"Herd
on the street! Herd on the street!" This should be a warning
cry. Pick up your kids and flee! A mob of men or beasts is at hand.
No more,
not now, not in New York as the month turned. On October 31, the
herds, perhaps 50,000 strong, flocked to Greenwich Village for Halloween
revelry and parades. On November 1, perhaps 2,000,000 people gathered in
five boroughs to watch 42,000 participants in the ING-New York
Marathon. Except for the losers among the elite runners, these mobsters
seemed cheerful.
I once
thought that marathons were Apollonian. Wearing shorts and sneakers,
their bodies stripped down to muscle, the runners were paragons of form,
training, and self-discipline. Do not break stride! In contrast,
Halloween was Dionysian. Wearing costumes, their bodies concealed, the
celebrants were paragons of freedom from form, training, and
self-discipline. No "nots" allowed.
No more,
not now. Halloween and marathons share the status of being public
feel-good events, more so for the spectators of the marathon than for the
runners straining to achieve their individual goals. Both Halloween and
marathons stir up jollity and a sense of communal well-being,
unless one is a runner veering towards the side of the road to vomit. On
Sunday morning, an NBC announcer ,waiting for the endurance test to begin
on Staten Island, marvelled at being at a "modern day
Woodstock." The marathon's theme song was Frank Sinatra's
canonical rendering of "New York, New York." On Saturday
night, on 6th Avenue in the Village, a person in a mask
whined, "Can you see through your mask? I can't see through my
mask." This tedious spoilsport was violating the spirit of the
night.
Because
they are public feel-good events, the Halloween festivities and the
Marathon are robust , wholesome popular entertainment. Both, of
course, have deep historical roots: Halloween in the cycle of the Celtic
year, which Christianity then adapted; the marathon in Greek history,
when a messenger ran 26 miles and 385 yards (such is the spurious
precision of historical fables) to tell Athenian citizens that Greek
forces had whipped the Persians at a place called Marathon.
Not
surprisingly, these spectacles efface history. The Villager
revellers have taken the Hell out of Halloween. One woman emerged
from a grocery store wearing a witch's hat, but she was pushing a
stroller in which the baby was wearing a tiara and a pink princess dress
with flounces. A man strolled through the crowds with his dog on a
leash; the little canine was strapped into angel wings. The organizers of
the Marathon fail to remind us that the Greek messenger who first ran
these demanding miles dropped dead when his job was done. On the
contrary, on the day before this year's Marathon, a story in the New
York Times mentioned a study that had concluded reassuringly that
only .8 of every 100,000 marathoners died because of their
exertions.
Enabling
both spectacles, and insuring their safety, are the New York
police. On Saturday, at 3:45 p.m., they stood in formation at the
intersection of 6th Avenue and Waverly Place. Their wooden barriers
and steel fences, for crowd control, were already in place. The men
and women seemed genial and relaxed. A French tourist, in elegant
suede boots, posed in front of them, her male companion focusing his cell
phone camera, both perhaps dreaming of Dolce and Gabbano ads. On Sunday,
police on gleaming black motorcycles, along with the media,
accompanied the elite runners–their knight consorts.
Both
feel-good herd spectacles are glocal events, at once global and
local. Marathons are run in several countries and at the Olympics.
Halloween may be infiltrating previously foreign spaces. A Mexican
anthropologist,with me in the Village said that she now sees United
States Halloween masks at Day of the Dead celebrations in the Mexican
villages she has studied for decades. Scripted as triumphs of human
resilience, in the case of the Marathon, and of human cavorting, in the
case of Halloween, they are harmless boosts of civic spirit. It is
far better to have sneakers than blood on the street; far better to
pretend to be a nasty devil than to be one.