Halloween is almost here. I feel pretty good about it, like the holiday will hit pretty close to my heart, the hearts of our nation. Everyone is stricken with paranoia, and Bush has a neurotic obsession with the word evil. Why not then? Let’s have big Halloween bashes to celebrate all of this madness.
This time of strangeness, gross depravity and murder sort of reminds me of 1938. Not for any genuine physical reasons, but for what I’ve heard and for the similarity in terrible vibrations that are in the air and drowning the news.
In 1938 the country was so paranoid that Orson Welles convinced millions of people that the Martians had landed and were ready to take over with his “The War of the Worlds” radio show. People who heard didn’t think it that far-fetched. They were ready for anything at that point, and Martians swooping down to destroy them would have just been another miserable peak to the trend of horror that they lived in.
In 1938 though, they were getting really weird, and were surviving the Great Depression with rumors of Adolph Hitler in Europe marching all over the place and gathering mass artillery to regain Germany. Today we aren’t that paranoid, and we wouldn’t believe a hoax like old Orson pulled off.
Say Tom Brokaw came on the news and claimed that Saddam’s robot army had launched a full-scale attack on our homeland. Billions of cyborgs that Saddam created in his own image had walked here, undetectable under the Atlantic Ocean and were now seizing Washington, D.C. and demanding all of our women. I’m sure Hollywood could produce images of this sort of thing.
I wouldn’t budge though, because I know what Orson did in 1938, and I don’t fall for the same gag twice. On the other hand, I also know that half of our civilians are ready for this sort of thing.
I have a friend that is prepared for all situations. Even if a gig like this was rumored, he’d drive around in his van gathering women to hand over to the robots. Come to think of it, I might join him, just for fun, to protect the frightened women, of course. I might stage the whole thing.
But all of that is rambling gibberish gone out of hand, and ridiculed paranoia – very extreme, but not so far from the truth. Not too far-fetched to believe that people in our nation are ready for about anything, that we wouldn’t even be that surprised if Bush was assassinated, the World Series blown up, or if priests started molesting children as if it were part of their job description.
None of this stuff is too far from the norm, and hell, the priest thing did happen. But I’m just writing to remind people that although things are getting weird, a healthy bit of paranoia never really hurt anyone. Don’t fall for Tom Brokaw’s gag on Halloween, and don’t go for the whole alien thing either . although I’ve heard that recently forty-five UFOs have been spotted somewhere near Laredo, Texas.
Times have changed a lot since 1938 though, and even making comparisons would be a terrible error on my part. We’ve evolved, a sort of mass mutation of the mind, and it is not even close to the same world. We do still celebrate Halloween though.