My monsters

So, when it comes to this year’s pop culture Halloween costume sleeper, the Washington Post gloats, “Bin Laden has become bloodier than Dracula, badder than Lucifer.”

Gee, they could have fooled me.

Move over, Freddie Krueger, Chuckie, Jason, Drack, King Kong, Frankenstein, Lurch, the Mummy, Woody Allen, my next ex-boyfriend and all the other monster-wannabees of the world.

Mop up the drool this instant!

Yes, friends, the mainstream media has predicted a minor, last-minute scramble for scowling Osama masks, complete with tatterdemalion beards, robes and turbans, the whole monster schmear – in demand among the sick subterranean set for whom Bad is good and Evil is better.

Pretty scary stuff.

Can’t you just see them? Not just raving skinhead punksters. But fantasy-ridden, hopelessly juvenile, chronically unemployed, clinically depressed mid-life pranksters, the Mad Magazine claque, or is that clique? Mercenaries manqu?, who, last Halloween, doubtlessly wore bespectacled, bewildered, bemused Harry Potter costumes complete with Magic Markered lightning bolts on their foreheads to answer their front doors on Oct. 31, this year suddenly, futilely trying to raise a beard and swathe their balding pates in laundry towels while pretending they’re giving poisoned candied apples to poor kiddie Trick or Treaters and then scaring them to death?

Creeps me out.

I mean, bad enough there’s been a recent run on those ultra-trendy helmeted, visored, $75 orange bio-hazard jumpsuits, accessorized with, what else, $24-dollar Rudy masks – yes, Manhattan’s knighted (or is that benighted?) mayor, that closet fascist and cafe society adulterer, whose besmirched image was almost instantaneously rehabilitated by his exemplary efforts in the 9-11 catastrophe.

Ack!

“The things that were stupid on other Halloweens are stupid this Halloween,” a deeply empathic Giuliani advises. “People should try to control themselves and not act like jerks – that would be helpful.”

Indeed.

As you may deduce, Halloween was never my favorite holiday.

Though the Mask and Wig Club near my neighborhood has always fascinated me – more for its name than its theatrical productions – that was not really my style. One Halloween as a little girl, I dressed up as … my mom(!), in clunky skunk coat and cloche hat while my little brother in a Woody Woodpecker costume kept poking me with his beak.

And yet, Halloween 2001 seems imbued with more poignance – what if something horrible really does happen in the malls of America? – plus trenchant political purpose, a kind of mordant commentary-by-costume.

An East-Coast detective, whose first Halloween costume was his mom’s WWII WAC uniform – “I was cute; glad I didn’t make a habit of dressing that way” – declares, “I would like to be the rocket destined directly for the empty heart of bin Laden.”

Terror, si! Terrorism, no!

“I suppose if I was going to a Halloween party this year,” says Rich, a San Francisco historian, “I’d be an envelope of anthrax — a pretty simple costume that doesn’t cost much and yet is topical enough to get a few reactions. And I think an envelope full of anthrax is about the scariest thing going these days … Couples might go as the World Trade Towers, an easy enough costume – only a couple of tall boxes and some time spent with tape and paint to paint them up. you could even include your own airplane, like one of those little inflatable airplanes that Southwest Airlines was giving out to their passengers or employees or whatever. Of course, some people might not approve …”

Hmmm.

“How fulfilling it would be to approach the front porch of a stranger and appear in the guise of the greatest person who ever lived,” Detroit writer David “Trout” Pomeroy e-mails me, “For a moment, a vicarious moment, you could experience the essence of being responded to as if it wasn’t really you but was, instead, this great person. Quickly, I’m sure, the person answering the door bell would realize you were not really the great person. Behind the mask, they’d conclude in a matter of seconds, was just you, the real you. But still, during the vicarious moment, so many wonderful things can happen. They get to imagine you are John Lennon or Elvis Presley or whoever the great person was, is, should be. And you get to go along for the ride, the vicarious ride.”

Boy, was I glad I asked my cartoonist buddy “Vic Titious” who he would like to be for Halloween: “A U.S. citizen…with constitutional rights,” he replied. “I know the idea is very scary to the power structure, but scary is what Halloween is all about.”

But don’t get too scared. Remember, when you see those dispiriting headlines about our bombs falling astray in battered countries where there is already nothing left to bomb, think of what great Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi once said: “When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they seem invincible but, in the end, they always fall – Think of it, always.”