halloween resurrected

Halloween in America comes from hidden roots in need of resurrection. Within the last century, when christmas carolers cajoled down the street, you boarded your doors. Carolers were pan handlers, saying we'll sing for booze and food and gold. Saying we'll tear up your shit if you don't. Halloween was pretty similar. It was always a liminoid event, a collective ritual where people got together for a mutually-agreed upon purpose, that purpose being a celebration of a slice of life where social hierarchy is flattened. Where everyone truly is equal. Think burning man. Think EDM shows. Think Occupy Wall Street.

Halloween was a special liminoid event because not only did it flatten the social hierarchy, it flipped it. The powerless dressed as something abnormal, something with strength, going to the front doors of the powerful and demanding tribute. It was a one-night rumspringa of the lower classes. How it used to be was that Halloween was a shit show. Participants fucked up fences and slashed tires and did tons of property damage. It was the vandalist’s version of the purge, taking place once a year on All Hallow's Eve.

A hundred years ago the newspapers and insurance agencies and candy companies got together and cast a spell of social amnesia on the populous. They concocted a mass cultural transmission to commodify the ritual for the rich, a sacrilege wherein the original hierarchical flip got re-flipped.

These liminoid events have morphed into liminal events where those special collective rituals take place at milestones instead of meaningful calendar days. Think of baptism, the water washing over us acting as a ritualistic cleanser. A spiritual do-over.

The liminal Halloween of today doesn't quite feel very cleansing. Today, Halloween is no longer liminoid, taking place one day a year. Today, Halloween happens whenever many of us leave the house. We don our MAGA hat or our BLM shirt and go out and riot, manifesting the flipped social hierarchy, the powerless showing their power.

The media focuses on the events most easily-captured, the physical damage. What's harder to put a camera on is the psychological warfare. MAGAts feel powerless, as if the way things have been is slowly being slipped from their control. The BLMers are kindred spirits with them in that way, feeling that fast and furious action is their only means to get noticed, to enact change.

More and more, having a voice means taking a side, and taking a side means dressing up. Once you do you're no longer who you were underneath. You're a MAGAt, or a BLMer, with all the connotations that come with either. Today we don't see physical damage as much as we do psychological warfare. People sling their molotov words. They graffiti their transgressions on any surface that will hold a message. People take up their version of morals and slash them across the throats of their dissenters.

Halloween used to be about the catharsis of annual power reversal. It was the weak submitting the wealthy for just enough time to calm back down. When the wealthy caught on, they did what the wealthy do and culled us calm with candy. Marx said it was religion that acted as an opiate for the masses, but commodity is the real sedative, because today, Halloween isn't a power reversal. It's a hunger games, an orchestrated civil war pitting one disenfranchised group against another. Weak on weak, the wealthy watching as they wipe their bloody hands onto all of ours.