The latest bad idea

For some reason, the Washington DC crowd these days is enamored of government by artificially created crises. Fiscal cliff, debt ceiling negotiations, sequester, whatever, the show goes on and on.

Lately, however, the people who have been hurt by round after round of arbitrary cuts aren't just taking it in silence.

Tonight in Charleston, over 100 people gathered to protest sequester-imposed cuts to the Head Start program, which so far has been forced to eliminate 82 jobs and 461 slots for young children. Among those who spoke out against these dumb cuts were parents and laid-off workers. Here's some coverage from the Gazette and Daily Mail.

Unless this situation gets fixed, I have a feeling that people affected by arbitrary cuts, whether young or old, are going to start showing up in the most inconvenient places to push our congressional delegation to make it go away. And I'll do all I can to make sure that happens.

The poetry of myth

El Cabrero has been on the road this week. Instead of ranting about current events, I'm trying to settle accounts with the ideas of Joseph Campbell, the famous student of mythology. My short take is that when he's good, he's really good. And the converse.

Here's some classic Campbell:

Whenever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed. The living images become only remote facts of a distant time or sky. Furthermore, it is never difficult to demonstrate that as science and history mythology is absurd. When a civilization begins to reinterpret its mythology in this way, the life goes out of it, temples become museums, and the link between the two perspectives is dissolved. Such a blight has certainly descended on the Bible and on a great part of the Christian cult.

To bring the images back to life, one has to seek, not interesting applications to modern affairs, but illuminating hints from the inspired past. When these are found, vast areas of half-dead iconography disclose again their permanently human meaning.

It's hard not to agree with a good bit of that, especially when you think about the lunacies of literalism, such as "creation science." I can't go all the way with Campbell and am allergic to his politics but he does have his moments.

JUST ONE LINK. Here's my latest rant on cuts to the Head Start program. Notice that I performed the charitable act of feeding a troll.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Voice of thunder

What is it about Abraham Lincoln that makes him the subject of such endless fascination? I would have trouble counting the number of books I've read about this or that aspect of Lincoln's life. If he was like most people, at some point I'd have my fill.

I love Bob Dylan, for example, but I think my life total for books about him is three. I've probably done that many Lincoln books in the last year, including one I just finished, Doris Kearns Goodwin's justly famous Team of Rivals. It wouldn't surprise me if I hit another Lincoln book or two before the year is out.

There is something epic and, to use an overused word, awesome, about this man and the time he lived through.

One thing that strikes me now is that Lincoln is how his life illustrates the power of stories. One thing that many people loved about him--and that drove some people crazy--was his constant use of stories. Some of these shed light on a situation. Some were just silly. Some perfectly summed up a complex situation.

I remember reading yet another book about Lincoln several years ago by James M. McPherson that suggested one reason the North won the war was that Lincoln was better at metaphors than his counterpart Jefferson Davis.

I think he has a point, although in fairness I must say, as Confederate General George Pickett once did about why his famous charge failed, that the Union Army had something to do with it.

I may return to that theme of the power of story in the next few posts, which may be irregular as I'll be on the road.

UNSPORTSMANLIKE CONDUCT. Here's the Washington Post on the impact of the sequester on the Head Start program, its children and their parents.

INEQUALITY MATTERS. From CNN, here's a suggested list of things to read about it.

URGENT WEIRD SPIDER UPDATE here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A full load for a short week

Right wingers around the country are praying for an Affordable Care Act train wreck, but it just might not happen.

ONE WOULD HOPE SO. According to a new poll, political attitudes may be shifting away from conservatism.

BUT NOT BEFORE lots of poor kids get whacked from Head Start.

GOOD BEGINNINGS. As WV's 150th approaches, here's a look at the politics of statehood.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Life is our dictionary

The theme at Goat Rope these days is the work of 19th century American sage Ralph Waldo Emerson, with a current focus on his essay/lecture The American Scholar. The essay didn't make a huge splash at the time but over the years its influence grew and he is now seen as a forerunner of those pragmatists and reformers who wanted to broaden the definition of education and scholarship to include knowledge of practical life.

This passage is typical:

Life is our dictionary. Years are well spent in country labors; in town--in the insight into trades and manufactures; in frank intercourse with many men and women; in science; in art; to the one end of mastering in all their facts a language by which to illustrate and embody our perceptions. I learn immediately from any speaker how much he has already lived, through the poverty or the splendor of his speech. Life lies behind us as the quarry from whence we get the tiles and cope-stones for the masonry of to-day. This is the way to learn grammar. Colleges and books only copy the language which the field and the work-yard made.

That sounds lie a precursor to the current support for vocational education, although it is also about how practical life enriches and creates living language.

THE ROAD NOT TAKEN. Here's a critique of the Obama administrations approach to the deficit debate.

IN CASE THIS BLOG HAS BEEN TOO MODERATE FOR YOUR TASTES, read this.

NO CLIMATE CHANGE HERE, BOSS, even though an Arctic sea route is probably going to open up later in this century.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Fair warning

My mind has been taking a stroll backwards lately to the spring of a year right before the millennial odometer rolled over. Most of us might not have been aware of it, but these were kind of the good old days in America. Maybe the last of them.

The country was at peace, mostly. The economy was booming, although it was kind of hard to tell in El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia. In a word, things hadn't quite gone to hell yet as they would in the early years of the next decade.

It had been a good year for me as far as work was concerned. We won some major fights defending the safety need for poor families and people with disabilities, both in courts and in the legislature.

I was also working my way through graduate school in sociology, a class or two at a time. I had just completed another class in theory and was enjoying the fact that my reading time was again my own.

To clear my mental palate, I listened to an 84(!) part lecture series by Arnold Weinstein on the classics of American literature, courtesy of The Teaching Company and my local library. And I resolved to read or listen to as many of the works discussed as I could.

This is probably a sad commentary on my life but that whole thing was one of the more pleasant experiences I've had. I read or listened to Irving; renewed my cursory acquaintance with Emerson; learned new things about Poe; hit some of Twain's and Melville's work that I had missed; dove into Fitzgerald and Faulkner; read the great plays by Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller; discovered "new" writers like Charlotte Perkins Gilman, etc.

Say what you want about the USA, but this country has produced some kickass writers.

Over the next few weeks, as things heat up in WV and I'm going to be spread kind of thin, this blog is going to focus on an early and hugely influential current in American literature, with a special focus on the work of one writer who is difficult to classify.

More on that to come.

I'M GETTING TIRED OF THIS DRAMA-OF-THE-WEEK GARBAGE from Washington, and from the leadership of the US House in particular. Here's a look at what the latest mess (the sequester thingie) would look like.

THE UBER MAMA OF MODERN MAMMALS, including us, was a bit of a rat.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED