Werewolves of Texas

By Ann "Babe" Huggett

For the malleable young, nothing beats having a role model to look up to and emulate. That's why sports figures, rock musicians and celebrities need to be so circumspect in their lives. They're not, of course, because it's in their commercial interest to keep the current toxic popular culture churning away for their risk adverse, corporate masters. Scandals help to hide the lack of talent amongst the unoriginal, cookie-cutter star set while generating you-can't-pay-for-this-type-of-publicity headlines sure to push off real news in favor of the mental cotton candy floss so beloved by commercial interests.

However, this type of decadent, inartistic slovenliness gets repetitiously boring after a while and a teen's radar is exquisitely tuned to winnowing out the bogus from the merely banal. So what's a poor teen looking for someone to pattern themselves after supposed to do? Our past heroes and heroines are either excoriated for not being politically correct, if they are even mentioned at all, or are considered so out-of-date as to be irrelevant. In fact, what with all this eco-greenie Gaia worship going on in our public schools, humans themselves are not only not held up as something worth while but actively despised for their respective and collective carbon footprints. Even that current socialist secular living saint, President Obama, is proving to have feet of clay for them because BP oil is still gushing into the Gulf of Mexico soiling US beaches, destroying Louisiana tide water ecosystems and killing untold numbers of marine and animal life all while he goes on yet another vacation and/or tees off at the nearest golf course.

One thing that I doubt anyone on the educational, environmentalist Left has bothered to remember, if they ever knew it to begin with, is that Nature abhors a vacuum whether it is in spatial form or between one's ears. When one has nothing worth evaluating on the noodle, all types of silliness gets planted and takes root. Now socialism can't really exist when the populace is actually educated so ignorance by humanity for Leftists is control-freak bliss. However, socialists NEVER seem to grasp that human nature is constant and therefore not perfectible within artificial, secular constructs.

Unfortunately for all of us, a folly of human nature is that it is prone to memes, the more nonsensical sometimes the better especially when one is no longer grounded historically, religiously or culturally and therefore adrift and bored out of one's skull. It is how fads, crazes and cultural inanities get so widespread. It's why some people anthropomorphize their pets into children, yearn to become blue skinned Na'avi, or reinvent the wheel when all they had to do was a little research.

The latest cultural wheel reinvention is happening right now in Texas schools where "wolf packs" of up to 20 teens come to school sporting fangs, slit iris yellow contact lenses and furry tails, yes, tails attached to their bumms. Influenced by Benicio Del Toro's role and make-up in the movie, Twilight and The Wolfman, not to mention all the pro-werewolf comics, animated cartoons and TV shows that have inundated their lives these past years, Texas teens are howling with delight although they don't want to be feared.

Evidently playing Hallowe'en dress-up year round gives them a feeling of "belonging" to a group as evidenced by what 15 year old "pack leader," Deikitsen "Lupus" Manley of San Antonio's Brandeis High School claims, "Human wolves have been around a lot longer than characters in Twilight. It gives us a sense of belonging. You gain friends and you belong and indulge your wild side."

And where are the parents in all this? Pam, Deikitsen's mother, made excuses for her son's childish play-acting lack of public dignity by saying, "As soon as he walks in the door, he is supposed to take out the fangs, and lose the lenses and tail. They're good kids. It takes courage to stand up and be who you want to be."

Uh...since when did "werewolf" become a career choice? Does that mean Deikitsen will father a litter with his future mate? Can he get a job without his rabies shots or drive a car without his dog license?

This werewolf craze is not just in Texas although the costuming seems to be confined to that state for now. A young teen of my acquaintance in Oregon is obsessed with lycanthropes and does nothing but draw them all day. At an age when she should be showing interest in the real world, she's instead drawing such blood-curdling creatures that I expressed real concern about the state of her mental health to her mother, who replied, "Oh, she's just allowing her internal rage to vent through her art."

Say what? That kid utterly skates through life with everything handed to her on a silver platter. She is totally without any personal responsibilities or discipline and would forget to breathe if it wasn't an automatic reflex. Is being stuck for years drawing the same Japanese-inspired manga style gothic horror cartoons a venting mechanism for a typical, government-controlled public school student bereft of all intellectual curiosity and desire for learning?

(British social commentator, prison physician and writer, Theodore Dalrymple, theorized that the normalcy of cursing in even what passes for normal speech now is a prime example of the inarticulate rage one experiences when confronted with complex emotions hamstrung by a limited vocabulary thanks to substandard, government-run state schools.)

So what looks on the surface to be another cyclic generational teen fad ala Michael Landon or Michael J. Fox has a troubling undercurrent of mental instability. Lest anyone think that it's just teens that fall prey to this fad, young adults are joining in but with even scarier undertones. Someone calling herself "Wolfie Blackheart" found what she claimed was a dead dog, cut off its head and boiled it making sure to post her culinary skills on the web for all to see.

When her exercise in really graphic photo journalism came to the attention of the local police, Wolfie went in to that default mode as exhibited by the Texas teens about not needing to be feared because, "I would never kill a canine. I am a canine."

© Ann "Babe" Huggett