Kevin McCall is equivocating on ICE activity while voting for it.
By Billiam Rodgers
A constant in my life is that conservatives try to ruin Halloween.
When I was seven, my evangelical babysitter almost convinced my mother that Halloween was satanic. Instead of me dressing up like The Undertaker and condemning my soul to Hell, she suggested we attend a "harvest festival" at her church.
Kids have unarticulated views of the world. Although I couldn't argue theology or folk traditions with my mother, I knew one thing for certain: Halloween is awesome, whereas "harvest festivals" are boring and lame. They are obviously weak imitations of a superior concept. I didn't want a sanitized holiday; I wanted monsters and candy. Anything less and I was being cheated. In the end, Halloween won. I celebrated by wearing the most grotesque costume I could think of, splurging on one of those masks with a pump that drips fake blood.
The right wing doesn't hate Halloween because of Satan; many of them treat the devil like a second deity for all the attention they give him. Their antipathy to Halloween is a question of who gets to control culture. There isn't a space in Calvinist protestantism for Freddy Krueger gloves with plastic knives, so they try to eliminate them. They host "hell houses" with misogynistic and homophobic morality plays. They end Trick or Treat at 3 p.m., and frighten credulous parents with stories of razor blades. Their goal is to replace Halloween with ersatz imitations that keep us safely under their control. Anything else they may claim is equivocation, a statement designed to conceal the truth.
I assumed, for all our failures as millennials, that we won this battle in the culture war and Halloween, or "Freak Christmas," would be safe for generations of kids to come.
But if the right wing can't control culture, they'll do something a little more direct: kidnapping people and throwing them in cages. One of New Mexico's only haunted house attractions, McCall's Pumpkin Patch in Moriarty, was accused of that this week in a social media panic. The owner, Kevin McCall, is a Torrance County Commissioner, and in March he voted to extend ICE's contract to keep detainees at the county detention center. The Albuquerque Teacher's Federation sent an email to their union about this vote, grimly warning them to "beware of rotten pumpkins." From there, rumors escalated online, morphing into what people are calling "McCall's Prison Patch," a belief that McCall invited ICE to lurk around his haunted house, balancing the pretend monsters inside with real monsters outside.
McCall said this rumor was not true, saying that ICE is "in no way, shape, or form" involved in an operation on his farm. Another lawmaker, Rep. Stefani Lord (R-Sandia Park), said the controversy was "cancel culture nonsense." The hairdos on TV news reported the rumor as "misinformation" with all the pedantic certainty of people who don't understand anything at all.
Because McCall, a Republican, is helping ICE. They needed a prison for people they kidnapped from their families and he gave them one. On Wednesday, he complained (while missing the irony completely) about how hard the controversy had been on his family. He said the decisions he makes as a commissioner have nothing to do with his personal business. Apparently it's a costume he can take on and off. He won't call the child-snatchers when you're spending money at his farm, but he will allow them to abuse people a short drive down the road.
What's the difference?
McCall, like the people who tried to steal my favorite holiday, is equivocating. ICE is here. They are preying on our communities and making it less safe to move about freely. And McCall is their ally. Whether ICE grabs innocent people from their homes or from his farm is immaterial. He wants that sweet green from both ticket sales and Trump's fascist regime.
He cited the modest 100 jobs at the center as his reason for extending ICE's contract. This isn't about masked goons breaking up families, it's about jobs for our families!
This is also an equivocation. And it's a vulgarized version of the old "would you steal bread so your children can eat?" question. It is moral to steal bread for your children. It is not moral to steal other people's children so you can have bread. Celebrating Halloween won't condemn you to hell, but helping ICE destroy lives will certainly give your soul all the value of a damp cigarette butt on the sidewalk.
It does not matter what costume we dress collaboration in, it's still collaboration. This isn't routine county business. These are not simple differences in political opinions. ICE's activities are a power play by people who know they are deeply unpopular and if they can't win you with culture they'll zip tie you and remove you from "their" communities. Anything else they may claim is a trick.
Halloween will survive, in spite of culture wars and armed attacks from the right wing. Halloween is a holiday for freaks, creatives, and rebels. It belongs to us, not collaborators. We will protect our communities and our traditions. You can help by attending the NM Dream Team's vigil for Torrance detainees at 11 a.m. Oct. 11th in Estancia Park (bring noisemakers).
Our current fascist regime, as all fascist regimes do, will collapse and everyone who helped them will own their guilt when the history books are written. In the meantime, fuck McCall's and spend your money at other attractions.