In the spirit of fair play

El Cabrero does not generally view the world with quite the same lens as Sarah Palin, to put it mildly, but she might have had a point or been close to having one when she said the following:

"So we're bombing Syria because Syria is bombing Syria? And I'm the idiot?"

A bit more seriously, here's what the American Friends Service Committee and several allied groups had to say about the issue.

Happy 148, West Virginia!

Today is West Virginia Day, the anniversary of its formation as a separate state from Virginia in the midst of the Civil War on June 20, 1863.

On this special day, this poem seems to be a good fit:

Appalachia
By Muriel Miller Dressler

I am Appalachia. In my veins
Runs fierce mountain pride; the hill-fed streams
Of passion; and, stranger, you don’t know me!
You’ve analyzed my every move–you still
Go away shaking your head. I remain
Enigmatic. How can you find rapport with me–
You, who never stood in the bowels of hell,
Never felt a mountain shake and open its jaws
To partake of human sacrifice?
You, who never stood on a high mountain
Watching the sun unwind its spiral rays:
Who never searched the glens for wild flowers,
Never picked mayapples or black walnuts; never ran
Wildly through the woods in pure delight,
Nor dangled your feet in a lazy creek?
You, who never danced to wild sweet notes,
Outpouring of nimble-fingered fiddlers;
Who never just “sat a spell,” on a porch,
Chewing and whittling; or hearing in pastime
The deep-throated bay of chasing hounds
And hunters shouting with joy, “He’s treed!”
You, who never once carried a coffin
To a family plot high up on a ridge
Because mountain folk know it’s best to lie
Where breezes from the hills whisper, “You’re home”;
You, who never saw from the valley that graves on a hill
Bring easement of pain to those below?
I tell you, stranger, hill folk know
What life is all about; they don’t need pills
To tranquilize the sorrow and joy of living.
I am Appalachia: and, stranger,
Though you’ve studied me, you still don’t know.

SPEAKING OF WHICH, here's an article on how it happened.

THE CHOPPING BLOCK. Here's an op-ed by yours truly in defense of Medicaid.

YOU'VE HEARD ABOUT IT, NOW WATCH THE VIDEO. Just for fun, here's that Paul Revere history lesson from Sarah Palin.

URGENT SEA MONKEY UPDATE here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Funeral for a friend

I spent part of the last weekend at another funeral, which is something I hope does not become a habit. This time, the memorial was for a remarkable woman who was my one time boss and long time friend.

Elizabeth Ann "Toney" Reese, grew up in the coalfields of Boone County, where her father died in the coal mines. For most of my childhood and a good chunk of my adulthood, she was the librarian in my small town.

(She even broke up a fistfight of mine in the alley beside the old library when I was in junior high.)

I hung out there a lot as a kid and got a job there while going to college as a part time janitor. It was a calling I pursued with lackadaisical diligence. It was while I should have been running the vacuum cleaner that I discovered such things as the poetry of Langston Hughes and the radical beliefs of American icon Mark Twain on issues of race, religion, empire and politics. After a while I started doing other things there and a summer job turned into a 10 year detour.

She had the amazing gift of turning that small library into the kind of place where everyone felt welcome. People sometimes have to go to schools, courthouses, social service agencies, and the department of motor vehicles, but nobody has to go to a public library. You have to make it the kind of place where people want to go. And she did.

I was surprised to find that I really enjoyed the work. I loved bantering with all kinds of people, trying to come up with creative programs, and finding the answers to challenging questions patrons had in those days before Google. And I learned a lot about my hometown along the way.

I'm glad that I had the chance to tell her more than once before she died that I learned everything I knew about how to deal with people and work in the community from her.

She turned that little library into a liberated area. While it may well be a utopian dream to think the whole world could be like that, I learned from her that here and there it can be done.

CREATING "THE OTHER." Here's an interesting take on violent rhetoric and dehumanizing political opponents and the consequences thereof.

I THINK I REFUDIATE THIS. In Sarah Palin's denial that political rhetoric can lead to violence, she used the term "blood libel," which is an example of exactly the kind of rhetoric that led to a great deal of violence. The term refers to the old anti-Semitic accusation that Jews used the blood of Christian children in their rituals. Such accusations frequently led to murders and pogroms in Jewish communities. Not surprisingly, a number of Jewish groups are not amused.

REVISITING THE SOCIAL SECURITY FIGHT. Here are some words of sanity on the subject from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

PUBLIC EMPLOYEES are the latest object of attack on the right, which maintains that these are overpaid in comparison with private sector workers. Here's a little reality check.

UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT: the WV state senate. Meanwhile, acting Governor Tomblin's first state of the state seems to indicate continuity with Manchin-era policies.

TALK ABOUT OLD WINE. People were brewing it in Armenia over 6,000 years ago.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

The Platonism of the left, the wilding on the right

El Cabrero tries not to rant too much here about things that get on my last nerve, but I may indulge myself a bit today. My topic of choice is what I've come to think of as the Platonism of the left.

Plato, of course, was a great Greek philosopher and student of Socrates. He wrote brilliant and often charming dialogues that have influenced thought for 23 centuries or so--so much so that Alfred North Whitehead famously referred to Western philosophy as "a series of footnotes to Plato." I've fallen under his spell more than once myself.

But thinkers from Nietzsche to Karl Popper have pointed out the dark sides of Platonic thought. For Nietzsche, he represented pure decadence for devaluing the material world in favor of the realm of forms or ideas. For Popper, he was an advocate of a closed society.

Platonizing has become a verb or sorts, which at the broadest level means to imitate his thought. At it's worst, it can mean believing that one's own ideas or models of the world are more real than the world itself.

I think the Platonism of the Left has surfaced during the health care reform debate. Some "progressive" people would apparently prefer an imaginary perfect bill which had no chance of getting anywhere to an imperfect real one that will make a huge difference for many Americans.

I don't mind if people would prefer to live in an imaginary world--as long as they don't mess up the real one.

Meanwhile, there's also the Whackadoodleism of the right. See below...

MORE UGLY. Some representatives who voted for health care reform have received death threats. What exactly is in that tea, anyway?

IT'S ALL FUN AND GAMES until somebody cuts a propane line. The FBI is investigating an incident involving a cut gas line at the home of the brother of Virginia Democratic Congressman Thomas Perriello after his address was published in a Tea Party blog which urged the faithful to visit the place and express their feelings about his vote in favor of health care reform.

AND STILL MORE. One might think that after the wave of name calling, vandalism, death threats, and other fun and games that right wing leaders would try to tone down the rhetoric. Sarah Palin appears not to have gotten the memo (if one existed) however. In a recent tweet, she wrote

Commonsense Conservatives & lovers of America: "Don't Retreat, Instead - RELOAD!"

Read more here.

WHATEVER HAPPENED to the old conservatism?

FALLOUT. A group of evangelical Christians have responded to Glen Beck's assertion that the idea of social justice is communist/Nazi. (One sometimes wonders whether those who assert the Whackadoodle equation of communism and Nazism may have dozed during their history of World War II classes.)

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED