pparently, there's a big brouhaha at the moment to stop what some people consider
to be the worst crisis of modern times: little girls who think Moana, the cartoon
Hawaiian princess in some Disney movie, is pretty and want to emulate her. This,
it seems, would cause the United States to plunge into chaos because it's
“appropriation” or some such thing.
Don't kid yourself. This isn't about culture. Like everything else these days, it's about race and sex and tradition, and how to undermine them. If a little boy wanted to dress up as Moana, or someone from the ghetto wanted to dress up as a slick-haired briefcase-carrying cologne-wearing door-to-door life insurance salesman, you can bet the lefties would be calling us names for opposing it.
Now, I'd probably gravitate to things that are are a little scary for me, like tensor calculus or yellow cake or the Windows blue screen of death. But even scarier is the implied racism of the terms “white privilege,” “cultural appropriation,” and so forth ad nauseam.
The purpose of Halloween is to help kids adapt to scary things. The world starts getting colder, as if starting to die. Snow starts to blanket the world. The start of winter is like death, zombiism, and white supremacism all rolled into one.
It seems that some adults have failed to come to grips with these things. Perhaps they had unhappy childhoods, and so everyone else must have one too.
It might make sense that little kids might want to dress up like a social justice warrior or that scary representative from Florida (isn't being a state rep appropriation almost by definition?) who decided to get five minutes of fame by twisting President Trump's words during his condolence call to the family of a soldier killed in Niger.
But those things are too abstract to make a convincing costume. Besides, they are all things, like mortgages, inflation, and April 15, that scare only adults. It would be like a kid dressing up as antidisestablishmentarianism: where would they even start?
So here are a few ideas, and no regard for whether they're politically correct.
- Younger Dryas Throw a sheet over their head and call them the Laurentide ice sheet. Granted, there are certain obvious problems with wearing a sheet, but I've always been partial to geological epochs, and there are lots of others to choose from, like the Archean era where the earth was covered by big clumps of bacteria.
- President Going out as a president is not very imaginative. but who says it has to be a real one? In 2024 the voters, fed up with the establishment and the never-Trumpers, might very well elect a raccoon.
- NSA The National Security Administration is still scary. The kid'll need a pair of sunglasses, couple of old hard drives, a few yards of Cat 6 to drag behind, and a couple of tools for tapping fiber optic cables. Just make sure they bring a signed FISA warrant with them. They're really easy to get.
- Silicon valley Carry around a big finger and wag it at people for telling us fake news. The kids'll need lots of adhesive tape to put over people's mouths for saying things they don't agree with.
- Cuba Carry around a sound generator and wear a Che t-shirt and a stache. Hand out pamphlets extolling the virtues of communism: starvation, secret police, gulags, that sort of thing. Always good for a laugh!
- Harvey Weinstein I don't actually recommend this one. Your kid could get arrested for public indecency. But if you can convince his or her friends to carry blankets over their heads to protect themselves from his sperm, it might get a couple of cheap laughs—the very effect I'm going for in this web page. Give them a wad of money in case somebody complains.
Well, by now you're probably saying, yes! Thank you! Those are great ideas! But aren't they a little abstract? And aren't they all appropriating somebody or something?
Sadly, that's the nature of Halloween. No matter who or what the child pretends to be, they're appropriating something. Civilization advances by appropriating what's good and rejecting what's bad.
That tells us what's really going on: white males encourage others to show admiration for their culture by appropriating it, because they're proud of it. If only the libs would appropriate that.
oct 26, 2017, 7:28 am; edited oct 27, 2017, 7:41 am
