In lieu of a post

The WV legislature ended (thank God) Saturday at midnight. I've been thinking about all that for the last 60 days and could use a break. In lieu of a real blog post, here's an interesting take at the role of religion in American life and how it's been manipulated.

Sorry for slow posting lately. Between internet troubles, travels and work, it was hard to do.

Lean, mean, green

I have mentioned before that a major hazard at this time of year for people living near gardens is an attack of summer squash, an aggressively imperialist species.

The above picture is living proof if more was needed of the dangers of these pernicious plants. Not content to lie there like most vegetables, these green miscreants are about to slither out of the basket and rampage over an unsuspecting world.

DEAL WITH IT. Here's Krugman on the Affordable Care Act and the right wing's state of denial.

THE LATEST JIHAD. It looks like it's true love between WV's anti-gay uterus-police and its attorney general. I figured the latter would be busy recusing himself from cases started by his predecessor which challenge abuses of sleazy corporations.

WOULD THIS BE IRONY OR HYPOCRISY? Although the same WV AG mentioned above seems to be deeply concerned with the personal decisions of women, he pretends to believe that some parts of the Affordable Care Act threaten  privacy. Judges? Personally, I'm leaning towards hypocrisy.

ONE MORE WV AG RANT. As I've pointed out before, this was the same "pro-life" person who expressed regret at Governor Tomblin's decision to expand Medicaid, despite the fact that around 223 West Virginians die prematurely every year because they don't have health coverage. I think that would be another one for the hypocrisy column.

PATRIOT. Union miners overwhelmingly approved an agreement with Patriot Coal. I think it's a pretty big win for the UMWA and would like to congratulate union members and allies who made a bad situation better.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Napoleon again

Watching the WV legislature is an occasionally enjoyable spectator sport. Earlier today, which is almost yesterday at this point, I watched an interim committee meeting in which the staff person for an anti-gay "religious" group dug himself in deeper and deeper in a rambling speech.

A line from Napoleon which may well have appeared here before came to mind: "Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake."

(Of course El Cabrero has no enemies. He may, however, have any number of euphemisms.)

THIS IS GOING TO BE INTERESTING. The Supremes vs health care reform, that is.

EXTREME INEQUALITY makes for bad economics.

THE WHOLE REGULATIONS KILLING JOBS THING isn't all it's cracked up to be.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Drilling for gold with silver

Grassroots groups and plenty of ordinary citizens are losing their patience with the WV legislature for its failure so far to regulate Marcellus Shale natural gas drilling, which can have all kinds of negative consequences for citizens, landowners, taxpayers and the natural environment.

A number of groups joined together today in the state capitol for a well-attended press conference on the subject. You know it's a good press conference when the reporters outnumber the speakers and this would definitely qualify.

Some speakers were landowners who told gut wrenching stories about damage to health, family and property and even the loss of a beloved home. Others addressed broader issues.

Aside from compelling stories, for me the stickiest soundbite had to do with water, which is something that will be trashed in massive quantities in the hyraulic fracking process used in Marcellus drilling. As one speaker put it, "Water is life. Everyone knows that."

Water is likely to be the most valuable commodity (and it's really sad that water is becoming a commodity) in the coming century. The speaker predicted that water will continue to be a precious and declining resource long after the drilling is done. Squandering water in this way is like "using gold to drill for silver."

Here's my take on the issue. If memory serves, F. Scott Fitzgerald said that there were no second acts in American life. I don't think that's the case. The Marcellus Shale issue gives WV leaders something like a second chance to have some control over how powerful extractive industries treat the state and its people. State leaders had the same chance 100 or so years ago and blew it.

In their defense, it probably would have been hard for a state politician living in the 1880s to imagine the abuses and exploitation the coal industry would inflict on the state. Current lawmakers have no such excuse.

GO LONG. E.J. Dionne Jr. advises President Obama to try something other than capitulation here.

RELIGIOUS RIGHT: the sequel.

A WORTHY SUBJECT. This item on the art of airplane sleeping speaks to my condition as it is yet another valuable art I haven't mastered.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

THE BYSTANDER EFFECT

Image courtesy of wikipedia.

In the wake of the highly publicized killing of Kitty Genovese in Queens, in which news reports stated that a number of people witnessed without intervening, (see yesterday's post) two psychologists decided to study how people respond to the sufferings of others.

John Darley and Bibb Latane were obviously unwilling and unable to replicate that tragedy, but the did design an illuminating experiment that showed that people often take their cues about the seriousness of a situation from other people.

As Lauren Slater described the experiment in her entertaining book Opening Skinner's Box,

They recruited naive subjects at New Your University (NYU) to participate in what appeared to be a study of student adaptation to urban college life. A student sat in a separate room and spoke into a microphone for two minutes about the challenges at NYU. In a series of separate but audio-wired rooms were tape recorders carrying other student's stories, but the naive subject didn't know the voices were pre-recorded; the subject believed they were actual neighbors.

When one of the pre-recorded "students" who had previously self-identified as having severe epilepsy pretended to have a major seizure, the scientists observed how long it took for the subjects of the experiment to notify the experimenters that something was wrong. The pretended seizure lasted for a full six minutes.

Here's what they found. Subjects were likely to intervene when they believed that the only other person in the experiment was the person with the seizure. The rate was 85 percent.

But when they believed that four or more other people were listening as well, they were much less likely to intervene. The rate was 31 percent.

In other words, as Slater put it, "There is something about a crowd of bystanders that inhibits helping behavior." So much for the old "safety in numbers" theory. The term for this is "diffusion of responsibility," about which more tomorrow.

Another interesting finding was the time factor. Ninety five percent of those who intervened did so in the first three minutes of the apparent crisis. The longer people waited to intervene in a bad situation, the less likely they were to do so.

Does that sound familiar?

SPEAKING OF PSYCHOLOGY'S DARK SIDE, here's Wired interview with Philip Zimbardo, who conducted the Stanford Prison Experiment and wrote the recent book, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding how Good People turn Evil.

TALKING SENSE. Here's conservative Ben Stein taking on the myth that tax cuts "pay for themselves."

$12 BILLION A MONTH AND A LOT OF DEAD AND INJURED PEOPLE. Must be the Iraq war we're talking about.

THEOCRATS NO MORE. This is an interesting article on the disillusionment with the religious right by some of its former leaders.

YOU DON'T NEED A WEATHERMAN to know climate change is for real. In a welcome shift, Southern Baptists have taken a stronger stand on countering it. Here is the AP and NY Times on the subject.

A THEORY OF NAMES. Here's a good one on the effects of unusual names on children. Short version: they make for better self control. I guess Johnny Cash was on to something.

I DIDN'T NOTICE THIS, but WV small schools advocates won a round with a bill this session that limits school bus rides.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

MEANING

Photo credit: everystockphoto.com.

El Cabrero has a special respect for things, people and ideas that have proven themselves in tough situations. The ideas of the late Viennese psychologist Victor Frankl would certainly qualify. He developed these in the crucible of Nazi concentration camps but found they had applications in less extreme conditions as well.

Frankl found that people who had a sense of purpose or meaning in their lives were better able to bear up to unbearable conditions and keep a sense of their humanity in the face of dehumanizing treatment. He also believed that people always retain a degree of inner freedom:

Man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind, even in such terrible conditions of psychic and physical stress....

Fundamentally, therefore, any man can, even under such circumstances, decide what shall become of him--mentally and spiritually. He may retain his human dignity even in a concentration camp. Dostoevski said once, "There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings." These words frequently came to my mind after I became acquainted with those martyrs whose behavior in camp, whose suffering and death, bore witness to the fact that the last inner freedom cannot be lost.

Some things that helped people retain a sense of purpose were love for others, a desire to accomplish certain things, a sense of accomplishment for past achievements or even the determination to bear suffering with dignity. But

Woe to him who saw no more sense in his life, no aim, no purpose, and therefore no point in carrying on. He was soon lost.

END GAME. Apocalyptic religious types can't get enough war these days.

NAFTA AND EVERYTHING AFTER. Here's a good one from the Boston Globe about the downsides of "free trade" agreements. Congress is considering extending a NAFTA-style agreement to Peru.

MORE ON HEALTH CARE. According to the Economic Policy Institute, employer-provided health insurance continues to decline. According to the author of the report, “A universal health care system would provide Americans with access to the type of health care appropriate for the most prosperous nation in the world.”

AMERICANA. Here's a lengthy but good piece from the New Yorker about how America modernized. There's a cool Thoreau thread running through it.

HOW'S THAT NEXT WAR COMING? According to the McClatchy papers,

Despite President Bush's claims that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons that could trigger "World War III," experts in and out of government say there's no conclusive evidence that Tehran has an active nuclear-weapons program.

Of course, the great thing about this administration is that they've never let facts get in the way of an unnecessary war.

MONKEY BUSINESS. It looks like they can rationalize too.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

HAINTS!

Welcome to Haint Week at Goat Rope. Now some flatland readers--and maybe even some fellow hillbillies that ain't been raised right--may want to ask what, exactly is a haint?

Well, let's see. According to the Reflexive Property of Haintness, a haint is a haint, so if you see one, that's what it is. More precisely, a haint is that which haunts so if it's haunted, you got a haint.

It seems like an appropriate theme for Halloween Week.

El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia has more than its share of haints. There are some pretty good collections of local haint lore. One of the best is the late folklorist Ruth Ann Musick's The Telltale Lilac Bush and Other West Virginia Ghost Tales, which I devoured in elementary school.

I'm not sure what I'd say if asked point blank if I believe in haints. Some days, I don't even believe in the multiplication tables. But basically I think we live in a wild, open universe and that Hamlet was right about there being more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophies, Horatio.

I will venture this much: I think the quality of hauntedness or even sacredness has more to do with places than with spectral beings. More about that tomorrow...

CHECK THIS OUT. It's a very interesting article from the NY Times Magazine about the current state of the religious right.

US LABOR MAKES INTERNATIONAL APPEAL. The AFLCIO has filed a complaint with the International Labor Organization over the anti-union bias of Bush's NLRB.

KISS THOSE POLAR BEARS GOODBYE. Here's a good but grim one on the future of coal.

MEDIA MADNESS. Here's an interview with Paul Krugman about the right wing media.

THE RACIST MIND. Is it different? Maybe. Note: Spinoza came up with basically the same answer in the 1600s.

UPDATE ON MEGAN WILLIAMS CASE. The Charleston Black Ministerial Alliance is the latest group which has decided not to support a march planned by out of state groups. Others include the state NAACP and the Logan County Improvement League.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

CHICKENS COMING HOME TO ROOST

Caption: The consequences of our actions are sometimes distinctly uncool.

This week, in addition to links and comments about current events, Goat Rope is offering its readers a daily Nietzschean nugget from his book Beyond Good and Evil.

Admittedly, Nietzsche was kind of whacked at times, but when he was good, he was very, very good.

Today's selection highlights one of the irritating things about life:

The consequences of our actions take us by the scruff of the neck, altogether indifferent to the fact that we have 'improved' in the meantime.

I hate it when that happens. Don't you?

PEOPLE SUPPORT CHIP. A new survey shows overwhelming support for expanding the Children's Health Insurance Program (70 percent) and most (64 percent) support overriding the Bush veto.

HEALTH CARE and growing inequality is the subject of this column by WVU-Tech's John David.

YOU WOULDN'T KNOW IT given all the bashing of public education these days, but African-American students have made significant progress in closing the achievement gap according to this EPI snapshot.

OH GOOD. In yesterday's Gazette, no less than two leaders of the religious right have issued fatwas against the infidel.

One called for the banning of Pat Conroy's novels from AP English classes. Now I haven't read Conroy and no doubt would have picked something different since I'm an unapologetic member of the let-them-eat-classics school of literature. I've even tortured more than one GED class by making them read Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown" aloud.

But that's not the point. It does not appear to have occurred to the people in question that vastly more harm has been done by people not reading than by reading, not to mention the harm done by censorship itself. Congratulations to the students who attended a school board meeting last night to assert their opposition to censorship.

The other one was mostly about the the "radical homosexual agenda to force their decadent lifestyle upon the citizenry at large." It also castigated some members of Congress for "normalizing and recognizing sodomy as a civil rights entitlement..." (Note to self: look up some legal definitions).

Another target was the recent action of the Charleston City Council to pass a measure opposing discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. The piece also managed to come out in favor of the death penalty.

It occurs to me that there are certain regimes around the world which share the priorities of these groups and which they might perhaps find more congenial to their felicity.

ON A RELATED NOTE. There are groups in WV, such as Create West Virginia, which have argued that if WV is going to attract creative people and investments and build a high road economy, we need to be open to diversity.

Let's imagine how the actions of the domestic Taliban might look to someone from outside considering West Virginia. They might say "Hmmmm. They like to ban books there. Maybe they'll get around to burning them soon. And they seem to hate x group there, but tomorrow it might be y or z. Thanks but no thanks."

TO CLEAR THE PALATE, it looks like the humble sea cucumber could teach us a lot about tissue regeneration. And it looks like going to the beach and eating seafood is an older tradition than we thought.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ENCIMA DEL MUNDO

CONFLICT: WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR?

Caption: Lily is ready to rumble.

The 1950s has the reputation of a decade of conformity and mediocrity which I think is undeserved. There was a lot of creativity in American life in that period, including some of the cleverest critiques of conformity and mediocrity.

Not to mention Elvis.

El Cabrero just finished revisiting a sociological gem of that period, Lewis Coser's The Functions of Social Conflict. It's a little gem that holds up pretty well.

Coser was one of the first to integrate two strands of social thinking, conflict theory and functionalism. Conflict theory is pretty much what it sounds like, with a particular emphasis on inequalities of wealth and power. Marx would be the classic example.

Functionalism is kind of what it sounds like too, an approach that examines how the various aspects and institutions of a society function or dysfunction as a whole and for particular groups.

When the book was written--1956--the dominant strand in sociology was what C. Wright Mills called "grand theory," an elaborate and largely unreadable brand of functionalism represented by Talcott Parsons which tended to view social conflict as a bad thing or symptom of dysfunction. Coser, inspired by the quirky German theorist Georg Simmel (1858-1918) looked at the positive as well as negative functions of social conflict.

(Here are some nuggets about Simmel.)

Coser distinguished between conflict and hostile feelings or attitudes:

Social conflict always denotes social interaction, whereas attitudes or sentiments are predispositions to engage in action. Such predispositions do not necessarily eventuate in conflict; the degree and kind of of legitimation of power and status systems are crucial intervening variables affecting the occurrence of conflict.

In other words, sometimes hostile attitudes are not openly expressed in conflict. When it does happen, though, conflict "helps to establish and maintain the identity and boundary lines of societies and groups."

Far from causing societies to fracture, it can sometimes be part of the glue that holds them together.

About which more tomorrow.

LOGAN ACTION PLANNED IN WAKE OF MEGAN WILLIAMS CASE. The American Friends Service Committee and the Logan County Improvement League are holding a candlelight vigil Oct. 2 at 6 p.m. at Big Creek, the area where Megan Williams was tortured and sexually abused. Dr. Johnny W. Meade, pastor of the Church of God in the Name of Christ Jesus, invited the organizations to conduct the service at his church, which is located on the right about one and one-fourth miles up Trace Fork Road off Corridor G behind the Thornhill Chevrolet dealership.

Organizers are hoping that this event will give residents of Logan County and other people of good will a chance to come together to make a positive statement. For more information, call 304-752-3422.

SPEAKING OF WHICH, here's an interesting article on the history of race relations in southern WV which appeared in Friday's Gazette.

ON THE DOWNSIDE? Here's an item on the apparently declining political clout of the religious right.

IT'S ALL ABOUT TABLES. The Rev. Jim Lewis has a great knack for picking a theme or image and spinning it out in all kinds of ways. The theme for the latest edition of Notes from under the Fig Tree is Table Talk.

VETO BATTLE EXPECTED THIS WEEK on the Children's Health Insurance Program is likely to happen this week.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

REGARDING LIFE, DEATH AND WALT WHITMAN (AND STUFF ON CURRENT EVENTS)

Although April has passed, and most of May, T.S. Eliot's line fron The Waste Land about April being the cruelest month still rings true. The ongoing carnage in Iraq and elsewhere and the massacre in Virginia left their mark. But I also felt something else, like an old and deep body wound.

It finally occured to me that April was the anniversary of the death of a very close comrade, friends and co-worker. We fought side by side for several years in some poverty related policy battles and had quite a winning streak for a while there, although she suffered from a debilitating illness that consumed more and more of her life force.

It was a great partnership and what I miss most are the conversations. When we weren't in predatory mode, we spent exalted timeless moments discussing literature, philosophy, science, religion, life and death. Sometimes our best discussions would be at breaks between meetings, court cases, or legislative sessions.

One area where we differed was the subject of death. She believed it was the end and I could never quite convince myself of that, although, like Hamlet, I sometimes wish I could. When her time came, she faced it like a Spartan. The last book she read was the philosophical poem of Lucretius, De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things). In that materialist vision, all that exists are atoms and the void and death is just a dissolution.

For reasons I can't fully explain or articulate, I sometimes have a sense that the difference or gulf between past and present, life and death, and the living and the dead aren't as clear or final as we often think.

The best expression I've found of this sense comes from a lesser-known poem of Walt Whitman's called "Song of Prudence," which will be the guiding thread through this week's Goat Rope.

Meanwhile, back in the world...

MORE ON THE ARACOMA FIRE. Ken Ward of the Charleston Gazette had an good article yesterday featuring an interview with Minness Justice, a MSHA mine inspector who had worked at Massey's Aracoma mine in which two men died in a Jan. 2006 fire.

WHITHER EVANGELICALS? According to this item from today's NY Times, the recent death of Jerry Falwell signals a generational change in evangelical Christians. Many members of the new generation have broader priorities, such as fighting poverty and AIDS, climate change, etc.

DOWN YES, BUT OUT? From the same source, here's a look at the recent fortunes of the right.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

THE BIG SQUEEZE AND OTHER STUFF

Caption: These chickens had to scratch for a living.

(First, a correction to yesterday's post on "The Two Bums." A closer inspection of the photo reveals that there were in fact three bums in that picture. Second, a reminder that all the posts this week are loosely connected. Please click on the last few days if this is your first visit.)

Something good happened to this country between the end of World War II and the early 1970s. In that period, the US economy grew dramatically.

And, while there has always been great inequality in this country, the benefits of growth were shared among all sectors of the population.

But that positive trend came to an end in the 1970s. Contributing factors were the costs of the Vietnam War, the energy crisis, and economic stagflation that baffled many economists.

Stagflation refers to a slow economy with high unemployment accompanied by high inflation. This puzzled many economists at the time as the conventional wisdom was that you either had unemployment or inflation but not both at the same time.

Real wages for American workers began to stagnate and fall, a tendency that continued for more than a decade.

This crisis created the political opening for right wing, which had been building its political and ideological base since the mid 1960s , to gain power. They were aided in part by growing resentment among middle income Americans against “welfare queens,” unions, minorities, a backlash against the civil rights movement, etc.

The growth of the religious right enabled this movement to exploit divisive issues and “culture wars" and thus gain support from middle and lower income Americans for an agenda which would ultimately betray them.

Let them eat jihad…

Once in power, the right pursued policies that made the income gap between the very wealthy and everyone else begin to grow. As a result, when the economy grew, the benefits weren’t shared across the population as they had been in the post war period.

According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (get link) after tax income for the wealthiest one percent of the population grew by 111 percent between 1979 and 2002. It grew by 48 percent for the top fifth.

If the post-war pattern had continued, there would have been similar gains across the board. Instead, the Congressional Budget Office reported that the middle fifth gained on 15 percent, while the bottom fifth gained five percent. By other measures, lower income Americans actually lost ground.

As previously noted in this blog, Census data for every year since 2000 has reported increasing poverty, stagnant wages, and a growth in the number of the uninsured for every year since 2000.

It can’t be stressed enough that this growing inequality was not the result of “market” forces acting alone but through the use of political policies to shift budget priorities, promote trade deals benefiting multinational investors at the expense of ordinary people, attacks on unions, and cuts to the safety net.

As Dean Baker, economist with the Center for Economic and Policy Research, has repeatedly pointed out, there has been a conscious and deliberate use of the powers of government for the last 25 years to redistribute wealth upward. He calls it “a right turn leading to a dead end.”

The country can no longer afford the politics of resentment and the circular firing squad it creates.

But there is some good news, about which more tomorrow…

NO COMMENT. This item appeared in the UK Guardian.

WEST VIRGINIANS SPEAK OUT AGAINST THE WAR. A number of groups, including WV Patriots for Peace, WV Citizen Action Group, the AFL-CIO, and AFSC held a press conference yesterday on the occasion of President Bush's veto of the Iraq supplemental.

FIG TREE NOTES. Here's the latest edition of Jim Lewis's Notes from Under the Fig Tree.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

DOMESTIC TALIBAN HOWLS AT MOON

Caption: You can almost hear them...


The latest stunt of the Taliban/jihad school of Christianity would be funny if not for the fact that it isn't funny.

But then again, it kind of is.

Here's the story:

Leaders of several conservative Christian groups have sent a letter urging the National Association of Evangelicals to force its policy director in Washington to stop speaking out on global warming.

The conservative leaders say they are not convinced that global warming is human-induced or that human intervention can prevent it. And they accuse the director, the Rev. Richard Cizik, the association’s vice president for government affairs, of diverting the evangelical movement from what they deem more important issues, like abortion and homosexuality.

The letter underlines a struggle between established conservative Christian leaders, whose priority has long been sexual morality, and challengers who are pushing to expand the evangelical movement’s agenda to include issues like climate change and human rights.

The letter was signed by such religious right luminaries as James C. Dobson, chairman of Focus on the Family, Gary L. Bauer, onetime presidental candidate and current leader of Coalitions for America, Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council; and Paul Weyrich, chairman of American Values.

Allow me to try to fairly sum up the position of the letter writers: Poverty? Who cares? Injustice &#%* it! Oppression? Bring it on! Screwing up the planet? Big whoop!

Now that's some religion.

It is hard for me to fathom how some people think that following Jesus of Nazareth consists of obsessing about other people's sexuality while ignoring what Jesus called "the weightier matters of compassion and justice."

They ought to crack open a gospel every once in a while.

To NAE's credit, Cizik apparently continues to enjoy their support.

HEALTH CARE RANT: If you are really bored, here's an op-ed of mine on the U.S. health care crisis that ran in yesterdays' Charleston WV Sunday Gazette-Mail.

AND SPEAKING OF HEALTH CARE...This item from today's NY Times shows that being uninsured isn't just for poor people anymore.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: STYGIAN