Guardian readers may not know that last night was the most mischievous night on the American calendar. Depending on where you hail from stateside, October 30 is called either Devil's Night or Mischief Night. (The only night on the British calendar I've seen that comes close in spirit is Guy Fawkes Night, now popularized worldwide by the movie, V for Vendetta.)
Basically, Mischief Night's more innocent face is teenagers engaging in low-level vandalism - smashing pumpkins, toilet-papering houses and pelting eggs at anything and everything. But coming from the Philadelphia suburbs I remember its more malevolent face hovering over the city of Camden, New Jersey, which the Washington Post's Emil Steiner, also a Philadelphia native, recounts while tracing the night's history. Read on ...
I grew up in Philadelphia, a stone's throw from Camden, NJ - then the epicenter of Mischief Night vandalism. On October 30 1991, when I was 13 years old, the city was torched by rampaging teenagers (at least it was reported that they were teenagers). There were 130-plus fires in a city of only 87,000.
I still remember waking up that morning and watching a replay of the city ablaze on the local news. It looked medieval, which, as Steiner finds out, is precisely the time period from which the holiday sprang before angry young male Americans - actually Motor City "devils" if you like - placed their signature upon it.
Detroit is widely considered the nexus for what became known as Devil's Night. In the years after World War II, young Motor City residents spent the night getting even with those whom they felt had wronged them. This modern-day "inversion festival" - the name comes from a medieval European tradition in which the commoners could, for a day, "invert" the usual order and pull pranks on their feudal lords - quickly degenerated, however. (When you're an angry young man, who hasn't wronged you?)
I guess Devil's Night fits right into the darker side of Americana, where our cultural belief in the redemptive force of violent retribution is repressed by sanitized versions of history that laud meta narratives of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," which naturally cannot do justice to the complexity of the American revolution, our violent march west and our unipolar, yet waning, moment in international politics.
But the British already know this, because if my founding fathers didn't engage in a little mischief of their own with the help of angry young men against King George, I wouldn't be writing this post.
