A holiday we could use

A Mexican custom of which El Cabrero is a big fan of is the Day of the Dead, which corresponds with All Saints Day in the Church calendar. Halloween, you recall, is All-Hallows-Eve or the day before. Similar customs are observed elsewhere, but it is the official Goat Rope verdict that this is the coolest.

The celebration likely has pre-Christian roots. During the Aztec month of Miccailhuitonli (say that 10 times while spinning around), there was a festival presided over by the "Lady of the Dead" which was dedicated both to children and the dead. Originally, this was celebrated in the summer, but there was an understandable post-colonial shift.

Now the festivities usually continue for the first two days of November and include acts that symbolically welcome the dead back into their homes and visiting family graves. There's special food including "pan de muerto" or bread of the dead. Family altars and gravesides are decorated with religious objects and symbolic offerings of food flowers and even alcohol and cigarettes.

I think the basic idea is right on, i.e. that the living and the dead are connected. That idea is enshrined in the ancient creeds of Christianity, which speak of "the communion of saints."

Maybe that's because the dead aren't quite as dead as we tend to think or the living aren't as alive as we tend to think. I'll leave that to the reader's discretion...

(This came from a blog post here from 10 years ago. Recycling.)

Funeral for a friend

I got some sad news this week. A friend of mine I hadn't seen for years died after a long illness. We met over 20 years ago in the midst of a huge struggle between the Ravenswood Aluminum Corporation (RAC) and the 1,700 union members and their families who were locked out of the plant.

RAC used to be owned by Kaiser Aluminum but its ownership had been kicked around over the years. The management at the time was eager to get rid of the union, even though the workers agreed to continue working under the terms and conditions of the old contract.

At midnight Oct. 31,1990 they were informed that they would be locked out of their jobs and permanently replaced.

The average age of a union worker was over 50 with over 20 years of service at the company.

What followed was a fight that lasted nearly two years and bitterly divided the community.

I visited the area with a union  miner friend shortly after it started. We had some experience in that kind of thing and offered solidarity, but nobody seemed interest. It was around a year later that I got a call from inviting me to come and meet with some steelworkers and members of the women's support group.

We met above a place called Ike's and it was there that I met my friend Sue. She was active in the support group but was the most unlikely labor militant you'd ever meet. She was a devoted homemaker and mother of three, active in her church and community. Neither she nor any of the other people impacted by the lockout ever imagined they'd be in this kind of situation.

We met regularly with folks for several months, trying to think of things to keep morale up while events took their course. I worked a lot with the women's group. This may not be a surprise to anybody, but I found they were more concerned with how everyone was doing and were more likely to follow through. No one seemed to look out for others as much as Sue. She was part of the glue that held people together at a critical time.

Eventually and against all odds, they won the lockout, thanks to unsung heroes like Sue. After two years of living dangerously, folks readjusted to a "normal" life.

No victory is permanent, but the plant stayed open and stayed union for until 2009. It's now closed.

It was a good fight, and the best part for me was meeting and standing together with people like Sue.

When you're in a struggle like that, people often swear to stay in touch. Sometimes you do, but often the tides of life cause us to drift apart.

I had lost contact with Sue until I got the news and it  hit me pretty hard. I guess a lot of the people I knew from that fight have passed. And I'm not getting any younger.

I guess the main thing is to do what we can with the time we have. She did anyway.

On Iran, death, hell and other stuff

WV Senator Joe Manchin is starting to feel the heat around the Iran deal, as this news story and this commentary show. I'm hoping that in the end he'll take advice like this.

NOT SURE I'M READY FOR THIS. It looks like Warner Brothers is going to make a film version of Dante's Inferno. Ironically, a silent version made over a century ago got it right. These days, who knows how bad it'll be? I guess the car chases will be cool anyway.

BEFORE HELL, COMES DEATH (unless it's a really bad day). Here's a look at how Americans die compared with other parts of the world.

THE END OF AN ERA. There have been lots of changes at the Charleston Gazette-Mail since the papers merged. Longtime journalist Paul Nyden is retiring. I hope he keeps sending stuff in though. He really rocked the pillars in the day.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Late on a Mother's Day...

...It has occurred to me that this is my first Mother's Day without a living mother. Mine passed at age 90 in early January. I am not one to put private sentiments on public display but I will say this: her life was quiet but good and touched many people and her passing was like that of a sweet candle that finally burned out.

I'm glad that I was there when she drew her last breath as she was there when I drew my first. I feel honored to have received my life from her. From her, I received the greatest gift: that of tenacity. I have long felt that my active life was the complement of her quiet life.

As the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer says, "May light perpetual shine upon her."

Two deaths

I had unexpected news of two deaths today. One was in the extended family that will no doubt have many rippling effects. He was a good man who was like another father to my children and another grandfather to my grandchild. A Vietnam veteran, a Democrat and a quiet decent man from southern West Virginia respected by all who knew him.

The other was that of the great Latin American author Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Marquez is best known for his style of magical realism, which he believed only told the truth about the Caribbean world. I've often thought that the truth about Appalachia could best be told that way as well. I am in awe of his One Hundred Years of Solitude, which recounts the creation and dissolution of an entire world.  In my dreams, I'd write a book about this place as baroque and layered as his. But only in my dreams. Who but Marquez would begin a novel thus:

"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."

It kind of makes you wonder what kind of random thoughts will float through our heads when we face our own (metaphorical, one hopes) firing squad.

I am not fluent in Latin, alas,  but  I like the sound of some phrases I know. Like this one, which wishes that the dead may rest in peace: Requiescat in pace.

At times like these, I love the words of the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer, in which I was steeped from my infancy: "Give to the departed eternal rest. Let light perpetual shine upon them."

Love and death

Many Goat Rope readers from West Virginia are doubtless familiar with my friend the Rev. Jim Lewis, a "retired" Episcopal priest and tireless fighter for justice. And if you know Jim, you also knew Judy, his beloved wife with whom he shared a strong connection for 59 years.

With absolutely no disrespect intended to Jim, Judy was the toughest one. Judy recently passed after a decades-long battle with cancer.

Jim regularly publishes his "Notes from Under the Fig Tree," which I have frequently linked here. The latest edition is a very moving tribute to Judy.

Whether you knew her or know Jim or not, it's a very moving meditation on love, marriage, death and all those things. It moved me and I'm not easily movable. You can read it here.

It reminded me of some lines from Shakespeare's Sonnet 116:

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickles' compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
  If this be error and upon me proved,
  I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

That's all for today.

There is no defense...

...against a summer squash attack.

WORTH A LOOK. Here's USA Today about waiting for the Affordable Care Act in WV. Notice working people wanting coverage versus political posturing by others.

WEIRD STORY ABOUT RAT CONSCIOUSNESS AFTER DEATH here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Okinawan requiem

This past weekend, the Spousal Unit and I attended a performance of Mozart's Requiem by the local symphony. It reminded me of how much I like the idea of performing rituals for and/or in honor of the dead. I imagine this can be done in lots of ways, but one in particular is strong in my memory.

Three years ago, as regular readers of this blog know, I went to the Holy Land, aka Okinawa, for an intensive seminar with the greatest living masters of traditional karate in the land of its birth. Over a dozen people attended from around the US, Canada,  Brazil and Europe. Between training sessions, we drank, babbled and bonded.

On the final weekend, three of us went to the beautiful Peace Memorial Park, where some of the heaviest fighting in the Battle of Okinawa took place in 1945. By the time it was over, more that 100,000 Okinawan civilians, including some the greatest karate masters, had died. We walked all over the park, which is pretty huge and full of beautiful shrines and monuments bearing the names of those who died. The contrast between what must have been unimaginable noise, chaos and carnage and the quiet and peaceful park was stark.

By way of background, Okinawa was the first and longest lasting of imperial Japan's conquests. Once an independent kingdom, it was forcibly annexed to Japan in the late 19th century. Okinawans were conscripted into that country's colonial and military adventures and suffered horribly. In the Battle of Okinawa, many were massacred or used as human shields by Japanese soldiers or died as collateral damage of the US attack. Today, Okinawa remains a prefecture of Japan, the poorest in that nation, and also bears the heaviest US military footprint.

The three of us were deeply moved by what had taken place here and decided that it demanded a ritual of us. Since we all followed different schools of karate with roots in Okinawa, we chose to perform our own versions of the karate kata Kusanku.

Katas are the solo formal exercises of karate, a predetermined series of defensive and offensive movements that contain vast amounts of information, strategy, and applications. Properly executed, they are both strenuous to perform and beautiful to watch, combining fast and slow, hard and soft, expansion and contraction. Katas are done with the whole force of the martial artist, mind, body, breath and intentionality.

The Kusanku kata by tradition was taught by a Chinese military envoy in the 1700s to the karateka of Shuri, then the capitol city. It is one of the longest and most complex kata in karate, with over 60 movements, including blocks, strikes, kicks, joint techniques and leaps. My friend Jon, from Portugal by way of Denmark and the UK, performed the Shito-Ryu version. Rich, from northeast Ohio, performed a version from a Korean influenced style. I did Kanku Dai, the Shotokan version. You can see it performed by a master here (I didn't do it that well, needless to say).

In all styles, the kata begins with a bow. Then the hands are raised above the head with fingers and thumbs touching and the karateka gazes  at the gap between the hands. Then, as if ripping apart a veil, the hands forcefully come open and the action begins.

Strange as it may sound, it was solemn, like a prayer. I think in the future that if someone close to me dies, which I hope won't happen, I'll keep that custom and perform a kata in their memory. I think I'd like it too if, when I die, someone would take a moment and, as skillfully and forcefully as possible, perform an old kata, one passed unbroken through an Okinawan lineage and one that he or she has  struggled with for years and has sunk deep into muscle memory.

I can't think of a greater honor.

Fish day! and other signs of life

A lot of people around the country and beyond are thinking about the carnage in Connecticut, as am I. But two events this weekend reminded me about the persistence of life as well.

Today, Dec. 16, 2012, was officially declared Fish Day at Goat Rope Farm. By way of explanation, during the winter, spring and early summer, the creek that runs by our place is teeming with minnows, crawdads and such. But the dry spells of late summer often dry the creek totally up for weeks or more at a time.

After a while, the water returns. Shortly thereafter, aquatic insects do the same. But fish usually take a while. Fish Day here as occurred in February but sometimes as late as April. For some reason (would that it was an omen of good tidings), it came early this year. This morning, I caught a glimpse of a solitary minnow but didn't trust my eyes. I thought I saw it again this afternoon but waited until seeing it again this evening before calling it.

Life goes. But it also comes back.

The other reminder was the December ritual of planting garlic, the only vegetable I seem to get along with very well in the gardening arena. In a time of year when much seems dead, putting perfectly good garlic cloves in the ground seems like a total waste. One expects them to molder and disappear, but they tend to sprout up in spring and grow to maturity in summer. Life out of death again.

I'm reminded of a Springsteen lyric from the song Atlantic City. You may well know the one.

LINK TRUCK BROKE DOWN

"I am shocked, shocked..."

El Cabrero is about to hit the bird's road, to borrow a metaphor from Beowulf. I'm flying today to Italy for a week or so where the Spousal Unit has been studying Dante these days. I plan on doing some posting from abroad, but probably on an irregular schedule.

My travel plans were interrupted Wednesday evening, however. As I was exercising on a stationary bicycle, I started feeling woozy. Then I was shocked in the chest, which felt about like being kicked there.

As a martial artist, I am used to being kicked in the chest, but still it was disconcerting to experience this in the absence of a tangible human foot. I wondered what was up until I remembered the internal defibrillator that was installed there a few years ago and which hadn't done anything up till now. Over the next few minutes, it shocked me two more times.

I wasn't sure how serious it was, so I took a moment to compose myself in case it was The Big One and then set about practical things like calling 911, changing clothes, etc. During all this time, for some reason I took bizarre comfort in remembered lines of the divine Miss Emily Dickinson's death poems.

After a plethora of tests and a miserable 24+ hours, it looks like the machine mistook a fairly minor cardiac incident for a major one.

Game on!

Of gardens, winter, death and life

"Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit." Those lines from the Gospel of John have been on my mind this weekend, as four generations of my family headed to Columbus for the funeral of my favorite aunt.



(And, yes, we did hit a White Castle on the way home.)




Only a week or so before, I planted garlic in our garden. The idea that anything put under the ground in such wicked weather could sprout, grow and thrive months later seems impossible, but it happens.

I broke up the ground with a spading fork, pushed garlic cloves into the dirt with freezing fingers and covered it liberally with old hay and goat manure. Unless something goes wrong, new life will emerge from dirt and decay.

When I try to think in a purely rational way about what happens to us after the Big Checkout, I've always found it as hard to believe that nothing comes after it as it is to believe that anything comes after it.

In the absence of knowing, I'll stick with Bruce: "Everything dies, baby, that's a fact/but maybe everything that dies some day comes back."

ZOMBIE ECONOMICS. Bad ideas are hard to kill.

LEFT BEHIND. Here's a profile from the Charleston Gazette of a miner who died in Massey's Upper Big Branch mine and the widow he left behind.

NO SHOW. WV's newest senator ducked out of controversial votes on the DREAM Act and repealing don't ask/don't tell.

NEANDERTHALS apparently used human bones as tools.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Passing from nature to eternity

A death in the family just happened, a favorite aunt who made it nearly to age 90 before coming down with pneumonia. Her husband, who served in the Navy during World War II, preceded her in death.

I always liked that side of the family and enjoyed visiting them as a kid, including all the cousins. They lived in the BIG city of Columbus three hours distant, a place of almost unimaginable magnitude to someone growing up in my part of West Virginia. I always stayed in their basement, which incidentally used to have a well-stocked bar which I may or may not have been known to raid.

Columbus also had these places called malls, unheard of in WV at the time, where, if I played my cards right, I might be able to get a karate book. It also had a certain hamburger chain famous for their small sized burgers, a kind of nutritional crack upon which I still feed whenever I can.

I have many fond memories of her and her family. I wish her well on her journey and send my best to those who remain.

I was told that one of the last things she said was that she had seen her father and mother, who passed decades ago. Her husband, a day before his death, saw his deceased brother. It makes you wonder.

ANOTHER LOSS. From Ken Ward's Coal Tattoo, here's a moving profile of one of the miners who died in Massey's Upper Big Branch mine disaster.

TWO SIDES. It looks like the US Senate moved fast on the unemployment/tax cut deal. Here are two opposing takes on the deal and the dealer. Most groups that I trust on this issue hate the high end tax cuts but support the unemployment extension and are hoping the House makes a better deal.

WELL OFF, but empathy-impaired.

MY STARS. Here's a look at America's cult of the celebrity.

ME ME ME. Here's a look at narcissism.

The carriage held but just ourselves

OK, I admit it. I have a thing for Emily Dickinson. In her lifetime, she was like a volcanic eruption that nobody saw. And, at the risk of being a downer, I think some of her best poems were about mortality.

If life is what happens when we're making other plans, that is probably even more true about death. Here's one of my favorites:

Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.

We slowly drove, he knew no haste,
And I had put away
My labour, and my leisure too,
For his civility.

We passed the school where children played,
Their lessons scarcely done;
We passed the fields of gazing grain,
We passed the setting sun.

We paused before a house that seemed
A swelling of the ground;
The roof was scarcely visible,
The cornice but a mound.

Since then 'tis centuries; but each
Feels shorter than the day
I first surmised the horses' heads
Were toward eternity.

EYE WIDE OPEN

The Goat Rope series on the Odyssey of Homer resumes today. You will also find links and comments about current events. If you like this kind of thing, check back on earlier weekday posts.

If people remember any episode in the Odyssey, it's generally the one where Odysseus visits the island of the cyclopes and has a run-in with the one-eyed giant Polphemus. It is pretty memorable.

To briefly recap, after the end of the Trojan War, Odysseus and his men (around 600 to start with in several ships) make a gratuitous raid on the Circoneans, which ends badly. Then they land at home of the Lotus Eaters, who are blissed-out stoners who offer his men the addictive drug that makes them forget all about going home. He forces them, "with streaming tears," back to their ships.

From there we sailed on, our spirits now at a low ebb,
and reached the land of the high and might Cyclops,
lawless brutes, who trust so to the everlasting gods
they never plant with their own hands or plow the soil.
Unsown, unplowed, the earth teems with all they need,
wheat, barley and vines, swelled by the rains of Zeus
to yield a big full-bodied wine from clustered grapes.
They have no meeting place for council, no laws either,
no, up on the mountain peaks they live in arching caverns--
each a law to himself, ruling his wives and children,
not a care for any neighbor.

They land first at a nearby island, teeming incidentally with wild goats. They could easily stock up on game and head on home to Ithaca. Odysseus, however, can't leave things well enough alone. Gazing across to the island, he says,

'The rest of you stay here, my friends-in-arms.
I'll go across with my own ship and crew
and probe the natives living over there.
What are they--violent, savage, lawless?
or friendly to strangers, god-fearing men?'

It might be rational to do a rapid recon and get the hell out, but our boy is addicted to adventure--or terrified of boredom. Oddly, he decides to take along a large skin of super strong wine. As John Prine might say, he's "wishin' for bad luck and knockin' on wood."

In the end, his curiosity will mean a gruesome death for six of his men. About which more tomorrow.

THE NEXT BIG THING. Here's an op-ed by Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research about the Employee Free Choice Act, which would make it easier and safer for workers to join unions. In El Cabrero's humble opinion, this would be the most significant legislation in decades and could help reduce poverty and rebuild the nation's battered middle class.

ON A SIMILAR NOTE, here are Labor Day reflections from Larry Matheney of the WV AFLCIO.

SICK KIDS. West Virginia ranks second in the nation in the percentage of children with chronic illnesses. From the Charleston Gazette,

About 18 percent of West Virginia children - 69,500 kids - have special health needs or chronic illnesses, such as asthma and diabetes. Only Kentucky has a higher percentage - 18.5 percent.

WEALTH, WORK AND INEQUALITY is the subject of this interesting op-ed.

BEACHFRONT PROPERTY? Climate change-induced increases in sea level over the next century could be higher than predicted, according to some scientists.

ANIMALS AND DEATH. How do they deal with it?

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

CHRISTIANS AND JEWS

Caption: The western wall of the Jerusalem Temple, which was destroyed by the Romans in the year 70. Image courtesy of wikipedia.

The theme for this week's Goat Rope is early Christian history. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier posts.

One of the most tragic features of Christian history is its role in the rise of anti-Semitism, which has had horrible consequences over the centuries.

It's important to remember that Jesus was a Jew who spent virtually his entire ministry among Jews, with perhaps a few exceptional encounters such as those related in the gospels. All of his earliest followers were Jewish. The whole New Testament, with the exception of Luke, Acts and possibly some minor epistles, was written by Jewish believers in Jesus. Likewise, many early converts were either Jewish or were Gentile "God fearers" sympathetic to Judaism.

However, controversies soon arose between the new religion and the old, reflecting Christian anger over the failure of more Jews to convert. While many Jews of the time expected some kind of Messiah, for the overwhelming majority, Jesus did not fit the bill. He was, after all, a peasant who was executed in the most degrading way and many recalled a passage in Deuteronomy that said that anyone hanged on a tree was accursed by God (21:23).

Early Christians engaged in a series of polemics in which they attempted to present themselves as the legitimate heirs of the Hebrew Bible and Jews as those who rejected their redeemer and ultimately God. The Jewish connections were further frayed as more and more Gentiles joined the movement.

Also, as early Christians attempted to survive in a Roman world, they began to shift the blame for his crucifixion from Rome to the Jewish leaders and even to the entire Jewish people. At the same time, Roman anti-Judaism increased after the Jewish revolts of the first and second centuries which resulted in the destruction of the Temple and the disperal of Jews throughout the empire.

Finally, when the church became the official religion of the empire, the state was fully set for centuries of bloody persecution.

IRAQ. Despite the Bush administration's efforts to put a triumphal spin on events in Iraq, the Washington Post reported the following:

Iraqis of all sectarian and ethnic groups believe that the U.S. military invasion is the primary root of the violent differences among them, and see the departure of "occupying forces" as the key to national reconciliation, according to focus groups conducted for the U.S. military last month.

A GOOD RESOURCE for current information about the need for "An Economy that Works for All" is here.

MORE ON THE JUDICIAL HELLHOLE CLAPTRAP can be found here and here.

NEW DRUGS could change the nature of death, according to this Wired Science item. The post speculates that with new anti-aging drugs, people would still die, but without a lot of the distasteful preliminaries.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A "GHOST" STORY?

Today is the last day of Haint Week at Goat Rope. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier entries.

Haint, by the way, is Appalachian for that which haunts. In addition to comments on current events, posts this week have deal with the belief in ghosts, the allure of "haunted" or sacred places, the feeling of weirdness, and the Day of the Dead. It seemed a fitting theme for Halloween.

El Cabrero has refrained from taking a position on the existence or non-existence of such things but I will tell about something that happened to me.

A dear friend and co-worker of mine died a little over two years ago. We fought a lot of battles together and did pretty good for a while there. But what I most miss were our conversations. When not in predatory mode, we talked about all kinds of things: life, literature, philosophy, religion, science, you name it.

One thing we disagreed about was death and everything after. She tended to think it was the end and I was never able to convince myself that was the case. Not that I was particularly happy about that; at times, total extinction sounds pretty good to me.

A while after her death from a debilitating and cruel disease, I had a strange experience. I was not asleep but not completely awake, in a kind of liminal state between the two. I had the clear and unmistakable experience of her passing right through my core. It was like a very warm greeting. There was nothing visual or auditory about it, but as far as I'm concerned it was her and it was good.

Was it a sleeping or waking dream or an example of wish fulfillment? My official statement is the same as Hamlet's:

"O good Horatio, I'll take the ghost's word for a thousand pound."

DOING SOMETHING ABOUT THE WEATHER. A powerful coalition of religious groups, including evangelicals, is pressing congress to take action on climate change.

HEALTH CARE. Here's a NY Times editorial stating the obvious: we need universal health care. Note: stating the obvious is a virtue these days.

MEGAN WILLIAMS MARCH UPDATE. The Student Government Association at WV State University plans an anti-hate rally for Nov. 17. The student group joined the NAACP, Black Ministerial Alliance, West Virginians United for Social and Economic Justice, the Logan County Improvement League and others in not endorsing a Nov. 3 march organized by out of state groups. Here's more.

Meanwhile, the Logan County prosecutor has urged Williams to refrain from making public statements as it may damage the case, as the AP reports.

Here's the latest on the march. And here's background on hate crimes law from the AP.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

REGARDING LIFE, DEATH AND WALT WHITMAN (AND STUFF ON CURRENT EVENTS)

Although April has passed, and most of May, T.S. Eliot's line fron The Waste Land about April being the cruelest month still rings true. The ongoing carnage in Iraq and elsewhere and the massacre in Virginia left their mark. But I also felt something else, like an old and deep body wound.

It finally occured to me that April was the anniversary of the death of a very close comrade, friends and co-worker. We fought side by side for several years in some poverty related policy battles and had quite a winning streak for a while there, although she suffered from a debilitating illness that consumed more and more of her life force.

It was a great partnership and what I miss most are the conversations. When we weren't in predatory mode, we spent exalted timeless moments discussing literature, philosophy, science, religion, life and death. Sometimes our best discussions would be at breaks between meetings, court cases, or legislative sessions.

One area where we differed was the subject of death. She believed it was the end and I could never quite convince myself of that, although, like Hamlet, I sometimes wish I could. When her time came, she faced it like a Spartan. The last book she read was the philosophical poem of Lucretius, De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things). In that materialist vision, all that exists are atoms and the void and death is just a dissolution.

For reasons I can't fully explain or articulate, I sometimes have a sense that the difference or gulf between past and present, life and death, and the living and the dead aren't as clear or final as we often think.

The best expression I've found of this sense comes from a lesser-known poem of Walt Whitman's called "Song of Prudence," which will be the guiding thread through this week's Goat Rope.

Meanwhile, back in the world...

MORE ON THE ARACOMA FIRE. Ken Ward of the Charleston Gazette had an good article yesterday featuring an interview with Minness Justice, a MSHA mine inspector who had worked at Massey's Aracoma mine in which two men died in a Jan. 2006 fire.

WHITHER EVANGELICALS? According to this item from today's NY Times, the recent death of Jerry Falwell signals a generational change in evangelical Christians. Many members of the new generation have broader priorities, such as fighting poverty and AIDS, climate change, etc.

DOWN YES, BUT OUT? From the same source, here's a look at the recent fortunes of the right.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD: RITE ONE

Before the massacre at Virginia Tech I had planned to build this week's Goat Rope around a biblical theme.

The post that I had planned to use for today was going to be about enriching it was for me (I now realize) to grow up in the Episcopal Church, where hearing the Bible and biblical language in the liturgy was a part of every service I was dragged to.

In the wake of yesterday's tragedy, I can think of nothing better to do than start with the biblical words that open the service of the burial of the dead:

I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord;
he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live;
and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.

I know that my Redeemer liveth,
and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth;
and though this body be destroyed, yet shall I see God;
whom I shall see for myself and mine eyes shall behold,
and not as a stranger.

For none of us liveth to himself,
and no man dieth to himself.
For if we live, we live unto the Lord.
and if we die, we die unto the Lord.
Whether we live, therefore, or die, we are the Lord's.

Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord;
even so saith the Spirit, for they rest from their labors.

And the words of the committal:

In the midst of life we are in death;
of whom may we seek for succor,
but of thee, O Lord,
who for our sins art justly displeased?

Yet, O Lord God most holy, O Lord most mighty,
O holy and most merciful Savior,
deliver us not into the bitter pains of eternal death.

Thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of our hearts;
shut not thy merciful ears to our prayer;
but spare us, Lord most holy, O God most mighty,
O holy and merciful Savior,
thou most worthy Judge eternal.
Suffer us not, at our last hour,
through any pains of death, to fall from thee.

It is a beautiful and dignified service, one that I hope to go out with. Here's the full rite from the Book of Common Prayer.

AS MOTHER JONES SAID, "Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living." We proceed.

PSYCHOLOGY AND TORTURE is the subject of this fascinating piece by Stephen Soldz via Common Dreams.

WHAT WE KNOW AND HOW. This latest piece of research by the Pew Center for the People and the Press suggests that changes in information technology haven't had much effect on what the public knows about current events or how they find out.

PRESCRIPTION DRUGS. FamiliesUSA is urging people to call the Senate this week and urge passage of the Medicare Prescription Drug Price Negotiation Act. Look for more on this here soon.