“The invasion of Iraq has given Osama bin Laden a historic gift, vindicating his claim that Americans as Crusaders.

Immediate availability for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux as a free download or on CD…. and you will be glad you got it.

I have just started to see this silly vocal mannerism popping up everywhere.

Are You Worried? Get Over It. (New York Times)

may speak volumes to the demographics of the Bush vote. [thanks, Jerry]

More on the role of lack of intelligence on the part of the voters in the outcome of the election:

And , prophetically:

“When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental — men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack, or count himself lost. His one aim is to disarm suspicion, to arouse confidence in his orthodoxy, to avoid challenge. If he is a man of convictions, of enthusiasm, or self-respect, it is cruelly hard.

The larger the mob, the harder the test. In small areas, before small electorates, a first rate man occasionally fights his way through, carrying even a mob with him by the force of his personality. But when the field is nationwide, and the fight must be waged chiefly at second or third hand, and the force of personality cannot so readily make itself felt, then all the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum.

The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their hearts desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

–H.L. Mencken, The Baltimore Evening Sun, July 26, 1920

“Why did this race end up 51-48? Most pundits can’t answer to that question, and don’t even know how to approach it. We make this suggestion: Beware explanation. Many aspects of this election are worth discussing. But most of the pundits you see on TV won’t even know what they are.” [more…] (Daily Howler)

“Yes, the devastation will be extreme. The good news? He’ll sow his own destruction.” — Dennnis Jett (Salon)

“When the Personal Shouldn’t Be Political: It should concern us that declarations of ‘faith’ are quickly becoming a condition for seeking public office.” — Gary Hart (New York Times op-ed)

“Time to Get Religion: Democrats need to give a more prominent voice to Middle American, gun-shooting, Spanish-speaking, Bible-toting centrists.” — Nicholas Kristof (New York Times op-ed)

Here is some further thought-provoking, although inconclusive, discussion of the relationship between intelligence and political stance in modern America, in light of my discussion below.

Related: Jane Smiley writes:

to anyone that the assault on Fallujah began as soon as Bush had the election in the bag? Make way for the body bags.

for the two lengthy posts below. They are hardly the norm here. At times like this, I do tend to go on. Please persevere and read through them if you will. I would really be interested in my readers’ reactions and critiques.

Dennis Fox:

I appreciate Dennis’ thoughts, with which I largely agree (returning Dennis’ favor). I should say a little more about two things, though — what I mean by more ‘militancy’ (Dennis’ word, not mine, although it is a neat encapsulation) and what I mean in derogating the intelligence of the electorate.

In the post to which Dennis was responding, I was mostly urging transcending the narrow political aspects of the struggle. It seems a given to me that, for the forseeable future, third party movements aside, most of the elected officials in the US will be Republicans or Democrats and the battles for political power will be waged within the two-party system. While I certainly thought this campaign struggle was one worth fighting, I don’t think it is useful to continue to confine ourselves to that venue. It was clear that, even with an unprecedented populist movement in the form of grassroots funding, activist organizations emerging in parallel to the DNC, excursions to neighboring battleground states, etc. the Republican machine, which focused on getting out the vote of their core constituents, was more effective still. I would love to see an analysis telling me I am wrong and that we just didn’t try hard enough, but I don’t think the answer in 2008 or whenever is more of the same. The electorate does not strike me as like a soaked sponge from which, the harder you press, the more votes you can squeeze out. Alot of commentary will blame the lack of clearly-enough articulated alternatives to aspects of the Republican agenda we were criticizing, the lack of appealing personality to the candidate(s), etc., but they are barking up the wrong tree. The Democrats ran as good a race as they could have in the face of Republican machine politics and their lock on the media. Not only do the Republicans have a stranglehold on electoral support, now and for the forseeable future, but opportunities for fundamental change are largely filtered out by working through a political system which has evolved to constrain us in essentially conservative directions. A two-party system, especially with the current electoral college mechanism, forces a regression toward the mean (Dennnis’ characterization of the Democrats’ goals as “tepid”) and inherently disenfranchises those who lose out. A 51% majority becomes a wholesale “mandate”, and there is nothing the other 49% can do about it. It is time for the left to start reading revolutionary theory again; there is a reason that fundamental change in any society occurs outside the constraints of the political system extant in that society at that time. Here in the US, the important social advances of the twentieth century for equal rights, gay rights, women’s rights, etc. were not won by adherents trying to squeeze out enough votes in one particular election, and their proponents were not broken by single defeats at the ballot box. Rather, they were (and continue to be) essentially consciousness-raising movements and protracted struggles. The votes followed. The political process should be a tool for the popular will, not the other way around.

So I come to the basis for my belief in the importance of cultural activism as a foundation for political change. It is fundamental, especially to one accustomed to thinking psychologically, that assumptions and values shape perceptions of reality, give weight to evaluations of relative significance, and influence all decisions in the social as well as the personal spheres. All the commmentators who, identifying this election as having been won on ‘moral values’ are on the wrong track to suggest, for example, that people voted their ‘family values’ even at the expense of their pocketbooks. It’s all values! The inequities in distribution of wealth, their accentuation under the current administration; the prosecution of a war, a preemptive war, a war without national consensus or international support, a war fought on a deceptive basis, a war executed with no thought toward adequate funding and manpower, a war with no attention toward the stabilization of the war-torn aftermath, a war without sufficient command structure to prevent horrendous and illegal violations of captives, and without sufficient commitment to thee prevention of indiscriminate collateral civilian casualties; the baldfaced mendacity of administration officials; the trampling on fundamental domestic privacies and civil rights — these are all moral issues. And IMHO the most profoundly ‘family value’ I oculd ever live is to fight so that my children and their children inherit a liveable, peaceful and just world. Republicanism is anti-family and, as I quoted in another post, Republicanism isn’t morality.

As narrow and rigid as their delineation of the sphere of values, they should not be allowed to define the terms of the debate and have a lock on the moral plane. Let us not forget that the Republican agenda has essentially reactionary roots in humiliation and defeat, both on the political and personal levels. Politically, it was Johnson’s betrayal of the southern Democrats with the Civil Rights Act that drove them into the Republican fold and created the modern bloc of red states, along with voting rights, school prayer, legalized abortion and the defeat in the mistaken militarist adventurism of Vietnam. On a personal level, Bush’s rigid born-again fervor was the reaction of a cognitively limited man to a need to be ‘saved’ from a directionless, dissolute ne’er-do-well life. Now we are facing a zealous convert (with whom everyone knows, as the old saying goes, that there is no arguing). Reactionary rigidity should not be the defining source of the values of a vibrant and constructive society.

Dennis thinks my final note about the impact of media spin, ignorance and manipulation is more to the point than blaming the public’s lack of intelligence. But I think that falling mercy to manipulation, spin, allowing one’s mind to be thoroughly colonized by a destructive and dominant meme, is a lack of intelligence. In this society, one is given enough opportunities to examine one’s assumptions and values that to accept the unexamined ones with complacency is contemptible. Certainly in a democratic state, anyone is entitled to have any set of values they choose, but that does not mean all are equivalent in terms of logical consistency or moral import. Certainly, as Dennis opines, there is both intelligence and stupidity on both the right and the left, but it is far easier to be stupid, and thus it is more prevalent, in the service of the unchallenged dominant paradigm than if one has to thoughtfully construct for oneself an alternative set which bucks the cultural norms.

Bush has made a deliberate appeal to a deep-seated anti-intellectual trend in the American psyche. Quite simply, those not confident of their intellectual abilities are intimidated by those they perceive as more articulate and informed. During the 2000 campaign, I found it impossible to believe that the voters did not see how limited Bush was, until I realized that they did realize it and not only did they not care, they welcomed it. Nevertheless, my incredulity got the better of me again during the 2004 campaign and especialy during the debates. It is not that the American people are not bright enough to recognize Bush’s limitations; it is that they are not bright enough to care. The extent of most of the voters’ assessment of the relative qualifications of the candidates was how “nice” they are, how good a drinking buddy each of them would make. Let’s face it, people find Bush a nice guy. (They ought to; he has worked incredibly hard at expunging every ounce of East Coast patrician blue blood that might scare them off from his pitiful “jes’-folks” sham-Texan persona.) Badda bing.

A corollary of the deliberation and conscientiousness with which one examines and constructs one’s value system, and another touchstone of intelligence IMHO, is the ability to articulate and defend the basis for one’s values and assumptions, and not all value systems are equivalent in that regard either. The “echo chamber” concept got under my skin several years ago, readers may recall. I worried that I, and most webloggers on the left, only talk to likeminded individuals and that there is no meaningful exchange or refinement of our thinking going on. But weblogging among thoughtful people is burgeoning; among people smart enough to be daunted if it were not meaningful communication and not waste their time on it. So, recently, I am reassured of several things — that within a basic community of belief, real communication around nuanced differences and clarifications is possible; that it is useful in refining stances, tactics and strategies as a change agent; and that there is a substantial contrast between the left and the right with regard to their willingness and ability to dialogue thoughtfully about principles and assumptions. In the weblogging world, there has been no talking to the War Bloggers. In the past several years, they have come to inhabit a different universe. I am sorry, but I continue to feel that the ability and willingness to examine one’s own beliefs and enter into dialogue about them on a confident but open basis is a hallmark of intelligence. And I continue to feel that, in those terms, this election demonstrated that the cowed and manipulated, cognitively colonized electorate is, well, unintelligent and inattentive, contemptibly so, to what has been done to them. A mind is truly a terrible thing to waste.

Asked by some readers to be more specific about the militancy I propose, I have to say I am preoccupied with a comment someone made sometime earlier in Bush’s reign that this ought to be a very good time for bohemians. The models I find most useful for challenging the dominant paradigm come from countercultural precedents throughout history. As Timothy Leary put it in one of his last pieces of writing,

Of course, what is most pungent for me is the countercultural movements to which I have been exposed, and to some extent lived, during my lifetime, as exemplified by the Beats, the ’60’s efflorescence, the cyberculture of the ’90’s, and the anticorporate/antiglobalization movement best exemplified by Adbusters and No Logo. Since ‘culture’ is essentially used in two senses — to refer to both a society’s collective beliefs, customs, values and their idiomatic expressions; and to refer to those groups and societies themselves which live those values and beliefs — ‘counterculture’ is in opposition to both of those. It challenges people’s sensibilities and it often offends people. I haven’t felt that the in-your-face confrontational aspects of counterculture have been very evident since the ’60’s. We have to be brazen about our challenges to the mor&eacute’s and conventions, to the limited and limiting conceptions, to the mandate to do business as usual, to the intolerance and injustice. We have to revel in provoking xenophobia. I can’t get this out of my head:

“We are all outlaws in the eyes of Amerika.

In order to survive we steal,

Cheat, lie, forge, fuck, hide and deal.

We are obscene, lawless, hideous,

Dangerous, dirty, violent…and young…”

as Jefferson Airplane sang. And,

“We are forces of chaos and anarchy

Everything they say we are we are

And we are very

Proud of ourselves…”

I know the ’60’s counterculture is often tried and convicted on its excesses and its naiveté, but a little more of that would not be harmful in the ’00’s IMHO. And I have to say a word about that word “young.” In many ways, the gains of the ’60’s counterculture have been, partly correctly, framed as struggles for the trappings of youth, and it has been dismissed and diminished as being merely an expression of perennial and perhaps superficial youthful rebellion — music, dress, hair, sexual experimentation, etc. This discounts several important forces shaping the ’60’s counterculture, into a more profound world-changing model. Certainly, opposition to war has a long and venerable social history, but, shaped perhaps by the threat of being drafted, antiwar sentiment during the Vietnam era suffused a more substantial segment of a population than perhaps ever before in any society; and played a substantial part in ending the war. The appeal of nonviolent civil disobedience as a mode of political action was vastly magnified. Sigificant challenges to limited conceptions of family and social structure and indeed to our relationships to our own bodies have had such a profound impact that they now seem mundane. A central role for esoteric xenospirituality did more to loosen the reign of established religion on the hearts and minds of America. The new paradigms for the exploration of consciousness in both meditative and devotional practices on the one hand and, on the other, mind-altering drugs were crucial to the creation of a profound skepticism about received wisdom and conventional truths about the nature of reality and of personhood. Among other things, they arguably form the philosophical underpinnings of the profound relativism of deconstructionism and the post-modernist artistic ethic. I am also convinced that the ’60’s counterculture instigated an ethic of interdependence, honest communication, empathy, and compassionate dedication to helping those in need that it perhaps its most enduring legacy. (I certainly think that my career choice of a helping profession with little regard for earning poitential was an expression of a commitment to countercultural values which have suffused me and which I hope to convey to my children, with no illusions about how much more difficult it will be for them to make the same choices…)

People who are interested in exploring one aspect of the ’60’s counterculture should run out and rent the eye-opening 2002 Siegel and Green documentary on the Weather Underground. As much as it is a portrait of the ultimate extremists of the era, it is a social history of the context of massive upheaval — which you are either too young to recall or no longer appreciate to its full extent — to which an entire generation of passionate and committed people were driven by an American government and society in many ways the precursor to that which we face now, during a similar illegal and immoral war.

Perhaps I say it now because I am older (at least in chronological terms), but: let us get beyond youthful rebellion, at a time when it is clear the struggle is for the survival and flourishing of people of all ages, but build on the venerable countercultural traditions. I argue for the preservation of rage as well as the ethic of mutual aid and compassion. Of course, some reading this post and that below about ‘depression’ will say that my anger is my blindspot, a part of my character pathology; or that it is merely a time-limited reaction to Tuesday’s setback. It is often said that the artist’s creativity comes in two flavors — a youthful, exuberant, energetic version and a more sober, reflective, ‘mature’ form. I know this will be a controversial statement but, while subtle expression can be mind-changing and transformative as well, I fear that when the passion and anger are extracted, while art may be luminal, ‘mature creativity’ is too often in the service of the reaffirmation of traditional values and the maintenance of the status quo, usually performed by those who no longer have the energy or the will to struggle.

So, to transform our society and awaken those in the cultural trance, reasoned sober left-brain argument should be counterbalanced by right-brain exuberant crazy wisdom, irreverence, and both subtle subversion and outrageous provocation.The movement is inclusive, and spread by unprecedented modes of instantaneous communication, with the benefit of unprecedented historical and crosscultural memory and appreciation. If we transform consciousness, the reactionary movement cannot succeed.

We can afford nothing less.

A number of my friends have written to me, as a psychiatrist, to ask for four-year prescriptions for antidepressants. And, with a little less levity, several people have asked me to write from my perspective as a mental health practitioner on coping with post-election emotional difficulties. I have been reluctant to do so for several reasons. First, it has been difficult to rouse myself from my own torpor. Second, should post-election stress be treated as a mental health problem and pathologized? Certainly, somewhere around 50% of the voting public are grieving at the present moment. One of the characteristics of most psychopathology is that it is suffered in loneliness and isolation from those around you, who have a hard time understanding the distress. But once a condition crosses a certain prevalence threshold, considering something pathological yields to treating it as a feature of the population . Most of us who are in distress about the results of what many of us called the most important election struggle of our lifetimes at least have others around us who share our sentiments and support our suffering.

It is true that we often turn to mental health professionals after a traumatic event which affects an entire population; this is highlighted after plane crashes or, most recently, as psychological practitioners poured into New York City after 9-11. But I have long considered it a dubious proposition that the training and experience of psychotherapists and psychiatrists in ministering to individuals are necessarily pertinent to the demands of ministering to traumatized populations. Certainly, it is good preventive medicine that people whose degree of distress is beyond the range of ‘expectable’ reactions to a trauma be identified and followed, but not the traumatized population as a whole, even if we could. After 9-11 a closer look suggested that crisis intervention with the population based on trauma-treatment principles turns out not to have a measurable preventive effect. Not only that, it can apparently impair people’s native abilities to cope and further traumatize them.

Finally, even if we were experts on coping with mass trauma, we cannot ignore the fact that there is not just one single prescription for dealing with distress at a time like this. People’s ways of experiencing the trauma, and the coping strategies and resources they have on hand to bring to bear, vary tremendously. In what turned out to be a rather surreal experience, I listened to one of NPR’s call-in talk shows yesterday afternoon which had a psychiatrist on talking about dealing with post-election stress. Listeners would call telling him how they had been getting by, or asking whether he would recommend certain things they had thought of doing — getting more politically involved, taking a break from political involvement, getting out of the country for awhile, putting their head under the covers. His answer to each and every suggestion was little more than a variant on, “Yes, that would be a good idea. Yes, that would be a good idea too…” Yes, everything is acceptable (nothing is forbidden).

(By the way, one of the most constructive suggestions I have heard is that progressives should have much more sex, not only to lighten up and start enjoying things more but to procreate more. Liberals seem to be having fewer children than those in the religious right, the argument goes, and more and more decisively losing the demographic race for a voting edge. So if we want to take back the White House and Congress in our children’s generation, start now…)

But, more seriously, I find that most helpful framework for understanding what we are going through is what has been popularly called the “five stages of grief.” Popularized by the late psychiatrist Elizabeth Kubler-Ross in the ’60’s to help people dealing with terminal diagnoses, this paradigm had actually been a way of understanding how we cope with receiving any catastrophic news; only more recently was it hijacked as a way of understanding grief. The five stages, probably familiar to many of you, are denial(“Bush didn’t really win”), anger (“Why the f**k did this happen to me?”), bargaining (“If I’m only energetic enough as a political activist, it’ll nullify the impact of Bush’s victory, I promise”), depression (in which one is paralyzed by the outcome) and acceptance.

A couple of things to notice. First, tuning in to the progressive media like Air America in the first couple of days after the election, many of their personalities seem still to be stuck in the denial stage, with elaborate arguments on how the votes just needed to be retallied and we would find that Bush hadn’t really won. Get real; if anyone can give me a convincing reason to see this as a realistic concern and not just a stage in attempting to cope with the devastating reality, I would be impressed. (Of course, I still believe Bush never won in 2000, so in another sense this ‘reelection’ is not legitimate. But that’s water under the bridge.)

Second, while the bargaining phase in which many of us find ourselves (how many times have you heard people saying since the election that the answer to how they are feeling is to get more involved?) sounds like it promises a fresh and overwhelming influx of activists for the next time around, if it precedes a thorough-going acceptance of the proportions of the problem, it is unrealistic and will be unsustainable. Bargaining is based on deluding yourself that the uncontrollable is really controllable, promising that bad outcomes will never occur if one’s efforts are just perfect enough. It is essentially a grandiose way to try to comfort oneself. In this light, all the analyses you are hearing, or will hear, about why the Democrats’ ran an imperfect race, and we will win next time if we only clean up our act, are flawed. Organizing has to start from the realization that we are not destined, or even likely, to win any particular campaign. (That is certainly what led to an effective Republican machine, as everyone’s comparisons to the Goldwater defeat of 1964 indicate.) To be effective , the devotion of energy has to be based on disabusing ourselves of the notion that we would inevitably win if only…

So, although there is no absolute timeline for passing through the stages, I would be more impressed with someone who resolves a week or a month from now to step up their political activity, once they are past their depressive lassitude and pessimism, and past the omnipotent bargaining. Some say that “grief work’ — in which one, accepting the reality, can truly and genuinely experience the pain, adjust, and reinvest energy in productive activity — can only begin after negotiating all five stages of the grief reaction.

Curmudgeon that I am, I am tempted to suggest that one should not fully abandon phase II, the angry phase. But unconstructive anger that it happened has to be supplanted, again after acceptance, by constructive anger at the perpetrators. Although in many ways we live in a pathologically anger-averse society, it can be a tremendous source of productive energy. You know I am a great fan of rage, properly directed. Some have said that I am at my best when I am finding fault with others. Well, there is something to be said for that! There’s a bumper sticker I like that says something like, “If you’re not outraged, you’re not really paying attention.” (IMHO, it ought to say “…enraged…”.) Even classical psychoanalytic theory speaks of the reciprocal relationship of anger and depression; that the latter is the former turned inward. Certainly, militant acting up is a better solution than remaining a suffering victim self-perpetuating the violence that Bush’s reelection has done to us all by taking it out on ourselves.

It’s not the naive anger of “I’ll be damned if I am going to let myself suffer while living the next four years in Bush’s America”. Get real, Eliot, you are going to suffer. But I’ll be damned if I am going to suffer in silence, and if there isn’t going to be hell to pay for the Republican assault on our freedoms, our security, our peace of mind, our environment, and the world my children and grandchildren will inherit.

With all the talk about how the fear of gay marriage won Bush the election, I think this straightforward paean by my friend, writer Steve Silberman deserves to be read.

“The overwhelming majority of U.S. counties are Republican; however, counties carried by Democrats are generally more densely populated. The county-by-county map, therefore, visually overstates the Republican share of the vote, because the Democratic votes are concentrated in fewer counties that cover a smaller land mass.” (Media Matters)

I would add the obvious fact that a region will show red whether the vote in favor of Bush was 70-30% or 51-49%. The ‘sea of red’ out there in the heartland is really a sea of purple, as boing boing pointed out. [Oh, how I wish I lived in a land of multiple political parties, coalition government, proportional representation and instant runoff voting…]

I want President Bush to have a dream

like the one that Ebenezer Scrooge had

I want him to be visited by the ghosts of Iraqi children

who cry out, “But mankind was your business”

I want all the Tiny Tims of the world

to get their 401k money back

from the white collar criminals who stole it

I want them to not go to war

for oil, good ratings, or weapon sale quotas

because this white collar mafia is in power

I wish President Bush would have an affair

I wish he’d take off his black pointed cowboy boots

and took at the moon more often

And then I wish he’d wake up

and be inflicted with what Jim Carey had

in the movie “Liar Liar”

I wish all the billboards across the country read:

“Give back the votes your brother stole”

and the poets would shout from every street corner,

“The emperor wears no clothes”

I want his mouth washed out with soap

every time he says “weapons of mass destruction”

and for him to wear a Darth Vadar helmet

if he ever says “the axis of evil” again

I hope President Bush looks out his White House window

when we descend on Washington marching for peace

like hordes of starlings who know their way home

because it is in their nature

I want President Bush to have a dream

like the one that Martin Luther King had

I want him to be visited by the ghosts of King,

John Lennon, Paul Wellstone, and the Kennedys

I want the New York Times to cover the story

when his father scolds him for being a bully

I hope he gets some Gi Joes for Christmas

and starts to play with real toys and not with real people

I think President Bush should go back to school

and look up some words in the dictionary

or study history – like the Roman Empire

I’d like him to write on the blackboard 100 times,

“I will not promote propaganda – or the far right agenda”‘

“I will not join gangs”

I want President Bush to be haunted

by the ghosts of our Founding Fathers

until he learns this lesson:

that killing civilians is a terrorist act

and pre-emptive strike is invasion

I want him to break out in song

at his next Address to the Nation

singing “Give Peace a Chance” is all we are saying

and “We Shall Overcome”

I want President Bush to have an epiphany

or else I want him gone

I want Americans to say “yes” when the polls ask,

“Should regime change begin at home?”

And I want him to stop shouting “Fire!” in the theatre

when he is the one with the matches

I want him to care about children

more than slogans and re-elections

If President Bush doesn’t have a real dream soon

he should step aside for those who do

He should impeach himself

and ask for forgiveness

For imposing his nightmare on the world

—Colleen Redman

“The Republican expected to chair the Senate Judiciary Committee next year bluntly warned newly re-elected President Bush today against putting forth Supreme Court nominees who would seek to overturn abortion rights or are otherwise too conservative to win confirmation.

Sen. Arlen Specter, fresh from winning a fifth term in Pennsylvania, also said the current Supreme Court now lacks legal ‘giants’ on the bench.

‘When you talk about judges who would change the right of a woman to choose, overturn Roe v. Wade, I think that is unlikely,’ Specter said, referring to the landmark 1973 Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion.

‘The president is well aware of what happened, when a bunch of his nominees were sent up, with the filibuster,’ Specter added, referring to Senate Democrats’ success over the past four years in blocking the confirmation of many of Bush’s conservative judicial picks. ‘… And I would expect the president to be mindful of the considerations which I am mentioning.'” (Houston Chronicle)

US out of SF!

“‘America our nation has been beaten by strangers who have turned our language inside out who have taken the clean words our fathers spoke and made them slimy and foul

their hired men sit on the judge’s bench they sit back with their feet on the tables under the dome of the State House they are ignorant of our beliefs they have the dollars the guns the armed forces the power plants

they have built the electric chair and hired the executioner to throw the switch

all right we are two nations.'” — John dos Passos (1938), USA (via Editor’s Cut)

(image via boing boing)

Electing to Leave: “So the wrong candidate has won, and you want to leave the country. Let us consider your options.” (Harper’s) Don’t worry, FmH could still be written and published from Europe…

I am posting in full an email I received today from TrueMajority.org:

Playing the Nazi card and manipulating credulous Catholics in one fell swoop! It takes the breath away. Sputter on, Keyes, into the obscurity you deserve after your humiliating defeat tomorrow, which will satisfy me perhaps more than any other result tomorrow night save Bush’s defeat.

Open thread: Who else would you single out as someone you are desperately yearning to see go down to defeat at the polls tomorrow?

HP Lovecraft meets Charles Schultz [via the null device]

A reprise of my Halloween post of last year:

It is that time of year again. What has become a time of disinhibited 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 Sunday 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, monogrammed jack-o’-lanterns and the like. Related, a 1984 essay by Richard Seltzer, frequently referenced in other sources, entitled “Why Bother to Save Halloween?”, argues as I do 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).

In any case: trick or treat!

This is doing the rounds as an email chain letter and is being posted to many places on the web. It is supposedly a plea to vote for Kerry from a “very conservative” Orlando Sentinel columnist. The email I got says,

“He’s a Conservative Republican who is anti-abortion, anti-tax-and-spend, loudly critical of legislation by the judiciary, doesn’t think much of ulticulturalism or secularism, has suggested Clinton “turned the Oval Office into a whorehouse,” thinks Ronald Reagan is the greatest thing to come down the pike since canned beer, and voted for Bush in the last election.”

Reese’s ‘column’ begins,

“Americans should realize that if they vote for President Bush’s re-election, they are really voting for the architects of war – Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and the rest of that cabal of neoconservative ideologues and their corporate backers. I have sadly come to the conclusion that President Bush is merely a front man, an empty suit, who is manipulated by the people in his administration. Bush has the most dangerously simplistic view of the world of any president in my memory.”

The only problem is I cannot find anything like this piece, or anything by or about Charlie Reese, by searching the Orlando Sentinel site. Much as I would love to believe in this religious conversion from the dark side, it sounds to me like a spam troll by an anonymous Kerry supporter to get conservatives to give the Democratic candidate another look. Snopes, my favorite debunking site for the abuse of the credulous (like myself!), has nothing about “Charlie Reese.” Does anybody know any more?

Addendum: It turns out I couldn’t find anything because it is “Charley Reese”, not “Charlie…” (Thanks to the comment from reader NWD). Reese was with the Sentinel until 2001 but has posted his columns on lewrockwell.com since then. Here is a link to “Vote for a Puppet, Not a Man.” Here is a more accurate capsule biography of Reese:

“Charley Reese [send him mail] has been a journalist for 49 years, reporting on everything from sports to politics. From 1969–71, he worked as a campaign staffer for gubernatorial, senatorial and congressional races in several states. He was an editor, assistant to the publisher, and columnist for the Orlando Sentinel from 1971 to 2001. He now writes a syndicated column which is carried on LewRockwell.com. Reese served two years active duty in the U.S. Army as a tank gunner. Write to Charley Reese at P.O. Box 2446, Orlando, FL 32802.”

I apologize for my initial skepticism.

“In the long run, is it sometimes better for a party to lose an election than to win?” (Boston Globe)

This is where I grew up in the ’60’s.

“A British stockbroker in jail in the United States has been lifting the lid on a controversial prison regime through a compelling weblog.” (BBC)

“A pair of Mississippi women challenge the army brass on behalf of their soldier-husbands in Iraq” (Village Voice)

“A brief history of the ultimate pop faux pas” (Village Voice). And also see the story below, also about lip-synching:

“Physicist says imaging techniques prove the president’s bulge was not caused by wrinkled clothing.” (Salon) I don’t think you actually need the Photoshop enhancement techniques to tell that he is wearing a wire. It is even evident on the original (left) photo.

The article goes on to detail Bunning’s history of bizarre and erratic behavior behind Democratic innuendoes that he is demented (in the clinical sense; not just name-calling). Republicans counter with homophobic smears about his Democratic challenger.

With our Byzantine electoral college system, it is actually possible that John McCain will end up inaugurated as the next president in January. Here’s how. (Tech Central Station)

Bush’s One-Finger Victory Salute

Australia requires citizens to vote. Should the U.S.? — Eric Weiner (Slate)

Related:

“A tiny conical tooth embedded in a pterosaur neck bone is all that remains of a 100-million-year-old battle between a flying reptile with a 12-foot wingspan and a 26-foot-long crocodile-snouted spinosaur.” (Discover)

A recent New York Times article said that prominent webloggers, including Kevin Drum and Glenn Reynolds, have increasingly moved to a ‘feline Friday’ model of weblogging in which Friday is given over to posting pictures of their cats. Now we are cat lovers; we have two at home (as well as our dog) but I have never thought they are very blogworthy. This, however, is a cat-related item interesting enough to post:

“GeorgeWBush.org (a Democratic parody site) recently noticed that its mail server had been quietly gathering erroneously addressed Bush campaign e-mails for several months. The letters are now viewable on their site. Some were used by Greg Palast in his Oct. 26 BBC Newsnight investigation on Republican plans to obstruct voting…” [via Declan McCullagh’s Politech mailing list]

FmH readers — do me the courtesy, at least, of sending me an anonymous email telling me you when have turned me in to the secret police service, okay?

“The hard-drive technique is simple. TiVo enthusiasts have developed computer programs that can initialize a hard drive so it will be recognized by the device. Hook the drive up to your computer, run the program, connect the hard drive to the TiVo and you’re basically done.” [more…] (Tech News World)

My earlier post on the Red Sox World Series victory did not deserve to go up without mention of Victoria Snelgrove’s killing by the Boston Police during the post-pennant celebration. Here is a belated commentary on her death from Russ Stein, a Boston paralegal, at Lew Rockwell’s libertarian site.

This certainly should not be swept under the rug as it appears to be, especially given that no one wants any inconvenient interference with their celebration of the subsequent World Series win.

New York Times overview of the Identity Theft Epidemic

Dr. Michael Fitzpatrick reviews MMR: Science and Fiction: Exploring the Vaccine Crisis by Richard Horton:

Abu Ghraib was assuredly not the only place military abuses of Iraqi detainees occurred; rather, it was only the place it happened to come to light. Similarly, it is a no-brainer that al Qaqaa was not the only place the US failed to secure weaponry and explosives which have been looted and used in the insurgency. What distinguishes al Qaqaa is simply that the deficits had to be reported to the IAEA and came to light.

The issue to grapple with is what impact the new bin Laden tape will have on the election — both what bin Laden might intend and what unintended consequences it might have. Both campaigns produced dignified resolute responses affirming a commitment to prosecute the War on Terror with maximal effectiveness, but both were scrambling to figure out how to position themselves (Washington Post ) after this bombshell, as was the press (Slate ). Certainly, Daniel Schorr’s analysis this morning on NPR, that (paraphrased) “any mention of Iraq helps Kerry and any mention of the war on terror helps Bush”, is reductionist and pat. (I think it is becoming evident that Schorr, one of my favorite commentators in days of yore, has long passed his prime.) William Rivers Pitt’s reflections at TruthOut grapple with the issues in more detail. Certainly, it appears that bin Laden is alive and, as Pitt observes, “tanned, ready and rested”, in no way on the run. It appears that will reinforce concerns about Bush’s failure to capture him. Pitt, of course, reminds us in this context of Bush’s resurrected March 2002 comment about just not being that concerned about bin Laden anymore. And Pitt argues that the Bush administration must have worried about the impact of the tape, given that the US ambassador to Qatar reportedly tried to prevent al Jazeera from broadcasting it.

Bin Laden tells us that our security depends on not threatening Muslim security, in essence to stop prosecuting the War on Terror. And, as Nicholas Kristof points out in his New York Times op-ed piece today, Bush knows it:

“I often criticize statements by President Bush, so today let me praise some of his real wisdom:

” Oct. 11, 2000: “If we’re an arrogant nation, [foreigners] will resent us. If we’re a humble nation but strong, they’ll welcome us. … We’ve got to be humble.”

It’s a good thing Mr. Bush tried to be humble, or the U.S. would have an approval rating even lower than 5 percent in Jordan, and Osama bin Laden’s approval rating in Pakistan would be higher than 65 percent.”

But is bin Laden really hoping that the American electorate, to whom his message is addressed directly, are receptive and informed people who will understand that they ought to turn Bush out of office to prevent another 9/11? Does he think anyone will actually believe this, in the fear-ridden fall of 2004? In essence, will the voters be more pissed off at Bush or at bin Laden, as Tom Grieve put it in Salon? Will the tape make it easier or harder for those who voted for Bush in 2000 to look back and admit they were wrong? (And don’t forget that this is an American electorate roughly half of which still believe that Saddam Hussein was involved in the WTC attack, that the invasion of Iraq had something to do with al Qaeda and that it has improved their security in the world.)

Or does he hope to sway a segment of the public into the Bush fold by stimulating their jingoistic anger and fear? It has been argued that bin Laden’s aims are facilitated by polarization and having a belllicose, ignorant Bush administration in power. In this vein, William Gibson argues that Bush and bin Laden are symbiotic, and that bin Laden knew full well that the tape would nudge the voters toward the man who “has always proven so wonderously adept at doing everything (ObL)’d most want him to do.”

In fact, could that misadministration’s frantic efforts to suppress the tape be little more than a charade? The embassy in Qatar might have been directed to attempt to prevent the airing of the tape even in the face of certainty it would be useless. It is not reasonable to think we could stop al Jazeera from broadcasting it once it had been received; I doubt al Jazeera gave the US embassy a courtesy call alerting them to the arrival of the tape before the news was in the broader grapevine, and it is not as if we have any special cachet with al Jazeera.

This appears to be bin Laden’s October surprise (BBC ). The pundits are saying (Guardian.UK) that it comes in place of the terrorist attack they expected to disrupt the election process — the threat of which I have thought arises not so much from intelligence about al Qaeda’s plans as the fear-mainpulating agenda of the RNC. Bin Laden may have diminished capacity to mount further massive attacks, and may be resorting to a propaganda battle instead out of necessity. Billmon (welcome back!) agrees with me, calling this “virtual terrorism” on bin Laden’s part, and smarter than an actual attack would have been.

Those who grow frustrated with seemingly outlandish conspiracy theories can stop reading here (although, with the Bush cabal, truth can certainly be stranger than fiction…); I speculate that the bin Laden tape could also be be the rumored October surprise we have been waiting for from the Bush administration as well. Karl Rove told Hannity the other day, asked about an October surprise, that he still has a few tricks up his sleeve. You know it. FBI analysts have assessed the tape as probably genuine and probably recent; should we take this at face value? (If bin Laden, savvy as he is, is aware of continued doubts about whether he is still alive, and interested in establishing that he is, why doesn’t he hold up something like a recent New York Times front page in his tape, by the way?) The tape was reportedly dropped off anonymously at al Jazeera’s Islamabad offices. Isn’t it even remotely possible — — that it is a sophisticated counterfeit planted by the Bush administration themselves? [Is anyone else discussing this possibility on the web? — FmH. Addendum: Yes, he is.] Given the administration’s failure to deliver bin Laden to the voters dead or alive and, indeed, its failure to prevent Bush from being caught in that embarrassing lie about his March ’02 comments, could they be calculating that the next best thing is to use a bin Laden ‘campaign appearance for Kerry’ to tip the remaining undecided’s back into the fold? The conventional wisdom is that the cowboy-in-chief is vulnerable around not having brought bin Laden to ground, but the Bush campaign may actually be ecstatic that he is still out there, or that the public can be convinced that he is.

Whether or not it is a Bush cabal production, as Billmon puts it the tape “allows the GOP to turn every remaining campaign event into a bin Laden hate rally”. After all, the basis of the Republican campaign strategy has come down to manipulating the voters’ fear quotient and little more, and Tom Ridge’s shenanigans with various coloring-book alerts have long since stopped being credible. In the process, the bin Laden tape also serves another Republican purpose by bumping the issue of the missing explosives off the front page. Watch how they spin.

It is also important to realize that bin Laden, in sharing with us that the genesis of the 2001 attack lay as far back as his 1982 thinking, is warning us how longrange his thinking is, no matter how next week’s election and the next four years go. And, while a particular contempt is reserved for Bush, whom he teases for his indecisive paralysis in the classroom after learning of the WTC attack and whom he lumps in with other corrupt regimes (“half of which are governed by the military and the other half of which are governed by the sons of kings and presidents… in both categories, you find many who are characterised by hubris, arrogance, greed, and unlawful acquisition of money”), he warns the American voters that Kerry’s views on security are not that much better. “Your security does not lie in the hands of Kerry, Bush or al-Qaeda. Your security is in your own hands.”

“Republicans have long insinuated, and occasionally asserted, that bin Laden favors Kerry’s election, so it must have come as a relief to Kerry’s campaign that bin Laden ended his denunciation of Bush with a dismissal of the Democrat as well.” (Washington Post)

Whoever wins next week (or whenever the post-campaign litigation is finally settled), bin Laden may be correct that it is up to right-thinking people to reject the misguided and dangerous premises of the permanent WoT®…and the sooner the better for the peace and security of both the US and the entire world.

Bin Laden is not the real top terrorist that the Bush administration let walk. (Slate)

“NAACP head Julian Bond says the GOP is going all out to suppress the black vote. Can his ‘Election Protection’ offensive stop them?” (Salon)

Give Bush enough rope, and he hangs himself every time. Forget the verbal gaffes and malapropisms; the man obviously cannot think through theconceptual implications of what he says. Bush on Wednesday accused Kerry of opportunism, saying:

‘A political candidate who jumps to conclusions without knowing the facts is not a person you want as commander-in-chief.’

(Reuters)

Bad break, Mr. Cheney. It happened on your watch, despite your your best effort to sow seeds of doubt about Kerry’s “wild charges.”

…but here at the Gelwan household, half a mile from Fenway Park, it’s a different matter altogether! Those of you who have gotten to know me from my weblog might puzzle over the idea of my being a baseball fan — or a sports fan of any sort — never having seen any sports references in five years’ worth of FmH posts. And you would be largely correct. But — and it is probably difficult for those of you outside of New England to grasp this — it has been almost impossible to avoid getting swept up in the fever for the past two weeks here in Red Sox nation. Watching eleven ball games in a row has been more than I have seen in the past ten years (as someone who never watches baseball on television during the regular season and goes to, at most, one or two games at Fenway some years). There has been a certain ease and relief, especially in what otherwise seems such a contentious divided society, of being part of a ubiquitous shared experience of tension and release, hope and ultimately jubilation for a change. And of sleep deprivation. It may have been my imagination, but the bleary-eyed glances of passersby on the streets, the caffeine-craving impatience of those waiting on the lengthened lines at my favorite café, and the yawns of drivers stopped next to me at the traffic lights seemed to be ties that bind.

Sharing in the Red Sox’ drama and triumph was even a resonance between me and my patients at the psychiatric unit. Normal bedtimes on the unit were suspended so that the patients could stay up and watch the games, and bonds grew even among patients who would otherwise be utterly withdrawn, struggling with the inner demons that had brought them in for admission. A patient who had known me for a long time, through a number of admissions, and had never known me to be interested in spectator sports, would ask me each morning in the psychotherapy group whether I had stayed up to watch the game the night before and, when I indicated each morning that I had, tease me for being a “fair-weather fan.” I actually think a number of my psychotic patients have been recovering more quickly from their episodes this time knowing that they share the experience of rooting for the Sox with one another and with their treatment team members.

The fact that this pennant season was a suspension of my usual disbelief will give me some distance from which to observe something I suspect will happen in the months to come to many for whom being a Red Sox fan is a way of life . Momentous events are stressors, even if they are happy events. The end of the curse will change everything for some Sox fans. No longer will they have easy recourse to the reflexive, philosophical “wait ’til next year” as a template for dealing with disappointed hopes. Perhaps losing will no longer come as easy. There is already alot of caution in the wind lest we become what we detest — like Yankees fans, thinking that we are entitled to win. Not likely, given the indications that the Red Sox management is going to exercise some fiscal restraint and that their salary budget is not the bottomless well Steinbrenner’s is. And also not likely because this Red Sox team is not by any stretch the debut of a dynasty but a snapshot in time, the chemistry not likely to repeat itself even as soon as next year given the number of pivotal players becoming free agents and not likely to be signed to new Red Sox contracts despite the fans’ magical wish to freeze the action. Come to think of it, that might be a good thing for the psychological health of the Red Sox fans. Commentators are already predicting that the fans will have none of the usual preoccupations to talk about through the winter. But they will probably be replaced by ample opportuinities to obsess about the future configuration of the team and — as always — how the rivalry with the Yankees will go next year. The one thing I dread, which might be too painful to bear (especially after Roger Clemens), is if the Red Sox face Pedro Martinez on the mound in pinstripes next season.

The radio dial today, savoring the victory, nevertheless had room for the bittersweet. Time and again, I tuned in to someone talking about how sad they were not to have been able to share their victory celebration with a departed parent who had instilled their love of the sport and the team but had not lived long enough to see this culmination. There’s that Nike ad they kept showing in which we view a Sox fan in the stands as the decades tick away from 1918 to 2004 and he ages from a little boy to an old man, with the loved ones with whom he takes in the games. Cheap sentimentality, perhaps, although still poignant. But for me the poignancy of the moment is abit different. My father, who died in 1991, was a lifelong baseball fan whose two sons, neither of whom was a passionate sports fan, never connected with him on that level. He would have been delighted to see my family pouring ourselves unabashedly into the postseason fever this year. In a sense, I feel cheated that I never let myself get into it while he was around to share it with. In another sense, I feel more complete in a way, connecting with something I was denying in myself, something of him in me, a coming home. And, in turn, grateful for the last two weeks of my wife and I sitting in front of the games with our son and daughter in a way whose memory they may cherish long after we are gone, whenever something the Red Sox do recalls this magical season.

Probably, no one has been able to access FmH since sometime Tuesday. Several city blocks here in Brookline, including that housing The World (Software Tool & Die), the web server hosting this weblog, were hit with a power failure sometime on Tuesday. Attempts to power up with a generator resulted in a power surge, according to the tech support folks at The World with whom I finally spoke this evening, which bagged some of The World’s hardware.

Back up now, I hope for good. Sorry for the prevention of timely access. I hope it isn’t just from reading about it here that you learned of the lunar eclipse this evening (see below), because by the time the page was back up you would have already missed it…

“…Don’t Read It Alone…”

Scientists Find Prehistoric Dwarf Skeleton. “In a breathtaking discovery, scientists working on a remote Indonesian island say they have uncovered the bones of a human dwarf species marooned for eons while modern man rapidly colonized the rest of the planet.” (Associated Press)

Coming on the heels of the Iraqi administration letting the cat out of the bag last week about the missing explosives, one has to wonder about the impact of Allawi’s seeming disaffection with the US. This could be yet another blow to Bush’s reelection effort (if the American public is listening). US officials reportedly could not believe Allawi would be critical at first, and thought there had been a mistranslation of his remarks. (Wake up and smell the coffee…) It is a sort of fitting symmetry that, having turned on the man the misadministration originally built up to run the post-invasion Iraqi puppet regime, Ahmed Chalabi, his successor Allawi turns on them.

Addendum: Kevin Drum asks,

No, you’re not alone, Kevin. Great minds think alike, I guess.

Also: Drum has what is probably the definitive post about the ludicrous Republican efforts to squirm out of the implications of the missing 380 tons. Ah, schadenfreude is sweet.

“Laboratory tests found that regular cups of green and black tea inhibit the activity of certain enzymes in the brain which bring on Alzheimer’s, a form of generative dementia that affects an estimated 10 million people worldwide.” (Yahoo! News) Essentially, tea is an acetylcholinesterase inhibitor, acting in the same way as (albeit more weakly than) the anti-Alzheimer’s prescription drugs donepezil (Aricept), rivastigmine (Exelon) and galantamine (Reminyl). It is abit inaccurate to say that the enzyme they inhibit, acetylcholinesterase (ACh-ase), brings on Alzheimer’s disease. It degrades the neurotransmitter acetylcholine in the brain, and Alzheimer’s is characterized by a drop in brain acetylcholine, but this is not thought to be due to abnormal activity of the enzyme. Nevertheless, inhibiting ACh-ase can compensate for some of the effects of the illness.