LATIMES.COM/OPINION THURSDAY, OCTOBER 31, 2019A
OP-ED
W
hen I was a boy,we
didn’t celebrate Hal-
loween. I recall trick-or-
treating once, the year
I was 5, my mother
taking my sister and me to our nana’s
house in South El Monte, me in a cowboy
costume, my caramel-colored corduroy
vest and chaps fresh from my mother’s
sewing machine, my sister’s ladybug
costume too. We approached a few
houses to collect whatever candy we
could, and aside from a future Hallow-
een party or two and our elementary
school’s costume parade, that was it.
My father experienced most holidays
through the advertised supermarket
specials where he worked, and he hated
Halloween, hated the idea of spending
good money on candy that would be
given away, and to begging strangers on
top of that. This was just before the start
of the 1980s and the advent of slasher
films, hysteria about razor blades in
apples, and hospitals starting to offer
X-ray services before children took their
candy home. But my father’s despising
of Halloween wasn’t about potential
danger, or being cheap, or his kids over-
doing it with sugar. More than anything,
he loathed the notion that things could
be gotten for free. To him, everything
came at a price. At some point, he be-
came determined to teach us this.
Every Halloween, he would discon-
nect the doorbell’s wires, tape butcher
paper over the side window beside the
front door, and block the door with his
pick-up truck, the bumper so close to
the house that to squeeze ourselves
outside we’d have to step through my
mother’s gardenias. Because our bed-
room windows faced the street, they had
to stay dark. My mother, a woman who
picked her battles carefully, would turn
on the kitchen light, the only other light
allowed besides the television. The TV’s
volume would be low, our family hidden
from the outside world. Night would fall
and I would try to ignore the other chil-
dren racing with excitement past our
house.
In later years, I’d dress up with wan-
ing interest, any costume seeming for-
eign and silly and childish. As an adult,
Halloween became something I experi-
enced from a detached emotional dis-
tance and with a certain degree of dread,
the way one might stand at the edge of a
packed dance floor to admire everyone’s
moves, held back by two left feet.
Now my wife and I live on the north
side of El Monte, in a neighborhood that
my 10-year-old self imagined as home to
wealthy folks, but that simply turned
out to be where most of El Monte’s re-
maining white people lived. The neigh-
bors to our left are emblematic of the
city 30 years ago: Mexican American,
their son the first to finish college, his
mother a lifelong Dodger fan whose
shouts alert me to how the team is do-
ing.
A more current El Monte is repre-
sented by the neighbors to our right: an
immigrant Chinese couple, a doctor and
a civil engineer, busy professionals who
live with the doctor’s parents. The lawn
has been left to the weeds, its center-
piece an Asian citrus tree that produces
curious, bulb-like fruit. Daily, the doc-
tor’s mother catalogs them with taped-
on numbers.
The neighborhood we share comes
with a legacy of trick-or-treaters. In
decades past, it was a neighborhood
where carloads of kids came because
every house gave out candy. This re-
mains mostly true. While some of the
neighborhood’s newer neighbors decide
what Halloween means to them, the
streets here still hold generations of
giddy memories, and there are still
plenty of lit porch lights and jack-o’-lanterns to guide the way.
It wasn’t until my wife was expecting
our son that we actually stayed home
and passed out candy. That first time
was the night that I came to understand
firsthand that to welcome trick-or-
treaters is to offer neighborly generosi-
ties, one by one, in bite-size form. In the
children’s joy, in their bashfulness, in
their pride at dressing as a favorite
superhero, and in the thank-you’s from
their parents, I began to see Halloween
as a taking down of the figurative and
literal fences that otherwise separate us.
Even if this is just for a few hours, and is
punctuated by the occasional chainsaw
sound effect or spray of fake blood, it is
still a glimpse of a place where our hu-
manity is recognized and shared.
My childhood Halloweens had kept
me from these connections, and at
night’s end, I felt happily bewildered by
something so basic to everyone else. As
we gathered our party chairs and tidied
the porch, I felt that something inside
me had unlocked. When I tried to ex-
plain it to my brother-in-law, he smiled,
then encapsulated it best. “You’re par-
ticipating,” he said.
This year I’m expecting to see kids in
the usual store-bought outfits, as well as
some re-purposed El Monte Jets or
Little League uniforms. They’ll arrive
with plastic jack-o’-lantern buckets,
with pillowcases, with plastic shopping
bags from Superior or Green Farm
Market. There will be mildly embar-
rassed teenagers, ones about to age out
of this part of the tradition, with a mask
in their hands instead of over their face.
There will be the vicarious parents
pushing strollers with barely costumed
babies. There will be the sink-or-swim
parents that will wait at the curb as their
children cautiously approach. And there
will be us — my wife, our young son and
me — waiting by our door with a bowl of
candy, ready to greet them all.Michael Jaime-Becerrais an
associate professor of creative writing
at UC Riverside and author of “Every
Night Is Ladies’ Night.”Hanna BarczykFor The TimesMy El Monte Halloweens
By Michael Jaime-Becerra
The holiday used
to puzzle me. My
neighborhood has
changed that.
L
et us stipulate that Donald Trump is a
vulgar and dishonest fraud. Yet history is
nothing if not a tale overflowing with
irony. Despite his massive shortcomings,
President Trump appears intent on re-
calibrating America’s role in the world. Aligning
U.S. policy with actually existing global conditions
— and ending our endless wars, starting in Syria —
may prove to be his providentially anointed func-
tion. Go figure.
“Great nations do not fight endless wars.” So
the president announced in his 2019 State of the
Union address. Implicit in this seemingly innocu-
ous statement is a radical proposal to overturn the
U.S. national security paradigm. Tug hard enough
on the dangling threads of that paradigm, and it
could unravel.
To acknowledge the folly of this country’s end-
less wars calls into question the habits that Wash-
ington sees as the essence of “American global
leadership”: (1) positioning U.S. forces in hundreds
of bases abroad; (2) partitioning the planet into re-
gional military commands; (3) conferring security
guarantees on dozens of nations, regardless of
their values or their ability to defend themselves;
(4) maintaining the capability to project power to
the remotest corners of the Earth; (5) keeping in
instant readiness a triad of nuclear strike forces;
(6) searching for “breakthrough technologies”
that will eliminate war’s inherent risks; (7) unques-
tioningly absorbing the costs of a sprawling na-
tional security bureaucracy; (8) ignoring the cor-
rupting influence of the military-industrial
complex; and outpacing all other nations, in (9)
weapons sales and (10) overall military spending.
Complementing this Decalogue is an unwritten
11th Commandment: Thou shalt not prevent the
commander in chief from doing what he deems
necessary. Congress has habitually deferred to an
increasingly imperial presidency, treating the war
powers specified in the Constitution as nonbind-
ing.
This Decalogue-plus-one emerged early in the
Cold War. During the 1960s, it was tested in Viet-
nam. While that didn’t go well, D+1 persisted, even
after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Soviet Union,
the threat that had prompted the creation of the
Decalogue, had vanished, but a new rationale ap-
peared: perpetuating American primacy.
Military activism surged. During the otherwise
disparate presidencies of George H.W. Bush, Bill
Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, the
United States intervened in or attacked Panama,
Iraq, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo,
Afghanistan, Sudan, Afghanistan (again), Iraq
(again), Libya, Somalia (again), Yemen, Syria, sev-
eral West African nations and, briefly, Pakistan.
Reticence regarding the use of force vanished;
the 11th Commandment achieved a status compa-
rable to the doctrine of papal infallibility. After the
Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, an open-ended Authori-
zation to Use Military Force handed the com-
mander in chief a blank check to “deter and pre-
vent” terrorism anywhere and by whatever means
necessary.
The “global war on terrorism” now centers on
the Turkey-Syria border. Given media coverage of
the president’s abrupt troop withdrawal there, you
might conclude that the pivotal issue is the fate of
the Kurds, with the United States military deemed
uniquely responsible for their well-being. Ameri-
ca’s abandonment of the Kurds undoubtedly
qualifies as cruel and immoral. Yet what really
matters to Washington insiders is the threat that
any pullout from the Middle East poses to their
cherished Decalogue.
Proponents of D+1 can point to a few achieve-
ments: Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Libya’s Moam-
mar Kadafi, both of them guilty of terrible crimes
(although innocent of any direct involvement in
Sept. 11) are gone. For the moment at least, the re-
pressive Taliban does not rule in Kabul. And Al
Qaeda’s Osama bin Laden and now Islamic State’s
Abu Bakr Baghdadi are dead.
Yet widen the aperture and the outcome ap-
pears less impressive. Regime change in Kabul,
Baghdad and Tripoli produced not liberal democ-
racy but chronic instability, pervasive corruption
and endemic violence. In Afghanistan, the Taliban
never admitted defeat and today threatens the
Western-installed Afghan government. If anyone
can be said to have won the Iraq war, that honor
must surely belong to the Islamic Republic of Iran.
And despite hundreds of thousands of deaths and
trillions of dollars spent, the United States has
come nowhere close to fulfilling its declared politi-
cal aims in the region.
Now the president of the United States, using
the authority granted him by the 11th Command-
ment, says he wants to call it quits. In response,
Democratic and Republican defenders of the
Decalogue insist that Trump may not do what he
declares himself intent on doing. Senate Majority
Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), typically the
president’s most stalwart defender, took to the
pages of the Washington Post to denounce
Trump’s decision, insisting that “the post-World
War II international system” that “has sustained
an unprecedented era of peace, prosperity, and
technological development” must be preserved.
If you believe that the world today resembles
the one that existed in the wake of World War II —
the U.S. economy dominant, Europe weak and vul-
nerable, China poor and backward, a climate crisis
unimaginable — McConnell’s argument would
possess merit. But that world no longer exists.
Sadly, Trump’s determination to blow the whis-
tle on this charade doesn’t extend much beyond
making noise. Even his troop withdrawals result in
little more than repositioning. As a result, diplo-
matic initiatives that might actually open a path-
way to ending endless wars — restoring normal
diplomatic relations with Tehran, for example, or
curtailing weapons sales (and giveaways) to na-
tions that use U.S.-manufactured arms to create
mayhem, or declaring a no-first-use policy on nu-
clear weapons — don’t even qualify for discussion.
The fears of the Decalogue’s defenders are not
misplaced: Syria is a dangling thread. Give that
thread a good yank and U.S. national security pol-
icy might become undone. But it will take someone
with greater determination, consistency and
strength of character than Donald Trump to com-
plete this necessary task.Andrew Bacevichis a contributing writer to
Opinion. His newest book, “The Age of Illusions:
How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory,”
will be published in January. A longer version of
this essay appears at TomDispatch.com.Will Trump
save us from
‘endless war’?
By Andrew BacevichI
n Hollywood, stories comein
cycles. Winston Churchill biopics,
mall cop comedies or blockbusters
about attacks on the White House
get released within months of each
other. TV creators and filmmakers offer
up parallel versions of the Getty grand-
son’s kidnapping, and tales of similar
mysterious, sense-triggered forces (“A
Quiet Place” and “Birdbox”).
The reason for these overlapping
projects isn’t that studios or networks
are looking to copy their rivals — they’d
prefer to be unique. It’s that writers and
producers can’t help but tap into what’s
in the air. The zeitgeist is real.
With the near-simultaneous releases
this month of Paul Rudd’s Netflix series
“Living With Yourself ” and Will Smith’s
feature “Gemini Man,” we are now deep
into a story cycle about evil twins, sec-
ond selves and doppelgangers. Add to
these projects “Counterpart,” whose
final episode aired on Starz in February,
Jordan Peele’s movie “Us,” and a little
earlier, the “Twin Peaks” reboot on
Showtime, and it’s clear duality is in the
cultural ether.
In each of these stories, the second
selves pose a threat to the originals,
taking over their most important re-
lationships, or trying to end their lives.
The evil twins are more confident, more
cunning and physically stronger. They
aren’t riddled with indecision or guilt —
doppelgangers don’t equivocate or
compromise. They are vastly superior to
the original models in every way but one.
They lack souls.
Yes, they functionbetter. They’re
good at getting — or taking — what they
want, but something essential is miss-
ing. They have none of the self-defeating
quirks, none of the internal messiness,
that makes humans human. They are
devoid of depth and vulnerability.
Why are Hollywood writers telling
these stories? What are they reacting
to? Why have so many recent projects
independently seized on the same
theme?
The answer is likely found in our
daily, even hourly, subservience to our
own second selves. In gaming and on
social media, we have allowed avatars
and doppelgangers to take over. We
aren’t living our best lives, they are. And
they’re doing it at our expense.
It’s not just a millennial, digital na-
tive problem. Too many of us of every
generation are slavishly architecting
and updating versions of ourselves that
appear remarkably successful, happy
and loved. These filtered images and
stories don’t depict our flaws or short-
comings, unless they are winkingly
self-effacing. Look, I’m so cute, I just fell
off my paddleboard in Kauai!
Every time we post or tweet this way,
our prettiest pictures and our wittiestthoughts belong to them, not us. Our
doppelgangers get liked and followed
and retweeted. We end up feeding off
their scraps, chasing the tail of our ava-
tars’ popularity. We are complicit in our
own oblivion.
The story line Hollywood has tapped
is an antidote to the alarming and heart-
breaking tendency of people across
cultures and continents to tether them-
selves to their more perfect, less real and
less interesting facsimiles. It only makes
sense that writers would be on the offen-
sive: Good stories require real charac-
ters — complicated, unvarnished,
flawed.
Think about the best films or series
you’ve seen. Whether comedic or tragic,
they probably involve leads whose flaws
impede the full realization of their hap-
piness. From Bridget Jones to Walter
White, from “Friends” to “Fleabag,” the
messiness is what makes for a relatable,
universal human experience. We are
connected by our common failings, our
inevitable self-inflicted suffering, and
that connection is the wellspring of
empathy.
When too-perfect doppelgangers
dominate our lives, and we exist to serv-
ice them, we may add followers and
friends, but we lose each other.Ethan Drogin,a television writer, was
most recently an executive producer on
“Suits.”Why evil twins are a thing right now
By Ethan Drogin