Just two weeks!
I was never a big Halloween enthusiast — not as an adult, anyway. I had the normal child’s fondness for the day, of course, but that pretty much ended when I outgrew the costume bit and my taste for candy waned. Since then the holiday has been one spent catering, often lackadaisically, to the formidable candy-seeking ambitions of my own children, while focusing the better part of my attention on navigating the twilit suburban streets filled with shrouded ambling pre-teen traffic hazards.
A couple of years ago I accepted an invitation to a friend’s costume party. I went as a boxer. I allowed my niece, Grace, to practice her makeup skills on me. I ended up with a pretty good bruise, coming from a wispy nine year old girl.
The party was fun, but did not rekindle in me any particular love for the holiday.
But this year is different. This year, I intend to celebrate the day, to make October 31st an event. Because October 31st has become…
Cultural Appropriations Day!
The idea that people own the things they have in common with other people, that food and language and dress are trademarked property of this or that group, is a silly arrogance of the identity movement. I’ll have none of it. I don’t begrudge American aboriginal peoples the use of automobiles in lieu of their traditional ponies, nor citizens of Africa the benefits of polio vaccinations and genetically modified agriculture. These products of western civilization — my cultural group — are available to the world, and I welcome their universal appropriation.
I have a strong affinity for burritos; I appropriated one this evening (conceptually, from Americans of Mexican descent; practically, from the white kid behind the counter), at a very authentic Chipotle Mexican Grill, while waiting for my daughter (whom, incidentally, my wife and I appropriated from China when she was nine months old) to return from an out-of-town soccer game. (Soccer was itself appropriated from medieval Europe. One needs a lot of parentheses if one intends to dutifully annotate every appropriation. I don’t.)
For Halloween Cultural Appropriations Day this year, I intend to be a tasteful billboard of looted cultural traditions. From head to toe, from my sombrero to my [note to self: what do people from other cultures wear on their feet?], and everywhere in between, I intend to appropriate with abandon — my imitative homage to the boisterous freedom of the world’s great melting pot.
I’ll look like I dressed at the U.N. gift shop. I’ll do it for amusement, but also as a rejection of the belief that what distinguishes our rapidly multiplying factions is more important than the ideas that unite us as a country — and that it’s my job to help others obsess about their hyphenated lives.
I can hardly wait.
[note to self: Nikes, maybe? Air Jordans?]