Fatal to be hungry

I've spent a decent chunk of the last several years in working with friends to try to fight off attack on poor people in general and food assistance in particular. It would probably be safe to say our success has been limited.

Several of these fights are still in the works and are caused by the Trump administration's human wave attacks on SNAP (Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program).

While musing on that subject, I ran across a couple of quotes about hunger and the cruelty and the enormous condescension people show to people who are poor.

Let's start with cruelty:

"It is fatal to look hungry. It makes people want to kick you."

Now cruelty's close relation, condescension:

“It is curious how people take it for granted that they have a right to preach at you and pray over you as soon as your income falls below a certain level.”

I'm not sure which is worse.

The boot or the face?

For some reason, “1984,” George Orwell’s book about a nightmarish society, has had a revival in the Trump era.

Maybe it’s the weather.

The New York Times reported it was top of Amazon’s list in early 2017. Around the same time, Penguin USA reported a 9,500 percent increase in sales over a few days. It’s a hot item nearly 70 years since its publication.

It’s probably a good thing that more people have been reading it. It’s probably a bad thing that people felt like they had to.

A haunting line from the book that has stuck in my mind: “If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.”

Some days I think that might not be too far off — unless we act to prevent it. There are dangerous trends that, if unaddressed, point towards a disastrous future.

The top two are economic inequality and climate change.

Let’s start with inequality, which is reaching record levels and is likely to worsen, since returns from wealth grow much faster than productivity or wages. This doesn’t just impact life chances; it affects the length and quality of life itself.

Research shows that one’s relative position within society has a huge impact on health and longevity. People in higher social positions tend to live longer and be healthier than those below them — even if you control for behavioral factors such as smoking, exercise, obesity and diet.

Studies by British epidemiologist Michael Marmot suggest that the key ingredients to longevity and health are a sense of control over one’s life and the ability to fully participate in society. These diminish as we move down the ladder.

According to Marmot, “It is inequality in these that plays a big part in producing the social gradient in health.” The wider the divide, the sharper are the effects.

In “The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better,” epidemiologists Richard G. Wilkinson and Kate E. Pickett expand on these themes. Using international data, they found that high degrees of inequality have negative effects not just on mental and physical health, but also on things like substance abuse and addiction, education, incarceration, obesity, social mobility, violence, social trust, teen pregnancies and child well-being.

While social problems pile up at the bottom, “The effects of inequality are not confined to the poor. A growing body of research shows that inequality damages the social fabric of the whole society.”

Harvard researcher Ichiro Kawachi has described inequality as a “social pollutant.”

The concentration of wealth makes it easier for the very wealthy to buy political influence and further stack the deck, endangering democracy. One person/one vote is turning into one dollar/one vote. It’s a self-perpetuating cycle, with the state, including its means of repression, effectively being captured and controlled by economic elites.

Overheated economic systems are also prone to catastrophic recessions and depressions, which have devastating impacts on communities, as we saw during the most recent recession.

Widespread inequality increases social tensions around the world, and the frustration it causes is a fertile breeding ground for toxic political movements, hate groups, religious extremism, armed conflict, racism and scapegoating vulnerable people. Movements such as these feed on the pain but ultimately will fail to cure it.

In the worst case, authoritarian political movements can gain political power and use it to advance the interests of elites while repressing popular resistance. It’s happened before and the results weren’t pretty.

Unfortunately, the same inequality of economic and political power is also being used to block meaningful action on climate change, since those who profit from a fossil fuel economy prefer short-term profit to long-term sustainability.

The playbook is pretty obvious: use wealth and political clout to delay action on climate until it’s too late, then say it was going to happen anyway.

Meanwhile its effects include things like extreme weather events, heating oceans, melting glaciers, rising sea levels, extinctions, crop failures, health impacts, damaged habitats, invasive species, mass displacement and migration, conflict over scarce resources, water contamination, desertification, epidemics, collapsing fisheries, droughts and floods and a host of other unpleasantries that will affect everyone but hit poorer communities hardest.

And that fun is only beginning.

If this keeps up, things don’t look good for the human face. The smart money will be on the boot.

I’m not sure what it will take to keep that from happening, but it probably won’t be business as usual.

In 1933, the great German Christian theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer pondered what a just response from people of faith would be required to deal with the evils of his time, particularly the persecution of the Jews.

He came up with three possibilities.

One was to “ask the state whether its actions are legitimate and in accordance with its character as state, i.e. it can throw the state back on its responsibilities.” That’s worth a shot, even though it hasn’t worked too well lately.

Another option was to “aid the victims of state action,” since “the church has an unconditional obligation to the victims of any ordering of society ...” That’s always in order, even if it doesn’t solve the problem.

The third option was a bit edgier: it was “not just to bandage the victims under the wheel, but to jam a spoke in the wheel itself.”

Just a thought.

(This appeared in today's Gazette-Mail.)

A spring arrival

Photo credit: Sister in Law Unit.

Spring is here and one unexpected sign of it is a baby great horned owlet that was recently born on our hill. He (or she) is pretty cute.

Speaking of spring, here's a great quote about it by George Orwell. I posted this on Facebook a while back. Sorry for the duplication but something this good deserves to be read more than once.

“ I think that by retaining one’s childhood love of such things as trees, fishes, butterflies and—to return to my first instance—toads, one makes a peaceful and decent future a little more probable…

At any rate, spring is here...and they can't stop you enjoying it. This is a satisfying reflection. How many a time have I stood watching the toads mating, or a pair of hares having a boxing match in the young corn, and thought of all the important persons who would stop me enjoying this if they could. But luckily they can't. So long as you are not actually ill, hungry, frightened or immured in a prison or a holiday camp, spring is still spring. The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it." George Orwell, Some Thoughts on the Common Toad

 Orwell didn't explicitly mention owls, but I think he'd be down with them.

Defeat is no refutation

In George Orwell's 1984, the evil O'Brien, a member of the Inner Party, says this to the hapless protagonist Winston:

If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.

What if you knew that was really going to be true, at least for the non-elite (as it seems to me to be some days)? Or what if you somehow knew that humans would fail to address climate change and thus bring about a disastrous future? Would you just give up?

To put it another way, is your interest in working for a better or less bad world based on a realistic hope of getting there or would you struggle on as skillfully as you could without it?

The willingness to continue the struggle without hope is what Tolkien called the "theory of courage," which he felt was expressed in the vision of Norse mythology. According to Tom Shippey, author of The Road to Middle-Earth,

The central pillar of that theory was Ragnarok--the day when gods and men would fight evil and the giants, and inevitably be defeated. Its great statement was that defeat is no refutation. The right side remains right even if it has no ultimate hope at all. In a sense this Northern mythology asks more of men, even makes more of them, than Christianity, for it offers them no heaven, no salvation, no reward for virtue except the sombre satisfaction of having done what is right.

This view of things speaks to my condition on many if not most days. I do believe it is possible with luck and technique and cunning to make some things a little better or less bad here and there. But I have no vision of a utopia or real hope for realizing some final goal of a truly just society and I don't think it's necessary to have either to keep up the fight.

HEALTH CARE REFORM turns one year old today.

"HAVE YOU NO DECENCY, SIR?" Apparently not. Here's an interesting op-ed on union busting in Wisconsin.

UPPER BIG BRANCH. New federal criminal charges have been filed in the wake of the Massey mine disaster investigation. Here are more details from Coal Tattoo.

CHUPACABRAS are (apparently) mythological monsters--the literal translation of the Spanish word is "goat-sucker." To find out more about such beasts, which are entirely unwelcome at Goat Rope Farm, click here and here.

NOTE: It is with some trepidation that I admit to scheduling this post to appear a few hours in advance so I can reacquaint myself with sleep. The last time I did this, the tsunami hit Japan. I trust (and hope) that there was no causal relation between the two events. If anything really bad happens between now and then, let me state emphatically once again that I was against it.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A BEGINNING, MIDDLE AND END. SORT OF

The Goat Rope Odyssey cruise continues, along with the usual links and comments about current events. If you like mythology, click on earlier posts.

Aristotle said that every story should have a beginning, a middle and an end. That's true of Homer's Odyssey, although it's not told in a chronological way. It begins near the end, shortly before Odysseus' long-delayed homecoming after 10 years of fighting at Troy and 10 more years of wandering and getting stuck.

Here's a skeletal outline for now:

The goddess Athena asks her father Zeus to give Odysseus a break and help him go home. He's been stuck on the island of the goddess Calypso for seven years. It doesn't sound like a bad gig: sun, sand, surf, and sex with a goddess (most of whom were considered to be hot), yet he cries every day out of homesickness. Zeus agrees to cut him some slack.

The story then cuts to the Old Home Place at Ithaca. Things are bad. Swarms of suitors are swarming around his wife, the faithful Penelope. Most people think her husband is dead and she is under great pressure to marry. The suitors are insolent, bullying his son Telemachus and eating the family out of house and home.

Athena then goes to Ithaca to give Telemachus a boost and suggest a plan of action that gives him something positive to do and gets him out of harm's way for a while. He visits the homes Odysseus's' old comrades Menelaus and Nestor seeking news of his father and gaining a good repute.

We don't get to the main character until book 5, when the god Hermes (see last week) visits the island of Calypso and tells her she needs to let him go and help him on his way. Odysseus sails off with her help but is shipwrecked by the sea god Poseidon, who holds a grudge for Odysseus' blinding of his son Polyphemus the cyclops.

Eventually he makes it to the land of the Phaeacians, where he receives hospitality and eventually reveals himself. It's there that we hear from the man himself the well known stories of the cyclops, Circe, Scylla and Charybdis and the other disasters that befell him on his way home.

(There's a lot of irony in this story. One example is the fact that Odysseus is a totally unreliable narrator who has a great deal of trouble telling the truth. Was he or wasn't he?)

The Phaeacians deliver him safely to Ithaca where after many ruses he and Telemachus open a major can of smackdown on the suitors and he is reunited with Penelope. The carnage is severe but the gods again intervene to make peace.

Next time: greatest hits.

KNOW NOTHINGS. Has ignorance become a badge of honor?

ORWELL AND STRAUSS. A philosophy of fear underlies much of current politics.

LEAVING WAR TO THE PRIVATE SECTOR. Here's a good editorial from the Gazette.

TOUGH QUESTIONS ABOUT QUESTIONINGS. Psychologists are debating whether assisting in military interrogations is a violation of professional ethis.

DOING GOOD AND DOING WELL. Socially responsible investment funds are catching on.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

MORAL DISENGAGEMENT

St. Anthony tormented by demons, by way of wikipedia.

The theme at Goat Rope lately is understanding human evil, along with links and comments about current events. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier posts.

Most normal people have internalized moral norms about how other people should be treated. However, under certain conditions, these moral restraints can be shut off. The result is what psychologist Albert Bandura called "moral disengagement" and it is often a key feature in acts of violence and cruelty. Here's a link to an essay of his on the subject.

This is the abbreviated Goat Rope version:

Under normal conditions, people have both inhibitive and proactive moral tendencies. Inhibitive means we understand it's not nice to hit little Tommy with a sledge hammer. Proactive means that if little Susy falls into a pit of boiling sludge we should pull her out. That's the good news. The bad news is that people all too often have ways of tossing both out the window.

Here are a two ways that can happen:

*Reconstruing the situation or coming up with moral justifications to treat people badly. Labeling them as the enemy usually works pretty good here. So does ideology. As Voltaire once said,

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

*Using euphemisms. Orwell was all over this one:

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism., question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.

We don't blow away villages; instead, we use surgical strikes. We don't torture, we just use rough interrogation. We don't kill innocent civilians, although collateral damage happens.

There are other ways of kicking off the switch, about which more tomorrow.

THE WIDENING GAP between rich and poor isn't just about money; it's about life expectancy, as the latest snapshot from the Economic Policy Institute suggests.

OH GOOD. Inflation may be the order of the day. That's all we need during a recession...

HEALTH CARE. A new report from the Commonwealth Fund found that

the United States spends more than twice as much on each person for health care as most other industrialized countries. But it has fallen to last place among those countries in preventing deaths through use of timely and effective medical care...

A TOUGH TEA LEAF TO READ. The US is finally sending a high level official to talk with the Iranian government. With a normal administration, I'd say that was a good sign, but I trust this one about as far as I could throw it. A worst-case scenario would involve the Bush administration prematurely declaring diplomacy to be a failure in order to try to justify yet another war.

ON A SIMILAR NOTE, many Americans oppose a rush to war with Iran, if anybody is listening.

MEGAN WILLIAMS CASE. Bobby Brewster pleaded guilty to charges related to the kidnapping and torture of Megan Williams and faces up to 40 years in prison.

MINE SAFETY. Federal investigators are winding up a criminal investigation related to the fire at Massey Energy's Aracoma mine that killed two workers in Jan. 2006.

URGENT EXTINCT FLYING REPTILE UPDATE here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A RHETORICAL FLOURISH,WINNERS AND LOSERS IN IRAQ, AND ANOTHER MESS

Caption: Bantam rooster and noted free-market economist Dr. Denton "Denny" Dimwit is a master of rhetoric.

Political rhetoric is never exactly innocent, but El Cabrero suspects that the rhetoric of our time, particularly that of people in power, is way over the top.

What better antidote can there be than a dose of George Orwell's classic 1946 essay, "Politics and the English Language"?

Here are some nuggets:

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible...

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as "keeping out of politics." All issues are political issues and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer...

Political language--and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists--is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

WINNERS AND LOSERS. Tha March/April issue of Foreign Policy has an interesting feature by several authors on the subject of "Who Wins in Iraq?" There are ten winners.

Sneak preview: the U.S. didn't make the list.

The top three winners were

1. Iran ("After nearly 25 years of wrestling with Saddam Hussein, Iran's Shiite rulers have the war to thank for their newfound power.");

2. Moqtada al-Sadr ("How a radical Shiite cleric became the most powerful man in Iraq"); and

3. Al Qaeda ("The terrorist network was on life support after September 11--until a new front opened in Baghdad and revived its mission.")

Other "winners" who made the list were, in order, Samual Huntington of "Clash of Civilizations" fame; China; Arab dictators; the price of oil; the United Nations (diplomacy may not be so stupid after all); Old Europe (see previus item); and Israel.

My guess is that the legitimate interests of the American people are buried somewhere in the "also ran" category.

ANOTHER MISTAKE WAS MADE. The latest collateral damage inflicted by the Bush administration hit the Medicaid program, which provides health care to around 55 million children, people with disabilities, low income families, and elderly Americans.

The so-called Deficit Reduction Act of 2006 (you know, the one that didn't reduce the deficit) included draconian cuts to social programs and harsh new rules in order to pay for more tax cuts for the rich. This is from the New York Times:

A new federal rule intended to keep illegal immigrants from receiving Medicaid has instead shut out tens of thousands of United States citizens who have had difficulty complying with requirements to show birth certificates and other documents proving their citizenship, state officials say...

Under a 2006 federal law, the Deficit Reduction Act, most people who say they are United States citizens and want Medicaid must provide “satisfactory documentary evidence of citizenship,” which could include a passport or the combination of a birth certificate and a driver’s license.

Under a 2006 federal law, the Deficit Reduction Act, most people who say they are United States citizens and want Medicaid must provide “satisfactory documentary evidence of citizenship,” which could include a passport or the combination of a birth certificate and a driver’s license.

The article quotes state officials who say that the rule changes haven't turned up many undocumented immigrants receiving Medicaid but has resulted in significant drops in rolls due to the difficulty of complying with the new rules.

Of West Virginia's congressional delegation, only Shelley Moore Capito supported the Deficit-Reduction-Act-Which-Didn't-Reduce-the-Deficit.


SPEAKING OF IMMIGRANTS EATING ALL THE HEALTH CARE (NOT)...Doh! The same issue of Foreign Policy cited above has a little item titled "You Can No Longer Argue..." It completes the sentence like this: "...that illegal immigrants are an excessive burden on U.S. healthcare...According to a RAND Corp. study on healthcare spending in the United States, foreign-born residents, particularly the undocumented, use far fewer medical services relative to their population share than U.S.-born citizens."

Legal immigrants make up 9.9 percent of the population and account for 7 percent of health care spending; undocumented workers are estimated to be 3.2 percent and account for 1.5 percent of healthcare spending.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED