I was walking my son to school the other day, when my son pointed to a holiday decoration on the neighbor’s house and said, “Daddy? What’s that?”
I was struck so dumb I couldn’t speak, not least because one of the renters of that house — a butchishe woman of the “wait, which boy band are you channeling?” type — was raking her leaves. In considering my answer to him, as we walked on, three possibilities occurred to me to explain what I saw.
And what was it, exactly, that I saw, hanging upside down a pole jutting out from that woman’s upstairs porch? A roughly humanoid figure — perhaps mummified in burlap, which in turn had been darkened with soot or perhaps watercolor paint — wrapped tightly in red tape. The “head” (pointed downward) had a square board strung around the neck, upon which was written… well, here I have to slip into code in a probably perfunctory attempt to escape the ghosts of the chercheplex. What was written on the board was something akin to the phrase “I made an effort to do something in a little village.”
One possibility, favored by my spouse, is that this was an attempt at a species of historicist irony. By referencing a recent piece of pop culture, and doing so in a way that signaled some of country’s ugliest aspects, perhaps my neighbor was trying to say a version of “hey, look at this truly ugly part of our history! This is literally the scariest thing I can think of!” Now, if this had happened with a lot of context — say, other displays of a similar nature, perhaps especially of those displays lampooned the perpetrators of that type of horrific violence — I might buy that explanation. This would be on par with what remains the scariest haunted house I have ever visited, in Spookyworld (Foxboro, MA), one that involved dirty needles and OD’ing drag queens on the floor of a Disco of Death. But there was no context. The associated display was a very standard one involving fake gravestones, skeletons, a big clown diorama in the window, and lots of cobwebs. Standard Halloween gothic.
A second possibility — one that I later learned is consistent with what my neighbor would publicly espouse if questioned on the matter (in an unapologetic piece of literal street theatre, I sicced my 79 year old father on this woman so that he could innocently ask her “hey, what does that mean?”) — is that she was unironically honoring the explicit intent of said recent piece of pop culture by creating a display of what in fact happens to persons who make efforts to do things in little villages. The trouble with this explanation is that it kind of implies that while every other part of the (rather typical) Halloween display was on brand (as in, here are examples of all the things that scare us most, which we put out at this time of year so that we can get it out of our system, so to speak), this one part was not on brand. It doesn’t quite make sense that someone would honor “dishonorable” things (skeletons, clowns) while also honoring an ostensibly honorable thing (the moral order that prevents people from making an effort to do ostensibly immoral things in small villages, and the reality of violence visited upon persons who make any such efforts).
The third possibility — which is the one I explicated to my older son when we were out of earshot — is that she was unironically honoring the implicit intent of said recent piece of pop culture by creating etc. etc. This explanation requires that she is in on the joke, so to speak, of the controversy surrounding that particular artistic object. And while in on the joke, she isn’t ironically trying to make fun of it, using Halloween to point out of how fucking scary it is use the trope of the little village and its violent moral order, she is instead using Halloween to honor that trope. She is, in a word, owning the libs by stringing up a dummy of a lynching victim on her house. This explanation, like the one before it, assumes that my neighbor is abusing, in a way, the spirit of Halloween.
I guess this raises the same kind of question that bedeviled Prince Harry one fancy-dress ball lo these many years ago, when he thought it would be funny to wear a Nazi arm band. Are there some things that are so de trop that we can’t even joke about them? And if we say we can’t joke about them, doesn’t that given them even more power? If we can’t laugh at everything, even God, then does not that lead us down the path of dusting the pages with poison mushroom powder so that we kill our fellow monks who were only, at the end of the day, trying to amuse themselves after a long long hours of prayer and fasting?
How on earth did I get from describing a neighbor’s certainly misguided, and possibly horrifically racist, Halloween display to Umberto Eco? Sigh. The perils of a liberal arts education.
Pimpgnosis 