Shape of things to come?

This is so not cool. The daily newspaper is starting to creep me out more than The Walking Dead. On the Gazette-Mail webpage today we have:

*an article about how the legislature, thanks to a right wing "think" tank, is considering vouchers for schools;

*another one about how they are considering cutting public education even more by cutting the business inventory tax;

*another one on how the state's public colleges and universities have been cut to the bone and are likely to be cut even more; and

*one more on Republican plans to undo the Affordable Care Act, which covers around 225,000 West Virginians.

The zombies are looking pretty good right now.

For the hell of it

This op-ed of mine about Dante's Divine Comedy (and us), came out in yesterday's Gazette-Mail.

No human creation is perfect, but one that comes pretty close in my book is Dante’s “Divine Comedy.” Its three books, or canticles, provide a guided tour of hell, purgatory, and paradise through the eyes of the poet and summarize the Christian theology, philosophy and world view of much of medieval Europe.

The opening line of the “Inferno” is one many can relate to: “In the middle of our life’s journey, I awoke to find myself in a dark wood, having lost the true path.” Dante is in fact so lost that, with the help of divine intervention, he has to literally go through hell to find salvation.

That rings true for me in more ways than one.

Along the way, he is aided by the spirit of Beatrice, someone he loved from afar in his youth, and by the ancient pagan Roman poet Virgil. Beatrice symbolizes divine grace, while Virgil represents human effort and reason. Both are needed, but human effort can only go so far. In the end it must give way to help from above. Virgil speaks less and less as the story continues and disappears completely near the top of Purgatory, while Beatrice takes the lead.

If Dante is read at all these days, most stop with the “Inferno.” Its appeal is understandable, but stopping there is a bit like walking out of a good movie half an hour into it.


His hell is like an inverted funnel that gets worse as you go deeper. He classifies sins differently than we might today. The least bad places there are are for those who lacked self-control in life. Then come the abodes of the violent. The worst part, which is ice cold, is reserved for deceivers and traitors.

Generally, punishments fit the crime by resembling or contrasting with the sin itself. For example, those given to lust in life are driven around in a violent wind, while fortune tellers walk eternally with their heads on backwards. The term for this is “contrapasso.”

Lowest of all is Satan, “the Emperor of the sorrowful kingdom,” who betrayed his creator. In a dark parody of the Trinity, he has three mouths which gnaw on Brutus and Cassius, who betrayed Julius Caesar, and Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Jesus.

After you go so far down, you often wind up going up, which is what happens to Dante and Virgil. I hope it happens to us as well.

After descending to the bottom of hell, they wind up on the opposite side of the world at the mountain of Purgatory, where the souls of those who are saved but still tainted by sin are purified.

(So much for the idea that medieval people believed the world was flat.)

Purgatory is a seven-story mountain or wedding cake where one by one each of the seven deadly sins is cleansed, again with the penance fitting the crime. Pride is purged by carrying heavy weights, which keep the penitent from looking up. Lust is purified in a fire so hot that Dante says he’d have gladly jumped into molten glass to cool off.

Those in Purgatory who are destined for salvation are not any better than those in hell. The only difference is that they repented of their sins. As Beatrice says, “When condemnation of the sin bursts forth from the sinner’s lips, here in our court the stone is turned back against the blade.”

Dante’s heaven is pretty trippy. There are different levels or spheres according to the capacity of those who are saved. It’s a bit like the mother of all light shows, where some are closer to the stage than others, but everyone can see as much of it as they can handle.

His journey involves conversations with saints and saved souls, as well as a warning from his ancestor that he must prepare for a life of exile from his beloved city of Florence (he was exiled in 1302 when political winds shifted and never returned).

At last, he is granted a vision of God words cannot describe. He ends the poem by saying that “like a wheel in perfect balance turning, I felt my will and my desire impelled by the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.”

May we all end up that way ...

It’s an amazing work, one that can also be read as a poem of exile and even of politics. It’s hard to doubt that he enjoyed handing out real estate in hell to his opponents, including some corrupt popes. Many commentators have also noticed that hell seems to have more than its share of Florentines.

I’ve often thought that it would be interesting if he could be brought back to bring the “Divine Comedy” up — or down — to date. A U.S. or even West Virginia specific version of “Inferno” would be really cool — or maybe ice cold. I might even have a suggestion or two. For example, the evil genius who first came up with the idea of separating surface rights from mineral rights, which has caused so much suffering here, surely deserves s special spot.

I imagine that one circle of hell that might be getting a lot of business soon (unless people repent, of course) is that of false counselors, those who used their words, power and influence to promote unjust causes. Such people who inflamed others with their speech are themselves encased in flame in the eighth circle of hell.

There are plenty of voices of hatred today inflaming our worst fears and passions. My wish is that, when we hear them in the land of the living, we follow the advice of Virgil where he says of other lost souls, “Mercy and justice deny them even a name. Do not speak of them. Look and pass on.”

Hitting bottom would be nice

The climate at the WV legislature this year reminds me of the lyrics of a John Prine song:

"We're goin' down down down to the bottom of a hole in the ground/smoke em if you've got em."

At this point hitting bottom would be nice since it would mean things wouldn't get much worse.

I'm going to share several items from the Gazette-Mail that tell the story.

FIRST, there's this Statehouse Beat column of Phil Kabler that lays things out pretty well. See especially the part about the hypocrisy behind the Republican leadership's anti-labor moves and the bogus WVU study.

MEANWHILE, I just love it when well-fed and well-paid outsiders urge leaders to take food from the mouths of hungry people. I have a feeling the guy who wrote this hasn't missed too many meals. 

It's almost as good as when Koch brother-funded hacks urge the abolition of public broadcasting. My friend Scott Finn had this to say about that.

HOW DO YOU TOP ALL THAT? Maybe totally screwing up public education for good.

These are only a few more reasons behind my campaign to change the state motto to "you can't make this **** up."

Two to ponder

The Charleston Gazette-Mail's political report David Gutman, has been on quite a streak lately. In one recent article, he contrasted the centrality of coal to public discourse in WV with its relative absence on the national stage. Draw what conclusions from that you may.

In another, indirectly related, piece, he writes about how WV is one of a handful of states with a declining population. In fact, we lead the nation on that.

Apropos of nothing, the lyrics of a country song have recently come to mind: "If you're going through hell, keep on going."

What would Dante say?

The Gentle Reader may recall an expose by the Center for Public Integrity and ABC News a while back about how coal companies, their lawyers, and a lab at Johns Hopkins routinely collaborated to deny miners black lung benefits.

According to news reports, Hopkins has terminated that program, which will forever be a scar on the institution. It should never have existed to start with. I wonder how many miners died before getting the benefits they deserved

One doctor there, and I use the term loosely, is said not to have found a single case of black lung in the more than 1,500 cases he investigated. Since then, the federal government has informed around 1,100 miners that they were wrongly denied benefits.Of course, they only informed the ones who still lived.

All of which makes me wonder what circle in Hell Dante would assign to those responsible. I'm guessing it would be somewhere in Malebolge, the eight circle, which is reserved for fraud, or maybe even the icy ninth, which is reserved for those who betray. I think it's a safe bet that he'd put them way down.

More on food

At this stage in my life, I didn't expect to focus on things like school food any more, but there you have it. As I mentioned in yesterday's post, folks around the country are pushing to get more schools to feed all students for free by taking advantage of the federal Community Eligibility Provision.

That's not the only thing going on in the food for kids arena these days. First, here's the good news: WV is once again kicking off the summer food service program at over 400 sites in the state. As my friend Rick Goff, head of the state Office of Child Nutrition says, "hunger doesn't take a summer vacation."

The bad news is that Republicans in the US House want to gut nutritional standards for school food programs. As in hello to more salt, fat, processed food and high fructose corn syrup.

I'm not sure what circle in hell my good friend Dante would put such people in, but I imagine it would be a really nasty one.

Infernal real estate

I'm sure my beloved Dante enjoyed parceling out real estate in Hell for the first canticle of his Divine Comedy. Some days, I'd kind of like to hand out the real thing. Some of the prime lots would go to people who cheated sick coal miners out of the black lung benefits they deserved.

ROBIN HOOD. Here's  an idea that makes way more sense than austerity.

IT'S NOT ALL BAD. Here are some creative ways West Virginians are promoting wellness in their communities.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Shame

Watching the roll-out of the Affordable Care Act makes me proud of West Virginia and its governor, Earl Ray Tomblin. Tomblin decided in May to expand Medicaid under the act, after many West Virginians urged him to do so.I hear that around 50,000 low income West Virginians have signed up in the first few days.

Sadly, many states--and especially the former slave states of the south--have chosen not to do this. The New York Times sums it up pretty well:

A sweeping national effort to extend health coverage to millions of Americans will leave out two-thirds of the poor blacks and single mothers and more than half of the low-wage workers who do not have insurance, the very kinds of people that the program was intended to help, according to an analysis of census data by The New York Times.

Can you say "racism?"

I'm quite a Dante fan and can only imagine how much fun the Poet had in assigning real estate in hell to people he thought deserving. Given the opportunity, I'd save some of the choicest spots for those who could have helped people and chose not too. Shame on them. Let me say that again in Shakespearean:
"Shame and eternal shame, nothing but shame."

MORE ON THAT (MINUS THE HELL PART) from CNN here.

THE REAL DEAL. Here's economist Dean Baker on the real reason some folks would rather shut the government down than let some people get health insurance.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Dealing with hell

El Cabrero just finished reading Interesting Times, the autobiography of the British Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm. In it, he quotes from a book titled Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, which has an interesting suggestion about how to deal with the hells humans create for themselves on earth:

There are two ways of enduring it. The first is what many find easy: accept hell and become part of it, until you no longer see that it is there. The second is risky and needs constant attention and learning: in the midst of hell to look for, and to know how to recognize what is not hell, to make it last, to give it space.

That sounds like a good plan to me.

NO TIME FOR LINKS TODAY.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

This is hire and salary, not revenge

A medieval view of hell.

(El Cabrero is sauntering through Hamlet lately. If you like this kind of thing, please click on earlier posts. If not, try scrolling down to the links section.)

Things start falling apart quickly in Hamlet by the middle of Act 3. The troupe of actors allows Hamlet to modify an old play to "catch the conscience of the king." The king reacts as a guilty person would and calls off the performance.

Hamlet is summoned to his mother's chambers but has the chance to kill Claudius on the way. He decides not to whack him because Claudius is at prayer and to kill him then would be to send him straight to Heaven. As previously mentioned, to really whack somebody right in Elizabethan theater, you don't just send them out of this world--you dispatch them to the nastier parts of the world to come.

He reasons thus:

Now might I do it pat, now he is praying;
And now I'll do't. And so he goes to heaven;
And so am I revenged. That would be scann'd:
A villain kills my father; and for that,
I, his sole son, do this same villain send
To heaven.
O, this is hire and salary, not revenge.
He took my father grossly, full of bread;
With all his crimes broad blown, as flush as May;
And how his audit stands who knows save heaven?
But in our circumstance and course of thought,
'Tis heavy with him: and am I then revenged,
To take him in the purging of his soul,
When he is fit and season'd for his passage?
No!
Up, sword; and know thou a more horrid hent:
When he is drunk asleep, or in his rage,
Or in the incestuous pleasure of his bed;
At gaming, swearing, or about some act
That has no relish of salvation in't;
Then trip him, that his heels may kick at heaven,
And that his soul may be as damn'd and black
As hell, whereto it goes.

It's debatable whether Hamlet really thinks this way or is just looking for any excuse not to do the deed.

HOSTAGES. Some right wingers in congress care more about tax breaks for dead millionaires than the 1.2 million Americans who will lose unemployment benefits in March.

LAST CHANCE? Here's Robert Greenstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities on President Obama's health care reform proposal. And here's Paul Krugman on yesterday's summit and the future of reform.

INTERESTING IDEA. The Obama administration is considering using the purchasing power of the federal government to nudge private contractors to meet certain job quality standards.

DENYING THE DENIERS. This item by Bill McKibben takes on the climate change denial industry.

THE HUMAN TOUCH can mean a lot.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

TWO KINDS OF EPICS

The rage of Achilles was the subject of The Iliad, an epic of kleos. Image courtesy of wikipedia.

Aside from links and (occasionally snide) comments about current events, theme here lately is Homer's classic epic poem The Odyssey. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier posts.

The Iliad and the Odyssey, both attributed to the bard Homer, are the only two surviving epics about the Trojan War, a major theme of ancient Greek literature and legend. Most historians think that there really was a war between some Greeks and a city in Asia Minor (now Turkey) sometime around 1250 BC, although Homer's epics probably date from much later, probably the 8th century BC.

For that matter, nobody knows who Homer really was or whether the epics should be seen as the collective creation of generations of bards rather than a single individual, although many people incline to the latter view. One semi-serious joke says that the Iliad and Odyssey weren't written by Homer but by someone else with the same name.

Whatever can be said of all that, the Iliad and the Odyssey are two very different kinds of epics. The Iliad, which tells the story of the wrath of Achilles in the last year or so of the war, has been called an epic of kleos or the attempt to gain glory through valor in combat. The Odyssey is an epic of nostos or homecoming.

A word about both:

Kleos is often translated as glory, but it means more than that. Homer's characters had a pessimistic view of life after death. People in the underworld were shades of their former selves--jibbering bats, as one passage puts it. The only meaningful kind of immortality was to live and die in such a way as to be remembered in song and story after one's death. That was kleos.

Achilles in the Iliad is the perfect example of a hero motivated by kleos. He is given a choice between a long and peaceful but unremembered life or early death but lasting glory as a warrior. He chose the latter (although his ghost in the Odyssey regrets that decision).

Nostos (sorry for my horrible efforts at Greek) means homecoming, as in how a veteran of the Trojan War tries with or without success to go home and reintegrate into a peaceful community. It's about going from a state of war to a state of peace--if you're lucky. (Methinks it's also related to the word nostalgia.)

One of the challenges Odysseus faces in his homecoming is leaving kleos and the overwhelming desire for it behind.

But as many veterans and others have found, sometimes surviving war or other ordeals is sometimes less difficult than the homecoming. Many never quite make it home, whether home is considered literally or metaphorically. More on that tomorrow.

BOTTLE BATTLE. The movement against the environmental impact of and waste created by plastic water bottles is growing.

GOODBYE TO ALL THAT. A former white supremacist who broke with his past spoke in Charleston last night.

THE NOSE KNOWS all kinds of things. It helps you feel them too.

AW, HELL! Fewer Americans believe in it.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED