American Fear

So. It’s Halloween, which was my favorite holiday back when I had time for holidays that family members didn’t force me to attend (I am being “forced” to shepherd the world’s most enthusiastic Kitty around the block this evening, which one can’t help but look forward to). I already wrote the Halloween Poem this year, and I have no money for a costume, so how to celebrate? I was going to use the opportunity to write about the potentially economicidal deficit hole that the U.S. accountant-in-chief is touring the country frantically to make people aware of, figuring hell, that’s scary, right? But perhaps scaring other people ought to be left to other people, if I’m the sort that thinks economic fact is good enough.

I’ll stick to analyzing fear, which I’m much more suited for, but keep the same context: Namely, Fear in America.

Fear has played a huge role in our country this decade; perhaps bigger than it has since McCarthy. We’ve gone to war plenty of times, and usually our government asks us to be brave — to pinch pennies, to donate goods and services, to work hard and pray hard and be the tough, unbeatable Americans we all like to think we are (which is probably why, deep down, we like war).

But not this time, eh? This time, we went to war and the government asked us to be afraid. To go to our rooms like children, to keep shopping and not worry while the grown-ups handled the war. (And a fine job they’re doing, yo.) Not to conserve or recycle or donate, but buy lots of presents for eaach other for Xmas, and watch the color-codes, and denounce anybody who says anything bad about the President. To be greedy and fearful and reactionary.

That doesn’t really sound like America to me. From what I understand, we’re kind of legendary badasses over here, aren’t we? I mean, England was to the 18th-century world what we are today — an Empire, the ultimate in “don’t mess with them”, the Big Bosses, the one landlord you can’t afford to get on the wrong side of. And we, who were just a bunch of outcasts really, stood up to them, fled to the woods and then stomped them when they came after us, and eventually punked them into giving us our own country, on the biggest, most fertile landmass yet discovered. We wrote our own government, and for two centuries successfully held together a country many times the size of most successful ones. We were loudmouths, vandals, snipers, warrior-poets, all that.

We laid the smack down on an Empire, and though it’s predictable that it didn’t make us smart enough to realize that our own days as an Empire would be numbered if we chose to go that route, you’d think it would have at least made us tough enough to stand up to our own politicans. Unfortunately, like most tough people, we have psychological weaknesses — we can’t bear to be called unpatriotic, we’re afraid of people different than us, and we get so caught up worrying about our own homesteads that we tend to shrug and figure the suits must know what they’re doing.

And they do, believe me. At least, they do in the short-term. In the long-term, they don’t care, because they’ll take their ill-gotten treasures and run, and we’ll be left holding the bloody bag.

So remember, when you jump at a shadow tonight, when you feel like a kid just long enough to wonder if the dead really are out walking, when you get a little scared of the dark — remember that fear always has a purpose. Fear can make people act without thinking. Fear can make people close their eyes to things they really need to see, or close their mouths when they want to speak out, or hand over their most prized possessions (say, civil rights) in order to keep those shadows from leaping out. But you’ve all seen the movies — the shadows leap out anyway. Being timid just gets you eaten first.

Maybe this Halloween, the fear’s purpose can be to help us practice being badasses again, because if things keep going the way they are, we’re going to need those skills we’ve let languish since the Revolution.

Viva la ph34r! And while you’re here, please tell me what’s a good scary movie. I haven’t seen a good one since Candyman, I think. But I hate bad ones, so I usually skip them until someone tells me otherwise. ;)