WHO WAS DANTE ANYWAY?

The man himself, courtesy of wikipedia.

The theme lately at Goat Rope is Dante's Divine Comedy and how to enjoy it. And, yes, you really can. You will also find links and comments about current events. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier posts.

To understand the Divine Comedy, you need to know something about its author and protagonist, Dante Alighieri. The whole thing is in a sense autobiographical. I don't mean that Dante literally went to hell, purgatory and heaven (although most of us have made at least part of that journey at some point in our lives), but rather that Dante is the main character and much of the story refers to his real life.

Dante was born in Florence in 1265 to a respectable family. His father was a member of a guild. We don't know much about his education but he obviously had a good one. We also know that from childhood, he had a major crush on Beatrice Portinari, who was the subject of much of his poetry.

As a relationship, this one never went anywhere, but Beatrice was The One That Got Away (maybe a little like Charlie Brown's red headed girl). She was for him the essence of beauty. In the Divine Comedy, she came to represent spiritual grace. Dante wedded Gemma di Manetto Donati in a marriage that was probably arranged in childhood. They had several children together.

He was a poet, diplomat, soldier and politician. If you think our times are politically polarized, check out Italy in the late medieval period. There were huge tensions between Guelphs and Ghibellines. Guelphs tended to favor the papacy, while Ghibellines supported the Holy Roman emperor (Voltaire once pointed out that the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy nor Roman nor an empire.)

In Florence, the Guelphs won decisively but then split into two opposing camps, the Black and White Guelphs. Dante was a member of the latter party. He fell afoul of political intrigues around 1301 and was exiled from Florence on pain of death for the rest of his life. He died in 1321.

Thus the Divine Comedy is a poem of exile, written after his banishment. He sets it the year before, on Holy Week in the year 1300. The journey related there helps prepare him for the exile to come and the work itself may have been his way of working through the trauma.

But here's the kicker. While Dante is definitely Dante, he is also us. His story is ours as he makes the trip. So don't just read it; put yourself in it.

OH GREAT. Employers in Britain are trying to take a leaf from US union busters.

BUT IT COULD BE WORSE. Here's a snapshot from the Economic Policy Institute on the murder of trade unionists in Colombia.

TALKING SENSE. Here's a good blog post from Create West Virginia about moving to a high road economy. The Gov. and Legislature in El Cabrero's beloved state are hooked on corporate tax cuts, but a lot of good data cries out for public investment in education.

WORKER FREEDOM BILL. A bill that would prohibit employers from requiring workers to attend meetings to listen to views on politics, religion and unions passed the WV House of Delegates earlier this week. Here are several links courtesy of Lincoln Walks at Midnight. The WV Public Radio story is worth a listen if you're wired for sound. It faces a tougher fight in the senate.

FUN ITEM. Writer Beth Lisick spent a year reading self help books and lived to tell the tale. Here's a diverting interview. Apparently some of them were pretty good.

OK, SO I'M ADDICTED. To The Wire that is. But living without cable in the sticks, we're still on season two.

SINCE WE'RE BEING KIND OF RANDOM TODAY, here's an item on C.G. Jung.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

WHAT THEY SAID...

Caption: Backward priorities aren't going to get us where we want to go.

More than a year ago, writer Holly Sklar wrote a strong op-ed with the title "Wanted: A High Road Economy." The immediate context of the piece was the now successful campaign to raise the long stagnant minimum wage.

But she also raises some serious issues about the choices that continue to confront us as we try to meet the economic challenges of the 21st century, both in the U.S. as a whole and in El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia.

Again, it comes down to the low road or the high road:

Waving the banner of "global competitiveness," corporate and government policymakers are running the U.S. economy into the ground. We are becoming a nation of Scrooge-Marts and outsourcers—with an increasingly low-wage workforce instead of a growing middle class.

She cites an all too familiar list of current trends: record numbers of Americans without health care; stunning trade deficits and debt to other countries; declining public investments in infrastructure and R&D; growing inequality and personal debt; etc.

She notes:

We will not prosper in the 21st century global economy by relying on 1920s corporate greed, 1950s tax revenues, downwardly mobile wages and global-warming energy policies. We will not prosper relying on disinvestment in place of reinvestment. We can't succeed that way any more than farmers can "compete" by eating their seed corn.

The low road doesn't even make good business sense. One of the sources cited by Sklar is the book How We Compete: What Companies Around the World Are Doing To Make It In Today's Global Economy by Suzanne Berger. In discussing the results of a study by the MIT Industrial Performance Center of more than 500 international companies, Berger says:

Contrary to the widely held belief of many managers, we conclude that solutions that depend on driving down costs by reducing wages and social benefits—in advanced countries or in emerging economies—are always dead ends. . .

Strategies based on exploiting low-wage labor end up in competitive jungles, where victories are vanishingly thin and each day brings a new competitor. . . As low-end firms that compete on price move from one overcrowded segment of the market to the next, there is virtually no chance of gaining any durable advantage. The activities that succeed over time are, in contrast, those that build on continuous learning and innovation.

In an interview from MIT's openDOOR in 2006, Berger makes it plain:

Globalization can continue to produce great benefits for our society--on the condition that we strengthen the infrastructure of education and research. We also need to recognize that openness has costs, and that the costs and benefits are not evenly distributed. Many who lose jobs because of the relocation of production or trade will not get new ones that pay as well. So if we are going to maintain broad public support for an economy open to international flows of goods and services and capital, we need to be sure that losing a job does not mean losing a family's access to basic necessities, like health care, provision in old age, and education.

That is talking sense.

EFCA HELD HOSTAGE IN SENATE. The U.S. Senate voted 51-48 for cloture on the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) yesterday. Sixty votes were needed to move the measure to a floor vote. Supporters are planning on keeping up the campaign as long as it takes. Even yesterday's vote represents a victory of sorts--it's the first time in ages that a majority of senators voted to reform labor laws.

YOUNG AMERICANS in a new New York Times/CBS/MTV poll seem to be moving to the left of their elders on some issues. Details here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED