CLAUDIO SALVUCCI

Throwing sorcery into the cauldron of leftist brainwashing

Yes, for the low retail price of $24.95 (broomstick sold separately), you can provide your teens with everything they need to enter the lucrative world of sorcery.

Pennsylvanians go Transylvanian as another bumper crop of pumpkins heralds the advent of Halloween, with all its impish lampooning of evil and death.

And so on a recent chilly moonlit night, I was walking through Borders Books and Music in Oxford Valley, quickening my steps and averting my eyes through certain wicked little sections as if they bore Dante's immortal inscription over the entrance of Hell: "Per me si va nella citta dolente..." ("Through me one enters the city of sorrow...")

In the ostensible sanctuary of the young adult section, I was halted by a fiendish little apparition called "Silver Ravenwolf's Teen Witch Kit," with sundry occult items depicted on the cover along with two young malcontents, who, if they lived under my roof, I'd ground until Christmas just for looking like that.

Yes, for the low retail price of $24.95 (broomstick sold separately), you can provide your teens with everything they need to enter the lucrative world of sorcery. Why let them fritter their lives away in such useless rational pursuits like science, music or engineering, when they can be employed in more constructive enterprises like say, using love magic to bewitch Britney Spears.

New Age publisher Llewellyn Worldwide released this Endora's box back in August. It contains six "magickal talismans": a bell, moon pendant, prosperity coin, crystal, wish cord, and - of course - the always handy pentagram, a must have for the budding young heresiarch.

Fifteenth century alchemist Thomas Norton is slapping his spectral forehead right about now. Forget all this red philosophers' stone malarky. Stick a few trinkets in a box, find yourself a bookstore outlet, and voila! You can turn credulousness into gold!

(Me, I'm working on a Phrenology Fun Pack as we speak. Ka-ching!)

I'm trying to understand here what peculiar pleasure we adults take in allowing every superstition, pseudo-science and snake-oil to be planted in teen-agers' minds at the very same time we are ripping hard science, history and classics out of their education by the roots.

Ecology is no longer the scientific study of population dynamics - it is an experiment in leftist brainwashing, where the one species on Earth we secretly hope goes extinct is our own. History is no longer the analysis of past events - it's the script for a multiculturalist comic book in which the protagonists defend the earth from villainous white people, whose only apparent contribution to world civilization is apologizing for their existence.

And barely an iota of our venerable Greco-Roman heritage is left in higher education: Former classical bastions like Bryn Mawr might now have more students worshiping Greek gods than translating Greek literature.

Into this cast-iron cauldron of politically-correct ignorance we now hope to stir in witchcraft?

Pardon me while I choke on my eye of newt.

I'll leave it to the clergy to give this Teen Witch Kit the business end of Commandment Numero Uno. For the time being let's just say there's a reason why witchcraft is on the outs with both science and religion - including, incidentally, many of the old pagan ones which this kit purports to draw from.

It's thoroughly senseless to convince teen-agers that they possess magical powers, which in point of fact, they don't have and never will. We can sympathize with their escapism, and understand why it might be sorely tempting at times to trade the reality of Bensalem, PA for the fantasy of Salem, MA. But maturity tells us that this is not an egocentric universe that orbits around our petty wants and desires. Bad things happen to us all whether we want them to or not. And that's why one night a year we personify those grim realities into devils, ghosts and witches, and have a bit of fun at their expense.

Ultimately it doesn't matter if it's white magic, black magic, or a darling shade of mauve: When you start chipping away at the moorings of reason, every day starts to look a bit more like Halloween and, as Jerry Springer demonstrates, people start to dress accordingly.

And should one of those spandex specimens come sauntering up to my door on any other night besides Oct. 31st, I ain't reaching for the candy corn, I'm dialing 911.