Hilarious Halloween decoration (not)

A number of people in the town of Greeneville, Tennessee called the police last week to report what appeared to be a man crushed by his own garage door. It turned out to be a Halloween decoration.

Americans go to great lengths to decorate their houses, gardens and themselves at Halloween. Indeed, encouraged by retailers, who begin stocking their shelves with Halloween-related products more or less the morning after the Labor Day weekend, Americans spent more than $8 billion on this “holiday” last year. And they are predicted to spend $9.1 billion on it in 2017.

I like American-style Halloween, I really do. It is a mostly fun event at a mostly dreary time of year, and one we enthusiastically joined in with every year during our expatriation. But inevitably, some people take it too far. As in this case. Why? Because Halloween is on the 31^st of October. You can therefore expect to find fake gravestones strewn across gardens, cobweb-draped houses, zombie-like hands reaching up out of lawns and signs warning you about the presence of ghosts, witches and the like towards the end of October. But not in MID-SEPTEMBER!

So is it any surprise that people walking or (more likely) driving past what looked like scene of a horrific accident almost six weeks before Halloween should be alarmed enough to phone the police?

The local cops don’t seem to think so. Rather than cautioning people to restrict their ghoulish activities to around the actual time of the event, they simply published a photo of the grizzly lifelike prank on their Facebook page along with the warning: “Do NOT call 911 reporting a dead body. Instead, congratulate the homeowner on a great display.”

Well ha fucking ha. I know that people in the US have long started putting up their Christmas decorations in early December, some even being so bold as to do so before the previous “holiday” – Thanksgiving – in late November. But this is a step too far.

It’s patently obvious that a blow-up Santa by your front door or a string of fairy lights heralds the onset of what our American cousins euphemistically call “the festive season.” A doll made up to look like a horribly mangled body, complete with what appear to be bloody handprints on a garage door, is not so obviously a joke related to an event in the relatively distant future.

Preppers

Preppers are about as American as apple pie is commonly asserted to be (albeit falsely). Like Tea-Baggers, Mormons, the Amish and the National Rifle Association (NRA), I doubt preppers could have developed - let alone thrived - anywhere but in the self-styled Land of the Free and Home of the Brave.

Fiercely independent, deeply patriotic yet doggedly suspicious of authority in general and government in particular, preppers tend to be politically conservative white Christians from low-income backgrounds. As such, they are like the distillation of the American psyche.

So what are they? Preppers believe that a catastrophic natural disaster or foreign invasion is just around the corner. Or, as they like to put it, "the shit is about to hit the fan" (SHTF). Convinced that the US economy, society and possibly civilisation itself are in imminent danger of destruction and/or collapse, they prepare - hence the name - for their chosen nightmare scenario by

• Hoarding food
• Stockpiling weapons and ammunition
• Training in armed combat
• Learning survival skills
• Building emergency shelters
• Disconnecting from the power grid and
• Buying gold and silver, typically in the form of coins.

Although there may not be the 4 million or more preppers claimed by some of the myriad "survivalist" Web sites, they certainly are far more than a handful of paranoid gun-nuts. In fact there are so many serious preppers in America that Costco (a nationwide chain of wholesale stores open to the public) stocks a large selection of what it terms "emergency kits", ranging from water storage and filtration systems to a year's supply of food for four people, comprising 30,144 servings of freeze-dried and dehydrated meals (yours for only $3,999.99).

Preppers even have their own reality-TV show (sponsored, tellingly enough, by the Wise Food Storage Company and the United States Gold Bureau). Entitled 'Doomsday Preppers', the documentary series charts how various people are getting ready for what they see is inevitable: an all-out assault on the American way of life, be it man-made or environmental. 

Unfortunately, preppers are not simply wacky loners content to play out their apocalyptic or Chinese-invasion fantasies in their own basements or woods in the same way that people used to gather for weekend 'Dungeons and Dragons' sessions. Often enough, their paranoia spills over into violent confrontations with the law.

Only last week, police arrested a 45-year-old survivalist who had spent 5-6 years breaking into cabins in the Utah mountains to steal food and guns. And almost exactly a year ago, police in Washington state hunted a 41-year-old man who had allegedly shot dead his wife and daughter. They eventually tracked him down in a sophisticated fortified underground bunker in the forest, where a SWAT team had to blast its way through the roof. When they got inside, they found the man dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, as well as 13 guns and shelves neatly piled with ammunition, food and other supplies.

Local Crime

We clearly live too close to Detroit. This is getting unbearable.

"The Talk"

America is currently gripped by the case of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black 17-year-old in a hooded sweatshirt who was stalked and then shot dead by a vigilante as he was walking home from a shop in Florida. Bizarrely enough, the boy's self-confessed killer, George Zimmerman, has not been arrested because the state has a so-called "stand your ground" law that allows the use of weapons in self defence, even outside the home.

Leaving aside the details of the case, which are still coming to light a month after Trayvon's death, it was in conjunction with this that I discovered a rite-of-passage that black parents across the US feel obliged to go through with their adolescent sons.

"The Talk", as it is known, is not a discussion about how babies are made. "The Talk" is a reaction to the fact that racial profiling is a reality in 21st-century America - an allegedly post-racial society which now even has a black president. It is an acceptance that African-American teenage boys throughout this "great nation" are routinely considered a potential threat.

As such, black parents have to explain to their children how they should dress and behave to avoid being seen as "acting suspiciously", the term George Zimmerman used when telling the cops why he was following Trayvon Martin against their advice.

As one of my wife's colleagues confirmed, black parents tell their teenage boys not to hang around on street corners, but go to friends' houses instead. They tell them to put the hoods of their hoodies down when going into shops, to always be polite to police officers and never raise their voice or get angry towards them, no matter how they are treated, and to keep their hands visible at all times.

Slavery may be long gone in America, but, sad as it may seem, kids of one specific ethnicity have to be taught by their own parents to be subservient to authority figures, even in the face of blatant injustice, simply because of who they are.

I am a big fan of hoodies. I frequently go out to my local shop at night wearing one. Yet nobody has ever confronted or followed me, let alone dialled 911 or accused me of appearing threatening or suspicious. I will never have to have "The Talk" with my son or caution him against playing outside with his friends. There is no need.

Why? Because we are white.

Unmarked Squad Cars

Unmarked police cars are supposed to be hard to spot, right? Well in the States, they're pretty easy to identify - by no fewer than three characteristics:

1. Most of them are Dodge Chargers
Whereas the police car ("interceptor") of choice has always been the Ford Victoria, police departments across the US think the best way to avoid detection is to disguise their vehicles as muscle cars. Perhaps they should be more imaginative in their range of models.

2. Most unmarked vehicles are black
More lack of imagination on the part of the nation's finest. And since relatively few regular cars are black, unmarked squad cars tend to stand out like a sore thumb - not least because they look like normal police vehicles, albeit without flashing lights on the roof or the stickers on the side.

3. Police vehicles have what looks like an extra wing mirror
This is the biggest giveaway of all. Because police officers want to be able to illuminate stopped cars at night without having to get out, they have a spotlight mounted next to the driver's (and sometimes the passenger's) side wing mirror, which they can move around using a clumsy-looking handle that extends inside the vehicle.

As a result, when you see a black Dodge Charger with what appears to be double wing mirrors, you have plenty of time to slow down, stop texting, put down your beer and hide your unlicensed guns before the cops see you.