It's not all bad news

This New York Times article shows how Medicaid expansion is touching the lives of thousands of people in West Virginia.

THIS, ON THE OTHER HAND, IS PRETTY BAD. The richest 1 percent of the world's population now owns half the world's wealth:

In its study titled "Working for the Few," the British-founded development charity Oxfam concludes that the $110 trillion wealth of the 1 percent richest people on the planet is some 65 times the total wealth of those floundering at the "bottom half" of the world's population.

Further, this "bottom half" now owns the same as the richest 85 people in the world and the wealthiest grew their share of bounty in 24 our of 26 countries surveyed between 1980 and 2012...

URGENT MANTIS SHRIMP UPDATE here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED 

Fish tales

When I was a kid, I used to love fishing, although for some reason I lost the habit as I got older. I have several fond memories of times spent along river banks.

Once when I was pretty little, I took my Zebco reel out to what we called "the Mud River dam" (this was way before the real one was built in Lincoln County). It consisted of some rocks and metal that created a waterfall of something like two feet. It was huge at the time, however.

There was a sandbar below the "dam" that I chose for a fishing spot. After casting in the line, something took the bait and tore all along the river bottom. My heart pounded and I was sure I was about to land The Big One. I gradually reeled the monster in to the river bank.

It turned out to be a crawdad. There's probably a deep significance to that.

Anyway, one thing I remember as a kid were all the stories about giant monster catfish that were said to haunt the Ohio and Kanawha. It turns out that those stories were right. The high point of my weekend newspaper reading experience was this Gazette-Mail story about a Sissonville fisherman, Dustin Hagy, who caught a four foot long, 60 pound cat in Dunbar.

You've got to see the picture to believe it.

Congratulations to Hagy, who got it weighed and photographed before turning the beast loose once again, apparently none the worse for the wear.

Some get the big cats; some get the crawdads. That's life.

THE LONG WAY HOME. Here's a veteran's powerful first hand account of dealing with post-traumatic stress problems after returning from the war in Iraq.

ALMOST THERE on health care.

GOOD NEWS/BAD NEWS. The recession may be officially over, but not the parts of it that hurt people. It's like being cured of a disease but having the symptoms linger and even get worse.

DEBUNKING THE DEBUNKERS on climate change, by way of Ken Ward's Coal Tattoo.

IF YOU WANNA GET TO HEAVEN, get in line.

URGENT MANTIS SHRIMP UPDATE here. The picture is worth a click.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

MYTHS OF THE PSYCHE

Antigone Leads Oedipus out of Thebes by Charles Francois Jalabert. Image courtesy of wikipedia.

Mythology is a perennially fascinating subject. There have been any number of modern interpretations of the meaning of myths. Classical scholar Elizabeth Vandiver divides these into "what" and "why" theories.

"What" theories, which were discussed here last week, try to explain myth in terms of other things, such as expressions of rituals, social solidarity, explanations of natural and historical events, etc. "Why" theories of myths are broader in scope and tend to focus on the universal function of myths for the human mind.

The person who did the most to open that can of worms was none other than Sigmund Freud, who turned to myths in developing his theory of psychoanalysis, specifically the myth of Oedipus as recounted in the Greek tragedian Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus.

To recap that myth, an oracle foretells that Oedipus is destined to kill his father and marry his mother. Laius, the father, orders the infant exposed, but unbeknownst to him, a shepherd takes pity and spares the infant, who is raised by another couple elsewhere he believes to be his parents. When he learns of the oracle, he flees his home and kills a belligerent person on the way. Reckon wonder who that guy was?

He becomes tyrant (nonhereditary ruler) of Thebes when he solves the riddle of the Sphinx, a monster terrifying the town. He also gets to marry the Jocasta, widow of the king. When a plague breaks out, Oedipus swears to get to the bottom of it. The blind seer Tiresias says the plague is due to a hidden crime, which turns out to be... When the truth is revealed, Jocasta kills herself and Oedipus blinds himself. (There's a bunch of stuff going on with seeing/not seeing.)

For Freud, the only possible reason why this myth is compelling to modern as well as ancient readers is that it reveals a universal conflict in the human psyche that begins in childhood and has ramifications throughout life. He believed the Oedipus complex was a universal human trait.

Most people today wouldn't go that far, although it seems to fit for some people. Scholars of mythology in particular point out that this kind of mythic theme is far from universal across cultures and the Oedipus myth itself occupied only a minor place in the Greek mythic cycle. For that matter, other myths are at least as compelling as that of Oedipus.

When El Cabrero first discovered Greek tragedy, I was much more impressed by Aeschylus' tragedies of Orestes, who killed his mother to avenge his father's death and had to deal with the wrath of the Furies in the wake of that primal transgression. He didn't even rate a complex. No fair!

Official Goat Rope verdict: myths, like any other kind of story, can convey deep psychological insights, but they are best understood as much as possible in their own terms and as part of the symbolic universe of which they are a part. And not every compelling story reflects a universal truth of human nature.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and even when it isn't it isn't always what Old Sig thought.

SAD MILESTONE. The AP reports that US military deaths in Iraq have reached 4000.

THIS IS NO SHOCK, but good jobs are getting harder for workers at lower education levels to find.

LONGEVITY GAP. As the gap between rich and poor widens, so does the gap in life expectancies across socio-economic lines.

YOU HAVE TO CLICK ON THIS LINK if only to see the freaky mantis shrimp.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED