Halloweiners

By only

Sunday October 15, 2006

Costumes for VIPS

Halloween is a time when we all get to pretend to be something we’re not, to be ghouls and devils and fairy princesses. Politicians, however, spend their entire careers pretending to be something they’re not–honest, helpful, sober. And most them already are ghouls, spooks and devils, creatures of the night that spend every day of the year in human being costumes. So what fun is Halloween for them? It’s not fair. They can’t even let themselves enjoy the cocaine. Er, candy. So Only, in sympathy for these poor, suffering monsters, is making a few costume suggestions so our leaders can enjoy prowling the shadows of our crumbling society’s streets as much as the corridors of power.

Bill Clinton
That crazy outburst of Ex-President Bill Clinton’s on Fox last week had nothing to do with Chris Wallace’s needling him on Osama. It was a full moon that night, y’see, and Bll had just finished watching Teen Wolf starring Michael J. Fox, and there he was on Fox, and things were getting kind of hairy, and it all just kind of came together into an angry mess. Bill needs to exercise his inner teen wolf, just like a certain wolf exercised a certain teen in the Oval Office a few years ago, y’know what we’re sayin’? Also, Bill has the hairiest body since Grover Cleveland, and we’re not just talking presidents here. Incidentally, did you know the only reason they let Cleveland into the White House a second time was so he would clean up his leftover sheddings?

Fidel Castro
Sometimes the magic of Halloween costumes lies in their simplicity. The beard was already a cinch; just pop on a top hat and voila. Not only would this costume be perfectly politically ironic, but Castro would also be a good guy to invite to a party because since there’s no candy in Cuba, all the children get bottles of rum as they go door to door. Unfortunately, he would also probably spend the entire party explaining the irony that he had escaped more attempts on his life at the hands of American assassins than Lincoln had spent years as President before he was shot.

Hugo Chavez
This leftist “oil pimp” was easy. He’s more of a Venezualan celebrity than he is a president. His flamboyant charisma has skyrocketed his talk show ‘Aló Presidente’ to hieghts only rivaled by CSPAN. So to best present his sense of popularity but enigmatic personality Only suggests Hugo go as Mr. Snuffleupagus. Back when Sesame Street was made by communists and homosexuals Senor Snuffleupagos shared similarities to Chavez’s own political approach: If Sesame Street was the world, then the grown ups (The Capitalists) never believed he existed, but the children (everyone else) knew he did.

Dick Cheney
Now, many of you might be saying “Dick Cheney as the Phantom of the Opera is an easy costume choice.” They’re both deformed, pasty faced, and lurk in shadows mumbling, but you’d be missing the fact Dick has an incredible pair of lungs. Sunday mornings the halls of the White House ring with Dick’s arias reverberating from the showers in the North Wing, with George picking up the colouratura soprano with the trembling vulnerability of a contrata eunuch boy dropping a bar of soap. Beautiful.

Vladimir Putin
We’d like to see Vlad dress up as a lump of ginseng. Apparently at the Kremlin, they bottle his breath as a health tonic, and when the Russian president walks by his assistants’ eyes start to tear up. Ginseng was an easy choice because all he has to do to pull it off is make a grumpy face, paint himself turnip coloured (in Russia known as “The Other Potato”) and walk around naked. Naked doesn’t make him look more ginseng-like, it’s just his thing. Who’s going to point it out to him? The last person–some journalist–made mention of his naked Tom Cruise costume last year, and she regretted it.

Sam Sullivan
Originally we thought “Professor X from X-Men!” because we love any superhero whose costume includes a woollen blanket. But we didn’t want to make him shave his head–people might mistake him for the Dalai Lama. Finally we decided on Dr. Stephen Hawking. They are both galactic geniuses, and give lengthy speeches that eventually sound like someone beating a xylophone made up of hog-tied frogs.