2 weeks Ago By Rupert Hawksley
The only bright spot of this stupid, pointless, infuriating time of year is that at least my own child’s devotion to trick or treating has finally waned. Twelve long, long years it took, with me weeping with boredom every step of the witchy way. No, I didn’t find it cute when they were tiny and all dressed up like little witches, wizards and ghosts.
I found it boring and cold. No, I didn’t find it endearing when they got a bit older and started going up people’s paths themselves while parents waited at front gates. I found it boring and cold and embarrassing.
And last year, when they all changed into famous murderers and bloody corpses I found it boring and cold and wished we could at least go back to the bit where they were tiny and dressed – it turns out – relatively cutely after all. Halloween is a nightmare , and not in any of the ways it’s supposed to be. Particularly over the last 10 years or so, as the American way has overwhelmed us, it has become a festival of expensive tat and – as my personal energy and other resources become increasingly depleted – even more expensive effort.
God, I envy the people who can embrace it as a wonderful opportunity to show off their imaginative and creative skills via their kids’ inventive homemade costumes and intricate makeup, and the porches artfully dressed with webs, spiders and hand-carved pumpkins modelled on the gargoyles of Notre Dame. And by envy, I mean hate, obviously. Stop showing me up.
It has become a rehearsal for all the worst bits of Christmas. The weeks of anticipation and fibrillating excitement that distracts your children from even the nugatory bits of homework or LISTENING TO WHAT I TOLD YOU TO DO AND THEN DOING IT that they can customarily manage. The TV schedules and shops fill with one theme and one theme only.
And then there’s the comedown, aggravated by the sugar they have been encouraged to eat by people who don’t have to live with them for the next 24 hours and clean up the sick. But even more than these superficial frustrations and irritations, I find myself hating Halloween more with every passing year – with an animus that alas my child’s late-arriving disinterest in the event will do nothing to appease – because of the deeper stupidity it represents. I have always had a low tolerance for those who profess an interest in “the supernatural” (under which moronic umbrella I also include astrology, crystal-healing and the rest, simply because it saves time and mental filing space) but as the world becomes more and more full of thrashing illogicalities and more and more determined to uncouple fact from reality, I find my patience wearing even more thin.
I’ve just watched a documentary, for example, about the digital afterlife industry . Tech bros have realised that there is money to be made in appearing to allow people to talk to the dead. Of course there is.
It’s all the bereaved have wanted since time immemorial. Read Next As religion dies out, Halloween becomes more important than ever But now AI can crunch the whole of a dead person’s data – and the size and depth of our true digital footprint is astonishing – and add it to the whole of humanity’s internetted history and create an avatar of the lost person that, if all goes well, can converse utterly convincingly with the living. And they do.
And a not inconsiderable portion seem to slip towards the belief that their loved one has in fact returned. If humankind, as TS Eliot said, cannot bear very much reality, I suspect we can bear even less unreality and remain sane. Then there’s the US election – a straight fight between truth and untruth.
One side says what it likes, the other side sits there struggling to get its boots on while the falsities travel a million times round the world, swaying more of the credulous with every sweeping pass. Votes will come in, be counted, and the carefully tallied numbers are likely to be dismissed if they do not suit the Republicans, who are now more akin to cult members than a political party. There are the conspiracy theories that engulf us at every turn.
There are the repeated assaults on biological and other scientific facts. There is the desperate clinging on to the faith that the earth is not in climate crisis, that the accumulated evidence – the recorded temperatures, the visible storms and the hurricanes, the measurable rainfall, the plotted graphs drawn from repeated data sets – mean nothing and that we can all go on living our lives heedless and carefree. I feel we are dangerously maxed out.
We have used up all our allowance for playing with facts and truths, for looking for things below and beyond that we cannot understand. This is not the time to be encouraging, even in a plastic-pumpkin and rubber-masked way, people’s credulity. I can’t find even the limited fun I once could in us seeking out the unknown and unknowable, of indulging our fears and our fantasies.
This is the kind of thing you can afford to do when things are settled, agreed upon, when there is a body of established knowledge, when every fact is not up for debate and every apparent commonality is not built on shifting sand, to be rebuilt and recalibrated with every new breeze that blows. By heck, think of how much fun I’ll be by Christmas..
