Not to worry

NPR had a feature on the website today about the importance of not stressing out about things.

According to some of our good friends on the far right, here are a few more things not to worry about:

*Unemployment. John Boehner says unemployed people are just lazy.

*Racism. Bill O'Reilly said last month that white privilege doesn't exist. A rich white guy would know, right? and...

*Climate change. The American Spectator says it's "A false alert."

And here's a bonus item: a WV radio personality says poverty isn't really a problem because lots of people have cars, video games and air conditioning.

Now all that is a relief. I feel better already.

Full load

A lot of interesting items have caught my eye recently. First, El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia is, according to a Gallup poll, officially the most stressed state. Hawaii was the least. Maybe they ought to send us to Hawaii for a while and see how that works.

ONE POSSIBLY STRESSED WEST VIRGINIAN is a Republican legislator who suggested elementary kids should have to work for their meals, the poor ones anyway. Stories about the debate on the Feed to Achieve Act, when the comments took place have shown up on the Huffington Post and a Washington Post blog.


Here's what he said during the debate: "If they miss a lunch or they miss a meal they might not, in that class that afternoon, learn to add, they may not learn to diagram a sentence, but they'll learn a more important lesson."

I'm not sure what that lesson might be. 

AT LEAST OUR LEGISLATURE DIDN'T DO THIS. According to the Post's Wonkblog, Montana may have blown its chance to expand Medicaid because one confused legislator cast an unintentional vote. Doh!

HAIRY THUNDERER OR COSMIC MUFFIN? Another study suggests that people who believe in a punitive God are more likely to have emotional problems. And, I would surmise, to kill people in the name of that God.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Good zombies

El Cabrero is a sucker for clever strategies. I am struck with amazement and often a little jealousy whenever I hear about people responding to injustices in creative ways.

I had that feeling again when a friend sent me this item, which describes a funny response to something pretty unfunny, to wit a hate group.

And not just any hate group but the Westboro Baptist Church, a gay bashing litigious group that even seems to give hate groups a bad name. When the group planned an action at a military base (they often target military funerals the same way they do mine disasters as examples of God's wrath for America's alleged toleration of homosexuality), local organizers decided to zombie the group.

According to this Huffington Post item, around 300 people showed up in zombie garb, far outnumbering the approximately eight members of the hate group.

Ordinarily, I think that the Westboro groups is so obnoxious that there is no great need to counter them.  I mean, they even embarrass homophobes. But if you're going to do respond, what better way than to zombie the hell out of them?

GRIN AND BEAR IT. Really.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Goats versus picnic tables

Don't bet on the picnic tables.

WHERE'S THE BEEF? Krugman takes the president to task again here.

TALKING SENSE. This op-ed by some friends of mine talks sense about taxes, budgets and deficits.

JAWING AROUND. A Kentucky coal miner found the jawbone of a 300 million year old shark 700 feet underground.

AUTHOR CHRIS HEDGES spoke in Charleston WV this weekend about the decline of liberal institutions.

UNION SUPPORTERS rallied at the state capitol Sunday as well. El Cabrero was on the way when the fan belt died in my old car.

BOUNCE BACK from stress if you want to live to be 100

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Demand and control

Edith is stressing out the turkeys.

El Cabrero has been blogging off and on about how social status affects health and longevity. As mentioned previously, there's a really clear social gradient that seems to work all up and down the scale.

Those in the highest status positions are healthier and live longer than those with "only" high status positions, who live longer than those with moderate social status positions, and so on.

One key factor in all this, according to British epidemiologist Michael Marmot, is having a sense of autonomy and control over life and work. This tends to increase as you climb the ladder and decreases as you descend it. In The Status Syndrome, Marmot cites research that finds that high demand/low control work situations are particularly toxic.

This problem isn't limited to the workplace however. A typical low income person in the US can face control/autonomy issues all the time, i.e. by living in an unsafe neighborhood and/or in bad housing; facing economic insecurity, from juggling bills to dealing with evictions or foreclosures; and dealing with conflicts with landlords, neighbors, bill collectors, etc. These kinds of experience trigger the body's stress reaction and change body chemistry and hormone production.

And here we face an evolutionary lag. Our bodies developed the stress response (or fight or flight syndrome) to deal with short term dangers and threats. If the stress is chronic, this can trigger all kinds of problems, ranging from heart disease to mental disorders such as depression...all of which explains why diseases and early mortality are as unequally distributed as wealth and status, albeit in the other direction.

PUBLIC OPTION. Here's the latest on health care reform in the Senate.

OUCH. The US economy has lost over 5 percent of jobs since Dec. 2007. The numbers are much higher in some areas than others.

KING SOLOMON DON'T LIVE 'ROUND HERE. This analysis from the Charleston Daily Mail talks about how hard it will be to find "balance" in current coal controversies.

THE LATEST TWIST in the Megan Williams saga is here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

That's just the stress talking

Workplace stress is probably not a major issue for this green heron.

Goat Rope has been running an off and on series lately about the links between social status health. The short version is that there is a big connection between the two and that people's health tends to be better the higher up the social ladder they are.

It's not just that people who are poor and/or have relatively low social standing get sicker and die younger, although that is true as far as it goes. Rather, it's like a social gradient that works all the way up or down. People who have very high status are healthier than people who just have high status. And so it goes.

British epidemiologist Michael Marmot, who has spent decades studying this, identifies some key components that might explain the gradient. One big one has to do with autonomy and a sense of control. This is especially true in the workplace.

While most people on the job talk about stress, research indicates that not all stresses are created equal. As Marmot puts it,

Ask more successful people if they are stressed at work and they will tell you, in slightly macho fashion, about how many e-mails they receive a day, how much in demand they are, how many different tasks await their attention, about their deadlines. If you ask about stress, they are unlikely to tell you that work is monotonous, boring, soul-destroying; that they die a little when they come to work each day because their work touches no part of them that is them. But this is the reality of many jobs; and the lower the status, the more likely that is to be so. Ask the people with all the e-mails which job they would rather be doing, the high-status job with continuous demands, and the company BMW and the firm's credit card, or the soul-destroying job with tasks that ask for little use of skills, that are completely determined by others, and, oh yes, that offer little in the way of self-fulfillment, financial rewards, or status enhancement. There are not too many high-status people who would swap their "stressed" place in the boardroom for a place on the production line.

More on that to come.

HEALTH CARE REFORM. A new poll shows strong support for a public option.

TWO CENTS MORE. Here's economist Dean Baker on the same.

CHILD WELFARE. El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia doesn't come out too well in this report.

MEGAN WILLIAMS CASE. There's been another strange turn of events.

URGENT GIANT SPIDER UPDATE here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

All shook up

Engraving of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake.

Goat Rope has been running an occasional series lately about how things like inequality and social status affect health and mortality. Brief recap: they do; a lot; all across the board.

Some factors already examined include things like money and material conditions, while others have more to do with one's relative position within a given society. Another key factor is power, as in one's ability to have some control over what life throws at us.

Michael Marmot uses an interesting analogy in The Status Syndrome: How Social Standing Affects our Health and Longevity,

Imagine that if you were caught in an earthquake you could simply turn it off. Earthquakes might, then, be part of life's rich tapestry instead of being an uncontrollable stress. Imagine further that your ability to turn it off depended on your place in the social hierarchy. High-status people could turn it off at will; low-status people could not affect it at all; and there were gradations of power over earthquakes from top to bottom of the social ladder. If stress led to illness, such differences in power could have a profound affect on the health gradient. Stress does, and differences in power do.

We've recently been reminded of the terrible power that real earthquakes have over people in areas prone to them. But metaphorical earthquakes, in the form of shocks over which we have little control and which we can't predict, happen all the time and people at the lower end of the money/status/power spectrum are the hardest hit.

More on this to come.

JOBS, JOBS, JOBS. Here are two items highlighting the need for action to create employment and here is something on the Obama administration's likely response.

PUBLIC OPTION. The administration has been quietly trying to build support for it, according to this McClatchy report.

SCORE A POINT FOR ZEN. Sometimes nonsense or things that defy rational expectations can jog creative thinking. El Cabrero feels vindicated.

URGENT T REX COUSIN UPDATE here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Game on

A street action in favor of health care reform in Huntington, WV this Saturday.

Goat Rope is back in regular operating mode this week following a two week furlough. Thanks to people for the comments and emails over the last stretch about the favorite books series. I haven't responded yet as I wasn't supposed to have access to email and such during those two weeks.

One thing I didn't do was take a break from the struggle over health care reform. In WV as around the country there have been many town hall meetings and public events and actions.

This season may well be remembered as Whackadoodle Summer as astroturf crowds tried to shout down public meetings and bizarre conspiracy theories about the diabolical idea of covering all Americans grew like mushrooms after a summer rain.

It all kinda reminded me of a famous essay by historian Richard Hofstadter titled The Paranoid Style in American Politics, which is alive and well.

All of which is to say, if want to have something to say when your grandkids ask you what you did in the big fight over health care, now would be the time to speak out, write letters, contact your congressional delegation, participate in forums and actions and all that.

BULL COOKIES. Here's a bull cookie-free op-ed on health care by one of the most progressive members of the WV legislature.

THE GHOST OF REAGAN still haunts the land.

THIS IS YOUR BRAIN under stress.

VODKA AND GOALS don't mix very well.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A bridge of silver

This picture has nothing to do with the topic at hand.

You can get good advice in brief and even random conversations sometimes. As I mentioned yesterday, I got some very good advice about dealing with people when I began working in the public library of one of my state's major cities over 20 years ago.

The advice was, in essence, never corner a crazy person. Since then, I've added the following: we're all crazy sometimes. Pushing someone into a literal or metaphorical corner where there's no way out but through you can cause a situation to escalate out of control. I've tried to avoid doing that over the years and it's been pretty useful.

Conversely, providing people with a graceful and face-saving way out of a bad situation can smooth the waters. Possibly one reason the American Civil War ended as civilly as it did (and didn't turn into a decades-long guerrilla war) was the courteous and generous terms offered to Robert E. Lee's army by Grant.

Years after that conversation in a library, I stumbled upon a similar thought in--of all places--Francois Rabelais' (1494-1553) hilarious and bawdy novel Gargantua and Pantagruel. (The book also offers an interesting and amusing menu of toilet paper substitutes, but I'll leave that to the Gentle Reader to discover.)

In that book, the genial giant Gargantua puts it like this:

...according to the true military practice you must never drive your enemy into the straits of despair, because such a plight multiplies his strength and increases his courage; which was cast down and failing before. There is no better aid to safety for men who are beaten and dismayed than to have no hope of safety whatever. How many victories have the conquered wrested from the hands of the victors when the latter have not been satisfied with moderation, but have attempted to make a complete massacre and totally to destroy their enemy, without leaving so much as one alive to convey the news! Always leave every door and road open to your enemies. Make them a bridge of silver, in fact, to help them get away.

LUXURY SHAME. Newsweek reports that some very rich folks are trying to make their consumption a bit less conspicuous in hard times.

STRESSED OUT. The number of Americans feeling that way has increased in recent times according to a psychological survey.

CLEANLINESS IS NEXT TO less severe moral judgments, recent psychological experiments suggest.

ZZZZ. Here's another plug for taking a nap.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Men into pigs

Circe offers the cup in this painting by John William Waterhouse by way of wikipedia. Think before you drink!

The theme at Goat Rope lately is the Odyssey of Homer, along with links and comments about current events. If you like this kind of thing, please click on earlier posts.

After a serious losing streak of one disaster or danger after another, Odysseus and his men get a little bit of a break on the island Aeaea, home of the beautiful nymph Circe.

It gets off to a rocky start though, when she encounters a recon party sent from the ship. When they visit her house, she welcomes them and offers them a meal, while slipping them the proverbial Mickey:

She opened her gleaming doors at once and stepped forth,
inviting them all in, and in they went, all innocence...
She ushered them in to sit on high-backed chairs,
then she mixed them a potion--cheese, barley
and pale honey mulled in Pramnian wine--
but into the brew she stirred her wicked drugs
to wipe from their memories any thought of home.
Once they'd drained the bowls she filled, suddenly
she struck with her want, drove them into her pigsties,
all of them bristling into swine--with grunts,
snouts--even their bodies, yes, and only
the men's minds stayed steadfast as before.
So off they went to their pens, sobbing, squealing
as Circe flung them acorns, cornel nuts and mast,
common fodder for hogs that root and roll in mud.

No doubt many female readers of this story over the ages probably wouldn't consider this to be much of a feat...

One man, Eurylochus, escapes and warns Odysseus, who heads in with his sword. This time, he gets a little help. The god Hermes warns him to take the herb moly with him as an antidote to her spells. When she brandishes her wand, he is to threaten with his sword. When she offers to share her bed, he must make her swear by the River Styx--the sacred oath of the gods--that she will not hurt him and will turn his men back into humans.

That's pretty much the way it goes down. After that, she tells him,

'Royal son of Laertes, Odysseus, man of action,
no more tears now, calm these tides of sorrow.
Well I know what pains you bore on the swarming sea,
what punishment you endured from hostile men on land.
But come now, eat your food and drink your wine
till the same courage fills your chests, now as then,
when you first set sail from native land, from rocky Ithaca
Now you are burnt-out husks, your spirits haggard, sere,
always brooding over your wanderings long and hard,
your hearts never lifting with any joy--
you suffered far too much.'

So begins a year of R&R: great food and wine, comfort and baths, not to mention daily dalliance with a goddess. Not a bad gig, all things considered.

Holy male fantasy, Batman!

This part of the story can be interpreted lots of ways. Peter Meineck, who has produced some excellent lectures on the classics for The Modern Scholar, suggests that at this point Odysseus needs to get in touch with the feminine after years of male violence. Staying for a year also means getting grounded and connected again to the cycle of the seasons.

Another way of looking at it is to note that it doesn't take much for Odysseus to forget all about his homecoming and his wife and child who have been waiting about 11 years by now. As Jonathan Shay notes in Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming, many of the veterans he worked with

went through periods during the first decade after returning form Vietnam when they apparently did seek the solace that Circe specifically offers in wine, good food, and great sex.

Often, however, fantasy and reality don't quite match and the result is disappointment and disillusionment:

A real-world woman, in America, meeting a haggard combat veteran, might have been as understanding as Circe, but unlike Circe had no staff of serving women, had to consider how to pay to keep up the household, had a life with her own family and friends apart from the veteran.

At any rate, it sure beats getting eaten by a cyclops...

SEVEN YEARS AGO. I don't know about you, Gentle Reader, but the anniversary of 9/11 reminds me of the victims but also makes me wonder where we'd be now if the US had pursued a wiser course in its wake.

JOBS VS ENVIRONMENT? Not really. Investing green technology and infrastructure could create 2 million jobs, according to a new report.

A NEW LOOK AT RELIGION. Here's an interesting take on religion based on a study by two anthropologists studying religious behavior and communication. Short version: it tends to promote social cooperation and childlike acceptance of validity claims.

STRESS. A Cambridge (UK) study found the West Virginians had the highest percentage of stressed out people in the nation.

DID YOU TAKE YOUR MORALITY PILL TODAY? A British psychiatrist has proposed the use of morality-enhancing medication.

DOGS AND CATS LIVING TOGETHER--MASS HYSTERIA. Israeli researchers have been studying how well cats and dogs get along when introduced in the same home. Each animal has a different set of body signals but some can learn to "read" the other's. I could have told y'all that.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED