Libertarianism revealed

This Venn diagram by my friend Ted Boettner works for me.

One good, one bad

I've tried to blog a good bit lately about good things happening in WV. One such is the growth of community gardens and local food in former industrial areas such as Wheeling.

AS FOR THE BAD, libertarian delusions cover that pretty well.

This must be my week for interesting encounters and unlikely conversations. Yesterday, I headed down to McDowell County to do spend the afternoon with some children in a summer program. McDowell is one of the poorest and most economically distressed counties in the nation. The kids were in Keystone, a predominately African-American community which is a pretty marginalized place in a very marginalized county.

I'm not sure what I was expecting, but I didn't find it. When I got there, there were three other people who planned on meeting with this small group of kids, including a representative of US Senator Joe Manchin, one from Governor Earl Ray Tomblin, and a member of the WV House of Delegates.

For real. How cool was that?

As if that wasn't odd enough, the delegate began his presentation to the kids, one of whom was as young as six, with a Latin quote from philosopher Rene Descartes. You guessed it, "cogito ergo sum." He then discussed the implications of "I think, therefore I am" in ways that Descartes never would have thought of. And they got it.

I don't know about you, but generally speaking I can go for a pretty long time in this state without running into someone, much less an elected official, who brings up 17 century French philosophers.

You just never know.

SUPERSIZE THIS. Fast food workers are on the move for a living wage.

SOLITARY CONFINEMENT. It's bad for the brain and doesn't exactly bring out the best in people.

"LIBERTARIAN POPULISM." According to Michael Lind, it's Ayn Rand in disguise.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

One good whack deserves another two

Earlier this week, I linked a good op-ed by E.J. Dionne on economic libertarianism. Here's another practical critique by Michael Lind and a more philosophical one from the Roosevelt Institute blog.

WHILE WE'RE AT IT, this column by economist Dean Baker points out that the latest free trade deal, like many before it, is mostly not about trade. And certainly not about democracy.

MR. MOJO RISIN.  The Spousal Unit has been bugging me for a week to put up a link about a newly discovered bearded lizard species (extinct, alas) that has just been named after Doors lead singer Jim Morrision. It's full name is Barbaturex morrisoni. I'm trying to think up some appropriate Doors lyric, but the closest I can come up with is "ride the snake" from The End.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Short haul

I am running around a lot today but did manage to find enough time to pass on this column by E.J. Dionne Jr. on one of my favorite punching and kicking bags, to wit economic libertarianism. As Dionne points out, one problem with that ideology is that it exists nowhere in the world. And that's a good thing.

ONE MORE ENCOURAGING THIING about WV is the dedication of some professionals to provide and improve child nutrition after the school day and beyond the school year. One example highlighted here is the Summer Food Service Program.

GET YOUR WHALE FIX here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A children's paradox

Image by William Blake.

I attended an event yesterday at which Geoffrey Canada of the Harlem Children's Zone spoke, along with WV Senator Jay Rockefeller and WV First Lady Gayle Manchin. Canada is a dynamic and entertaining speaker and he said something I wish I'd have written down exactly. Since I misplaced my pen, a not altogether infrequent event, I'll have to paraphrase.

The topic of the gathering was investing in children and it was noted that rhetoric about children (most speakers seem to be in favor of them) seldom matches action. He noted that when advocating that resources be put into early childhood education and development, people are often told that while this or that measure may be a good idea, there isn't any money available to do it.

He said, much better than I'm about to, that while we're often not willing to put more resources into quality education for children, as a society we seem to be more than willing to pay any price to cover the cost of not educating them. He noted that one seldom hears of a judge saying to a young person in trouble that while he'd like to lock him up for a really long time, there are no resources to do it.

More Okinawa pictures to come tomorrow.

THE POLITICS OF EDUCATION are starting to get interesting in El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia.

YOU MUST SEE this New Yorker cartoon.

IS MARRIAGE GOOD FOR YOUR HEALTH? The conventional wisdom is yes, but it kind of looks like the quality of the marriage is the main thing. In the interests of marital harmony, I will forgo the opportunity to make a snide remark.

MINER'S MEMORIAL. WV Governor Joe Manchin announced a memorial service for the 29 miners killed in the Massey disaster to be held in Beckley this Sunday. At last word, President Obama and Vice President Biden plan to attend.

NOT EXACTLY NEWSWORTHY. Rush Limbaugh tried to blame Massey's Upper Big Branch mine disaster on the United Mine Workers union. The fact that it was a non-union mine may limit the utility of this assertion, although true believers will no doubt keep the faith.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

THE JINGLE-MAN

Welcome to Edgar Allan Poe Week at Goat Rope. If this is your first visit, please click on the earlier posts.

In some ways, Edgar Allan Poe is the Rodney Dangerfield of American literature--he don't get no respect.

T.S. Eliot said some snarky things about him, for example, once stating that Poe "had the intellect of a highly gifted young person before puberty."

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the literary eminence of the early and mid 1800s, famously referred to him in a letter as "the jingle-man." To be fair, if you do read or hear more than the proper measure of his poetry, the jingles are very audible.

But here's the deal, Ralphie and Tommy Boy: more people know The Telltale Heart and The Raven than Self Reliance or The Waste Land.

(Note: I'm not implying that this is necessarily good thing.)

John Allan, his foster father, had a pretty sharp take on Poe's genius: "His talents are of an order that can never prove a comfort to their possessor."

Here's James Russell Lowell's take in verse:

"There comes Poe, with his raven, like Barnaby Rudge
Three-fifths of him genius and two-fifths sheer fudge,
Who talks like a book of iambs and pentameters,
In a way to make people of common sense damn metres,
Who has written some things quite the best of their kind,
But the heart somehow seems all squeezed out by the mind."

The snooty Henry James--who was nowhere near as cool as his brother William--wrote that

With all due respect to the very original genius of the author of the Tales of Mystery, it seems to us that to take him with more than a certain degree of seriousness is to lack seriousness one's self. An enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection.

Walt Whitman was more charitable:

Poe’s verses illustrate an intense faculty for technical and abstract beauty, with the rhyming art to excess, an incorrigible propensity toward nocturnal themes, a demoniac undertone behind every page—and, by final judgment, probably belong among the electric lights of imaginative literature, brilliant and dazzling, but with no heat. There is an indescribable magnetism about the poet’s life and reminiscences, as well as the poems.

(If it's any consolation, they loved him in France. But then they liked Jerry Lewis and Derrida over there too.)

But here's the deal: it doesn't really matter what the critics think. Poe has won the verdict of popularity. He was the father of the modern detective story and horror tale and a major early influence on science fiction. Those are three of the most popular literary genres (i.e. they are things people read voluntarily).

The accursed heart still beats...

AN ANNIVERSARY TO REMEMBER. Seventy five years ago this month, FDR--peace be unto him--was elected to the presidency.

THE SCIENCE OF MORALITY is the subject of this article from Time.

SPEAKING OF MORALITY AND SCIENCE, here's a good slam on economic libertarianism with a science slant.

FOR A 425 MILLION YEAR OLD PETRIFIED VELVET WORM UPDATE click here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED