It's not all bad

There's a little more than a week to go in WV's legislative session and things are not great by any means but they aren't nearly as bad as they could have been. (Not counting snowstorms, freezing temperatures and floods.)

Some real howlers, like the bill that would ban local anti-discrimination ordinances, got smacked down pretty hard. A bill that would fine teachers for teaching inappropriate subjects didn't go anywhere.

Some other bad bills that died--or appear to have died at this point--are drug testing for TANF recipients, bringing back the death penalty, and right to work (for less).

Some really bad ones got a little better, like scaling back rather than repealing prevailing wage and a wide open campaign bill that threatened to open the floodgates to corporate money from anywhere.

The jury is still out on other issues, like water protection and access to courts for workers and survivors of those killed on the job.

There might even be a decent bill or two passed, like reforms to truancy laws and the juvenile justice system.

I have a pretty wise yoga teacher who once suggested that we use the following mantra as we observe what is happening outside and inside of ourselves: "It's like this now."

So, yeah, it's like this now.

Feeding the trolls

I understand that it is the custom in Zen Buddhist monasteries to collect any remaining grains of rice after a meal and offer them to the hungry ghosts. Hungry ghosts in the Buddhist conception of the wheel of life and death are those beings who were greedy in previous lives.

In that unpleasant state or realm, one has a huge and empty belly that is always hungry but a tiny throat that can't swallow much. Feeding them is a meritorious act of generosity.

I've come to think of writing op-eds, like this one of mine, as a similar act since putting one in the paper feeds the trolls, which in this case refers to right wingers who lurk around the web in order to attach their remarks to pieces they disagree with like lampreys latching on to fish.

I devoutly hope that this act of providing nourishment will serve me well in my next rebirth.

THE DEATH PENALTY. E.J. Dionne argues that only conservatives can end it.

CLASS WARFARE, revisited.

CHIMPANZEES are just not that into cooperation.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Be not too eager to deal out death

I've recently re-read the Lord of the Rings cycle and this time around I've made notes on parts that seem relevant to working for social justice. Here's installment #2.

During the recent unlamented session of the WV legislature, there was a public hearing on bringing back the death penalty to the state, which hasn't had one since the early 1960s. I was one of the people who testified against it. All through my mind when I was on the stand, a passage from LOTR went through my mind.

When discussing the creature Gollum, Frodo the hobbit casually states that the creature deserves to die. Gandalf replies,

Deserves it! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.

I didn't go there since I figured quoting from a fictional wizard wouldn't exactly help my case. Instead, I focused on examples of fallible judgements. But I think Gandalf probably said it best.

THIS IS JUST GREAT, HE WROTE, IRONICALLY. GE, after making over $14 billion in profits and paying ZERO dollars in US income tax, is asking workers to make concessions.

THAT'S NOT ALL. GE isn't the only corporation to pay no taxes at a time when public services are being slashed.

GANDHI. A new biography will bust some bubbles. I'll stick to FDR and Walter Reuther.

IN CASE YOU WERE WONDERING, the most common modern psychosis is the persecution complex. Or that's what they want you to believe anyway, just to lull you into a false sense of security so they can really get you.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Change we can't help believing in

Tibetan image of the wheel of life and death, courtesy of wikipedia.

The theme at Goat Rope is hard times and ways of dealing with them. My first choice is that they "come again no more," as the song says. My second choice is that people come together and make them get better ASAP. But sometimes they just come and stay a while. And whatever else people do about them, we just have to get through them.

One way of looking at the world which is all about dealing with hard times and suffering is Buddhism--and you don't have to be a card carrying Buddhist to get something out of it.

According to Buddhist teachings, everything--good, bad, or indifferent--is impermanent, coming into being and passing away depending on conditions. No matter what the situation is, it's going to change. It may not change for the better, but it will be different. The Buddha taught that "whatever is subject to origination is subject to cessation."

We often screw up royally by regarding a temporary situation as permanent and acting or believing accordingly.

The Diamond Sutra, a Mahayana Buddhist text puts it like this:

"So I say to you -
This is how to contemplate our conditioned existence in this fleeting world:

Like a tiny drop of dew, or a bubble floating in a stream;
Like a flash of lightning in a summer cloud,
Or a flickering lamp, an illusion, a phantom, or a dream.

So is all conditioned existence to be seen."

Thus spoke Buddha.

The universe, in other words, is kind of like the weather in El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia: if you don't like it, stick around. It'll change.

SPEAKING OF HARD TIMES, the Economic Policy Institute reports that unemployed workers outnumber job openings by more than 3 to 1.

GETTING IT RIGHT. Here's a take on what we need to do to fix the US economy.

DEATH SENTENCES AND EXECUTIONS continued to decline last year, reaching a 14 year low.

AIR HEADED DINOSAUR UPDATE here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

THE OTHER AMERICAN IDOL

Nicolas Poussin's Adoration of the Golden Calf, courtesy of wikipedia.

El Cabrero was recently asked to give a talk on the economy to a Catholic rural ministry conference in my beloved state of West Virginia. The diocese has made a special priority of health and well-being and it occurred to me that that's not a bad lens to use in thinking about economic issues.

Religiously speaking, I'm a theologically laid back Episcopalian with periodic Buddhist and Taoist inclinations working for a Quaker group. (I kind of like the Greek gods too, but try not to talk about that in public very much.) I have a great deal of respect for the economic and social justice teachings of the Catholic Church and have found the diocese to be a valuable ally in working on public policy issues.

Lincoln once said that while he'd like to have God on his side, he had to have Kentucky. When I'm working on economic policy stuff, I'd like to have God on my side but need the Catholic church. Not that I'm saying they're mutually exclusive or anything...

Anyhow, it occurred to me that when it comes to the economy, idolatry is alive and well. I'm using the term in the non-sectarian sense of both elevating any relative good to the level of an absolute and in the sense of worshipping a human creation. Although people make the economy through their own actions, we often act and speak as it it were some kind of god ruling over us.

More on that tomorrow.

SAD NEWS. The number of Army suicides increased again last year, with about a quarter of those taking place in Iraq.

GOOD QUESTION. This item asks why America executes people with mental disabilities.

OH THE WATER. You've heard of peak oil. What about peak water?

BAD "FARMING." Here's a good editorial from the NY Times about the horrible way our industrial food system treats animals in confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs). It's bad for workers, the environment, consumers, and causes a great deal of unnecessary misery for the animals involved.

A SEA CHANGE? Here's yet another indication that the religious right no longer has a lock on evangelicals.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

VIOLENCE AND PUBLIC HEALTH

Improvements in human longevity and physical well-being over the last hundred or so years have come more from improvements in public health than in the treatment of individual patients and diseases.

I'm just talking about the basics, like clean water and a sewage system. This is still an issue in many parts of the world. In the developing world today, diarrhea is the leading cause of child deaths--two million per year. Around six million people of all ages die from it annually.

Dr. James Gilligan, author of the 1996 Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic, suggests that we take a public health approach to violence prevention and reduction at both the interpersonal and structural level.

Rather than conventional moralistic condemnations,

the only way to explain the causes of violence so that we can learn how to prevent it, is to approach violence as a problem in public health and preventive medicine, and to think of violence as a symptom of life-threatening (and often lethal) pathology which, like all forms of illness, has an etiology or cause, a pathogen. To think of violence as evil--if we confuse hat value judgment about violence with an explanation of it--can only confuse us into thinking we have an explanation when we do not.

Based on experience over 25 years in working with violent offenders, Gilligan believes that he has identified the pathogen or "virus" that causes violence. And that pathogen is shame.

More on that tomorrow.

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE UPPER CLASS? They're still there.

TWO FROM THE NEW YORKER. Here's George Packer on the future of movement conservatism. And here's an item on the elusive search for a cure for the common hangover.

NIRVANA. Not the band, the state of being. Here's an interesting article about a brain scientist who experienced it by way of having a stroke.

SPEAKING OF WHICH, more and more therapists and researchers are giving Buddhist-inspired mindfulness meditation a second look.

CLOSING A GAP. Some colleges are trying to break down the barriers between the sciences and the humanities.

DEATH'S DOOR. The Rev. Carroll Pickett, for years a prison chaplain at Huntsville, Texas who witnessed 95 executions, has come to oppose the death penalty and is the subject of a new film.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

THE BUDDHA IN THE BOAT

Welcome to the final day of Heart of Darkness Week at Goat Rope. What can I say? It seemed like a cheery holiday theme and I happened to be in Washington DC. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier entries.

As mentioned previously, Conrad's novel is recounted by the seaman Marlow to friends sitting at twilight on a boat. Marlow is described more than once as sitting like a Buddha.

I'm not sure how well-versed Conrad was in Buddhism, but that image really fits for this story. Particularly in the Mahayana tradition, it is the essence of a Buddha to overcome the delusions of dualistic thinking, which is the all-to-human tendency to classify the world through binary opposites like self/other, good/bad, us/them.

Dualistic thinking is also at the root of imperialist ideologies, with such pairs as civilized/barbarous, white/black, progress/primitivism, etc. Like Guatama, Marlow has gone beyond these dualities. As much as anything else, this story seems to me to be about setting up many polarities and then relativizing or demolishing them.

Two prominent examples would be colonizer/colonized and light/dark.

When the book was published (1902), Britain was near the apparent summit of its imperial power. It was a place where "the sun never set" and where a popular poet wrote of "the white man's burden."

But as the group gazes at the lights around the Thames, the recounting of the tale of the journey to the Congo begins thus:

"And this also," said Marlow suddenly, "has been one of the dark places of the earth...

"I was thinking of very old times, when the Romans first came here, nineteen hundred years ago--the other day..."

He imagines what this "dark" country seemed like to a Roman colonizer intent on extracting tribute

Imagine him here--the very end of the world, a sea the colour of lead, a sky the colour of smoke...going up this river with stores, or orders, or what you like. Sand-banks, marshes, forests, savages,--precious little to eat fit for a civilized man, nothing but Thames water to drink. No Falerian wine here, no going ashore. Here and there a military camp lost in the wilderness, like a needle in a bundle of hay--cold, fog, tempests, disease, exile, and death--death skulking in the air, in the water, in the bush...

Land in a swamp, march through the wood, and in some inland post feel the savagery, the utter savagery, had closed round him--all that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men. There's no initiation either into such mysteries. He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is also detestable. And it has a fascination, too, that goes to work upon him. The fascination of the abomination--you know, imagine the growing regrets, the longing to escape, the powerless disgust, the surrender, the hate.

...They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force--nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others. They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to be got. It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind--as is very proper for those who tackle a darkness.

Light and dark are relative and power an accident of history.

A little later, Marlow describes the European city which rules the Congo as "a whited sepulchre," borrowing an image from Jesus' attacks on the Pharisees. The "whiteness" of the imperial city is a superficial layer, concealing darkness, decay and rot within--and we haven't even made it to Africa yet.

Final comment. In a week's worth of writing about this book there's been scarcely a mention of the mad and enigmatic Kurtz who becomes the object of Marlow's quest. The Gentle Reader knows where to find him. He's up the river. Waiting.

WHAT RETIREMENT? Millions of workers, particularly younger ones, have no retirement savings:

More than one out of every three American workers born in 1990 will have zero dollars in a 401(k)-style plan at retirement, a government report said Tuesday, an ominous sign considering many businesses are dumping pension plans.

One step towards a solution would be the creation of universal voluntary accounts that workers could take from job to job and which could help them build the needed savings. Some folks in WV are working to establish such a system at the state level.

SHOUTING HEADS. A new study tells us what we kinda suspected:

Television can encourage awareness of political perspectives among Americans, but the incivility and close-up camera angles that characterize much of today’s “in your face” televised political debate also causes audiences to react more emotionally and think of opposing views as less legitimate.

COUNTING THE COST of the Iraq war is the theme of this op-ed from Madison, WI.

MEGAN WILLIAMS UPDATE. Here's the latest on the planned rally in Charleston.

DEATH PENALTY. New Jersey became the first state in over 40 years to abolish the death penalty, a step that foes of capital punishment hope will signal a larger trend. It is interesting that something seems to be happening at the cultural level. Even in the Bush era, the number of executions has declined dramatically.

URGENT DINOSAUR UPDATE. They found a new one in Antarctica.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

FEAR AND TREMBLING

Caption: This man has been overcome with it.

This is Haint Week at Goat Rope. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier entries.

(For the un-hillbilly, haint is Appalachian for that which haunts.)

Whatever haints may or may not be, one reason many people have believed in them over the ages is no doubt the feeling of fear or awe that sometimes strikes us in the apparent absence of an ordinary cause.

The 20th century German theologian Rudolph Otto referred to this feeling as the "mysterium tremendum." In his classic book The Idea of the Holy, he suggests that this feeling of awe lies at the basis of both religion and many superstitions:

The feeling of it may at times come sweeping like a gentle tide, pervading the mind with a tranquil mood of deepest worship. It may pass over into a more set and lasting attitude of the soul, continuing, as it were, thrillingly vibrant and resonant, until at least it dies away and the soul resumes its 'profane', non-religious mood of everyday experience. It may burst in sudden eruption up from the depths of the soul with spasms and convulsions, or lead to the strangest excitements, to intoxicated frenzy, to transport, and to ecstasy.

This feeling can take many forms:

It has wild and demonic forms and can sink to an almost grisly horror and shuddering. It has crude, barbaric antecedents and early manifestations, and again it may be developed into something beautiful and pure and glorious. It may become the hushed, trembling, and speechless humility of the creature in the presence of--whom or what? In the presence of that which is a mystery inexpressible and above all creatures.

The biblical Book of Job has a great description of this unbidden feeling of awe or dread:

“Now a word was brought to me stealthily, And my ear received a whisper of it. Amid disquieting thoughts from the visions of the night, When deep sleep falls on men, Dread came upon me, and trembling, And made all my bones shake." (4:12-14)

Otto believed that earlier, more "primitive" manifestations of this feeling had a dark side and generated belief in ghosts and demons:

Its antecedent stage is 'daemonic dread' (cf. the horror of Pan) with its queer perversion, a sort of abortive offshoot, the 'dread of ghosts'. It first begins to stir in the feeling of 'something uncanny', 'eerie', or 'weird'. It is the feeling which, emerging in the mind of primeval man, forms the start-point for the entire religious development of history. 'Daemons' and 'gods' alike spring from this root, and all the products of 'mythological apperception' or 'fantasy' are nothing but different modes in which it has been objectified.

From a purely psychological point of view, these unbidden feelings of awe and dread are the stuff of which haints are made.

POVERTY AND HUMAN DEVELOPMENT is the theme of the current issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. One item of interest deals with the possibilities of micro-loan programs to alleviate poverty and improve health outcomes in sub-Saharan Africa.

CHANGE TO WHAT? It's been two years or so since some unions split from the AFLCIO to form Change to Win. Here's an item from In These Times about what's changed, what hasn't and what might.

DEATH PENALTY. Yesterday's Supreme Court decision could mean a temporary moratorium on executions.

LATEST PRESS ON MEGAN WILLIAMS MARCH includes this item from the Daily Mail about Malik Shabazz,one of the march's organizers, and this item from the Charleston Gazette about the decision of the Charleston NAACP not to support the march, a decision shared by several other predominantly African American groups in WV.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

HOODOO

Caption: Hills have hoodoo.

Welcome to Haint Week at Goat Rope. If this is your first visit please click on yesterday's post.

For flatlanders, haint is Appalachian for things that haunt.

El Cabrero takes no position on the existence or nonexistence of haints. However, I am prepared to assert that some places have hoodoo, which is just as good.

They say that Appalachians have a strong sense of place, although we obviously don't have a corner on the market. But when I think of hauntedness, I think less about spectral beings than about places.

It seems to me that some places just seem to have hoodoo and others don't. Hoodoo, like the Oceanic term "mana" means some kind of weird immaterial force or quality that has been called "the stuff of which magic is formed."

Some places seem to have hoodoo because of things that happened there. Harpers Ferry is a prime example, almost as if events have left some kind of scar or imprint. So do the nearby battlefields of Antietam and Gettysburg.

Other places, like the sacred New River, seem to have it naturally, although the history probably helps. I tend to doubt whether flatland has any hoodoo, but I'll try to keep my mind open on that point. Maybe if there's water around...

Hoodoo is hard to define but who feels it knows it.

BLOWING UP THE BUDDHAS. Here's an op-ed from yesterday's NY Times about the destruction of the Buddhist statues in Afghanistan by the Taliban. This is pretty un-Buddhist, but El Cabrero is still mad about that.

DEATH PENALTY NEWS. This Reuters story is interesting:

The American Bar Association said on Monday it was renewing its call for a nationwide moratorium on executions, based on a three-year study of death penalty systems in eight states that found unfairness and other flaws.

The lawyers' group said its study identified key problems, such as major racial disparities, incompetent defense services for poor defendants and irregular clemency review processes, making those death penalty systems operate unfairly.

UPDATE ON MEGAN WILLIAMS MARCH. Here's the Daily Mail on the controversy caused by a march planned by outside groups. And here's the latest from the Gazette.

POVERTY AND CLIMATE CHANGE. Low income Americans are likely to suffer most from the effects of climate change and from higher energy costs. Here are suggestions about dealing with this from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

IN CASE YOU WERE WONDERING, the world's oldest living animal as far as anyone can tell is a 400 year old clam.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: SUPERMUNDANE