The War on Halloween.

We've been so busy being depressive here, we'd almost forgotten the holiday season! We're a mere four days from the ONLY HOLIDAY THAT MATTERS, and our favorite time of year has arrived: when the souls of the dead creep blindly through the darkness, when the wind is brisk and leaves scuttle merrily across the pavement, when the evenings are rosy and filled with Dickensian -- oops, pardon us, Lovecraftian cheer, and when every heart overflows with the murky glory of Halloween! All the other holidays are comparatively worthless, in our opinion. You're entitled to your own viewpoint, of course, but we won't endorse it.

It warms the heart to know that everyone, no matter what their age or belief system, can get into the spirit of things. (Hallelujah Night sounds charming, but it's impossible not to detect the pleasing note of panic underlying it.) There may be naysayers, certainly: those who tell us that Halloween is the Devil's game night, and that those who celebrate it are promoting the works of evil. Most likely true, but what of it? The distrust of the religious toward Halloween, as much as the holiday's curious appeal to more fun people, testifies to its importance. It awakens our primal intuitions, on at least two very basic levels: the power of disguise and the immediacy of death.

"We were all there when Janco arrived with his masks, and everyone immediately put one on. Then something strange happened. Not only did the mask immediately call for a costume, it also demanded a quite definite, passionate gesture, bordering on madness. Although we could not have imagined it five minutes earlier, we were walking around with the most bizarre movements, festooned and draped with impossible objects, each one of us trying to outdo the other... The motive power of the masks was irresistibly coveyed to us."
-- Hugo Ball

"The moment you take someone's face away in that way, it's the most electrifying impression: suddenly to find oneself knowing that that thing one lives with, and which one knows is transmitting something all the time, is no longer there. It's the most extraordinary sense of liberation."
-- Peter Brook

And the dead must have their day:



And yet ever and again we hear reports of active Halloween suppression, for one reason or another.

We at DHAIP deplore this. The collective unconscious must have its escape valve. Social repression, as with individual repression, only festers into mass perversion. We demand that Halloween be made into a federal holiday, and that the President indicate his respect for the tradition by wearing an evil clown costume. All the time.

We must continue to joyfully celebrate and keep Halloween in our own fashion. It has never made us a penny richer, but we say bless it, all the same!