EMBRACE THE DECLINE?

Dilbert creator Scott Adams gets off what might otherwise be a Friday short take.  “We’ve conflated politics and bad mental health until they are indistinguishable.”  The elaboration, by James "Long Emergency" Kunstler might be overthinking the blinging out of houses for Hallowe'en.

By some hidden working of unseen forces, legions of ghouls and demons are bursting out of the ground in every other front yard of small-town America. Supposedly hard-up working-class people go all-out constructing Halloween shrines to the totem figures of decay and death, as in some depraved cargo cult competition aimed at hastening our country’s descent into chaos. The end can’t come soon enough, seems to be the message. Something in the zeitgeist is prompting us to do this.

Year to year, these morbid displays of slavering werewolves, hooded skeletons, grinning mummies, pirate corpses, horned devils, giant spiders, flapping crows, and glowing skulls far surpass in scale the once-exuberant displays of Christmas time — as if to say the celebration of horror and terror has way more meaning in America these days than the message of peace-on-earth, angels-on-high, the boundless generosity of Santa Claus, and the humble birth of a loving god. Kind of reminds you of what Mr. Dylan said more than a half-century ago: “…he not busy being born is busy dying.”

This Halloween month, America looks super-busy preparing for the death of something, maybe itself.

That's possible, although the extravagant decorations with orange icicle lights and inflatables became a thing just before the collapse of Communism in Europe, and maybe cheap Chinese decorations, and now solar panel subsidies, had something to do with it.