I do not understand why, once a year, I am expected to provide a sugar rush to every kid in the neighborhood. This is the annual fall shakedown. The bonfire of the bonbons. And should I try offering these adolescent vagabonds healthy treats like diced carrots, sliced celery, a couple cheese chunks on toothpicks or, God forbid, a little rice pilaf, rather than being thanked for saving a young heart, my house would be egged, my windows soaped, and my cat redecorated.
What these ‘Kinder Mafia” demand is pure dextrose, not a mere saccharin rush. Their obsession with fructose, glucose, lactose, sucrose and maltose is neither healthy nor reasonable. They expect me to feed their sugar habit. . Oh, sure, they dress it up in fairy costumes and go door to door chanting, “Treat or trick”. But what they really mean is "Show me the Chocolate!" This is not the holiday the ancient Druid priests envisioned, nor the Aztec mortuary artists. It is not a holiday. It is sugar wealth redistribution, confectionery socialism straight out of the barrel of a gummy bear.
The roots of Halloween were planted long before Christians had enough saints to celebrate "All Hallowed Saint’s Day". The Aztecs were celebrating Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) even before they were speaking Spanish, maybe 3,000 years ago. And the Druids in Ireland were celebrating “Samhain” by carving turnip Jack-o-lanterns, 2,500 years before they saw their first pumpkin. "And how", you may ask, "could offerings to Mictecacihuatl, the Aztec Goddess who was still born, become individually packaged bags of M&Ms’ handed out to a skeleton named Debbie or Bobby? And I will answer you, ‘Only in a world where the love child of Salvador Dali and Ma Barker is allowed to design holidays, that’s where!
This is the night for hyperventilation and hypertension - when the line between the dead and the not-really-alive (also known as Donald Trump) becomes fuzzy, and everyone grows concerned about ghosts, spooks, ghouls and zombies entering our world. But its common knowledge that ghosts can not manipulate physical objects. So they can only harm you psychologically, meaning Scientologists are safe since they don’t believe in anything that might hint at L.Ron Hubbard's level of insanity. And nobody should be afraid of “spooks” because once you speak a spook’s name they are “spooken for” and thus rendered harmless; which is what Dick Cheney did to the spook Valerie Plame.
Now Dick Cheney was a real live ghoul, one of those creatures who revel in death and horror and who keep coming back to life again - usually on Fox News - the network staffed by brain dead zombies. Rupert Murdoch's invention is the perfect example of how we are terrified of all the wrong things in this life and death.
I cannot imagine Dick Cheney and his fellow Federalist Society banshees will cease being such soul sucking terror mongers just because they have finally passed beyond the veil of death. Hell, they will just be getting started!.
Yes, on October 31st, I will be answering my door bearing a bowl filled with tribute, because I don’t want to spend half of November pulling toilet paper out of my rain gutters. However, we could instead of this terror Halloween been celebrating "Reformation Day", when, in 1546, Martin Luther nailed his “95 Things I Hate About The Pope” to the front door of the Wittenberg Castle Church. He was was later charged with deformation of church intellectual property. But I diverse...
So, logically, children could be going door to door, calling, “Treat or I’ll nail your butt to the door, you papist low life, and, oh, by the way have you got any Jews hiding in here?” A bit hard to see children squeezing candy out of that transaction. So I guess we were lucky we got the screwed up jawbreaker, mini-Snickers holiday we did get, and not an endless election season that lasts four long painful years and gets won by the Russians.
The truth (as if that ever mattered about holidays) is that Martin Luther defiantly nailing his arguments to the church door was probably no more real than George Washington chopping down a cheery tree. Neither thing really happened. And neither does ghosts or ghouls. And this year you just might see Martin Luther costumes on Halloween Night. I did see a George Washington once, but that was so long ago the costume was probably made in the United States.
This year Americans will spend over $6 billion on this mish-mash of a holiday. Almost all of our black and orange fix, like cocaine, is provided by overseas suppliers who have no other connection to us, and although that kind of chump change would barely support the occupation of Afghanistan for a month, it does work out to about $65 per family each year. Our family is not spending anywhere near that much, so I figure Donald Trump and his Wall Street buddies must be spending like a billion each to make up for what us po' folks aren't spending anymore - call them the ghoul creators.
About 4 million Americans will even be buying costumes for their dogs this year, like PetSmart’s spider web dog collar for $12, or PetCo’s dogie Pumpkin dress- up for $16. It gives a whole new meaning to the term "Puttin' on the dog". Still, this canine costume capitalism is surprising. considering that dogs and skeletons would seem to be a natural costume combo, popular with dogs as well as the humans. And once the holiday was over you would not have to store the costume - you just let Rover bury it.
But as a nation we seem determined to spend as much as possible on this “dead holiday thing”. We will be putting 2 million pirates (mostly boys, and far outnumbering the original pirates) on the streets that night, along with 4 million princesses - mostly girls and about equal to the number of real princesses) with adults to follow behind them, as back-up muscle. At the ring of the door bell us older folks, cowering in our homes, then answer the door armed with only a half-empty bowl of bite sized Three Musketeers, and hope that is enough to buy us protection for another year.
And that is where all smart adults should be on Monday night, dreading the sound that fills the night with horror and chills the bones; “Trick or treat, trick or treat, give us something good to eat. Or else.” Yes, Trick or Treat, and bon appetit, my fellow cowering masses. And if you survive this night, you have just two years until the next horror ; election day 2018! Boo Who? Boo You, that's who!
- 30 –
It was October 31st , 1917 – Halloween - when the British Army made a third try to break the Turkish line at Gaza. They had a new General, Allenby, and a new plan. Instead of attacking the barbed wire and trenches close to Gaza, Allenby decided to try the other end of the Turkish defenses, at Beersheba. It was a similar choice to the sweeping left hook sent against Iraq forces in 1991: then, fast armored columns were supported by fleets of fuel trucks. But the limiting factor in 1917 was not fuel but water.
It is simply astonishing that a horse, a prey animal, a grass eater, could be so powerful a weapon of war. Since 4000 B.C. humans have trained horses to assist in killing other humans and other horses. We have ridden their backs into close combat where Equus caballus is shot with arrows, pierced with spears and slashed with swords: and beginning in the 18th century, cut by shrapnel and surrounded by deafening gunfire and explosions. And what is most astonishing is that for a horse, such combat is much more frightening than for a human.
Horses have the largest eyes per body size of any land animal. The construction of those lovely huge eyes also gives them a field of vision of 350 degrees, far wider than a humans’. Their ears can rotate 180 degrees, giving them the equivalent of hearing depth perception. In short, hoses can see and hear much more of the horrors on a battlefield more accurately than a human can. And the sound of a pistol in their own riders’ hand is more frightening because it is closer. So given this higher level of horror why have horses joined us in war?
It has been pointed out that war horses actually lived much more happy lives than their pampered domesticated stabled pets of today because a war horse was constantly surrounded with other horses – a herd. An army was a strict hierarchical social structure that mimicked the herd. And learning to use a horse in battle taught humans how to teach them selves to fight: every combat maneuver used by cavalry is based on herd behavior. A horse in column with willing follow the horse in front rather than run for safety alone, and a horse in a charge will run because all the other horses are running as well.
But the actual charge of Napoleonic cavalry (and the Australian Light Horsemen of 1917) was a good deal slower than the paintings might suggest. Sabers might be wildly waving and lances glinting in the sunlight, but charging horses do not slam into enemy troops at the end of a charge. The “shock” effect of a cavalry charge was far more psychological then physical. And that is the great secret of combat; the objective is not to kill your opponent. The objective is to convince him that he is about to be killed or worse, about to be painfully mauled, so that he stops fighting and runs away. The reality is that nobody fights to the death, not even a kamikaze pilot or a suicide bomber. They fight until they are convinced they cannot win. And seeing, as one general famously described it, “…a bunch of goo that a moment before was your best friends face…” has proven a very effect way of making people stop fighting. For every soldier killed a dozen will run away. And that is what humans learned by teaching grass eating horses to fight.
They formed up to the east of Beersheba, the 11th and 12th regiments, behind a ridge out in the Negev desert. They were 800 mounted men under the direct command of Lieutenant Colonel Bourchier, trained to fight as mounted infantry but this afternoon with their rifles slung across their backs and their bayonets gripped tightly in their right hands, they were pure cavalry, straight from the ancient steppes of Eastern Europe and the rolling fields of Belgium.
About two miles out they broke into a canter, about 15 miles an hour. The Turkish machine guns began to pepper the advancing cavalry. But most of the Turkish infantry were holding their fire, waiting for the horsemen to dismount and attack on foot. But instead, a half mile from the trenches, they broke into a gallop, and fell upon the Turkish soldiers at 30 miles an hour.
Trooper Eric Elliot remembered, “It was the bravest, most awe inspiring sight I’ve ever witnessed ...the boys were wild-eyed and yelling their heads off.” And Trooper Vic Smith would write years later, “Of course we were scared, wishing to hell we weren’t there…But you couldn’t drop out and leave your mates to it; you had to keep going on.” In fact the infantry was so stunned by the cavalry’s audacity that they failed to adjust their sights and most of the Turkish fire that finally began went sailing over the horsemen’s heads. And suddenly it seemed to the Turkish soldiers’ that their gun sights were filled with the barrel chests of charging horses, each carrying a screaming mad man directly at each Turkish private and corporal.
By five-thirty the battle was over. The Turkish Gaza line had been turned. But so surprised and stunned were the victors themselves that it was almost another hour before anyone thought to send word back headquarters. We have no listing of how many horses were killed or wounded. But afterward a trooper noted, “It was the horses that did it; those marvelous bloody horses.”
