While Donald Trump’s presidency has unwittingly turned everyone goth as a result of the misery he hath wrought worldwide, it didn’t seem that he could take one of the few sources of joy left for a goth away from them: that is Goth Day–better known as Bats Day at Disneyland. The event, which started twenty years ago, has garnered roughly over 8,000 goths at one point, who have shown up in attendance to let their darkness shine as the gathering picked up steam for a place to “happily” celebrate being miserable.
But Trump doesn’t even want you to have a safe space for your misery either. Or at least, he didn’t take into account the negative effects his 2018 tax plan would have on the organizers of Bats Day, which significantly minimized the number of deductions the event’s coordinators were able to make in putting together the grand homage to a perpetual melancholic state of being.
As their press release stated regarding the demise, “We can no longer run Bats Day in the Fun Park on the grand scale that it has. What most people don’t realize is that Bats Day is a labor of love; we don’t make money on it. Bats Day has never had any corporate funding or sponsorship, either: It is an event we do for the community.” Trump, apparently, is saying: fuck your community. Even if it does consist of mostly pale people that constitute your idea of the Aryan race, the one you can never be apart of because you are orange. Founder Noah Korda added, “Mind you, we can still do some deductions, but it’s not nearly as much as what we have been able to do,” but this still, is not enough to keep the corpse of the day moving.
Leaving pause for one to think if Trump can ever understand what he’s taken away from the goths. If goth even really exists anymore, for, also according to Korda, “Really, what the goth community was, it was all about the music. And unfortunately, due to the lack of new goth music coming it, it’s sort of metamorphosed into sort of like a, I guess you could say, like a style.” Maybe one that Trump should implement on all his subjugates considering we are living in a dreary time that warrants all-black, all day.
That deductions people like Korda have been able to make have disappeared as a result of this tax plan is telling of just how little the U.S. president cares for the community spirit. The people who struggle and at last succeed in finding their tribe only to lose it to the tax man, a puppet loosely controlled by Trump when he’s able to remember what he’s trying to control or do.
While there is still the separate and free to partake of on your own time “World Goth Day” every May 22 since 2009 (possibly a way to also honor Morrissey’s birthday, even though some people would rather not), there will never be that ironic magic of Disneyland to underscore the contrast of being a goth in a world that just wants to look the other way and pretend that everything’s fine and we’re all just so fucking happy.
