Civilization and all that

Long time visitors to this blog will recall that El Cabrero has a soft spot for ole Sigmund Freud. I don't buy the whole package, but he did have his moments. It occurs to me that one can reinterpret at least some of Freud's ideas in terms of evolutionary theory.

Here's one example: his classic little book Civilization and Its Discontents is pretty much what it sounds like. The main idea I remember after all these years is that living in modern, bureaucratic civilizations requires the repression of a lot of drives. He believed that since we can't get rid of the things that civilization provides without a lot of people dying AND since we can't get rid of our instinctual drives either, we're kinda out of luck.

I agree with the main idea any way. Our minds and bodies evolved under vastly different conditions that those we're living under now and this causes lots of stresses and strains and all kinds of problems. If we assume that humans have been around in their current form for 250,000 years (it could have been more or less), for all but the last 10,000 or so years they all lived by foraging in small groups. My my calculator, that amounts to 96 percent of our history.

In a hunter-gatherer society, there's may be a division of labor based on age and sex and some differences in status, but there's no permanent class system or built-in stratification (not to mention no alarm clocks). If we estimate that state societies first began to emerge 5,000 years ago, that's only two percent of human history. "Modern" societies with bureaucratic and capitalist features began to emerge 500 years ago, which is only .2 percent of human history (assuming I did the math right).

No wonder the shoe doesn't fit sometimes.

NEGLECTED. Paul Krugman's latest is about education.

SAVING CHIP. Here's a Gazette editorial on WV Senator Jay Rockefeller's proposal to preserve the Childrens Health Insuarance Program.

THIS IS STARTING TO GET GOOD. Rockefeller and WV Congressman Nick Rahall have joined with Senator Byrd in calling on Massey Energy to help fund the relocation of an elementary school near a huge coal silo and slurry impoundment.

MONKEY MOMS love their babies.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Wonky but important (with a Homeric digression)

"The Rage of Achilles" by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo. Image courtesy of wikipedia.

Aristeia is a great Greek work that I'd like to see enter the English lexicon. It's usually associated with the Homeric tradition and refers to a hero's best moment.

In the Iliad, an aristeia scene might begin with the hero putting on his armor and speaking words of encouragement to his men before going out to open a major can of whoop-ass on his opponents. He might not always prevail in the end, but people knew he was there. If the Gentle Reader has ever been involved in major struggles, metaphorical or otherwise, he or she will know that sometimes you're on and sometimes you're not. An aristeia is one of those rare times when you're really on a roll.

I'd say that the current struggle over health care is WV Senator Jay Rockefeller's aristeia. He's been a champion of health care issues all along, but I'd say this has been his best fight. Lately, he made national headlines for his (so far unsuccessful) fight to include a public option in the Senate bill.

His latest effort was more successful and deserves recognition. In most versions of health care reform proposed so far by Congress, the Childrens Health Insurance Program would have been phased out. The idea was that the need for it would diminish as more families gain access to other health care plans.

Plenty of people, including me, were not happy about this and wanted the program extended. After all, it was only this year that the program was reauthorized by Congress and the bill that passed included several improvements to the program. We wanted to make sure the program survived intact long enough for states to improve their plans and to make sure that all the bugs had been worked out of whatever reform bill finally passed.

Also, it would have been hard to persuade state leaders to make improvements in CHIP if they thought it wasn't going to be around much longer. Among the changes now possible under the reauthorized program are extending benefits to families earning up to 300 percent of the poverty level; reducing waiting periods for enrollment; expanding oral health benefits; and eliminating the five year waiting period for children of legal immigrants.

Late last week, the Senate Finance Committee voted in favor of one of Rockefeller's amendments which would extend CHIP until at least 2019. As the Charleston Gazette points out, CHIP covers around 14 million children nationwide and at least 25,000 in West Virginia. The issue isn't resolved yet, since this version of the bill will have to be reconciled with others, but my guess is that this amendment has a good chance of surviving.

CHIP is a popular program that benefits working families and it needs to be around as long as there's a need for it.

JOBS, JOBS, JOBS. This editorial from the Sunday NY Times about the job situation speaks my mind. No doubt the stimulus has kept things from getting worse, but more action is needed to address the still deteriorating employment situation. As the Times puts it,

Congress and the administration also have not done enough to directly create jobs. That could be done with more stimulus to spur job creation, or a large federal jobs program, or tax credits for hiring, or all three. Or surprise us. Just don’t pretend that the deteriorating jobs picture will self-correct, or act as if it is tolerable.

THIS IS YOUR BRAIN on religion.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

SAFETY VALVES AND SCAPEGOATS

Caption: These goats are ripe for scaping.

The guiding thread through this week's Goat Rope is social conflict and how it can either hold groups together or tear them apart (along with links and items about current events). If this is your first visit, please click on yesterday's post.

Sociologist Lewis Coser noted in his Functions of Social Conflict that feelings of hostility naturally arise in the course of social interaction and that sometimes these erupt into conflict. When that happens, conflict can often help hold groups together by strengthening their sense of identity and group boundaries. It can also help clear the air and establish better ways of dealing with problems. But sometimes it can result in the disintegration of the group.

Most societies have developed "safety valves" that allow conflict and hostile feelings to be expressed without threatening the overall structure. For example, while dueling seems pretty weird to us today, it did place limits on physical aggression and created elaborate rules for settling "affairs of honor."

Sometimes festivals such as carnival (ancestor of Mardi Gras), the theater and other forms of entertainment allow social norms to be relaxed and let people either act out a little or express themselves. Even jokes and humor can be an outlet for social tensions. As Freud once said,

Wit is used with special preference as a weapon of attack or criticism of superiors who claim to be in authority. Wit then serves as a resistance against such authority and an escape from its pressures.

As Coser notes,

The outcrop of political jokes in totalitarian countries bears witness to this, as does the statement attributed to Goebbels that the Nazi regime actually welcomed political jokes since they provided harmless outlets for hostilities.

Sometimes conflict is displaced, to use language from psychoanalysis. If it's too risky to attack powerful groups in a society, people often blame or scapegoat others. Witch hunts, literal or metaphorical, serve the same purpose.

Probably a great deal of bigotry, racism, xenophobia, prejudice, and similar phenomena are examples of displaced frustration, which can be deadly in their consequences.

Even when it doesn't go that far, Coser warns that displacement can be risky. They

involve costs both for the social system and for the individual: reduced pressure for modifying the system to meet changing conditions, as well as dammed-up tension in the individual, creating potentialities for disruptive explosion.

Displacement, unfortunately, has all too often been a major factor in politics here as elsewhere--examples could include the bashing of welfare mothers, gays, minorities, or others--and it usually serves as a distraction that keeps people from working for changes that would improve the quality of life for the majority of people.

Next time: realistic and unrealistic conflict.

SPEAKING OF CONFLICT, here's the latest report from the Coalition on Human Needs about the showdown with Bush over CHIP.

CANDLELIGHT VIGIL TONIGHT IN BIG CREEK in support of Megan Williams. For details from the Logan Banner, click here. Here's a little more on the subject from the Gazette.

NEXT STOP? Here's Seymour Hersh on the Bush administration's Iran plans.

TRIGGER HAPPY. It looks like the folks at Blackwater have been busier than some people thought.

GRATUITOUS ANIMAL STORY here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

CONFLICT: WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR?

Caption: Lily is ready to rumble.

The 1950s has the reputation of a decade of conformity and mediocrity which I think is undeserved. There was a lot of creativity in American life in that period, including some of the cleverest critiques of conformity and mediocrity.

Not to mention Elvis.

El Cabrero just finished revisiting a sociological gem of that period, Lewis Coser's The Functions of Social Conflict. It's a little gem that holds up pretty well.

Coser was one of the first to integrate two strands of social thinking, conflict theory and functionalism. Conflict theory is pretty much what it sounds like, with a particular emphasis on inequalities of wealth and power. Marx would be the classic example.

Functionalism is kind of what it sounds like too, an approach that examines how the various aspects and institutions of a society function or dysfunction as a whole and for particular groups.

When the book was written--1956--the dominant strand in sociology was what C. Wright Mills called "grand theory," an elaborate and largely unreadable brand of functionalism represented by Talcott Parsons which tended to view social conflict as a bad thing or symptom of dysfunction. Coser, inspired by the quirky German theorist Georg Simmel (1858-1918) looked at the positive as well as negative functions of social conflict.

(Here are some nuggets about Simmel.)

Coser distinguished between conflict and hostile feelings or attitudes:

Social conflict always denotes social interaction, whereas attitudes or sentiments are predispositions to engage in action. Such predispositions do not necessarily eventuate in conflict; the degree and kind of of legitimation of power and status systems are crucial intervening variables affecting the occurrence of conflict.

In other words, sometimes hostile attitudes are not openly expressed in conflict. When it does happen, though, conflict "helps to establish and maintain the identity and boundary lines of societies and groups."

Far from causing societies to fracture, it can sometimes be part of the glue that holds them together.

About which more tomorrow.

LOGAN ACTION PLANNED IN WAKE OF MEGAN WILLIAMS CASE. The American Friends Service Committee and the Logan County Improvement League are holding a candlelight vigil Oct. 2 at 6 p.m. at Big Creek, the area where Megan Williams was tortured and sexually abused. Dr. Johnny W. Meade, pastor of the Church of God in the Name of Christ Jesus, invited the organizations to conduct the service at his church, which is located on the right about one and one-fourth miles up Trace Fork Road off Corridor G behind the Thornhill Chevrolet dealership.

Organizers are hoping that this event will give residents of Logan County and other people of good will a chance to come together to make a positive statement. For more information, call 304-752-3422.

SPEAKING OF WHICH, here's an interesting article on the history of race relations in southern WV which appeared in Friday's Gazette.

ON THE DOWNSIDE? Here's an item on the apparently declining political clout of the religious right.

IT'S ALL ABOUT TABLES. The Rev. Jim Lewis has a great knack for picking a theme or image and spinning it out in all kinds of ways. The theme for the latest edition of Notes from under the Fig Tree is Table Talk.

VETO BATTLE EXPECTED THIS WEEK on the Children's Health Insurance Program is likely to happen this week.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A CHALLENGE

Welcome to Albert Camus Week at Goat Rope. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier posts.

El Cabrero just noticed by accident that 2007 is the 50th anniversary of Camus' Nobel Prize for literature.

Here's what he had to say about the challenges of his generation (which kinda sounds like the challenges of ours):

Each generation doubtless feels called upon to reform the world. Mine knows that it will not reform it, but its task is perhaps even greater. It consists in preventing the world from destroying itself. Heir to a corrupt history, in which are mingled fallen revolutions, technology gone mad, dead gods, and worn-out ideologies, where mediocre powers can destroy all yet no longer know how to convince, where intelligence has debased itself to become the servant of hatred and oppression, this generation starting from its own negations has had to re-establish, both within and without, a little of that which constitutes the dignity of life and death.

Sound familiar? There's more:

In a world threatened by disintegration, in which our grand inquisitors run the risk of establishing forever the kingdom of death, it knows that it should, in an insane race against the clock, restore among the nations a peace that is not servitude, reconcile anew labour and culture, and remake with all men the Ark of the Covenant.

He believed, rightly or wrongly, that some people from his generation were up for the challenge:

It is not certain that this generation will ever be able to accomplish this immense task, but already it is rising everywhere in the world to the double challenge of truth and liberty and, if necessary, knows how to die for it without hate. Wherever it is found, it deserves to be saluted and encouraged, particularly where it is sacrificing itself. In any event, certain of your complete approval, it is to this generation that I should like to pass on the honour that you have just given me.

More to the point, are we?

SPEAKING OF (NOT) PREVENTING THE WORLD FROM DESTROYING ITSELF, click here.

CHIP UPDATE. The House passed a stopgap spending measure to keep funding for the Children's Health Insurance Program at its current rate through Nov.

DOES GLOBALIZATION MAKE FOR WAR OR PEACE? According to this analysis, it depends...

BANG FOR THEIR BUCK. It looks like the folks at Blackwater are a little trigger happy even by military contractor standards.

MEGAN WILLIAMS CASE. This is the latest legal news as of now. There have been rumors of outside groups coming to Logan County to protest but these have not materialized so far. Meanwhile, local residents have been discussing organizing some kind of positive community event in response to these crimes. More on that as plans develop.

TALKING SENSE. The Chicken Littles of El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia are always talking about how we rank at or near the bottom in this or that (often spurious) business ranking list. This post a while back from abetterWestVirginia.com is a good response.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

PUSH THE ROCK

Welcome to Albert Camus Week at Goat Rope. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier entries.

In his work "The Myth of Sisyphus," Camus asserted that

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whet er life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.

(The reader has apparently answered the question in the affirmative at the moment anyway...)

For Camus, the question of the value of life was related to his idea of the absurd, that is human life as characterized by mortality, contingency, and the lack of an inherent meaning in a universe without God. As he put it,

in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger.

His image for the human condition was derived from the mythological figure of Sisyphus, who was condemned by the gods to perpetually roll a heavy stone up the hill only to have it roll down again.

Come to think of it, a lot of life is kinda like that. Still, Camus wound up affirming life.

Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable...."I conclude that all is well," says Oedipus, and that remark is sacred. It echoes in the wild and limited universe of man. It teaches that all is not, has not been, exhausted...It makes of fate a human matter, which must be settled among men.

All Sisyphus' silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. His rock is his thing...

I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. The universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

CHIP VOTE. The House passed legislation preserving and expanding the Children's Health Insurance Program 265 to 159 yesterday, not enough to override a Bush veto if it happens.

El Cabrero and his amigos held a press conference yesterday in support of the program for which we actually had press, which is a plus. High five! Great success!

CHIP AND IRAQ. The CHIP expansion mentioned above costs less than six weeks of the war in Iraq.

UNLEASHING WHATEVER UPDATE. A marriage made in heaven?

A TENTATIVE AGREEMENT between GM and the UAW has been reached. Here's hoping they got a good deal.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

REBELLION AND MODERATION

Caption: These guys are rebels.

Some of the wisest words ever were carved on the ancient Greek temple of Apollo at Delphi: "Nothing in excess" and "Know thyself."

(Unfortunately, the ancient Greeks weren't always that great at taking the advice...me neither come to think of it.)

The French philosopher Albert Camus, who is on the menu at Goat Rope this week, managed to do something pretty rare: combine rebellion with moderation.

Rebellion is the subject of his book The Rebel (so it isn't just a clever name). For Camus, rebellion springs from the urge for justice and freedom. It involves saying No to oppression, servitude, or degradation.

But rebellion itself must have its limits. All too easily it can and has mutated into fanaticism, totalitarianism, nihilism and terrorism:

Moderation is not the opposite of rebellion. Rebellion is in itself moderation, and it demands, defends, and re-creates it throughout history and its eternal disturbances.

He believed that it is not given to us to remake the world from scratch or to fundamentally change the human condition with all its inevitable tragedies and absurdities:

Man can master in himself everything that should be mastered. He should rectify in creation everything that can be rectified. And after he has done so, children will still die unjustly even in a perfect society. Even by his greatest effort man can only propose to diminish arithmetically the sufferings of the world. But the injustice and the suffering of the world will remain, and no matter how limited they are, they will not cease to be an outrage. Dimitri Karamazov's cry of "Why" will continue to resound; art and rebellion will die only with the last man.

But he argued that we can, here and there, with luck and skill and fortitude make improvements, end abuses, and reduce unnecessary suffering:

He who dedicates himself to the duration of his life, to the house he builds, to the dignity of mankind, dedicates himself to the earth and reaps from it the harvest that sows its seed and sustains the world again and again.

Him did talk pretty too.

CHIP SHOWDOWN. Congress could vote today on expanding the Childrens Health Insurance Program. President Bush has threatened a veto. Here's a good critique of Bush's position from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and here's the latest from the NY Times.

El Cabrero and amigos will have a press conference in support of CHIP this afternoon. It'll show up here (assuming we get any press) tomorrow. That will be today's moderate rebellion.

INDONESIAN HOBBIT UPDATE: Click here.

DIRTY TRICKS DEPARTMENT. Here's an item on the art and science of union busting and one more reason why we need the Employee Free Choice Act.

WHAT HE SAID. WV Senator Robert C. Byrd on Iraq:

The best way to support our troops is to bring them home, and the only way to get them home may be to somehow restrict the funds for this disastrous war. ... This senator will support no more blank checks for Iraq.

BEST OF LUCK to the GM United Auto Workers members in getting a decent contract. El Cabrero is a member of that branch of the UAW that doesn't know how to change the oil.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

TYGER! TYGER!

What immortal hand or eye...?

The poems from William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience have the ability to speak to all kinds of people and to people of all ages.

When El Cabrero's daughter was only a little thing, she had memorized most of this one:

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?

And What shoulder, and what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? and what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the lamb make thee?

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

Alas, between childhood and adolesence, something happened. When I asked her about the poem in the midst of her "cheerleader rage" years (a term she coined), this is what she came up with:

Tyger Tyger burning bright
In the forest of the night
I wish I may I wish I might
Get the wish I wish tonight...

In the spirit of the scientific method, of which Blake wasn't too fond, I can't say the cheerleading caused the mutation. But the correlation is there...

BLACK LUNG CASES INCREASE. This article by Ken Ward came out last week:

Black lung disease rates among U.S. coal miners have doubled in the last decade, according to new federal government data released this week.

Occupational safety experts say the figures reveal a troubling reversal from a quarter-century of success in fighting the deadly disease.

Ten years ago, about 4 percent of miners with 25 or more years of experience were diagnosed with the disease; now the figure is 9 percent.

Between 1993 and 2002, nearly 2,300 West Virginia miners died of black lung. West Virginia recorded the highest age-adjusted black lung death rate nationwide during that period, according to NIOSH reports.

The United Mine Workers union is seeking tougher regulations on underground air quality.

UPDATE ON THE LOGAN CASE More charges are likely to be filed against those accused of kidnapping, torturing and sexually abusing Megan Williams.

THE MORAL SENSE--Is it innate? And what does it consist of? Here's an interesting article about this scientific controversy.

CHIP VS. VETO. The House and Senate are nearing a compromise on expanding the Childrens Health Insurance Program (CHIP), although a veto threat from the Bush administration still hangs in the air.

ON THAT NOTE, here's an update on upcoming votes in Congress from the Coalition on Human Needs.

ONE MORE THING. Congratulations and a thank you to WV Governor Joe Manchin, who was one of 30 governors to sign on to a letter to the federal Department of Health and Human Services in support of the CHIP program.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

JAMES' SQUIRREL

The guiding thread through this week's Goat Rope has been a series of musings on the ideas of determinism and its opposite, which is usually called free will. I prefer indeterminsm.

If this is your first visit, you are fated by eternal laws of causality to click on the earlier posts. Or maybe not.

One characteristic of philosophical debates about issues like this is that it kind of depends on how you look at it.

The late great American philosopher William James recounted the story of one such debate in his Pragmatism:

SOME YEARS AGO, being with a camping party in the mountains, I returned from a solitary ramble to find every one engaged in a ferocious metaphysical dispute. The corpus of the dispute was a squirrel - a live squirrel supposed to be clinging to one side of a tree-trunk; while over against the tree's opposite side a human being was imagined to stand. This human witness tries to get sight of the squirrel by moving rapidly round the tree, but no matter how fast he goes, the squirrel moves as fast in the opposite direction, and always keeps the tree between himself and the man, so that never a glimpse of him is caught. The resultant metaphysical problem now is this: Does the man go round the squirrel or not? He goes round the tree, sure enough, and the squirrel is on the tree; but does he go round the squirrel?

James was asked to settle the dispute, which he did as follows:

“Which party is right,” I said, “depends on what you practically mean by ‘going round’ the squirrel. If you mean passing from the north of him to the east, then to the south, then to the west, and then to the north of him again, obviously the man does go round him, for he occupies these successive positions. But if on the contrary you mean being first in front of him, then on the right of him, then behind him, then on his left, and finally in front again, it is quite as obvious that the man fails to go round him, for by the compensating movements the squirrel makes, he keeps his belly turned towards the man all the time, and his back turned away. Make the distinction, and there is no occasion for any farther dispute. You are both right and both wrong according as you conceive the verb ‘to go round’ in one practical fashion or the other.”

There was method to his madness:

I tell this trivial anecdote because it is a peculiarly simple example of what I wish now to speak of as the pragmatic method. The pragmatic method is primarily a method of settling metaphysical disputes that otherwise might be interminable. Is the world one or many? – fated or free? – material or spiritual? – here are notions either of which may or may not hold good of the world; and disputes over such notions are unending. The pragmatic method in such cases is to try to interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences. What difference would it practically make to any one if this notion rather than that notion were true? If no practical difference whatever can be traced, then the alternatives mean practically the same thing, and all dispute is idle. Whenever a dispute is serious, we ought to be able to show some practical difference that must follow from one side or the other’s being right.

According to James, pragmatically speaking, accepting the idea of free will means "novelties in the world, the right to expect that in its deepest elements as well as in its surface phenomena, the future may not identically repeat and imitate the past." It means that improvements are at least possible. In James' words, it is a "theory of promise."

The other option is in effect to reduce humans to the status of objects that bounce off the walls of the universe with the predictability of billiard balls. I'm not convinced people are that kind of objects.

Come to think of it, I'm not even sure objects are that kind of objects...

THE LATEST ON THE MEGAN WILLIAMS CASE. Here are three items from the Gazette. At a meeting in Logan last night convened by AFSC attended by around 35 people, participants pledged to hold local law enforcement and prosecutors accountable, express support for the victim and her family, and work to bring the community together to respond in a positive way.

THE TRUTH ABOUT CHIP. President Bush is currently waging a preemptive war on the Children's Health Insurance Program. Here's a critique of his claims that the program undermines private health coverage.

NEW FIG TREE NOTES. Here's the latest edition of Jim Lewis' Notes from Under the Fig Tree.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

CONFRONTATION

Icon painted by La Cabra.

A while back, El Cabrero received a challenge from a Goat Rope reader to write about five things I most admire about Jesus. It took me a while to rise to that challenge. This is day five. If this is your first visit, please click on the earlier entries.

A note on method: I'm confining my remarks to events that happened during Jesus' natural life, although I believe there was and is more to the story...

This last post is about the last days of his natural life.

If Jesus had decided to say in Galilee and confine his activities to peasants in rural villages, he would probably have had a much longer life. But, as one of the gospels puts it, "he set his face to go to Jerusalem:"

Yet I must continue on my way today, tomorrow, and the following day, for it is impossible that a prophet should die outside of Jerusalem.

I don't pretend to know what his thoughts were when he made that decision--I'm not even sure what mine are most days. But whether you look at it as a religious or purely historical question, it seems clear that he knew that going there in the way he did and acting as he did would provoke the ruling elites of his day, both Roman and Jewish, to retaliate. And he knew that this retaliation was often drastic.

The Domination System of his time, to use the words of theologian Walter Wink, did not take kindly to challenges. Come to think of it, the Domination System of our time isn't too crazy about them either. And the Kingdom of God that Jesus proclaimed and enacted (see the post "The World Turned Upside Down "earlier this week) was nothing if not a challenge to the domination system.

The timing of the last Jerusalem trip was critical also. It was the festival of Passover, which was kind of like Christmas, Easter and Independence Day all rolled into one. The feast had political and subversive implications: it celebrated the liberation of the children of Israel from slavery and bondage in Egypt. The Romans were on high alert and Jerusalem was heavily garrisoned with soldiers.

Aside from many verbal confrontations with opponents that last week, Jesus engaged in two explicit acts which would have been seen as provocative. The first was his entry into Jerusalem, celebrated now as Palm Sunday. As Marcus Borg puts it,

Jesus' action was based on a passage from the prophets that spoke of a humble king who would enter Jerusalem on the colt of a donkey. He would be a king of peace who would banish chariots, warhorses, and battle bows from the land and command peace to the nations (Zech. 9:9-10). By riding into Jerusalem on a young donkey, Jesus enacted his message: the kingdom of God of which he spoke was a kingdom of peace, not violence.

The meaning of Jesus' mode of entry is amplified by the realization that two processions entered Jerusalem that Passover. The other procession was an imperial one. On or about the same day, the Roman governor Pontius Pilate rode into the city from the opposite side, the west, at the head of a very different kind of procession: imperial cavalry and foot soldiers arriving to reinforce the garrison at the Temple Mount...

The next day, Jesus created a disruption at the Temple, traditionally called its "cleansing," when the gospels say he overturned tables and drove out money changers. At the very least, this indicates that he viewed the Temple system as an unjust one that fed upon the poorest of the faithful.

It didn't take that much in those days to bring down the wrath of the ruling powers and this was more than enough...

Each of the gospels contains slightly different versions of the trial of Jesus. A very likely scenario, however, is pretty simple: there were standing orders to crush any disruption or display of resistance.

The punishment meted out to Jesus is telling. Crucifixion in the ancient Roman world was a punishment aimed mostly at rebellious slaves and those who threatened the legitimacy of the ruling order. And, to his eternal credit, Jesus really was and is a threat to the domination system of his and of every era.

Crucifixion at that time was as much spectacle as punishment, a prime example of the theater of empire and cruelty. Crucifixions took place in public places, on highways, prominent hillsides, or at heavily traveled crossroads. The message was simple: cross the empire and you die this way.

Many victims of this punishment were never even properly buried; instead, their bodies remained tied to the cross long after death as an example to others why might try to challenge the social order. This was, in the minds of many, a punishment worse than death.

What happened after the crucifixion of Jesus is beyond the scope of this post. Everyone must choose his or her own interpretation. My own best answer is to echo what was told to the disciples in the gospels when they came to anoint Jesus' body on the Sunday morning after his death: "Why do you seek the living among the dead? He is not here. He has gone before you..."

IF SPIDERS REALLY CREEP YOU OUT, don't read this.

HEALTH CARE CRISIS. This Charleston Gazette op-ed from John Sweeney and Kenney Perdue of the national and state AFLCIO, respectively, is about the need to expand health coverage to more Americans.

SUFFER THE CHILDREN, AGAIN. From the same source, here's a good op-ed by Renate Pore about the Childrens Health Insurance Program (CHIP).

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

THE WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN

A while back, El Cabrero was challenged by a Goat Rope reader to write about five things I most admire about Jesus. This is the third installation. If this is your first visit, please click on the earlier posts.

The third thing I'm going to highlight is what could be called Jesus' program. He called it the Kingdom (Greek: basileia) of God. As the Gospel of Mark puts it,

Now after that John was put in prison, Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God, and saying, The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel.

Then as now, there was all kinds of debate on what the term meant. For John the Baptist and many others before and after, it was God's coming apocalyptic judgment of the world, a cataclysmic divine intervention in history. It seems that for Jesus, the Kingdom had a present as well as future aspect. At least in part, it was something not just to wait for but to do. The Kingdom is a verb...

As John Dominic Crossan wrote,

In the beginning was the performance; not the word alone, not the deed alone, but both, each indelibly marked with the other forever.

For Jesus, the Kingdom meant the rule of the God of justice and compassion. It was the opposite of the kingdom or empire of men which was based on state violence, political oppression, economic exploitation, and religiously sanctioned injustice.

In the reign of God, the poor were blessed and the rich were cursed (Luke, ch. 6); the first were last and the last were first; women, children, the unclean, the sick, the outcasts and sinners were welcome, while the self-righteous were self-excluded. Equality replaced hierarchy and service/mutual aid replaced domination.

Jesus taught a subversive wisdom that turned the world upside down. But it wasn't all teaching. Jesus and his followers, together and in pairs, would go from village to village in Galilee proclaiming and enacting the kingdom.

What did it look like? People ate together, sharing whatever they had. The hungry were fed. The sick, who were often considered to be ritually unclean and isolated, were healed. Whatever that meant physically, it meant they were once again included in the life of the community. Those believed to be possessed with evil spirits were exorcised and restored to mental health.

As Marcus Borg puts it,

...the kingdom of God referred to what life would be like on earth if God were king and the kingdoms of the world, the domination systems of the world, were not.

And it involved acting as if that were already the case.

Obviously, this could be dangerous even if we didn't know the rest of the story. It would be dangerous today. Jesus warned his disciples, "If you follow me, you carry a cross."

HUNGERING AND THIRSTING FOR WHAT IS RIGHT. Here's a piece on the right to organize by economist Dean Baker, who recently visited El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia.

GOOD NEWS TO THE POOR. There actually was a little in WV. When the Census Bureau released its annual report on poverty, income, and health coverage, it reported that the poverty rate here dropped. El Cabrero is still going through the data but it looks like poverty fell in WV at more than twice the rate than it did for the nation as a whole--.7 percent compared with .3 percent.

We're still very poor compared to the rest of the country and have lots of problems and work to do, but ingratitude is a sin. We just need to build on this progress in the future. And this is another reminder that the Chicken Littles of WV, who have made a business of saying that everything is all bad here all the time, are off. We are the Little Engine that Could.

COUNT THE COST. But when you look at what Census figures say about the nation as a whole, it's easy to see we have major problems. The slight drop in poverty at the national level still leaves us below where we were in 2001. There was a slight increase in median household income, although wages of year round individual workers actually declined. The big news is the jump in the number and percentage of the uninsured, which went up 5 percent to 47 million Americans or 12.3 percent. The number of uninsured children went up from 8 to 8.7 million or from 10. to 11.7 percent of all children.

Here's a summary statement from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

And by the way, the $720 million we are spending (or will spend) every day of the Iraq war would go a long way towards dealing with some of these problems.

WOE UNTO YOU in the Bush administration who want to make it harder for children to receive coverage from the Children's Health Insurance Program.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

IN PRAISE OF HICKS

Caption: Orthodox icon of John the Baptist.

A while back, El Cabrero was challenged by a Goat Rope reader to write about the five things I most admire about Jesus. It took me a while to respond since I haven't found anything not to admire.

(He didn't seem to think much of goats if Matthew 25 is right, but that could be a mark of supreme wisdom.)

Anyhow, that's the theme this week. If this is your first visit, please click on yesterday's post.

The second thing I'm going highlight about Jesus reflects my personal prejudice as a hick from West Virginia. According to our pals at Wikipedia,

Hick is a derogatory term for an unsophisticated person from a rural area.

One of the few things the Roman and Jewish ruling classes would have agreed on was that Jesus was a hick. And a dangerous one at that. Indeed from the point of view of anybody who was anywhere in the ancient world, Jesus was a nobody from nowhere.

For sophisticated pagans, Rome was the place to be, and if you couldn't be there, you should be at a nice estate in the countryside worked by slaves or someplace like Athens or Alexandria. For Jewish rulers at Jerusalem, Galilee was a rural backwater whose residents were religiously suspect.

Then factor in social class. Both pagan and Jewish elites lived off of the labor and sufferings of the lower classes, whether of peasants or slaves or others teetering on the edge of oblivion. The gospels refer to Jesus as a tekton, which has traditionally been translated as carpenter but can mean any kind of manual laborer.

In a world where food security was not a given for most people and was tied to the land, a tekton would often be a landless peasant living a life even more precarious than that of those who tried to scratch a life from the soil and had to render up their surplus--and often their necessities--to the ruling classes.

Jesus knew all about living on the edge. He pretty much stayed there all his natural life.

Then factor in official credentials. Not only was he considered to be a lower class hick, but he had no official sanction to do the kind of stuff he was doing. Over and over in the gospels, people keep wondering "Who is this guy anyway? What's he think he's doing talking and acting this way?"

So the next time you get called a hick, smile, thank the person, and say you're in some pretty good company.

THE WORKER IS WORTHY OF HIS HIRE. According to a new report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research,

Unionization substantially raises wages and benefits even in typically low-wage occupations, according to "Unions and Upward Mobility for Low- Wage Workers", a report released today by the Center for Economic and Policy Research and Inclusion.

The report, which analyzed 15 of the lowest-paying occupations in the United States, found that unionized workers earned about 16 percent more than their non-union counterparts. Unionized workers in these same industries were also about 25 percentage points more likely to have health insurance or a pension plan.

For workers in these low-wage industries, unionization raised their wages, on average, about $1.75 per hour. In financial terms, the union effect on employer-provided health insurance and pensions was even larger.

SUFFER THE LITTLE CHILDREN... Here's an elegant response from Paul Krugman to the right wing attack on the Children's Health Insurance Program.

BUILT ON SAND. Excerpt from a long but good article in the New Republic about our neglected infrastructure:

Here is Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations: it is the "duty of the sovereign or commonwealth" to erect and to maintain "public institutions and those public works, which, though they may be in the highest degree advantageous to a great society, are, however, of such a nature that the profit could never repay the expense to any individual or small number of individuals, and which it therefore cannot be expected that any individual or small number of individuals should erect or maintain." Infrastructure is the classic public good that the free market does not and cannot provide. On the scale that is necessary, only the federal government can make the difference.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

GLORY DAYS

Caption: Venus, a Latin scholar, says "Sic transit gloria mundi."

El Cabrero is on another ancient Greece jag this week. If this is your first visit, please click on yesterday's post.

While I am officially in favor of world peace at all times and places, one of the more inspiring stories I know from ancient history is that of the diverse Greek city states that were the cradle of science, philosophy, tragedy, and (admittedly limited) democracy uniting to fend off the vast Persian invasions.

The first was in 490 BC when the forces of Darius were defeated by the Athenians at the battle of Marathon. A much larger force invaded ten years later under Xerxes. A small force of 300 Spartans under Leonidas and a few thousand of their allies held off the invaders for three days at Thermopylae before being defeated.

Athens was burned, although the population was mostly evacuated. An oracle from Apollo at Delphi told them that they would be safe behind wooden walls, which turned out to be the walls of their ships. The Greek navies defeated the Persian fleet at the battle of Salamis shortly thereafter. The following year, combined Greek armies again defeated the invading force at Plataea.

In the wake of the victory came a period of great creativity. Athens was rebuilt on a much grander scale. This period saw the full flowering of Greek philosophy and art.

It would have been nice to think that the Greek city states would form some kind of federation which would have enabled their culture to flourish for centuries...but that didn't happen.

One should never underestimate the human capacity for self destruction.

Fifty years after the defeat of the Persian invasion, two of the principle Greek cities, Athens and Sparta, with allies in tow, would begin a fratricidal war that would rage off and on for 27 miserable years and would include imperialism, arrogance (hubris), massacres and mass enslavements, plague, an early concentration camp, civil and class warfare, etc. The war wiped out Athens as a major political power in Greece and permanently damaged the Hellenic world.

It's a (literally) classical example of how easily things can spiral out of control. One would hope it's not too late to learn that lesson.

HOW WOULD YOU SPEND IT? We don't know how much wealth the Greeks blew on the Peloponnesian War, but according to Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and his colleague Linda Bilmes, the Iraq war in its first four years has (or will) cost the U.S. $720 million per day. According to the American Friends Service Committee

For that price, the United States could have provided: 34,904 Four-Year Scholarships for University Students; 1,153,846 Children with Free School Lunches; 6,482 Families with Homes and 163,525 People with Healthcare.

The AFSC has set up a new blog called How Would You Spend It?. You are cordially invited to log in and have your say.

UTAH MINING TRAGEDY. Here's an article from the Washington Post on the Utah mine disaster. Another tragedy is that the reforms passed in the wake of the Sago disaster had been fully implemented, it would at least have been possible to communicate with any survivors.

INCOMES DOWN FOR MOST AMERICANS. From the NY Times

Americans earned a smaller average income in 2005 than in 2000, the fifth consecutive year that they had to make ends meet with less money than at the peak of the last economic expansion, new government data shows.

While incomes have been on the rise since 2002, the average income in 2005 was $55,238, still nearly 1 percent less than the $55,714 in 2000, after adjusting for inflation, analysis of new tax statistics show...

Total income listed on tax returns grew every year after World War II, with a single one-year exception, until 2001, making the five-year period of lower average incomes and four years of lower total incomes a new experience for the majority of Americans born since 1945.

Thanks, guys! If you want more evidence of the Bush (mis)administration's class war from above, check out this story on their heroic war...against health care for America's children.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

UNPLUGGED

Caption: My legs hurt.

Pardon the late post--I'm on the road this week and it looks like internet access will be a problem. Please excuse any possible "interruptions in service."

Also, thanks to all who wished me well on the triathlon Sunday. I am pleased to say I survived and even managed to finish it before everybody went home.

I think the swimming was the hardest part, but none of it was exactly a picnic. The swim was 1/2 mile. The distance looked pretty easy from the shore but it was another thing in the late. Goggles or not, it's hard to see in a lake and hard to swim in a crowd. I think I zigged and zagged a lot.

The 24.8 mile bike ride gave me a chance to think about important things, like how much my legs and butt hurt.

The transition from the bike to the 3.1 mile run was another jolt. It is my experience that legs that have been biking a while don't like to be told to jog.

Did I mention it was uphill both ways? Even the swim?

All of which goes to show that having a seriously messed up heart is not an obstacle to endurance sports provided one is stupid enough.

KRUGMAN ON KIDS' HEALTH CARE. Here's a good one by Paul Krugman that attempts to answer the question "What kind of philosophy says that it's O.K. to subsidize insurance companies, but not to provide health care to children?"

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED