How much longer?

Ken Ward had a great post in Coal Tattoo today, which is the sixth anniversary of Massey Energy's Aracoma mine fire which killed miners Don Bragg and Elvis Hatfield. Nobody far up the corporate ladder was prosecuted for those deaths, although MSHA did level record fines (at the time) against the company.

Just think: if justice would have truly been done then--and if the big dogs at Massey were justly served--there's a good chance those 29 miners killed at Upper Big Branch might be alive. Ward quotes lawyer Bruce Stanley, who represented the families of Bragg and Hatfield:

Sadly, aggressive prosecution against upper management in the Aracoma case might have spared us the horror of UBB. We’ll never know, of course. But we certainly hope that the lesson of making deals with the devil has been learned, that the criminal investigation makes its way into the boardroom as well as the guard shack, and that Alpha chooses a different path than its predecessor.

This time around, at least, federal prosecutors haven't ruled out additional prosecutions.

I don't mean to get too apocalyptic,or too vengeful, but I can't help thinking of the verse from the Book of Revelations where the martyred saints cry out to God, asking how much longer justice would be delayed.

Circular reasoning

I've just started writing about Shakespeare here and hope to eventually go on a Hamlet bender, but first here's a random thought on great literature: it's impossible to read a work of it the first time. That is to say, in order to read one--especially if it is dense and rich--you have to have already read it. At least once.

That may sound strange, but I'll explain. I remember trying to read things like Hamlet and Dante's Inferno as far back as high school. But I didn't get much of it. If someone would have asked at the time what I was reading, I'd have to say with Hamlet, "Words, words, words."

Even things like William Blake's poetry, which seem deceptively simple at first, take a lot of work to really get.

I've found that really difficult (but good) works demand more than one effort and often require background reading before you can really get anything out of them. I'm not ashamed to say I've cracked open some Cliff Notes or the equivalent on more than one occasion just to get my bearings. There's a whole lot you miss the first time through.

I think it took me at least three or four assaults on The Iliad to really begin to get it. Probably more with Dante. Not that I think I've really mastered either. A lot of Shakespeare is like that. While you always get more if you go back, some are easier to get the gist of than others: Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, and Julius Caesar might be examples. Others, like Lear and Hamlet take more work. But I'd say it's worth the effort.

SIZING UP THE MOMENT (and the Obama administration) is the theme of Krugman's latest.

COAL TO LIQUIDS? The WV Affiliated Construction Trades Foundation raises some serious questions about a proposed plant to turn coal into liquid fuels.

FOUR YEARS AGO TODAY. Also from Coal Tattoo, this post looks back on the fourth anniversary of the Aracoma mine fire.

THE BIGGEST LOSER? Here's a look at some loopy weight loss ideas.

ANIMAL ANTI-FREEZE. This article looks at how some humble creatures deal with winter.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Theory wars

The Greek god Hermes, presumably the patron of hermeneutics. Image courtesy of wikipedia.

El Cabrero did not realize it at the time, but apparently a tempest raged in academic teacups in the 1980s and 1990s about literary theory of all things. It even had political overtones, as long as you strip the word "political" of most practical meanings.

And, while partisans marched on the English department, the right wing was taking over the country. Nice job, guys.

Anyhow, for a hoot I went on a jag of reading about literary theory a few years back. Aside from traditional, Marxist, and Freudian schools of interpretation, there was all kinds of wild stuff. There was structuralism, post-structuralism, post-modernism, semiotics, deconstructionism, post-colonial criticism, identity-based theories, cultural studies, hermeneutics and more. I even tried reading a little Derrida.

It was kind of fun, as long as you treated it like science fiction.

Some "texts" were found guilty of things like logo-centrism and, God forbid, phallo-logo-centrism. It is a truth universally acknowledged that when people talk about works of literature as texts, the better part of valor is to retreat immediately.

I think it worked like this. Late at night the literary police would pound on the door of a Jane Austen novel. The suspect would be interrogated and tortured until its author was convicted of not being an anti-imperialist revolutionary.

Well, no $%*#. I don't think there were any anti-imperialist training camps open to English women circa 1815.

Anyhow, I found the world of literary theory a nice place to visit but no place to stay. The stories, however remain.

I PREFER COFFEE TO TEA, CONTINUED. Here's an analysis of the astroturf tea party tendency.

UNEMPLOYMENT. Some are hit harder than others these days.

INEXCUSABLE. Here's the latest court decision on the 2006 Aracoma mine fire which resulted in two fatalities at this Massey Energy subsidiary.

CELEBRATE (NEANDERTHAL) DIVERSITY. There may have been several sub-groups of them.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Bounce back

Japanese Daruma doll. Image courtesy of wikipedia.

Lately, the theme at Goat Rope has been Buddhist lore, although you will also find links and comments about current events.

For the last week or so, the focus has been on the legendary figure of Bodhidharma or Daruma, the monk who is credited with bringing the Zen tradition from India to China. He is also associated with the founding of the martial arts of Shaolin kung fu and karate.

If you're familiar with the legends about this person (see previous posts), it's clear that he's a pretty formidable character and perhaps not someone you would ordinarily invite to a party or to Thanksgiving dinner.

It is a somewhat surprising fact of cultural history that the figure (literally) of Daruma would occupy a central place in Japanese popular culture, but there you have it. This wild monk has become a beloved figure not just in works of high arts, such as calligraphy, painting and sculpture, but as a toy, spinning top, fortune telling device, good luck charm, as a figure on kites, etc.

It is a common custom for someone who wants something to happen to buy a little Daruma doll like the one pictured above and color in one eye when trying to accomplish something. Once it happens, the other eye is colored it.

One common figure is the okiagari Daruma, a little egg-shaped figure with a weight in the bottom. When you push him over, he bounces right back, a good symbol of the Buddhist virtue of equanimity. There's a popular Japanese saying that expresses the idea behind it: "seven falls, eight rises." (That's pretty much how judo is learned, by the way.)

In other words, one good way of responding to adversity is to keep on getting up.

That's kinda Zen.

RECESSION ON THE MIND. Here's an item on the psychological effects of hard times.

A GREEN STIMULUS might look like this.

ARACOMA MINE FIRE CASE. The widows of two miners who died at the Aracoma mine fire in Logan County WV in 2006 have opposed a plea deal which would keep prosecutors from taking the case higher up the Massey Energy corporate ladder.

ET, PHONE HOME. Here are the best bets for extraterrestrial life in our solar system.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Cositas

Imaginitive drawing of the long since destroyed temple of Zeus at Olympia. Image courtesy of wikipedia.

El Cabrero has been so busy slacking and blogging about books for the last several days that current events and snarky comments about the same have been sadly neglected.

One more book for the road though: Tom Stone's Zeus: A Journey Through Greece in the Footsteps of a God was a lot of fun. I'm a big fan of the Hairy Thunderer and the whole Olympian family and this book scratched that itch.

(It's a bit ironic that many people have seen some kind of moral progress in the triumph of monotheistic religions over polytheism. At times I must admit that the evidence for this seems underwhelming...)

Anyhow, aside from the usual news fare of carnage and collapse, here are some items that caught my eye in the last week or so:

RECORD FINE FOR MINE FATALITY. From the Dec. 24 Charleston Gazette, Aracoma Coal Co., a subsidiary of Massey Energy, admitted criminal safety violations in a fire in which two miners, Don Bragg and Ellery Hatfield, died in 2006. The company pleaded guilty to 10 criminal charges, including one felony. The company must pay a record $2.5 million in criminal fines and an additional $1.7 million in civil fines.

WAL-MART COUGHS IT UP FOR WORKERS' UNPAID WAGES. Far be it from me to take joy in the misfortunes of others, but this is freakin' awesome!

SIGNS OF THE TIMES, PART ONE. Last week, an AP story reported that a growing number of Americans have been giving up their cats and dogs as the economy tanks. Yesterday's Gazette reported that both pets and farm animals have been abandoned at an increasing rate in West Virginia.

SIGNS OF THE TIMES, PART TWO. On a little less grim note, more people are using repair shops to fix old items rather than buy new ones as money gets tighter.

One thing that struck me on a trip to Mexico last summer was the vast number of businesses there that fix up all the things that people here just throw away. It was another reminder of how wasteful we are.

DEMOGRAPHIC ODDITY. At a time when adults in industrialized countries have grown taller, the average height of African-American women has been declining, beginning with those born in the 1960s. The effect is most pronounced in women with low and median incomes, while those with higher incomes have actually grown taller.

ONE MORE THING. Happy New Year and don't drink and drive!

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Cultures of honor

Stewpot Rooster was always ready to defend his honor.

Lately Goat Rope is looking at how cultural factors can shape people's attitudes towards violence. As noted previously, in societies where the good things of life are scarce and easily stolen, people often develop attitudes that support the use or threat of violence to defend goods, status and respect.

Social scientists refer to such societies as "cultures of honor," but that term may require a little unpacking. The term honor, after all, has many meanings. In this case, we are not referring to honor in terms of moral rectitude or virtue such as Samuel Johnson did in his dictionary. Johnson defined honor as "nobility of soul, magnanimity, and a scorn of meanness."

Instead, as Richard Nisbett and Dov Cohen argue in Culture of Honor: The Psychology of Violence in the South, the term refers to societies in which

The individual is prepared to protect his reputation--for probity or strength or both--by resort to violence. Such cultures seem to be particularly likely to develop where (1) the individual is at economic risk from his fellows and (2) the state is weak or nonexistent and thus cannot prevent or punish theft of property.

Think Wild West, prisons, rough city neighborhoods or schools, isolated but dangerous rural areas, herding societies, etc. Cultures (and subcultures) of honor have developed in many parts of the world where similar conditions prevail. And once a culture acquires certain traits, they can often endure long after the conditions that engendered them have changed.

ON A RELATED NOTE, here's a article about the influence of war on human evolution.

WHAT HE SAID. Here's Gazette columnist and economics professor John David writing in support of the Employee Free Choice Act.

HUNGRY PLANET. From the New Yorker, this is an interesting take on the global food crisis that takes a swipe or two at market fundamentalism.

SHINY HAPPY PEOPLE don't watch a whole lot of television.

FAILED CHARM OFFENSIVE. Here's what Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship had to say about the recent settlement of a lawsuit by the widows of the Aracoma mine fire.

WOOLY MAMMOTHS, ANYONE? Scientists are talking seriously about cooking one up.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: MAMMOTH

Chips and blocks

Roosters are not generally known for their conflict resolution skills.

Lately, Goat Rope has been exploring the cultural influences that shape how different people tend to think about violence and fighting.

My own family has deep roots in the gizzard of Appalachia. This is a nice place, but some of us around here descend from long lines of...shall we say...spirited Scotch-Irish people and even more spirited Celts. Some of the really crazy ones were on my father's side.

Those people were interesting, fun and colorful characters. They could be extremely generous and very gracious hosts and could really turn a phrase (provided you didn't mind some artful profanity). But many of them had what we might call a liberal attitude about scrapping when provoked.

There was even a saying in one branch of my family that people would say when someone displayed a lack of courage or spirit: "Where's your fightin' Gillespie?"

I wonder about the force of tradition and heredity. I am generally speaking a peaceful person. My day job consists of working for the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organization tolerant enough to hire me and even let me do this blog. I've spent a lot of time working on various ways of non-violently resolving conflict.

However, I've spent decades studying and practicing the fighting arts and would do it all the time if I could get away with it, bad knees and all. I love a good tussle, although generally of the non-physical variety.

My daughter (La Cabrita), a Ph. D. student in psychology, observed that I seemed prouder of her when she recently defeated a more advanced opponent at a karate tournament than for anything else she'd done. What can I say?--her kicks were awesome! My son (El Cabrito) could relate similar stories.

When they were little kids, La Cabrita out of the blue kicked El Cabrito across the room with a picture perfect side thrust kick. I am embarrassed to say that the first words that escaped my lips were "Good kick!"

That was something my great grandfather might have said...

Anyhow, I've recently read some interesting social science research on that might explain how some cultures (such as my own) got to be that way. As I've frequently argued, those who want to make the world less violent would do well to understand the things that contribute to violence. About which more tomorrow.

DADDY, WHAT'S A TRAIN? was a Utah Phillips song my kids enjoyed when they were little (and weren't kicking each other). On that note, here is an interesting take on the auto bailout currently being discussed and a call for investments in mass transit.

UNCONVENTIONAL WISDOM on taxes and economic growth here.

ARACOMA. Widows of two men killed in the Massey Energy mine fire in 2006 settled their suit yesterday.

GRATUITOUS ANIMAL VIDEOS here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Hill people

Note to email subscribers: I hit the wrong button and accidentally published an earlier draft that may have wound up in your mailbox. My bad!

Several years ago, a friend loaned me a copy of James Webb's Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America. El Cabrero is himself a member of that bellicose tribe, as are many of my fellow Appalachians.

(This was before Webb launched his political career and I remember thinking at the time that I kind of liked this guy--too bad he was a Reaganite. That issue has since been resolved.)

While I am normally averse to ethnic generalizations, our people do have a pretty long and deep combative heritage. After all, the Roman emperor Hadrian built his wall to keep our kind out--and I can't say I blame him all that much.

Looking back at my own family, it seems like I had ancestors in every major American war going back to the Revolution (generally although not always on the side of the United States). They probably invented some of their own as well.

When I came of age, I felt the tug of that tradition. The main reason I didn't enlist was that this was the beginning of the Reagan era and I didn't think that killing poor Latin American workers and farmers in the interests of the wealthy--a realistic possibility at the time--was just or legitimate.

I had to get my hillbilly ya yas out in a different way. But they didn't go away.

More along this line to come...

SIGNS OF THE TIMES. It's no surprise that bankruptcies are on the way up.

THEN AND NOW. Here's a look at the Great Depression and some lessons from it that could apply now.

THIS COULD GET INTERESTING. From the Charleston Gazette:

The U.S. Supreme Court decided Friday to hear an appeal of whether West Virginia Supreme Court Justice Brent Benjamin should have stepped aside in a case involving Massey Energy, after Massey's chief executive spent millions of dollars to unseat Benjamin's opponent in the 2004 election.

As sheer random chance would have it, Benjamin tends to rule in Massey's favor. In an editorial last week, the NY Times had this to say about tainted justice. Here's hoping the court ends this disgraceful fiasco.

MEANWHILE BACK AT THE RANCH, here's the latest on the lawsuit filed by the widows of the 2006 Massey Aracoma mine fire.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Being there

In yesterday's post, I mentioned that one of the wisest single sentences of philosophy I have ever found came from the ancient Stoic Epictetus. It simply said,

Some things are in our control and others not.

When sufficiently unpacked, I believe that little nugget has profound personal and political (in the broad sense) implications. Think how much stress and anxiety we suffer--with all the attendant health implications--by obsessing about things not in our control.

Jesus, who knew a thing or two about a thing or two, made the same point in the Sermon on the Mount:

Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature?

One of the saddest consequences of doing this is that while we're absorbed in worrying about things we can't effect we're probably missing out on a whole bunch of things we really can. This is true at a social as well as individual level.

Being focused on something we don't immediately control, even if it's a laudable goal, takes us away from where we are here and now, where we might actually be able to seize opportunities and avoid threats.

As the saying goes, you must be present to win.

ENERGY will be one of the biggest challenges for the foreseeable future. Here's a look at the problems and the options.

CORNOGRAPHY. It's what's for dinner.

CLIMATE CHANGE. Here's an item from Time about what the public doesn't yet realize about it.

MINE SAFETY. Here's the latest on the Aracoma mine fire case.

OH THE WATER. Undersea life is richer and stranger than many scientists imagined. Here's hoping it lasts.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Philosophy in one sentence

Roman Emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius.

El Cabrero has been pondering the role of luck and chance in human affairs lately. This is an interesting time to do it, since the goddess Fortuna has been cranking her wheel with unusual velocity these days. Some go up and some go down.

From ancient times, people have grappled with how to live in a world where unpredictable (for us at the time anyway) things can happen at any time. Many have turned to different kinds of divination for clues. Others chalk it off to the inscrutable providence of God, whose ways are not our ways nor are his thoughts our thoughts, to paraphrase Isaiah.

Another way people have dealt with uncertainty is through philosophy. Of the many schools of ancient thought, I've always had a soft spot for the Stoics, a Hellenistic vision of the world that became popular in imperial Rome. Stoicism was all about living a rational life in accordance with the nature of things and accepting external events as they come.

Interestingly, two of its greatest exponents were at opposite extremes of the social scale. Epictetus (c. 55-135) was a slave, while Marcus Aurelius (121-180) was one of the last truly great Roman emperors.

Stoicism was as much a kind of self-help or ancient cognitive therapy as it was an intellectual tradition. It has some features in common with other wisdom traditions such as Buddhism or Taoism.

If I had to come up with one of the most useful single sentences I've encountered in studying philosophy, it would probably be one from the Enchiridion of Epictetus. It simply says,

Some things are in our control and others not.

GOING GREEN. More retail businesses are going green.

THINK BIG. Here's economist Jeffrey Sachs with suggestions for the next administration.

ONE TO WATCH. The lawsuit filed by widows of Massey Energy's Aracoma mine fire has begun.

REMEMBER THE TROOPS WE'RE SUPPOSED TO SUPPORT? The Charleston Gazette reports:

More than half of all West Virginia soldiers who live in the state's most rural counties and recently served in Iraq and Afghanistan show signs of post-traumatic stress disorder or depression, according to a recent analysis of data from a survey of the state's war veterans.

About 56 percent of returning soldiers from West Virginia's rural counties suffer from mental health problems compared to 32 percent who live in urban areas, and 34 percent residing at out-of-state military bases.

TUG OF WAR. A new theory of mental disorders suggests that competition between parental genes may be a contributing factor.

I WAS NOT AWARE OF THAT. Did you know that snakebites kill 20,000 people a year in the developing world?

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: OCCLUDED