Room for (real) populism in West Virginia

Say what you want about the political attitudes of West Virginians. Everyone else has, including me. But things are complicated here.

Earlier this week, WV MetroNews and the Dominion Post released a poll about the attitudes of West Virginians towards big business. It might surprise some people. Among the findings:

*58 percent of respondents believed that government regulation of business is necessary to protect the public. Guess that means we haven't forgotten all the for-profit disasters that have killed or maimed so many state residents over the years;

*88 percent believed that too much power was concentrated in the hands of a few corporations;

*72 percent believed that corporations were making too much in profit.

All of these numbers are up significantly from a similar 2014 poll. The poll surveyed 404 West Virginians from all counties and has a 4.9 percent margin of error.

The upshot seems to me to be that people here are open to a real populist message and agenda if there's a willingness to put one forward.

If we don't, to paraphrase Shakespeare, the fault is not in our stars but in ourselves, that we are underlings.

They're back

One nice thing about this time of year in El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia is the blooming of the redbuds, which come to think about it aren't exactly red. These little trees are pretty inconspicuous most of they year but in the spring (earlier these days due to weird weather), they burst into glory and can make even a human-trashed landscape look pretty. Or prettier anyway.

SAVING LIVES, CUTTING COSTS. Happy 2nd birthday, health care reform! Here's hoping it doesn't get gutted by the supremes.

I DID NOT WRITE THIS scathing editorial about right wing Whackadoodles. But I kind of wish I did.

GETTING TAX BREAKS, BUYING POLITICIANS. Here's a look at some corporate tax dodgers and what they do with all that spare money.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Would that it were so

Kudos to AFLCIO president and former UMWA leader Rich Trumka for calling for serious discussions about climate change and the future of coal. Of course, I don't expect political leaders in the Mountain State of Denial to pay a lot of attention, but every little bit helps.

ON THE POSITIVE SIDE, climate change may  make reptiles smarter.

NOT ONLY ARE CORPORATIONS NOT PEOPLE, but America isn't one either.

LOOKING AHEAD, Nobel economics laureate Joseph Stiglitz sees a rough year in 2012.

HAS ANYONE NOTICED that I've gone a week without mentioning zombies?

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Mondegreens are us

“Mondegreen” is a term coined by Sylvia Wright for what happens when we mis-hear song lyrics. The word originated when Wright misunderstood the lyrics of an old ballad which she believed contained the lines that said

They have slain the Earl O' Moray,

And Lady Mondegreen.

The real second line said

“and laid him on the green.”

I think most people have come up with their share of Mondegreens, consciously or otherwise. When the Spousal Unit was a kid, she though the lyrics of Johnny and June Carter Cash’s "Jackson" started by saying “We got married in a peanut” instead of a fever.

El Cabrero, of course, is way above such silly errors. Although there was one time when the Stevie Nicks song “Edge of seventeen” came on the radio and I wondered aloud, “why the hell is she singing about a one-winged dove?”

I’ll bet you’ve got a Mondegreen or two up your sleeves as well, Gentle Reader.

FIXING AMERICA. Here's a review of a book on the topic by one of my favorite economists.

THE WHOLE CORPORATIONS/PEOPLE THING is discussed here. 

DOGS LOVE TO SNIFF IT. But who would have thought this could help killer whales?

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Cap the cap

As the Gentle Reader is no doubt aware, we're gearing up for the Mother of All Federal Budget fights right now. I've posted and linked all kinds of items about this lately, but here's a very short version:

*There are lots of ideas swirling around out there about budgets and deficits, but two of the worst are Republican Congressman Paul Ryan's plan which passed the House. It would gut Medicaid and CHIP and kill Medicare as we know it, along with slashing other programs and giving more tax breaks to the rich.

Another idea that is just as bad is the one proposed by Senators McCaskill and Corker (and unfortunately supported by WV's newest senator, Joe Manchin). It would impose draconian spending caps that would result in across the board cuts and do about all the bad things the Ryan plan would do, and maybe more.

Here's a good article by economist Dean Baker about why this is a bad idea.

And here's an analysis of the same bad idea by the WV Center on Budget and Policy.

BUDGET OPTIONS. Here's a good resource from the National Priorities Project that shows different federal budget alternatives. Meanwhile, their home website is well worth a look around.

SHIFTING COSTS TO SENIORS. The Ryan plan to euthanize Medicare would do just that.

DENY THIS. Arctic ice is melting at a faster than anticipated rate.

CORPORATE FRAUD. Noted economist Jeffrey Sachs calls out corporate corruption here.

MASSEY ENERGY was cited with more safety violations.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Keenest to win fame

Goat Rope is all about Beowulf these days, although you will also find links and comments about current events. For more, click on earlier posts.

The Beowulf poet and the society he or she (or they) came from knew nothing about Greek tragedy, but it doesn't take much looking to find some tragic themes there. For many people, especially those influenced by Aristotle, tragic art involves a noble character brought low by some flaw or mistake of lack of insight. That kind of works for Beowulf, although the flaw in question is as much a part of the society it came from as it was of the hero.

Beowulf as a young man was all about winning fame. Hence, the trip to the land of the Danes to kill the monster Grendel. Before all that,

...He had been poorly regarded
for a long time, was taken by the Geats
for less than he was worth: and their lord too
had never much esteemed him in the mead-hall.
They firmly believed that he lacked force,
that the prince was a weakling; but presently
every affront to his deserving was reversed.

He got fame alright, but never quite lost the thirst for it. He eventually became king and ruled well over the Geats for fifty years until someone stirred up the wrath of a dragon, which he vowed to kill single handedly. As the last lines of the poem go,

They said that of all the kings upon the earth
he was the most gracious and fair-minded,
kindest to his people and keenest to win fame.

You could say that the tragic flaw of Beowulf was the conflict between the first part of the sentence and the last four words. Had he been less keen to win fame, he would have delegated the dragon slaying to younger men and continued to rule justly over the Geats and kept them in safety. Instead, he died in the effort, leaving his people to the nasty fate anticipated by a grieving woman, who

...sang out in grief;
with hair bound up, she unburdened herself
of her worst fears, a wild litany
of nightmare and lament: her nation invaded,
enemies on the rampage, bodies in piles,
slavery and abasement.

As Dylan pointed out in a song, sometimes it's either fortune or fame, though neither are what they claim. Beowulf chose fame. I think I prefer fortune.

HOLY JUDICIAL ACTIVISM, BATMAN! A federal judge in Florida may have been overly caffinated (or something) when he ruled on the constitutionality of health care reform.

THINGS THEY DON'T TELL YOU ABOUT CAPITALISM. Here's an excerpt from a new book about that topic.

OF WRITERS, RELIGION, EXILE, POLITICS AND SUCH. Here's the latest edition of the Rev. Jim Lewis' Notes from Under the Fig Tree.

BRICKS WITHOUT STRAW. If memory serves, a labor dispute in Egypt a few thousand years ago led by an agitator named Moses kicked up some dust. Here's an item from the AFLCIO blog on the role of Egyptian unions in the struggle for reform.

CORPORATIONS AND THE COMMONS. This entrepreneur calls for a balance between the two.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Hammer time

There is an old saying that when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. We tend to get pretty attached to our hammers and use them whether they make sense or not.

(The problem with thinking everything can be fixed with a hammer, as any West Virginian can tell you, is that it leaves duct tape out of the equation altogether. But I digress.)

This is yet another thing I find useful in Buddhist thought, especially for people interested in social justice. Activists can get stuck in ruts--or sometimes time warps--doing the same things over and over. I love rituals--but not ritualism.

The Buddha taught that "attachment to form is a hindrance," which means that having fixed ideas about how things are or what to do can get in the way of getting anything done. Every day, every situation, every conflict is unique and demands a unique response, which may or may not look like anything that went before it.

CLIMATE CAPITALISM? Maybe so, maybe not. Read more here.

OKAY. Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship reports having "a totally clear conscience" about the Upper Big Branch mine disaster.

IN CASE YOU PLAN ON LIVING A LONG TIME, here's some advice.

OR, IF NOT, here's something on near death experiences.

ON THE SUBJECT OF DEATH, sitting a lot could make it happen quicker.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Going south

This rooster had a keen sense of honor, which may have led to his untimely demise.

For the last week, Goat Rope has been looking at cultural factors that may influence attitudes towards the use of violence. Please click on last week's posts if you find this interesting.

To recap briefly, in societies where the good things of life are scarce and easily stolen, people tend to develop a "culture of honor" which encourages people to engage in or at least credibly threaten violence in response to insults or threats. Such cultures often develop among herding peoples where central authority is weak or nonexistent, but once established they can continue long after a society's economic base has changed.

El Cabrero's beloved region of Appalachia may be a case in point...

In a 1996 book, Culture of Honor: the Psychology of Violence in the South, researchers Richard Nisbett and Dov Cohen argue that many parts of the American south and Appalachia (the two are not identical in my view) were settled by herding people such as my own Scotch-Irish.

They also identify different attitudes towards violence between those areas and northern states.

Let me be the first to say that it's dangerous to overgeneralize about a region and that the American south has undergone many changes, demographic, political and otherwise. I'm not going to give this book the coveted Blanket Goat Rope Endorsement, but it is interesting in at least identifying historical trends.

Nisbett and Cohen found (using data from the early 1990s) that homicide rates for white southerners were higher than that of white non-southerners in fights that developed as a result of arguments which generally involve some kind of insult. They controlled for other factors, such as urbanization, poverty, etc.

In terms of attitudes, they found that

southerners were not more in favor of violence in general, that they were not more in favor of violence in many specified contexts unrelated to culture-of-honor concerns, but that they were more likely to endorse violence when it was used for self-protection and for social control. The...data also showed that southerners were no more likely to endorse violence than northerners in a wide variety of specific situations. It was only for situations involving an affront, the protection of self, home, or family, and the socialization of children that southerners were more likely to endorse violence. Thus, southern ideology does not make all violence acceptable but, rather, allows violence as a tool for special purposes.

On the other hand, this attitude that violence may be permissible under some circumstances may have also contributed to southern traditions of courtesy, politeness and hospitality:

Perhaps that is also why southerns have a reputation for being so polite. The best way to keep a conflict from spiraling out of hand is to avoid the conflict in the first place. So southern hospitality, politeness, and friendliness are what keep social interactions going smoothly.

Y'all have a nice day!

PARTING SHOTS. President Bush is spending his last weeks in office rewriting rules and deregulating industries.

WHAT PRICE REFORM? This review of coal mine safety from the Charleston Gazette is a reminder that improvements were paid for by the deaths of miners.

MY PICK DIDN'T MAKE THE LIST. Here's one estimate of the 10 worst corporations of 2008.

DON'T JUST DO SOMETHING--SIT THERE. Here's more evidence that mindfulness meditation can be good for your brain.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED