It is that time of year again. What has become a time of disinhibitd hijinx and mayhem, and a growing marketing bonanza for the kitsch-manufacturers and -importers, has primeval origins as the Celtic New Year’s Eve, Samhain (pronounced “sow-en”). The harvest is over, summer ends and winter begins, the Old God dies and returns to the Land of the Dead to await his rebirth at Yule, and the land is cast into darkness. The veil separating the worlds of the living and the dead becomes frayed and thin, and dispossessed dead mingle with the living, perhaps seeking a body to possess for the next year as their only chance to remain connected with the living, who hope to scare them away with ghoulish costumes and behavior, escape their menace by masquerading as one of them, or placate them with offerings of food, in hopes that they will go away before the new year comes. For those prepared, a journey to the other side could be made at this time. It is fortunate that Hallowe’en falls on a Friday this year, as there is evidence that the pagan festival was celebrated for three days.

With Christianity, perhaps because with calendar reform it was no longer the last day of the year, All Hallows’ Eve became decathected, a day for innocent masquerading and fun, taking its name Hallowe’en as a contraction and corruption of All Hallows’ Eve. All Saints’ Day may have originated in its modern form with the 8th century Pope Gregory III. Hallowe’en customs reputedly came to the New World with the Irish immigrants of the 1840’s. The prominence of trick-or-treating has a slightly different origin, however.

The custom of trick-or-treating is thought to have originated not with the Irish Celts, but with a ninth-century European custom called souling. On November 2, All Souls Day, early Christians would walk from village to village begging for “soul cakes,” made out of square pieces of bread with currants. The more soul cakes the beggars would receive, the more prayers they would promise to say on behalf of the dead relatives of the donors. At the time, it was believed that the dead remained in limbo for a time after death, and that prayer, even by strangers, could expedite a soul’s passage to heaven.

Jack-o’-lanterns were reportedly originally turnips; the Irish began using pumpkins after they immigrated to North AMerica, given how plentiful they were here.

The Jack-o-lantern custom probably comes from Irish folklore. As the tale is told, a man named Jack, who was notorious as a drunkard and trickster, tricked Satan into climbing a tree. Jack then carved an image of a cross in the tree’s trunk, trapping the devil up the tree. Jack made a deal with the devil that, if he would never tempt him again, he would promise to let him down the tree.

According to the folk tale, after Jack died, he was denied entrance to Heaven because of his evil ways, but he was also denied access to Hell because he had tricked the devil. Instead, the devil gave him a single ember to light his way through the frigid darkness. The ember was placed inside a hollowed-out turnip to keep it glowing longer.

Folk traditions that were in the past associated wtih All Hallows’ Eve took much of their power, as with the New Year’s customs about which I write here every Dec. 31st, from the magic of boundary states, transition and liminality.

The idea behind ducking, dooking or bobbing for apples seems to have been that snatching a bite from the apple enables the person to grasp good fortune. Samhain is a time for getting rid of weakness, as pagans once slaughtered weak animals which were unlikely to survive the winter. A common ritual calls for writing down weaknesses on a piece of paper or parchment, and tossing it into the fire. There used to be a custom of placing a stone in the hot ashes of the bonfire. If in the morning a person found that the stone had been removed or had cracked, it was a sign of bad fortune. Nuts have been used for divination: whether they burned quietly or exploded indicated good or bad luck. Peeling an apple and throwing the peel over one’s shoulder was supposed to reveal the initial of one’s future spouse. One way of looking for omens of death was for peope to visit churchyards

The Witches’ Sabbath aspect of Hallowe’en seems to result from Germanic influence, and fusion with the notion of Walpurgisnacht. (Who knows the magnificent musical evocation of this, Mussorgsky’s Night on Bare Mountain?) Although probably not yet in a position to shape mainstream American Hallowe’en traditions, Mexican Dia de los Muertos observances have started to contribute some delightful and whimsical iconography to our encounter with the eerie and unearthly as well.

What was Hallowe’en like forty or fifty years ago in the U.S. when, bastardized as it has become with respect to its pagan origins, it retained a much more traditional flair? For my purposes, suffice it to say that it was before the era of the pay-per-view ‘spooky-world’ type haunted attractions and its Martha Stewart yuppification with, as this irreverent Salon article from last year [via walker] puts it, mnogrammed jack-o’-lanterns and the like. Related, an essay by Richard Seltzer, frequently referenced in other sources, entitled “Why Bother to Save Halloween?”, seems to have disappeared from the web. If anyone can find it, I would appreciate it if you would send me the link. I suspect that his message is similar to mine — that reverence for Halowe’en is good for the soul.

That would be anathema to certain segments of society, however. Halloween certainly inspires a backlash by fundamentalists who consider it a blasphemous abomination. ‘Amateur scholar’ Isaac Bonewits details academically the Halloween errors and lies he feels contribute to its being reviled. Some of the panic over Hallowe’en is akin to the hysteria, fortunately now debunked, over the supposed epidemic of ‘ritual Satanic abuse’ that swept the Western world in the ’90’s.

The horror film has become inextricably linked to Hallowe’en tradition, although the holiday itself did not figure in the movies until John Carpenter took the slasher genre singlehandedly by storm. Googling “scariest films”, you will, grimly, reap a mother lode of opinions about how to pierce the veil to journey to the netherworld and reconnect with that magical, eerie creepiness in the dark (if not the over-the-top blood and gore that has largely replaced the subtlety of earlier horror films).

“A scientist funded by the US government has deliberately created an extremely deadly form of mousepox, a relative of the smallpox virus, through genetic engineering.

The new virus kills all mice even if they have been given antiviral drugs as well as a vaccine that would normally protect them.

The work has not stopped there. The cowpox virus, which infects a range of animals including humans, has been genetically altered in a similar way.

The new virus, which is about to be tested on animals, should be lethal only to mice, Mark Buller of the University of St Louis told New Scientist. He says his work is necessary to explore what bioterrorists might do.” —New Scientist

Solar Tempest of 1859 Revealed: “A pair of strong solar storms that hit Earth late last week were squalls compared to the torrent of electrons that rained down in the ‘perfect space storm’ of 1859. And sooner or later, experts warn, the Sun will again conspire again send earthlings a truly destructive bout of space weather.

If it happens anytime soon, we won’t know exactly what to expect until it’s over, and by then some modern communication systems could be like beachfront houses after a hurricane.

In early September in 1859, telegraph wires suddenly shorted out in the United States and Europe, igniting widespread fires. Colorful aurora, normally visible only in polar regions, were seen as far south as Rome and Hawaii.” —space.com

I hadn’t checked in on the Kausfiles in awhile and was interested to find him raving about the Terry Schiavo case at length — largely in the service of his chronic desire to skewer NPR. Kaus frequently prefaces his most juiced-up rants with a statement that he had almost made up his mind the other way (” I was just growing more sympathetic to the cause of those who want to pull the plug on Terri Schiavo…”) until he heard such-and-such. Then he’s off and running.

In this case, he seems to be upset that the neurologist on whom an NPR report depended for a definition of persistent vegetative state had been an expert witness for Michael Schiavo, the husband who favors pulling the feeding tube and around whom, if you haven’t been following the issue, swirls innuendo about possible unsavory aspects to his motives. That he supports Schiavo’s right to die does not mean that his definition of PVS is biased, as Kaus suggests without coming right out and saying it (although he makes more egregious use of italics than I do); if it happens that scientific opinion is on your side of a case, it makes sense to hire an authoritative expert to say so, wouldn’t it? Kaus does have a point, that NPR’s coverage was not counterbalanced by interviews with anyone representing the ‘parents’ side’, although that may be because it is mostly Rabid Right right-to-lifers who are on that bandwagon.

Kaus’ greatest error, and one he publishes an erratum for further down in the column after he reads some legal sources, is one I suspect is a common and quite prejudicial confusion. He bandies about the term “surrogate” to refer to his assumption that Michael Schiavo has decision-making power with respect to his wife’s affairs. (He says, at one point, “Notice to All Potential Mickey Kaus “Surrogates”– If I’m ever in Terri Schiavo’s situation, and not in any pain, please follow these simple steps: Keep the feeding tube in, and keep Dr. Nuland out”, referring to prominent death-and-dying author physician Sherwin Nuland, who supports stopping life support in this case. Does Kaus leave himself open to the obvious rejoinder, that this might already be the case?) In fact, as Kaus’ correction notes, the standard for making decisions on the behalf of someone who cannot make decisions for themselves is not what anyone else wants for them, but what they would have told us they would have wanted themselves if they had been able to articulate it, so-called ‘substituted judgment’. (Of course, I am not a lawyer, although I have been involved in many incompetency cases as a clinical psychiatrist, usually involving determining whether a currently psychotic patient refusing treatment would have, when of sound mind, consented to medical care for a life-threatening condition. If what I am saying needs correcting fro a legal standpoint, please do not hesitate to do so.) It is the courts that make decisions in such case based on evidence about what the person would have wanted from those who know/knew her. I would be a fool to assert that the evidence presented by ‘loved ones’ would not be tainted at times by their own hidden agendas. But one would be a fool to think that courts are blind to such covert intentions. A guardian in such a case where a court has made treatment decisions based on ‘substituted judgment’ is really just monitoring adherence to the court-ordered treatment plan. There are far more safeguards against a malevolent or conspiratorial hijacking of decision-making authority over you when you are debilitated than the pop-culture horror stories animating your worst nightmares would lead you to believe.

Kaus also falls prey to the misunderstanding about PVS that animates most of the emotion surrounding this case. It is very unlikely that medical professionals will rush to judgment and make a hasty diagnosis that soemone is not sentient and that the condition is irreversible, and it is less and less likely as more sophisticated tools to identify and recognize the pattersn of brain activity (or lack of it) in a vegetative patient have come into play. As Kaus raises the spectre that “just occasionally a Susie (might arrive) from Dubuque to find exhausted relatives and cost-conscious doctors ready to give up on a PVS or coma victim who still has a chance to snap out of it,” he commits the quadruple sin of lumping coma and PVS together irresponsibly; letting wishful thinking get the better of him; and derogating the motives of both family members (who if they are hanging in there at the bedside by and large need to be persuaded to give up their last hopes for their lvoed one; the ‘exhausted’ ones aren’t there) and caregivers (who invariably fight a pitched battle against the ‘cost-conscious’ bean counters in hospital administration to give ongoing care to their patients).

She’s been gone from Salon for several years now, but they contacted Camille Paglia for her comments on current events. Here she goes:

• On the Democrats:
  

  “The emptiness at the heart of the Democratic Party is absolutely clear in the current campaign for the 2004 presidential nomination. The Democratic senators never take a stand without consulting a pollster. They’re all trimmers — they put their finger in the wind and frantically trim their sails. They were so twisted up about political fallout before last fall’s election that they gave Bush a rubber stamp for war. Sen. Robert Byrd was the only strong, eloquent voice denouncing this dangerous expansion of presidential power and misuse of our military.”

• On Bush:
  

  “I don’t personally hate Bush. I think he’s sincere and well-meaning. But I feel very sorry for him. Every time I watch him, I feel his suffering, and I suffer with him. But he’s out of his depth in this job. His view of the world is painfully simplistic — like a Wild West video game where the good guys wear white hats and always win. But he’s surrounded by manipulators — like Vice President Dick Cheney, the invisible man, the shadowy puppeteer.”

• On Rumsfeld:
  

  “The person I do hate is Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who is out of control and who has trashed what should be the professional cooperation between the State Department and the Pentagon. Rumsfeld is lost in some delusional state. He’s like Newt Gingrich in the grandstanding narcissism department. Both Rumsfeld and Gingrich show how narrow-bore thinking can turn high I.Q. into colossal stupidity.”

• On blowback:
  

  “Oh, yes, that’s the great accomplishment of the Bush administration! They’ve turned Iraq into a Hollywood studio for terrorism. Al-Qaida was on the run, we were after them in Afghanistan, and now there’s been a massive reinvigoration of al-Qaida. They’ve become heroic role models to Islamic youth. And there’s been a poisoning of world opinion against us — after the sympathy we got after 9/11.”

• On Dean:
  

  “Unless there’s some huge change, I’ll be voting for Dean in the Democratic primary, simply as a gesture for the antiwar side. But I’m not thrilled. I don’t think Dean is remotely presidential in manner. He hasn’t thought any of this through — the style of presidential authority. You can’t just run around wildly with this dour, dyspeptic, sanctimonious persona. Dean’s ability to galvanize a wide-ranging electorate is very limited. I don’t see how he’s going to inspire or attract African-American or Latino voters, or anyone outside white upper-middle-class professionals and the media elite.”

• On Kerry:
  

  “For years, I was looking forward to voting for John Kerry. He is deeply knowledgeable about military and world affairs and is truly authoritative in presence, with a natural gravitas. I once talked in Salon about seeing him on C-SPAN and thinking, wow, he’s so articulate and low-key — how wonderful to have a president like that! This was in the early Bush period when Bush could barely get a complete sentence out. But I’ve been shocked by Kerry’s performance on the stump. His manner is so strained, dead and aloof. One problem is that he’s spent way too much time with rich people and fellow thinkers — that burden of being a Massachusetts liberal that sank Dukakis. And the hair! All that faux-Kennedy stuff that Democrats like Kerry and John Edwards can’t get rid of. They’re so out of it! Don’t they see that hair styles have changed and that flowing locks don’t signal authority? Look at Bush’s short cut — it’s a Roman general’s style. Rush Limbaugh hilariously refers to John Edwards as “the Breck Girl” — perfect! And Edwards’ whole chirpy, boyish manner — who thinks that’s going to fly in the age of terrorism?
  

  
  But Kerry seems to be a prisoner of his handlers — that whole venal machinery of political consultants that has taken over the Democratic Party, all in the Terry McAuliffe mold. I loathe McAuliffe — a cheap buffoon and parasite. Consultants lobotomize the candidates, whose energy then gets sucked dry by fundraising. Kerry’s advisors have made him seem prissy. It’s a real tragedy because it’s Kerry who has the military record and knowledge of the federal government to be president — he’s an insider in the best sense.”

• On Clark:
  

  “What a phony! What a bunch of crap this Clark boom is. Clark reminds me of Keir Dullea in “2001: A Space Odyssey” — a blank, vacant expression, detached and affectless. There’s something sexually neutered about Dullea in that film — a physical passivity necessitated by cramped space travel — that I also find in Clark. And the astronaut Dullea plays is sometimes indistinguishable from the crazed computer, HAL — which I find in Clark’s smug, computerized vocal delivery.
  

  
  Doesn’t anyone know how to “read” TV? The guy’s an android! He gives me the creeps. And don’t they realize how short he is? He’s a slick, boudoir, salon military type who rubbed plenty of colleagues the wrong way. Clark is not a natural man’s man. And he’s no Eisenhower, who was a genial, charismatic leader with a genius for collaboration and organization. This is just another hysterical boomlet, as when the nerdy Northeast media went gaga for John McCain — “Finally, a soldier we like!” Well, McCain was another big hot dog with little natural rapport with regular guys. Clark made a major strategic error in going for the presidency. He’s been stumbling all over the place and exposing his lack of general knowledge as well as experience with practical politics.
  

  
  Two weeks ago, NPR ran a scathing series of taped quotes from leading military figures clearly implying they know more about Clark’s career failures than they can tell. A lot of people don’t trust him. Last summer, I thought Clark would be a good vice presidential partner for Dean. But Clark’s hubris undid him — he’s tainted meat now. The Democratic Party should stay away from this guy — who wasn’t even a registered Democrat until recently.”

• On the fall of Rush:
  

  
  ‘When the McNabb flap broke, Rush could have caught himself and demonstrated his genuine erudition in football — which he’s shared with his audience for years. But suddenly his isolation became dramatically clear. Where was his staff? Callers to his show challenged him, asking who exactly in the media had ever overrated McNabb? Rush kept saying vaguely, “the Philadelphia media,” and I winced. The Philadelphia media have fried McNabb! For heaven’s sake, a radio star here even took a mob up to New York to boo McNabb on the day he was drafted! McNabb is personally very popular, but his uneven skills as a quarterback are constantly being hashed over here.
  

  
  Days passed when Rush should have been getting research data from his staff — chapter and verse to support his position. His inability to manage basic crisis control amazed me. But through all of that public abuse and exposure, he emerged not diminished but with the dimension of a major Hollywood star, like Judy Garland, who attained semi-divinity through her drug overdoses and suicide attempts. It’s as if Rush stepped over from pugilistic political commentator to mysterious, tortured myth in just a few days.
  

  
  When Democratic candidates like Dean attack Rush, they don’t realize how they are alienating millions of people. By blaming the messenger, all they’re doing is showing that the Democrats have no answer to the policy dilemmas of our day. And that Newsweek cover story hatchet job on Rush was a total disgrace! After two years of intense debate about whether the American media is biased toward liberals, for Newsweek to produce such a pathetically underreported piece of crap is mind-boggling. Rumor has it that Newsweek stringers had gathered more positive comments about Rush’s career that were junked by the top editors.”

• On replacing Rush:
  

  “O’Reilly is a crass sliver of Limbaugh. He doesn’t have Limbaugh’s homespun Midwestern common sense or his broad sense of the nation. But O’Reilly and Hannity are thorns in liberals’ side, so there’s all this talk right now about getting liberal voices on the radio to counteract them. Well, Al Franken isn’t it, let me tell you right now — or Michael Moore either. Look at them! They’re like big, drooling babies — is this the face of the Democratic Party? Big, squalling babies — “wah wah wah!”

• On Letterman etc.:
  

  “The great switch — and I’m not sure how it happened — was into juvenile, white-boy David Letterman style, smirky, cynical, callow, smarmy and jejune. I wonder how many black fans Letterman has. I can’t stand him and never watch him. But those late-night shows became a vehicle for politicians — the Democrats started it, and conservatives have followed. And that media marriage between liberal figures and the smirky Letterman style has perverted the entire process. The authentic voice of talk radio is raw, rude and hot, hot, hot! — not that cool Letterman style (to use Marshall McLuhan’s media terminology).”

• On the kiss:
  

  “I do feel there’s something wrong with that kiss. Great stars have to learn to age gracefully. I loved it when Stevie Nicks — who’s a true artist — zinged Madonna for “kissing girls half her age.” She was right. Madonna was trying not only to compete with these figures she spawned but to overshadow and upstage them and suck them dry. It was very unfair to Britney Spears, even though she looked spectacular in white lace — as nubile as a real bride. Jennifer Lopez was smarter and opted out.”

• On blogging:
  

  “Blog reading for me is like going down to the cellar amid shelves and shelves of musty books that you’re condemned to turn the pages of. Bad prose, endless reams of bad prose! There’s a lack of discipline, a feeling that anything that crosses one’s mind is important or interesting to others. People say that the best part about writing a blog is that there’s no editing — it’s free speech without institutional control. Well, sure, but writing isn’t masturbation — you’ve got to self-edit.
  

  
  Now and then one sees the claim that Kausfiles was the first blog. I beg to differ: I happen to feel that my Salon column was the first true blog. My columns had punch and on-rushing velocity. They weren’t this dreary meta-commentary, where there’s a blizzard of fussy, detached sections nattering on obscurely about other bloggers or media moguls and Washington bureaucrats. I took hits at media excesses, but I directly commented on major issues and personalities in politics and pop culture.”

• The last word:
  

  “Most bloggers aren’t culture critics but political or media junkies preoccupied with pedestrian minutiae and a sophomoric “gotcha” mentality. I find it depressing and claustrophobic. The Web is a wide open space — voices on it should have energy and vision.”

…’Nuff said.

“Bush’s latest lie, blaming the USS Lincoln crew for that embarrassing “Mission Accomplished” banner that was stage-managed by his aides, isn’t surprising. The entitled always blame the enlisted.” —Joe Conason, Salon

The Banner stops Here: “Within hours after Bush pointed at those boastful sailors, his own spokesman admitted that the White House had, in fact, designed and purchased the gigantic banner. But it was all the sailors’ idea (perhaps like those letters “sent” by the soldiers in Kirkuk to their hometown papers, at the behest of their commanding officer). “We took care of the production of it,” Scott McClellan told CNN. “We have people to do those things. But the Navy actually put it up.” So the Navy is responsible for the presidential photo-op triumphalism, right?” Salon

“Powell succeeded in his donor drive, but only up to a point. Few if any of the assembled donors were prepared to put any of their cash into the so- called Iraqi Development Fund into which the residual money from the Oil For Food program, future oil revenues, and any other cash assets of the Iraqi regime are supposed to go. They will instead be channeling their money directly through the ‘UN window’ into funds under international rather than coalition control.

There are good reasons for the reluctance to trust Uncle Sam with their money. To begin with, it has taken six months for the U.S. to allow the establishment of the International Advisory and Monitoring Board. The organization is supposed to supervise the allocations made by the Development Fund, which increasingly resembles a Halliburton/Bechtel moneybox.” —AlterNet

“Climate, ecology, and stupid urbanization have conspired to create the ingredients for one of the most devastating wildfires in California history.” —AlterNet

Turn Off the Television And Help Kids Learn: “Researchers at the Kaiser Family Foundation and Children’s Digital Media Centers on Tuesday announced results of a study on children and television. Youngsters from 6 months to 6 years of age spend about two hours a day, on average, watching television, playing video games or using computers, they said. That’s about three times as much time as the same children spent reading or being read to, according to the researchers.

Perhaps most startling thing about the study was the revelation that as many as one-third of children 6 and younger have television sets in their rooms. What, other than a cheap babysitter, was on their parents’ minds?” —The Intelligencer/Wheeling News-Register

“The most powerful geomagnetic storm possible walloped the Earth early Wednesday, knocking out some airline communications but apparently causing no large power outages or other major problems.

The storm, the most disruptive to hit Earth since 1989, was unleashed by the fourth-most powerful solar flare ever seen, NASA said.” —New York Times I can’t tell you how disappointed I am at the cloudy, rainy skies over the northeast after hearing that the solar storm might cause auroral displays as far south as the U.S. middle latitudes; seeing the aurora has been one of the most eerie and magical pleasures of my life…

Ecologist Who Warned About Excesses is Dead at 88: “Garrett Hardin, an ecologist and author who warned of the dangers of overpopulation and whose concept of the ‘tragedy of the commons’ brought attention to the damage that innocent actions by individuals can inflict on the environment, died at his home in Santa Barbara, Calif., on Sept. 14. He was 88.

He and his wife, Jane, 81, committed suicide, said their son David.

Dr. Hardin, who suffered from a heart disorder, and his wife, who had Lou Gehrig’s disease, were members of End-of-Life Choices, formerly known as the Hemlock Society.”