Should you find your way up to Salem, Mass., this Halloween season, your chances of encountering a psychic are up ”” and the odds that that he or she has a felony record are down. That, for those of you who were too drowned in multimedia Harry Potter to notice, is the news from the real town where some estimate every tenth person is a witch.
In June, the Salem town council eased its rules on fortune tellers ”” or, to be more specific, those locals who are engaged in “the telling of fortunes, forecasting of futures, or reading the past, by means of any occult, psychic power, faculty, force, clairvoyance, cartomancy, psychometry, phrenology, spirits, tea leaves, tarot cards, scrying, coins, sticks, dice, coffee grounds, crystal gazing or other such reading, or through mediumship, seership, prophecy, augury, astrology, palmistry, necromancy, mind-reading, telepathy or other craft, art, science, talisman, charm, potion, magnetism, magnetized article or substance, or by any such similar thing or act.”
Salem may have been where witches were once tried and executed by puritans, but ”” thanks to the magic of branding ”” it has since become a mecca for witches and others involved in the occult arts, as well as for tourists. Around a hundred thousand tourists descend on the town every Halloween season.
The city I live in borders on Salem. And if anyone believes the people in costume there are what they purport to be (witches, wizards, warlocks) then I know a bridge in Brooklyn… They are just slick, greedy entrepreneurs who are certain there is a sucker born every minute—and based on the tourists reeled in by the phony hype (aided and abetted by unscrupulous city officials) there is a sucker born every minute. Us nearby locals know not to go on Salem’s streets for weeks before Halloween because constant traffic jams make gridlock common then.
But what is even more revolting and disgusting about the whole corrupt affair is that those who were hung were heroes for truth–not witches (which the whole circus in Salem makes look otherwise). If the victims of the witchcraft hysteria had been willing to lie under oath, they were let go.
But try to tell that to a modern group of public high school students in history class (I taught history for almost 40 years). That there are people willing to die for the truth and so as not to betray their sense of personal honor is incomprehensible to today’s valueless youth in a valueless society.
Which in my book makes the people of today’s Salem (and the sensation seeking tourist hordes) who infect that city as bad–or worse–than the people of 1692 Salem. At least 1692 Salem had a few people of integrity and honor–those executed for witchcraft.
If the people of Salem and the tourists visiting there were there to honor the victims–that would be one thing. But anyone who has seen the way Salem, the state, tourist agencies–and the play-acting witches at work know what a disgrace the whole thing is. They might as well be urinating on the graves of the people who died in Salem.
And I am not the only one who feels this way. I know a number of families in Salem who get out of town at Halloween time–and not just because the traffic is horrific, but because the place fills up with horrific people exuding the same empty-headed mob mentality that caused the 1692 executions.