Pedal-Pushers of the Undead - column

Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com

Pedal-Pushers of the Undead

These crisp autumn days mean that soon college administrators will be telling students what they must not wear for Halloween lest they hurt the feelings of other young grownups.

No one ever asks why college students are thinking about Halloween, that non-holiday, at all. They’re beyond trick-or-treating, don’cha think? College students should be doing college-student-thinky-things, like solving for x or writing about the influence of Fannie Brawne on John Keats’ existential vision of something-or-other.

And, besides, if folks on college campuses (or is that campi?) were to wear costumes, how would anyone know? To visit a college campus now is to wonder why so many people dress as if they looted their garments from hurricane debris – tee-shirts with pictures of that bearded mass murderer, knee-pants (yes, those 1950s pedal-pushers have risen from the sartorial dead), clown shoes, and desperately goofy hats.

That’s the faculty, of course; students usually manage to dress more appropriately.

As for the hurt feelings, well, I know of at least one college that last year greeted its incoming students with coloring-book sessions. If anyone suffers the Aunt Pittypat vapours from seeing someone costumed as capitalist oppressor Thurston Howell III the faculty can hand him a coloring book and a box of crayons in approved colors: “Look, honeykins. Here’s Mickey Mouse. See? Let’s color his house environmentalist green, okay? Then you’ll feel allllllllllll better.”

Oh, yeah, coloring books for college students will advance the arts and sciences of this great nation.

In Texas, college students who meet the legal requirements are permitted to carry firearms on campus, but are forbidden to dress up as Christopher Columbus, Pocahontas, or Zorro. A distressed 21-year-old princeling whose emotions have been triggered – yes - by being asked to, oh, read a book or solve some engineering problems may lawfully carry a pistol while on his way to his coloring-book sensitivity therapy to express his existential outrage.

And citizens are arguing about Halloween.

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