Pride and Prejudice: The fame and shame of Salem’s Halloween Nightmare

Daniel Patrick Welch, commenting from Salem, Massachusetts, USA, the oft-proclaimed Halloween Capital of the World

As a born-and-bred Salemite, I always get asked—by foreigners as well as folks from other parts of the country—what is the big deal with Halloween. The first thing I would make sure to say is that it has ZERO to do with Salem. The whole thing infuriates locals but we just go with it.

The whole "witch" thing in Salem is a shocking historical episode of religious and misogynist persecution. Accusations could lead to execution, so it was a very dangerous moment in history. There were class elements involved, the have-nots of Salem Village vs. the more wealthy folk of Salem Town; people who coveted neighbors' land and jumped at the chance; racist and puritan fear of African influence and dilution of "Christian values." It was a whole sort of soggy stew of bizarre overreaction.

As for the scary costumes, this is unrelated and comes from an Irish pagan folkloric tradition of scaring the dead back into their graves [hence scary costumes]. Fast forward 300 years and the landscape has changed--literally and demographically. The most notable thing, to my reading anyway, is that we (the current population of Salem) have completely outbred the early settlers.

The Irish, French Canadian, Polish, and other white(ish) European Catholics overwhelmed the WASP locals, who are now almost as scarce as they made the indigenous owners of the land through conquest and genocide. In recent decades, of course, new waves of immigrants have come from the Caribbean, Central & South America, Southeast Asia and more recently Africa.

So in the early years of the explosion of Salem as "the World Capital of Halloween," there was this giddy euphoria, disturbingly close to the Germans' postwar generations' feeling of "Wir sind es nicht gewesen" [It wasn't us who did it]. So we could embrace it all with this cartoon exuberance: sports teams named the witches, welcoming every sort of ridiculous nominally 'Halloween' related absurdity... all in the name of 'tourism' and making a buck for locals. This has all continued and worsened, of course--though mostly because it's a kind of runaway train wreck.

Like it or not, it is a new reality, and it can only be coped with--not stopped. In the background, there has been some maturing, some reflection on the town's responsibility to the historical record, and there are plenty of actual history truth-tellers mixed in with all the hype.

Oh, and It is no longer overwhelmingly gory. People watching is the real current sport, and, as likely as in the walking dead or vampires, you will see clever new additions of every possible kind from Trump with an attached baby (handing out free classified documents) to a coronavirus, and everything in between. In short, it has become a carnival.

The saddest part, for outsiders looking in, is that deep learning is as absent as it is generally for Americans. Or perhaps maybe most humans if you want to take seriously Santayana's famous warning that those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it: The wholesale conquest and ethnic cleansing in the name of profit, and its obvious analogs in current history, provoke no drive to derail current war-crazed national policy. Colonialism and imperialism rage unabated, as full-throatedly as ever pillaging continent after continent, albeit under slightly different guises and more nuanced justifying narratives.

Newer immigrants whose great-grandparents replaced the pilgrims who killed the natives sit in local bars, unironically spewing venom against even newer immigrants, who are somehow unworthy of human compassion.

In the end, in Salem on Halloween as back in the real world, the merry-go-round of history mimics the huge drunken circle of tourists and locals winding along downtown streets at 9 p.m....until the mounted police clop clop in to drop the curtain on this year's circus. Now, if you don’t mind, dear reader, I’m off to nurse my pint and watch the crazies. Happy Halloween.

Daniel Patrick Welch is a writer of political commentary and analysis. Also a singer and songwriter, he lives and writes in Salem, Massachusetts with his wife. Together they run The Greenhouse School. He has traveled widely, speaks five languages and studied Russian History and Literature at Harvard University. Welch has also appeared as a guest on several TV and radio channels to speak on topics of foreign affairs and political analysis--around his day job. He can be available for interview requests as time and scheduling permit. Despite the price of being outspoken against US foreign policy and military adventurism -- which can be steep in today's circumstances -- he believes firmly as did Rosa Luxemburg that "It will always be the most revolutionary act to tell the truth out loud."

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