Make Orwell fiction again

One of the better slogans I’ve seen lately is “Make Orwell Fiction Again,” a reference to the British writer best known for books like Animal Farm and 1984, and for his hatred of totalitarianism and authoritarianism.

He was particularly concerned with how words can be distorted by the powerful to justify or hide injustice.

Here are some lines from his “Politics and the English Language”:

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible…

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as "keeping out of politics." All issues are political issues and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer...

Political language--and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists--is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

For an example close to home, we need look no farther than House Bill 4011 and Senate Bill 498, which would basically stifle the teaching of history and of issues related to race and gender. They’ve been titled the “Anti-Stereotyping Act” and the “Anti-Racism Act,” respectively.  

(I’ve often wondered lately how different things would be if some legislators were as concerned with sanitizing and monitoring the quality of our rivers, lakes, and streams as they are with the teaching of history and public education…but I digress.)

Fortunately, HB 4011 was turned into a study resolution, but SB 498 passed the Senate and was referred to House Education and Judiciary committees. It’s not clear now what kind of amendments might be tacked on.

It’s hard to know where to start with this, but here are some issues in no particular order:

*This is a solution in search of problems. These bills didn’t originate from any situation in West Virginia. Rather, they’re part of a well-orchestrated national effort to impose cookie-cutter legislation on states designed to foment bogus culture wars and thus distract people from their real agenda of pushing policies that make the very rich richer at the expense of everybody else. 

This is why we can’t have nice things.

*This would have a chilling effect on public education, which is already under attack in West Virginia in so many ways. There seems to be an effort now to punish teachers and school service workers for winning during the historic 2018 work stoppage.  

*Sticking with the issue of undermining public education, these attacks also seem to be consistent with other none too subtle efforts to promote the privatization of education for the sake of profit. And sticking with the theme of history, we’re moving from extracting wealth from strip mining the land to doing the same with public education funds. 

(What’s next? Oh yeah, state parks, as in HB 4408.)   

*It’s impossible to look at American history without considering race, starting with the impact on indigenous people during and after “the Columbian exchange”—another Orwellian whopper—to the Middle Passage of the transcontinental slave trade to the role of slavery in shaping the American economy (agriculture, manufacturing, banking, finance, insurance, transport, etc.) to the Civil War to post-war Klan terror and sharecropping to Jim Crow to the Civil Rights Movement to mass incarceration and beyond. Yes, there are some horrific things there, but there’s also a lot of heroic and inspiring acts as well. Keeping people ignorant of them isn’t doing anybody any favors.

*It’s just as impossible to appreciate West Virginia history without discussing race. There are huge events like the biracial raid on Harpers Ferry, the Civil War and the creation of the state in 1863, but we’ve also been graced by brave individuals who made history here, whether they passed through or were born here. 

Those include trailblazing educators like Booker T. Washington and Carter G. Woodson; groundbreaking legislators like Elizabeth Simpson Drewry and Minnie Buckingham Harper; scholars and advocates like W.E.B. DuBois; attorneys like J.R. Clifford; math and science geniuses like Katherine Johnson; rank and file union coal mine leaders like Dan Chain aka “Few Clothes Johnson;” white labor leaders and civil rights champions like Walter Reuther, and more.

*Speaking of history and manipulating education in the interests of the powerful, generations of West Virginians already experienced a censored version in 8th grade West Virginia studies classes that left out the history of our colonial economy and multi-ethnic labor struggles, something that only changed in the 1980s with films like Matewan and books like Denise Giardina’s Storming Heaven. 

*Then there’s the idea that sometimes learning can make kids uncomfortable. I get that. It happened to me lot too, usually in any math class after 7th grade--or when I was required to read Great Expectations in 9th. But real education is about challenging our minds. As an adult, I’ve come to appreciate subjects like algebra…and Pip’s journey to insight and adulthood.

*Finally, if we ever want to keep our brightest in the state or invite others to come from elsewhere, it might be good if we stop publicly embarrassing ourselves.

(This ran as an op-ed in the Charleston Gazette-Mail. There was a public hearing today at which 24 people spoke against SB 498 while only four spoke in favor. Outcome TBD.)

Pass the chronos, please

I often think about how the New Testament uses two Greek words for time, kairos and chronos. Times of kairos can be described as critical, make-or-break, pivot points, hinges of history, times of decision and all that. Chronos is like the ordinary run of times when things are not so...interesting. 

It seems like this truly is a time of kairos for the nation and the planet with so much at stake, including ensuring the future of democracy; dealing with catastrophic climate change; fighting off authoritarianism; addressing gross inequalities and such, all in the middle of a pandemic. And things seem pretty close to unraveling all over the place.

And, just to prove that God, the gods, Lady Fortuna and/or world history have a sense of humor, people from West Virginia are going to have a disproportionate impact for good or ill. Will the right to vote be guaranteed or will the forces of racist voter suppression win? Will we "build back better" with a stronger and cleaner infrastructure and more just economy for all? Will we take what may be a last chance to deal with climate?

Which also means, what are the most effective things that we can do here and now to move things in a more positive or at least less bad direction? A lot of my friends are working on it. And we're all feeling it.

I keep thinking about those lines from Lord of the Rings where Frodo said "I wish it need not have happened in my time." 

To which Gandalf replies, "So do I...and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us."

I wouldn't mind a good chunk of chronos right about now.

How little bugs shaped big history

In H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, the octopus-like Martians almost wiped out humanity — until they died from infection from earth’s micro-bugs.

One might think if Martians could develop space travel, they’d have thought about germs too, but that’s not important now. The point is that things too small to see can have a huge impact.

I’ve been thinking lately about how outbreaks have often changed the course of history.

Let’s start with the Bible. Aside from the plagues of Egypt in Exodus, an example is related in 2nd Kings and elsewhere about the Assyrian siege of Jerusalem.

The Assyrians were probably the most brutal empire in the ancient Middle East, with detailed artwork depicting torture and mass executions. They ended the northern kingdom of Israel in 722 B.C., deporting and resettling many of the survivors aside from the Samaritans, giving rise to speculation about “lost tribes of Israel.”

The same almost happened to the kingdom of Judah around 701 B.C. When things seemed hopeless, the invaders were hit by a mouse-borne epidemic, a story backed by ancient Greek historian Herodotus centuries later.

No Judah would have meant no rabbinical Judaism or Christianity.

An outbreak in Athens around 430 B.C. helped end the glory days of ancient Greece. After the Greeks defeated the Persians, Athens went to war with Sparta and its allies. The Athenians were a sea power while the Spartans were strongest on land.

Athenians brought in citizens from outlying areas, staying supplied by sea while Spartans burned their farms and fields. Overcrowding made sanitation worse, leading to an outbreak described in detail by Thucydides, an Athenian general and historian who barely survived it.

There’s debate about the disease, but we can just say it was bad. According to Thucydides, “Words indeed fail one when one tries to give a general picture of the disease; and as for the sufferings of individuals, they seemed almost beyond the capacity of human nature to endure.” Demoralized people “became indifferent to every rule of religion or law.”

Tens of thousands died, including the great political leader Pericles. While the war would drag on for 27 years, Athens never recovered and was ultimately defeated. War exhausted the winners as well. It wasn’t long before Greece was dominated by the Macedonians under Philip and his better-known son, Alexander the Great.

Rome had its outbreaks, the worst coming in 541 A.D., after it converted to Christianity. The emperor Justinian wasn’t exactly good, but he was the last to be called “the Great.” The empire had two capitals, the western in Rome and the east in Constantinople, now Istanbul, Turkey. The west fell under “barbarian” domination, but Justinian came close to reuniting it, also engaging in diplomacy and war with the Persian superpower to his east.

Then came bubonic plague, carried by fleas on rats in grain shipments from Egypt. It raged off and on for around 200 years, killing 25-50 million people.

Any hope of reuniting the empire was gone, paving the way for the rise of Europe as distinct countries rather than imperial provinces. One place largely untouched was Arabia. Islam was soon to spread through plague-weakened regions as far as the Iberian Peninsula in the west and Persia and beyond in the east.

Plague would return to Europe around 1350, recurring in waves, by some estimates wiping out more than half the population. Some historians believe it killed feudalism and helped prepare the way for the rise of capitalism and Protestantism.

When Europeans encountered indigenous people in the Americas, Old World diseases such as smallpox, chicken pox, cholera, tuberculosis, mumps and measles wiped out huge portions of the population, far more than the considerable violence of the “discoverers.” The late Yale historian David Brion Davis called it “the greatest genocide in the history of man.”

Cortez’s small band of gold-hungry murderers wouldn’t have been able to conquer the huge Aztec city of Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City) in 1520 without the help of a smallpox epidemic that reduced the population by an estimated 40%.

Yet another epidemic made possible the expansion of the young United States and saved the world’s first victorious slave uprising. In the early 1800s, Napoleon sought to reimpose slavery in Haiti after a victorious uprising. Haitians fought back fiercely, aided by yellow fever, a mosquito-bourne virus brought from Africa during the slave trade. The French had never before been exposed to the disease. Their expeditionary force was wiped out. To raise money to recover, Napoleon sold the U.S. territory claimed by France for $15 million in what became known as the Louisiana Purchase. This nearly doubled the size of U.S. territory.

Epidemics weren’t done with Napoleon. In 1812, he invaded Russia with his Grand Armee of around 500,000 soldiers. Invading Russia is about as good an idea as invading Afghanistan. In addition to resistance by Russian soldiers, civilians and “General Winter,” the French were struck by lice-bourne typhus. As many as 400,000 invaders died, with typhus killing the majority. Who knows what a different outcome would have meant for Russia. Perhaps there would have never been a Stalin.

These are just a few examples of how microbes have shaped history. While we’re lucky that COVID-19 isn’t nearly as lethal as previous epidemics, it’s a safe bet that it will leave huge and lasting changes in its wake.

It’s up to us to decide what kinds of changes those will be.

(This ran as an op-ed in the Charleston Gazette-Mail.)

Interesting times

I don’t know if it’s authentic, but supposedly there’s an ancient Chinese curse that goes, “May you live in interesting times.”

(According to the late British author Terry Pratchett, there are two related curses. One is, “May you come to the attention of those in authority,” and the other is, “May the gods give you everything you ask for.” He wasn’t sure about the authenticity of those either.)

At any rate, our time is getting a bit too interesting for my preferences. It’s very rarely a good thing when a historical event on a global scale comes knocking on the door. I’m thinking of things like the decision to invade Iraq, the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Serbia in 1914 — not that I was around for all the above.

I’m reminded of a quote about history by the great German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who spoke of it as “the slaughter-bench at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of States, and the virtue of individuals have been victimized ... .”

Now that’s a cheery thought.

I think it’s interesting that the ancient Greeks had two words for historical time, chronos and kairos. Chronos referred to ordinary, not-too-interesting times — business as usual. Kairos meant a special time of challenge, crisis or decision. In the New Testament, for example, when Jesus said things like “the time is fulfilled” (Mark 1:15) or “my time is not yet come” (John 7:6), the word was kairos.

If there ever was a time of kairos, this is one.

Another word of Greek origin comes to mind, as well: apocalypse. Contrary to common usage, the word itself has nothing to do with the end of the world. Rather, it means something like uncovering, revealing or lifting the veil.

I’m hoping this crisis has lifted the veil on the world we live in. It has revealed that the real heroes who keep everything going aren’t hedge fund managers, CEOs or billionaires, but the helpers, retail workers, drivers, etc., who often work for low wages and no benefits. That needs to change.

It has revealed that health care, investments in public health and paid sick days aren’t luxuries or utopian notions, but necessities.

It has revealed the bankruptcy of an ideology that worships markets and the private sector while disparaging public goods and services, reasonable regulations and democratic and accountable governance.

It has revealed that entrusting government to those who believe government can’t do anything doesn’t bring about good government.

It has revealed that we ignore science to our peril.

And it’s a reminder that we need to pay more attention to the natural world we depend on — before it pays more attention to us.

Hegel also said, “What experience and history teach is this — that peoples and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.”

For all our sakes, I hope he’s wrong about that.

(This appeared as an op-ed in the Charleston Gazette-Mail.)

Interesting times

George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, 1770-1831)

I don't know if it's authentic, but supposedly there's an ancient Chinese curse that goes, "May you live in interesting times."

(According to author Terry Pratchett, there are two related curses. One is "may you come to the attention of those in authority" and the other is "may the gods give you everything you ask for." He's not sure about the authenticity of those either.)

At any rate, it looks like our time is starting to get interesting. I think it's very rarely a good thing when a world-historical event comes knocking on the door. I'm thinking things like the decision to invade Iraq, 9/11, Pearl Harbor, the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Serbia in 1914, not that I was around for all the above.

I'm kind of reminded of a quote about history by the great German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who spoke of it as "the slaughter-bench at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of States, and the virtue of individuals have been victimized..."

OK, that may have been a bit of a downer. Here's hoping history forgets about us. Quickly.

Poetic interlude

I haven't read much of Seamus Heaney (aside from his Beowulf, which was great), but I think I need to read more. By accident yesterday I came upon this selection from his Cure at Troy, which is his rendering of Sophocles' tragedy Philoctetes.

THE CURE OF TROY

Human beings suffer.
They torture one another.
They get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured.

History says, Don’t hope
On the side of the grave,’
 But then, once in a lifetime
 The longed for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea- change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that a further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles.
And cures and healing wells.

Call miracle self-healing,
The utter self revealing
Double-take of feeling.
If there’s fire on the mountain
And lightening and storm
And a god speaks from the sky

That means someone is hearing
The outcry and the birth-cry
Of new life at its term.
It means once in a lifetime
That justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.

Obviously, we're not there yet, but it's good to recall that such moments sometimes exist.

Another eclipse

I tried to take a picture of the eclipse with my phone but it obviously didn't turn out well. Still the lunar eclipse reminded me of a time long ago when a similar event brought disaster.

It happened during the Peloponnesian War between ancient Athens and Sparta and its  allies . The war lasted from 431 to 404 BC and sped the decline of Greece. It went through several fits and starts.

One of the worst turns was the Athenian decision to send an expedition to Syracuse, a fabulously wealth city in Sicily. For all kinds of reasons let's just say it turned out bad.

But when the Athenians were finally about to cut their losses and head for home, a lunar eclipse occurred. The Athenian general Nicias was given to believe in omens and, after consulting priests, decided to way 27 days.

That was just enough time for the Syracusans to seal their doom. With few exceptions, those of the Athenians who weren't massacred wound up dying in the stone quarries where they were kept in appalling conditions.

I draw two lessons from this:

1. just because you can go to war doesn't mean it's a good idea; and

2. when it's time to go, get the hell out.

The uses of history: reflections on Nietzsche and Martin Luther King Jr.

I've been running around too much lately to come up with a fresh post, but here's one from MLK Day six years ago. Parts of it are fortunately dated (ending the Iraq war), but most holds up.


El Cabrero has been thinking about the uses of history lately. This seems like a fitting topic on the occasion of Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday.

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche had some interesting things to say on this topic in his essay "On the uses and disadvantages of history for life" in his Untimely Meditations.

As the title of the essay suggests, Nietzsche wasn't interested in history as a social science or academic discipline but rather in how people can make use of history for their own purposes, and specifically to enhance human vitality.

The essay begins with a quote from Goethe:

"In any case, I hate everything that merely instructs me without augmenting or directly invigorating my activity."

Thinking about history has some risk since life requires both remembering and forgetting and we can suffer from both a scarcity and a surplus of historical awareness. We can get lost in the past to the detriment of the present.

Nietzsche identified three ways in which history could serve to enhance human life:

*There is a need to revere, conserve and treasure those things of the past that give people a sense of identity. He called this the antiquarian approach.

*For oppressed people, there is at times a need to "break up and dissolve a part of the past...bringing it before a tribunal, scrupulously examining it and finally condemning it..." He called this the critical approach.

*For those who aspire to making their own mark on history, the past can contain inspiring examples of the deeds of others. From these, we learn "that the greatness that once existed was in any event once possible and may thus be possible again..." He calls this the monumentalistic conception of history.

In the context of remembering the life and work of Dr. King and the tens of thousands of others who made huge gains for civil rights and social justice, the latter approach can be most useful to our life today. It would be tragic to allow this huge struggle to simply become a pious memory instead of a goad to action.

Here is one way to think about the legacy of Dr. King and others in Nietzsche's monumentalistic manner:

Once upon a time not too long ago, a relatively small number of people, in spite of all their human limitations, made a huge difference to the nation and the world against all odds. The fact that it was done is proof that it can be done.

That's the awareness we need to bring to the struggle for a living wage for working people. As Dr. King wrote in Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?,

There is nothing but a lack of social vision to prevent us from paying an adequate wage to every American citizen whether he be a hospital worker, laundry worker, maid, or day laborer.

That's the awareness we need to bring to the struggle to restore the rights of workers to organize, a struggle for which King literally gave his life in Memphis.

That's the awareness that we need to bring to the struggle to end the unnecessary war in Iraq and reshape America's domestic and foreign agenda. As King said,

There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war.

In other words, don't just remember the past, use it as an inspiration. Other people, who were just as screwed up as we are, did pretty damn good. It's our turn.

Diversity of bad ideas

Overwhelmingly but with some exceptions, participants in the Occupy movement have adopted, often explicitly, nonviolence as a method of action. However, in some places there are those who argue for "a diversity of tactics," which basically seems to consist of throwing things at cops.

Presumably such people believe that this is the best way to win over the hearts and minds of the 99 percent they claim to represent.

Sorry, but the most charitable thing I can say about that approach is that it is, in one of the Spousal Unit's favorite phrases, "dumber than dog ****." I say that not only as someone who works for a Quaker organization that promotes nonviolence, but also as a gun owning Gandhi-allergic Scotch Irish hillbilly with a black belt.

This has nothing to do with any belief on my part regarding the moral arc of the universe, the evidence for which is underwhelming to me most days. It comes down to this: as much as some seem to like throwing stuff as a method of change, the rulers generally have way more stuff to throw. And they can throw it harder. Second, most people are not all that turned on by the sight of people throwing stuff.

It seems to me but simple prudence to avoid giving one's opponent the excuse and/or ability to crush and/or totally discredit and isolate you unless there is a compelling reason to do so and I don't imagine that happens very often.

As a friend of mine once said about ultra "left" groups that engage in provocative action, "If they're not getting paid by the other side, they're getting ripped off."

IT'S MONDAY so it's gotta be Krugman bashing austerity.

HISTORY IS MESSY, so the Tennessee Tea Party wants to clean it up--by keeping slavery and such unsavory matters of American history out of the textbooks.

WHAT IS 24 MILLION GENERATIONS? If we were playing Jeopardy, that would be the number required for mouse sized mammals to evolve to elephant proportions assuming natural selection was favorable.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

So my daughter got her nose pierced

This is not my daughter, but it has a great nose.

Yes, that would be the one with the doctorate. I got one of those "Guess what?" calls over the holidays, the kind that every parent receives with some amount of trepidation. "I got something pierced today."

I knew the ears had long been done, but the other possibilities made me downright queasy. "It wasn't your tongue, was it?" I asked. She was speaking too clearly for that, but one never knows. I started running down the list and it turned out to be the nose.

I generally try to be supportive but the best thing I could come up with was the observation that I would feel fully justified using force to prevent someone from doing the same to me.

"You remember that you do karate, right?" I asked. "You get hit there."

She was undeterred by this possibility, possibly because she usually dishes out more punishment than she receives when sparring.

I talked to my son in law about this. "She just likes to express herself," he said. I guess this is what happens when one grows up listening to Madonna.

VOX POPULI. Most Americans support raising taxes on the wealthy to deal with deficits.

SOMETHING IS WORKING to fight poverty in different parts of the world.

HOPES FOR 2011 from Nobel economics laureate Joseph Stiglitz here.

ARE INVESTORS MOVING AWAY FROM COAL? Maybe a little.

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY, folklore pioneer Jacob Grimm was born in 1785, poet T.S. Eliot died in 1965 and President Lyndon Johnson outlined his vision of the Great Society the same year (he also said a thing or two, alas, about a certain dustup in southeast Asia). For more, click here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

The Goat Rope book shelf: history and biography

El Cabrero is slacking this week, which means no links or comments about current events. Rather, I'm taking a look back at the year in reading. Today, the topic is history.

By far the most engrossing book of this kind for me this year was Arthur Herman's Gandhi and Churchill, an account of the decades long rivalry between two worthy opponents. People of different political tendencies idolize one or the other of these men (usually not both, however). I'll pass. Both had their moments, but both also were capable of incredible blunders, callousness, and bull headedness. If I had to choose between one or the other, I'd pick FDR or Walter Reuther.

I've always been interested in the Pacific Theater of WWII, where my father and two uncles served, but my interest was piqued after my trip to Okinawa, where I toured the Peace Memorial and two museums that had exhibits related to the terrible battle that raged there. I really learned a lot from Max Hastings' Retribution: The Battle for Japan, 1944-1945. The Nazis had no monopoly on atrocities.

Finally, what is it about Western powers that makes them want to make ill-advised forays into the Middle East, anyway? They've been doing it since the Trojan War and it never seems to work out very well. Juan Cole's Napoleon's Egypt provided another case in point. It's amazing that he got to be emperor after leading that monumental goat rope.

Passion

I have a soft spot for the German philosopher Hegel, who once described world history--all too well--as "this slaughter-bench, upon which the happiness of nations, the wisdom of states, and the virtues of individuals were sacrificed..."

He also had this to say about what it takes to get things done:

We say, therefore, that nothing at all has come to pass without the interest of those whose activity is involved in it. And since we call an interest a "passion"--when all of one's individuality, to the neglect of all other interests and purposes one might have, is placed in the service of some cause; and every fiber of one's being, every last ounce of will-power is committed to it, so that all of one's needs and forces are concentrated upon it--we must assert as a general proposition that nothing great has been accomplished in the world without passion.

PREJUDICE is bad for your health.

YOU MIGHT NEED A (GOOD) WEATHERMAN or weather woman to know which way the climate change wind blows.

WHILE WE'RE AT IT, here's another one on the same subject.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Civilization and all that

Long time visitors to this blog will recall that El Cabrero has a soft spot for ole Sigmund Freud. I don't buy the whole package, but he did have his moments. It occurs to me that one can reinterpret at least some of Freud's ideas in terms of evolutionary theory.

Here's one example: his classic little book Civilization and Its Discontents is pretty much what it sounds like. The main idea I remember after all these years is that living in modern, bureaucratic civilizations requires the repression of a lot of drives. He believed that since we can't get rid of the things that civilization provides without a lot of people dying AND since we can't get rid of our instinctual drives either, we're kinda out of luck.

I agree with the main idea any way. Our minds and bodies evolved under vastly different conditions that those we're living under now and this causes lots of stresses and strains and all kinds of problems. If we assume that humans have been around in their current form for 250,000 years (it could have been more or less), for all but the last 10,000 or so years they all lived by foraging in small groups. My my calculator, that amounts to 96 percent of our history.

In a hunter-gatherer society, there's may be a division of labor based on age and sex and some differences in status, but there's no permanent class system or built-in stratification (not to mention no alarm clocks). If we estimate that state societies first began to emerge 5,000 years ago, that's only two percent of human history. "Modern" societies with bureaucratic and capitalist features began to emerge 500 years ago, which is only .2 percent of human history (assuming I did the math right).

No wonder the shoe doesn't fit sometimes.

NEGLECTED. Paul Krugman's latest is about education.

SAVING CHIP. Here's a Gazette editorial on WV Senator Jay Rockefeller's proposal to preserve the Childrens Health Insuarance Program.

THIS IS STARTING TO GET GOOD. Rockefeller and WV Congressman Nick Rahall have joined with Senator Byrd in calling on Massey Energy to help fund the relocation of an elementary school near a huge coal silo and slurry impoundment.

MONKEY MOMS love their babies.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

On the folly and hubris of the powerful

“There is a way that seems right to a man and appears straight before him, but at the end of it is the way of death and destruction.” Proverbs 14:12

El Cabrero has been musing lately on past and present events. It occurs to me that people in general and wealthy ruling groups in particular are not always the best judges of what is in their own long term interest.

Take the decades of sectional conflict over slavery that erupted in the American Civil War as an example. The slave owning aristocracy and their intellectual and political retainers made a practice of indignation, outrage, insolence and provocation.

Vehemently opposed to any measure that might limit the spread of slavery, they dreamed of conquering and annexing Cuba, Mexico, Central and South America to form a grand empire for slavery. The opposed even moderate measures to achieve a modicum of political compromise.

With the election of Lincoln in 1860, something that they ironically helped to bring about, they were faced with a president who did not propose to attack slavery where it existed but who wanted to contain it within its current bounds.

When the southern states seceded and attacked the United States at Fort Sumter, they basically forced the enactment of the measures they feared. The United States immediately responded with the "Anaconda plan" of surrounding and containing the rebellious states. So much for the expansion of slave territory. We know how the rest of the story played out over four years of war and the abolition of chattel slavery in the south and the US as a whole.

You could see some of the same thing in the responses of US business elites to the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt--peace be unto him--during the Great Depression. The "economic royalists," as he called them, fought it tooth and nail even though it wound up preserving and strengthening capitalism in the US and laying the foundations for a broadly shared prosperity and decades of economic expansion.

Some people never got over that and planned for years to dismantle the remnants of the New Deal and unleash unrestrained capitalism. For three decades and with considerable success they pushed for lower taxes for the wealthy and for corporations, deregulation of industry, weakening labor unions and the shredding of the social safety net.

Now we are all "enjoying" the fruits of their labor.

As Bob Marley sang, "Now you get what you want--do you want more?"

It's about time to take the keys away from some drunk drivers.

ONE NATION, UNDER DEBT. The nation's spiraling economic problems, fed by failed economic policies, tax cuts for the wealth, the cost of the war in Iraq, and the Wall Street meltdown, could seriously weaken its standing in the future.

ANOTHER MARKET FAILURE. Employer-provided health insurance declined for the seventh year in a row.

HOW LOW CAN IT GO? Several economists weigh in on likely scenarios.

THINK THE BAILOUT IS EXPENSIVE? Consider the potential costs of environmental destruction.

ON A RELATED NOTE, CNN reports that a new NASA website provides up to the minute information on climate change data.

ARE MALES NECESSARY? Maybe not for some sharks.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

LET JUSTICE ROLL DOWN LIKE WATERS

El Cabrero has been thinking about the uses of history lately. This seems like a fitting topic on the occasion of Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday.

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche had some interesting things to say on this topic in his essay "On the uses and disadvantages of history for life" in his Untimely Meditations.

As the title of the essay suggests, Nietzsche wasn't interested in history as a social science or academic discipline but rather in how people can make use of history for their own purposes, and specifically to enhance human vitality.

The essay begins with a quote from Goethe:

"In any case, I hate everything that merely instructs me without augmenting or directly invigorating my activity."

Thinking about history has some risk since life requires both remembering and forgetting and we can suffer from both a scarcity and a surplus of historical awareness. We can get lost in the past to the detriment of the present.

Nietzsche identified three ways in which history could serve to enhance human life:

*There is a need to revere, conserve and treasure those things of the past that give people a sense of identity. He called this the antiquarian approach.

*For oppressed people, there is at times a need to "break up and dissolve a part of the past...bringing it before a tribunal, scrupulously examining it and finally condemning it..." He called this the critical approach.

*For those who aspire to making their own mark on history, the past can contain inspiring examples of the deeds of others. From these, we learn "that the greatness that once existed was in any event once possible and may thus be possible again..." He calls this the monumentalistic conception of history.

In the context of remembering the life and work of Dr. King and the tens of thousands of others who made huge gains for civil rights and social justice, the latter approach can be most useful to our life today. It would be tragic to allow this huge struggle to simply become a pious memory instead of a goad to action.

Here is one way to think about the legacy of Dr. King and others in Nietzsche's monumentalistic manner:

Once upon a time not too long ago, a relatively small number of people, in spite of all their human limitations, made a huge difference to the nation and the world against all odds. The fact that it was done is proof that it can be done.

That's the awareness we need to bring to the struggle for a living wage for working people. As Dr. King wrote in Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?,

There is nothing but a lack of social vision to prevent us from paying an adequate wage to every American citizen whether he be a hospital worker, laundry worker, maid, or day laborer.

That's the awareness we need to bring to the struggle to restore the rights of workers to organize, a struggle for which King literally gave his life in Memphis.

That's the awareness that we need to bring to the struggle to end the unnecessary war in Iraq and reshape America's domestic and foreign agenda. As King said,

There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war.

In other words, don't just remember the past, use it as an inspiration. Other people, who were just as screwed up as we are, did pretty damn good. It's our turn.

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