A Halloween eulogy
Oh as I was young and fanged, beneath
a full moon's breaths of sustenance, I collected my Halloween booty.
In the dawn of the 70s, not abated by false ends and all too true
starts of a war, my biggest October surprises were how much people
dropped in my orange UNICEF box and if the house on the end of our
block would re-treat last year's popcorn ball.
Election cycle
Billy Bush accomplices to groping
accessibility. Twelve women advance accountability. FBI investigates
email's culpability. And a Wiener inserts its proximity. And many
more surprises to digest between sound bytes. All before Halloween.
October surprises they're called. Millennials won't scare anyone on
Hallow's Eve. Politics takes away the element of surprise on
presidential years—particularly this one. As I neared the end of my
annual booty call in the name of maturity I recall the candidates.
Names like Richard Nixon, George McGovern, Wendell Anderson, and
local politicians drown in leaves on lawn signs as I kicked. I
approached house in my vampire best, hurrying to get home before a
glimpse of light fell upon the signs.
Payback bars
Oh the millennials and their spawn.
They came in droves for Bernie to awake the trumpeters at dawn. And
now, with a rightful sense of complacency, I watch our nominee
castigated and investigated. I devalue validity as my candidate's
illustrated to bend more than Nixon's crookedest day. November,
December—and 2017 summer's surprise. It won't end until Trump's
ferrets are wasted, rabid and red, until they can no longer chew
documents but yearn to be fed. And then, after four score and three
years—and as long as those rodents can go—a new nation will be
conceived. In the next millennium political historians will look at
2020 as the year a nation was born. Forget Lincoln keeping it
together, forget emancipation, forget the Declaration of
Independence, forget Thomas Payne's pamphlet that suggested we have
the power to begin the wold over. But that is as good as hindsight
gets.
