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© unknownAmericans hate politics too much to fork out for Sarah Palin masks
There's little festive spirit in America this Halloween. Fox News offers an indictment of the general misery of recession-era USA with this dark story: "A girl was found hanging by a noose inside a haunted house attraction Thursday night. Customers may have even walked past her thinking she was a scary prop." Luckily, the girl survived, but this was just one of the many signs from the gods that all is not well in the beloved USA. Here are five more:
  1. Liberals hijack the festival to make a politically correct point.
    A student organisation in Ohio is running a poster campaign against "racist" Halloween costumes. The posters feature students of different ethnicities holding up photos of someone dressed as a stereotype (geisha girl, Arab terrorist etc), each beneath the tagline "We're a culture, not a costume." It was a cheap shot in the culture war, earning itself a volley of wonderful online pastiches. The best by far is of an offended Dracula holding up a photo of a guy in a vampire costume, again beneath the words "We're a culture, not a costume". Hey, his great grandfather didn't schlep all the way here from Romania to be a running gag at frat parties.
  2. Halloween becomes a sting operation to entrap paedophiles.
    The police are on alert in Fox Valley, Wisconsin for any signs of trouble from the burgeoning population of registered sex offenders. The cops will be conducting door-to-door inspections to make sure that they aren't talking to kids, handing out candy or "turning on the porch light". Ninety-one offenders are standing up for the spirit of the season and defying the order. A local defence attorney reasoned, "The fact of the matter is that well over 90 per cent of child sex offences occur when there is a prior relationship between the child and the offender ... The biggest danger you have is not from strangers, but from family". That cheering thought was the top story of the news-starved local paper, The Appleton Post-Crescent.


  3. People hate politicians so much that they refuse to wear their faces as masks.
    The Washington Post reports that the depression is just too depressing to be made fun of. According to Andra Duraes, manager of a DC costume shop, "This has been a very dead year as far as political stuff goes. We really don't have Sarah Palin. Nobody's asking for her." In previous years, Palin had flown off the shelves, along with Christine O'Donnell (presumably accompanied by a witch's hat and broom). But in 2011, says pollster Ron Faucheux, voters would rather dress as Lady Gaga than Newt Gingrich. "There's so much negativity. There's so much money. There's so much polarization that it's not something that people can step away from as easily and poke fun at," says Faucheux. Of course, one alternative would be to go dressed as Herman Cain who, as we all know, isn't really a politician at all.
  4. Rich people confirm our worst suspicions by mocking the poor.
    According to the New York Times, the law firm Steven J Baum celebrated last year's Halloween by dressing up as homeless people. That's warped enough, but it's even worse when you consider that Baum is a notorious foreclosure litigator and represents all of the largest mortgage lenders in the country. The Times journalist was sent photographs of the event by an informer. He describes them thus: "In one, two Baum employees are dressed like homeless people. One is holding a bottle of liquor. The other has a sign around her neck that reads: '3rd party squatter. I lost my home and I was never served.' My source said that 'I was never served' is meant to mock 'the typical excuse' of the homeowner trying to evade a foreclosure proceeding." One likes to imagine that somewhere around a burning car, a group of homeless people are having a Halloween party dressed as lawyers.
  5. The President just doesn't get it.
    On Saturday, children were invited to the White House for a holiday audience with Barack and Michelle Obama. The President handed out treats that included candy, cookies and dried fruit. Dried fruit?! Surely this is the apotheosis of liberalism gone mad? If there's one thing kids don't want on Halloween, it's to spend the night chewing on a dried date. To make things worse, the President posed with security men dressed as what looks like red peppers. Admittedly, every child finds the thought of having to eat vegetables terrifying, but is this really the best the White House can do?
All is not lost, however. Americans can still have fun, and the recession only makes the drinking harder. Arrests at the Ohio University bloc party were down from their high of 200, but it looks like the college will keep its "number one party school ranking" in spite of all those Ohioan liberal spoilsports. Elsewhere, a drunken Indiana student got bored waiting for a ride home and attempted to hijack one with his gun. Perhaps nothing better reflects the spirit of Obama's America than the weekend police report for Waukesha, Wisconsin. My favourite incident: "A father and his daughter were arguing at 9:37 pm Friday in the 2300 block of Imperial Lane about the daughter's addiction to prescription drugs after they were out drinking at a bar." Rock on, America.