Jack tales

I was at a meeting yesterday with a couple of friends and cronies whereat we cooked up various schemes to raise hell and entertain ourselves this summer. Since it was a typical West Virginia meeting, we digressed widely and shot that which is euphemistically called the bull. Digressions are often the most enjoyable and productive parts of a meeting in my experience.

In one such, I learned that the spouse of a friend was a storyteller who liked to tell Jack tales. Jack has showed up here before, but for newcomers, he is the subject of a cycle of stories that probably originated in the British Isles and were brought to the Appalachian mountains by settlers, where they are part of an oral tradition.

Most people are familiar with Jack and the Beanstalk, which is an English version. In the mountain variety, the stories morphed over time to express what I think is the best in Appalachian culture. I have spent a good many years running around the state telling about Jack. The stories enthralled me from the time I first learned about them and I've seen them work their magic on even the most jaded listeners.

I've made it a point to tell my grandkid the Jack tales I know and read him the ones I've forgotten. I think this is important not just because they are entertaining but because they teach you how you ought to act and live.

If you ever get a chance to hear one, try it. They're meant to be heard. Or you can get by with reading Richard Chase's classic collection The Jack Tales.

WHAT HE SAID. Here's Robert Reich on the right's war on workers.

KEEP IN MIND. A brain implant shows promise of improving memories for people with dementia or other brain injuries.

ANIMAL AWARENESS discussed here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Fudoshin

This pyramid at Teotihuacan has some fudoshin going on. It would be kind of hard to turn it over.

Today is the final day of Cool Japanese Words Week at Goat Rope. Each day has looked at a word or concept from the martial arts and/or Zen tradition that may be of interest to people who want to make the world less nasty. You'll also find news and links about current events.

Today's word is...fudoshin (rhymes with judo shin), which means "immovable mind."

As you might expect by now, the idea needs some unpacking. It does not mean dogmatism, rigid thinking or fixed ideas. Instead it implies a rooted mental state or level of determination as well as equanimity. Fudoshin in that sense is a necessity for anyone committed to working to improve things over the long haul.

In karate there is a posture called fudo dachi or immovable stance. It looks like a cross between a horse stance and a forward stance and has a low center of gravity. Things and/or people with high centers of gravity are easy to trip, throw or turn over.

Think of the song "We Shall Not be Moved."

I had a fudoshin moment a few years ago when I got summoned to the office of a high state official who was upset about things I'd written in newspaper columns about the shabby way poor people had been treated at the time. I'm not sure what the intent was, other than to "get my mind right" a la Cool Hand Luke. When I got the call, I agreed to go and was very polite, but all the while I was thinking, "Fudoshin, dudes. Deal with it."

In looking around to see what others have written about fudoshin, I found a pretty good summary in wikipedia. I'm not sure whether it's a quotation from another source or one written for the entry, but it works for me:

A spirit of unshakable calm and determination,
courage without recklessness,
rooted stability in both mental and physical realms.
Like a willow tree,
powerful roots deep in the ground
and a soft, yielding resistance against
the winds that blow through it.

WHAT PASSED. Here are some key ingredients of the economic recovery package agreed to by the conference committee. A vote in the House is likely today, with the Senate to follow possibly this weekend. While the bill isn't perfect, as Paul Krugman points out here, there are lots of good things in there and some bad things are taken out.

Some wheeling and dealing continued after the agreement had been reached. Final votes in both houses may occur today.

THE SHOCKING TRUTH. Here's an account of a revisitation of Milgram's famous experiment on obedience to authority.

TO SLEEP, PERCHANCE TO REMEMBER. Science finds a strong link between sleep and memory.

URGENT NEANDERTHAL UPDATE here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

MOCKINGBIRDS

Don't kill the mockingbird. Image courtesy of wikipedia.

A pivotal scene in Harper Lee's novel To Kill a Mockingbird involves a mob about to lynch an African American accused of raping a white woman. Just as they are about to storm the jail, disaster is averted when the young girl Scout strikes up a personal conversation with someone in the mob. That little intervention brought the man back to himself.

While that's obviously a work of fiction, it does highlight some important truths about human behavior. People are more likely to engage in acts of violence and aggression when they part of a group, are caught up in a role they are playing, and/or are in a state of anonymity..

The psychological term for this is deindividuation. Together with the dehumanization of the victim or enemy group, it is one of the most powerful vectors of evil.

Often, a state of deindividuation is accompanied by a change in how one looks. This is particularly true in the case of warfare. As Philip Zimbardo wrote in The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil,

Cultural wisdom dictates that a key ingredient in transforming ordinarily nonaggressive young men into warriors who can kill on command is first to change their external appearance. Most wars are about old men persuading young men to harm and kill other young men like themselves. For the young men, it becomes easier to do so if they first change their appearance, altering their usual external facade by putting on military uniforms or masks or painting their faces. With the anonymity thus provided in place, out go their usual internal compassion and concern for others.

Deindividuation isn't always about personal appearance. It can happen in environments where people feel that no one knows who they are. Factors such as conformity, obedience to authority, groupthink, etc. all can contribute to deindividuation.

According to Zimbardo, there are two effective ways for bringing about this moral transformation. One is to "reduce the cues of social accountability of the actor (no one knows who I am or cares to)..." The other is to "reduce concern for self-evaluation by the actor," for example by the use of alcohol or drugs, emotional arousal, or by projecting responsibility outward onto others. A classical example of the latter is the belief that "I was just following orders."

THE YOUNG AND THE INSURANCE-LESS. Young adults are among those most at risk of lacking health coverage. Here's a link with more information and some policy suggestions.

THE SPORTING LIFE. And now for something completely different, the new sport of chess-boxing has gained national attention. El Cabrero is holding out for mah-jong ju jitsu.

THIS MIGHT EXPLAIN THAT UFO ABDUCTION. Loss of sleep can produce false memories, according to a recent study. But caffeine can help restore it.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A TAINT OF DEATH

Caption: The truth behind the lie. Native workers during King Leopold of Belgium's reign of terror in the Congo who failed to meet production quotas were punished by mutilation. Photo courtesy of wikipedia.

Reading Joseph Conrad is always challenging for me. (If this is your first visit, please click on this week's earlier posts for background on the writer and his short novel Heart of Darkness.)

Part of the reason for that may be that Polish rather than English was his first language. On the other hand, I'm not sure he'd be a cakewalk in the original either. But part of the difficulty comes from the truths he related through his fiction.

Heart of Darkness has an odd narrative device. It is told by an unnamed narrator who presumably recounts the story verbatim as told by the well-travelled and world weary Marlow, who is like an Odysseus without a home to strive for.

The setting for the storytelling is liminal. It takes place among a group of old acquaintances on a boat at twilight on the Thames near enough to the sea to feel the tides. Many of the listeners are now landsmen, though all had been to sea in the past. As the silence settles in, Marlow, who is sitting "in the pose of a meditating Buddha," begins the tale of his journey to the "Belgian" Congo which was the site of almost unimaginable colonial brutality 100 years ago (see Monday's post).

There's way too much to the story to do more than indicate here, but here are some choice nuggets from Marlow about imperialism and the ideology that tries to justify it:

The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves,is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretence but and idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea--something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to...."

At the bottom, though, the idea/idol is a lie:

You know I hate, detest, and can't bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appalls me. There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies--which is exactly what I hate and detest of the world--what I want to forget. It makes me miserable and sick, like biting something rotten would do. Temperament, I suppose...

The lie and the taint of death that accompanies it are still with us.

EXPORTING JOBS. The US has lost nearly 3 million manufacturing jobs since 2001, with no end in sight, according to EPI's latest snapshot.

CALL UP THE RESERVES. Cognitive reserves, that is. They may be the key to maintaining mental abilities as we age.

ANOTHER VETO on CHIP yesterday.

MEGAN WILLIAMS CASE. Here's the latest, from yesterday's Gazette. It seems that publicity is more important for some people than the outcome of the trial.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

LABOR CALLS FOR IRAQ SOLUTIONS

Caption: Time to get out of the web.

The national AFL-CIO executive board called on the United States to seek an end to its military involvement in Iraq.

Here's an excerpt from the beginning of the statement:

No U.S. foreign policy can be sustained without the informed consent of the American people. Last November, the people spoke clearly, calling on the president and Congress to change course in Iraq. Rather than heed the will of the citizenry or listen to the military leaders speaking out against the current policy in Iraq, the president has chosen to escalate military action. This blind pursuit of the war now undermines the very war on terror that was its justification.

And here's one from the middle:

It is time to bring our military involvement in Iraq to an end. Admittedly, there are no good options now in that country. It has descended into a sectarian civil struggle, with American troops caught in the crossfire. The latest National Intelligence Estimate reports that the greatest violence comes not from al Qaeda and foreign terrorists, but from sectarian militias caught up in their own internal conflict.

And here's one from the end:

The AFL-CIO continues to strongly support initiatives and programs to promote democracy, workers’ rights and economic development in the Middle East. We believe the bipartisan Iraq Study Group (the Baker-Hamilton Commission) provides the president and Congress with a broad range of recommendations to address the wider regional conflict as well as economic and reconstruction assistance while charting a path for reducing the U.S. presence in Iraq.

We, therefore, call on President Bush to reconsider the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group. Specifically, the administration should open up a diplomatic offensive with allies and Iraq’s neighbors. This should include a new initiative to revive a peace process in the Middle East and it should include a timetable for redeploying U.S. troops out of Iraq’s civil strife. We also call on Congress to support these actions and insist on a timetable for disengagement. If the president refuses to act, Congress must use its powers under the Constitution and act.

Works for me.

WV UPDATE. The WV House Finance Committee modified a Senate-passed corporate tax cut bill. The house version includes combined reporting, which closes corporate tax loopholes and cuts in the business franchise tax. Combined reporting is a good step. The overall business tax package is less that what passed the senate. So that's a victory of sorts.

Here's the deal: about half of WV's general revenue fund goes to K-12 education, about 10 percent to higher ed, about 20 percent to health and human services, the the rest covers everything else from parks to public safety. Going nuts on tax cuts means cutting the things we most need for a better future. Cutting education money to give goodies to out of state corporations when we can't adequately give teachers or public employees a decent raise is a little weird.

RANDOM BUT INTERESTING NEWS ITEM. Here's the lead of a cool but random news story:

Scientists studying how sleep affects memory have found that the whiff of a familiar scent can help a slumbering brain better remember things that it learned the evening before. The smell of roses — delivered to people’s nostrils as they studied and, later, as they slept — improved their performance on a memory test by about 13 percent.

Who'd a thunk it?

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED