Ian Warden | Our inner demons are scarier than anything Halloween can offer

There is a dear old joke about lawyers, readily adaptable to apply to politicians, that goes like this. Question: Why do researchers prefer to use lawyers instead of laboratory rats in their experiments? Answer: Because there are some things rats won't do.

In recent days stars of the federal opposition and of the opposition Canberra Liberals' in the ACT Assembly have made artful public statements trying to make malignant political capital, against the ACT's government, out of the ways in which ACT roads are suddenly pocked with potholes.

The two Liberals in question are Sussan Ley, deputy leader of the Liberal Party in federal parliament and MLA Nicole Lawder her party's spokes-spindoctoratrix on City Services.

Those of us who shied away from careers in party politics always knew there were things we (just like our cousins the principled laboratory rats) would never be able to bring ourselves to do. Here, in opposition figures' attempts to exploit politically the ways in which recent weathers (in the form of extraordinary rains) have gnawed holes in road surfaces, we have a reminder of why we were too principled to go into politics.

Sussan Ley has even urged (see The Canberra Times of October 25 and the story "Canberra Liberals urged to fight for middle Canberra") that at the next ACT election voters should take a burning, pothole-stoked rage with them to their polling places and kick out the pothole-guilty Barr government.

Can it really be that holes in roads will be a major issue at the next ACT elections? Surely, Canberrans (the columnist wrote, feigning confidence in his fellow citizens but already feeling himself assailed with doubts), we see bigger pictures than that nasty, politically pornographic little sketch?

Meanwhile, although I have said above I was once glamorous enough to have oodles of political appeal (how my ruggedly radiant portrait would have shone on my corflutes and on my campaign teams' T-shirts!) I am now ravaged by age.

For last weekend's Halloween, and seeing the spirit of the festival alive in my neighbourhood, front gardens liberally decorated with spooky paraphernalia and trees and shrubs draped with fake ectoplasm (although perhaps it was real ectoplasm, for supernatural things do occur in Canberra's inner south) I toyed with the thought of going door-to-door trick-or-treating just as my uncostumed self.

"Great zombie mask!" I imagined half-terrified but appreciative children shrilling at my 76-year-old face after I had knocked on their doors with the knuckles of my (genuine) long, white, gnarled, bony, corpse-like hands.

In the end I didn't go ahead. Methought by waiting for next year's Halloween my bald, skull-like head and my gnarled face's power to terrify will (after another 12 months' accelerated ravaging) have an even greater power to bed-wettingly terrify those who see it.

I appear to joke but these are difficult times in which even to be plain let alone to be Halloweenesquely grotesque. For the online UnHerd magazine Ashley Colby has just posted a despairing essay - "Selfies have made you ugly" in which she shows how "our narcissistic era has killed off beauty".

One has to transcend one's narcissism in order to see beauty in another, and so experience love, she writes, "but society now precludes such transcendence". Today society is beguiling us into narcissistically marketing ourselves to the highest bidder, by cosmetically beautifying ourselves.

"Consider," she grieves, "the marketed self that dominates social media: an exaggeration of sexual attractiveness which has, with the help of the beauty-industrial complex, become grotesque. Female bodies are made to appear hyper-fertile through Botox and butt lifts, and male bodies virile through calf implants or tummy tucks."

"Calf implants"! If beguiled by narcissism how tempted we might be, those of us whose once manly, beefy calves have now withered away into Halloween-appropriate sticks.

Meanwhile, though, perhaps those of us who are never very grabbed by Halloween's one-night-of-the year of imitation hauntings subscribe to the sentiments of Emily Dickinson's famous little (but powerfully built) poem - "One need not be a House. One need not be a chamber to be haunted".

The point she makes is all of us who are thinking, sensitive, self-honest souls carry our own "ghosts" with us everywhere and all the time and are always being chillingly confronted by them in the "rooms" and "corridors" of our brain.

READ MORE IAN WARDEN COLUMNS:

And these virtual, internal ghosts, Emily thinks (and we know she's right, don't we dear readers) are far more terrifying than any of the routine sorts of wispy, wussy "external" ghosts we might meet in haunted houses, graveyards, and their usual haunts-habitats.

Among the many sorts of "internal" ghosts Emily has in mind (our sometimes shame-tinged doubts, fears, regrets, remorseful memories, those sorts of things) she surely is thinking of the pangs of conscience politicians (especially those down in opposition's gutter and driven to desperate and shameful things) feel when they are home alone with their consciences.

Perhaps, for them, for doing and saying the sorts of dishonourable things discussed earlier in this piece, every day (or more probably every sleepless night at about four in the morning) is a kind of internal Halloween. One does hope so.