Halloween on a Monday? This is Bullshit. Somebody needs to put in a call to the Pope or maybe Satan, or at the very least Satan’s press Secretary, Scott McClellan and get this deal worked out. Then again, it’s obvious that the deep thinkers at the Vatican and the White House have already dropped the ball, otherwise we’d have the Lord’s day to sleep off our candy corn comas. The Vatican probably doesn’t care anyway because every day is costume day in the Holy City. Instead of bite-sized Snickers they’re handing out wine and wafers – a.ka. the transubstantiated blood and body of Christ. “Trick or treat? No, just hand over the Jesus meat.” That shit is so spooky and macabre it makes Halloween seem about as thrilling as a Young Life pizza party. What could be scarier than a bunch of old dudes freeballing around in robes all day, laying down more incense than a dorm room pot smoker, chanting in a dead language, and passing out pieces or corpus? Easy. The White House – a.k.a. the meat grinder. Calling Dick, Don, Condi and George the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse might seem a little extreme, especially since Condi isn’t technically a man, but it’s been decades since America has seen an administration with a more voracious body count. On Tuesday Congress commemorated the 2000th U.S. Soldier to die in Iraq, which proves that wearing desert fatigues can be pretty frightening, If you really want to dress scary though, go for the expensive worsted wool and button-down look of the legislators who voted for this bloodbath. Not even Rob Zombie could direct a more senseless waste of life. Here’s a number that doesn’t get mentioned too often: 56,690 – that being the number of military and civilian Iraqis (the human shield around Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, if you will) who died in the Iraq war. Even at a relatively modest 120lbs per corpse that comes to nearly 7 million pounds of blood, meat and bones. If you toss on in the 12,072 Afghanis, your who’s-asleep-score totals 68,762. For you Old Testament types that’s roughly 23 eyes for every 911 victim eye, 23 teeth for every tooth. So maybe numbers aren’t your thing. Maybe you’re a Republican or a Bible thumper or a half-blind, crotchety old person who indiscriminately fills out the bubbles on the voting form to prove you’re still a functioning member of society (all perfectly horrifying Halloween costumes, by the way). You need a helpful illustration, an interactive experience perhaps to put the big numbers in perspective. Here’s an idea: Go to Sixth Street Halloween night. You’ll get to mill around with between 50-100,000 shiny, happy people – many of them single, some married, and some too young or old to really think of in those terms. Now, here’s the really scary part: Imagine them all dead. Boo! Better get some meat while it’s still hot.
This article appears in Barbara Bush.
