Before I start, this post has been Hannitized for your protection, meaning there will be minimal contact with the lunatic right wing fringe...
You're all aware of the War On Christmas trope that Fox News humped last year like Triumph the Insult Comic Dog on a poodle in heat, I'm sure. You know, the Christmas holiday is under attack from a general secular trend or from persons and/or organizations with a deliberate or unconscious anti-Christian agenda....that kind of crap.
Obviously, Christmas won. No Christmas trees were taken hostage, no presents hijacked by a tall gangly green beast driving a sled pulled by a dog...none of that happened.
But not satisfied with this, the right wing has opened an attack on another pagan holiday of nearly equal import, co-opted by Christianity: Halloween.
From the front lines comes this dispatch...pardon the pun...
Pumpkin Panic! Pumpkin Shortage Predicted for Halloween"Mysterious"?
Halloween without a jack-o'-lantern is like Christmas without a pine tree, Easter without any eggs and election day without any smear ads. It just doesn't happen.
But this year, it just might be a pumpkinless holiday for many pumpkin procrastinators. Between heavy rains rotting seeds in the ground, harsh summer temps reducing fruiting blossoms and two mysterious pumpkin rots attacking pumpkins in the field, a significant portion of the pumpkin harvest this year has been ruined.
I think not. Halloween has a long dark pagan history, one that as the father of a Wiccan and former non-practicing Druid (still have my body paints), I've been reminded of over and over again: "Dad, it's going to be Samhain soon! Can we light a bonfire in the bathtub?" Samhain marked the end of the light half of the year and the beginning of the dark half, where evil spirits and malicious beasts...like the denizens of some bizarre groupthink cult...begin to predate on the good people of the village. The idea of the Samhain celebration was to scare the spirits into staying away and to reinforce boundaries.
Now, who would these dark forces be today? My money is on the anti-Christians of the right wing, and I suspect this notion is not too far from the truth. They're always accusing the left of harboring "witchy lesbians", as a certain televangelist would put it.
Given their plummeting popularity and the subsequent loss of power, likely in both houses of Congress, isn't it likely that, as a last desperate attempt to create confusion and sow the seeds of a miraculous victory, the far right would attempt to destroy the one holiday they simply must believe is the most important to the liberal intelligensia of America?
And so, war has been declared on Halloween.
But unlike our war on Christmas, which was fought in the trenches and check-out lines of Macy's, with many casualties on both sides, they've taken a page from the other great pagan religion, Islam (just kidding, my Muslim friends!), and have decided to use stealth and cunning, along with biological weaponry.
As noted above, the right wing has powerful allies in the form of the weather control folks at the Pentagon....what? You thought Iraq was always a desert????...but I think they've co-opted the CDC as well:
Purdue University plant pathologist Daniel Egel says two types of fungus or rot have affected crops from the Midwest to New England. They cause pumpkins to develop mold spots and rot from the inside out.Yes. The "bright orange" ones will clearly mark you as a liberal, and make it that much easier for the forces of light to TP your trees and soap your car windows, the next step in this war. Count on it! I can guarantee that at least one of you reading this will wake up the morning of November 1st with broken eggs on your sidewalk!
He says a combination of high temperatures and record amounts of rain in August helped the fungi flourish.
One White County pumpkin farmer says she's lost about 85 percent of one pumpkin variety due to the rot.
Egel says shoppers should look for bright orange pumpkins with strong, green stems. He says consumers should also check for moldy areas or soft spots, especially on the bottom of the pumpkins.
We must plan for our counteroffensive. I suggest the following: on Halloween, dress up in costumes. This will distract the terrorists, and confuse them. If they think that the house that contains a 6'4" tall white balding male in fact contains a Wookie with a bowcaster and a bandalero of power packs, they might slip up in their haste to get away. Similarly, if they're expecting a mom with her hair up in a pony tail and three kids, and instead find a nurse tending to three little teddy bears, they might get confused, since their orders were specifically to leave animals alone.
The powers that be wouldn't want to have bestiality included in the list of moral sins they've committed, not this close to the Foley incident.
I urge you all...run out today and find a costume! Buy it! And come October 31, prepare for war!
And then we can prepare for the real assault on Christmas: returning gifts.
UPDATE: The counter-counteroffensive has begun! As James Wolcott reports:
This morning Mona Charen, whose career consists of objecting to things nobody (probably not even she) really cares about, crabs about some inane piece in the Times about gender stereotypes in trick-or-treat couture. When Jonah Goldberg, waiting for the foam in his protein shake to settle, notes that his daughter still dresses in innocent get-ups, Mona, deploying the maternal voice of experience, tries to scare him straight.Go read the article. Stellar stuff.
"The children's costumes are still okay. But just be aware that childhood now ends at age 8. By nine, some of her classmates will be dressing as sexy vamps. This is the wonderful world liberalism and feminism have purchased for her."
Her warning so intrigues the horndog that under the guise of "research," he dives head-first into Wal-Mart's online catalog, which seems to have fallen under the spell of Victoria's Secret.
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