It's a depressing day in my university department. Down the street in Washington Square park was where New Yorkers protested the Iraq war and welcomed John Kerry to challenge George W Bush.

Although by law, I am not allowed to fund a political campaign, I ate my way through a bake sale on Fifth Avenue for John Kerry.

Now, the only question on New York's fully fledged Democratic lips is "How could 51 percent of the country give Bush a second term?" It doesn't just feel depressing in the university. It feels depressing all over New York City.

I wasn't even going to bother to write about this until I read James Wong Wing On's opinion and a letter by LCH. While I agree with the direction of their arguments, I think that the arguments lack one additional layer of depth. They should peel back one more layer of the onion.

Karl Rove, Dick Cheney and all the usual suspects who advise Bush, have a pitch perfect understanding of the values described by Wong and LCH. But humans can change their minds when under a lot of pressure.

There are those who behave like cattle and succumb to the herd mentality. Wong calls them the apathetic types who keep quiet on earth shaking issues. How then do spin-meisters prevent these types from caving in to the opposition's political promises?

As James Carville, a strategist for John Kerry explained, the Republicans succeeded in making some Americans choose between keeping their guns or their jobs. Security has always been a given choice in the US. However, Americans shouldn't have to be duped into thinking that security may have to come at the expense of jobs / the economy or worse, civil liberties.

Welcome to George Orwell's 1984

I agree with Wong that Kerry paid too much attention to liberal and scientific liberalism. In other words he was giving too much respect to the ability of the average American to be an independent thinker. It is dismaying that many Americans associate the term "liberal" with bra burning, gay relationships and foetus killing.

Only in George Orwell's fictitious Oceania can terms be distorted beyond recognition. When was the last time this type of American dusted off a dictionary?

In Oceania, Syme the philologist, is editing the eleventh edition of the newspeak dictionary. Every day he's destroying words and cutting the language down to the bone. The destruction of words means that there will no longer be vagueness and shades of meaning in arguments.

As Syme triumphantly argues, the whole aim of newspeak is to narrow the range of thought. Thought crime (aka independent thinking) will become literally impossible because there will be no words in which to express it.

The Bush administration and the right wing media are already party to creating an Oceania type dictionary. Bush uses the same tried and tested phrases that are too easy to understand to the point of distorting facts; if a vocabulary that is above sixth grade level is introduced into his speeches, even he seems surprised.

The media is co-opted by writing headlines in as few words as possible. Headlines become a sound bite that is fitted into the slim news bar at the bottom of the screen and repeated over and over.

Also the quality of news analysis is non-existent. Each piece pretends to analyse when it is actually just a news release straight from the White House. This type of dumbed down news might as well be party slogans.

Duck speak

In 1984, the Ministry of Truth has declared three slogans:

War is peace
Freedom is slavery
Ignorance is strength

The 51 percent who voted for Bush appear to agree with the agenda that ignorance is strength. They have no interest in doing the math the US dollar is coming close to 1.3 to the euro and China and Japan own $1.3 trillion of US government debt.

Such a budgetary position has started to shift conditions in favor of Asia, a la Mahathir's cherished dream of an East Asian economic community. There are no questions asked about why China continues to peg its currency to the US' disadvantage or how they are taking the lead to rein in North Korea.

While they continue to feel 'strength', their freedom is becoming slavery - they are losing jobs and healthcare, working for less than minimum wage and being put on airline no-fly lists. All this is happening in a time of 'peace' while their sons and daughters are being sacrificed to war and they spend their days watching the change of colors in the terror alert.

In the eleventh edition, a new word is introduced 'duckspeak', which is to quack like a duck. Syme explains that it is one of those interesting words that have two contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it is abuse; applied to someone you agree with, it is praise.

So I'm not exactly sure what LCH means if I do not heed the lessons of this election, it will be to my own peril. Is this duckspeak for an opponent? The only things I've learnt from this election are that 1) my favorite professor, a World Bank economist, will have four more years to make Bush jokes in my economic development course and 2) I'm going to have to eat more baked goods in 2008.

TREENA WU is an economist and public policy analyst pursuing her PhD. She is currently residing in New York.