiftung für Studienreisen. Mr. Linke is a German lawyer, a friend, correspondent and fellow ZIS stipend traveler like me. We met at the the organization's annual conference at Schule Schloss Salem in 1973.
In some ways, the nearly 70 posts at this Hippomuse Substack arose from the philosophy that underlies the ZIS foundation.
1843 was a year of possibilities. So was 1973. So is 2024 if we can blow away the smoke and stuffing.
Happy Halloween. Happy Election Day. Tricks and treats to all!
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Excellent article Steve. This is the first time I’ve heard about ZIS. Not surprised that you were selected to participate. I most enjoyed hearing about your father’s antics at Halloween. I would not have expected that from the very reserved gentleman that I knew from the late ‘60’s. My respect for him has been raised several notches.