Trouble in the heartland

One of my favorite Bruce Springsteen songs, which I nominated here as an alternative state song for West Virginia, opens with the lines "Lights out tonight/trouble in the heartland." Here's another look at the trouble in the coalfield part of the heartland by way of WV Public Broadcasting and the Washington Post. Sad to say, I think they got it right.

BILL O'REILLY SAYS THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS WHITE PRIVILEGE. Charles Blow schools him here.

RANDOM LINK OF THE DAY. Here's a look at Freemasonry today by way of NPR.

A new state song

Readers of Goat Rope may recall that El Cabrero has launched an unofficial campaign to change the state motto of WV from "Mountaineers are always free" to "You can't make this **** up." I haven't gotten it on the state seal yet, but I'm told these things take time.

Earlier this week, whilst on a daylong road trip, an idea for another state song came to mind. Our main one is one I like, "The West Virginia Hills." Recently, "Take Me Home, Country Roads" as popularized by John Denver, gained semi-official status as well. Aside from the fact that the scenery it describes in the first verse applies mainly to Virginia, I'm not too crazy about that one.

My more serious nominee for at least semi-official song status seems particularly fitting when you consider our recent and more distant past, with things like chemical spills, mine disasters, industrial accidents, exploitation, and poverty. It's Bruce Springsteen's Badlands. Here's the chorus:

Badlands, you gotta live it everyday
Let the broken hearts stand
As the price you've gotta pay
We'll keep pushin' till it's understood
and these badlands start treating us good

I'm still pushing--and so are plenty of my friends and comrades. We haven't quite got there yet.

SPEAKING OF BADLANDS, here's an interesting essay on some and the economy that made them that way.

BAD ECONOMICS. Here's one from Krugman on how we took the wrong path.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Social studies project

Just in time for Labor Day, here's the latest edition of The State of Working West Virginia. This report is the sixth in so many years and the theme this time is From Weirton Steel to Wal-Mart, the former having once been WV's largest employer while the latter, sadly, now holds that distinction. I worked in this with friends from the WV Center on Budget and Policy. The musical soundtrack as got to be Springsteen.

AND ON THAT NOTE, here's Robert Reich on how workers can get a fair shake in today's economy. Yeah, it'll take a lot of work.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Down in Jungleland

Image by way of wikipedia.

I feel like I've been living in Bruce Springsteen-land for the last few weeks. And not in a good way.

Point of clarification: I love his music and I even torture several of his songs on guitar (including Thunder Road, The Ghost of Tom Goad, and Youngstown).

What I'm trying to say is that I've been reliving the kinds of stories he has often sung about. About working people who once had a shot at a decent life in this country before being sold down the river by the Judas economy and our Judas ruling class.

Specifically, I'be been working on what I hope will eventually be a report on The State of Working West Virginia. I've worked on a similar report for the last 6 years, but this one is a little different. It looks back on a period of time in West Virginia when at least those lucky enough to have a job had a pretty decent chance.

Around 35 years ago, believe it or not, WV had a higher median wage than the USA. Its workers also had a greater chance of being union members and were more likely than most workers in this country  to have health insurance and pension benefits.

That didn't last long. Employment in coal mining collapsed in the 1980s, when the REAL war on coal miners happened--and the coal miners lost. That was also the decade of the Reagan (counter) revolution, when manufacturing tanked and we entered the period of globalization. It was also the period of rising conservatism, when the social contract was shredded and the priorities of the US government focused exclusively on making the rich richer.

This was the period in which WV's largest employer switched from Weirton Steel to Wal-Mart. Need I say more?

It's been painful for me to look down that road because I lived through it and hated and fought against every minute of it.I keep hoping it will end but it never does. Even when we win victories for poor and working people, which we have, they all seem threatened by a never ending onslaught.

Maybe that's why when I watch things like the series The Walking Dead, about a zombie apocalypse, it just reminds me of today's political world. It's not a horror film--it's just a statement of the facts: the dead (capital) devours the living (labor).

JUST ONE LINK. Here's a good one from the New Yorker about the need to raise the minimum wage--and change this Judas economy.

Best. Expression. Ever.

 Maybe I don't get out much, but, on one of my rare visits to Facebook, an old friend who happens to be an educator describes as really bad day as "like being pecked to death by ducks."

That could be a tired old cliche but it's the first time I've heard it and I'm jealous I didn't come up with that a long time ago.

I mean, think about it. Being pecked to death by ducks would take a really long time. It would probably not be all that bad to start with but would eventually get old and then probably really be bad.

I DON'T USUALLY LIKE DAVID BROOKS COLUMNS HERE, but this one on Springsteen gets a pass. (I wonder if he's figured out the Bruce isn't into that whole right wing thing?)

PATRIOTISM. What is it, really?

IF YOU LIVE IN WV AND WANT TO GET IN ON A GOOD FIGHT, click here and urge Gov. Tomblin to undo cuts in child care for working families.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Darwin on the left

I've been meandering lately though some musings on the relationship between human evolution and social life. Some recent posts have looked at how Darwin's ideas were received and celebrated on the political right. A look at how Darwin was received on the left seems to be in order now.

One lefty contemporary of Darwin's who eagerly received his ideas was none other than Karl Marx, who saw some similarities between the former's ideas his own materialist theory of history. He wrote in a letter to another radical leader that

Darwin's book is very important and serves me as a natural-scientific basis for the class struggle in history.

Marx was also amused to find that Darwin projected the workings of capitalism onto nature:

It is remarkable how Darwin recognizes among beasts and plants his English society with its division of labor, competition, opening-up of new markets, 'inventions,' and the Malthusian 'struggle for existence.'

(Marx had snarky things to say about everybody.)

It seems, though, that Marx believed that once people became human, social relations of labor and interaction (including especially economic relations) were the decisive factor. In the "Theses on Feuerbach," he wrote that

the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations.

His sidekick Friedrich Engels followed suit in viewing humans as uniquely developing through conscious production, which he believed "makes impossible any immediate transference of the laws of life in animal societies to human ones."

This basic denial of human nature was to become a dogma of the communist movement, with disastrous consequences.

RIGHT WING BACKLASH? This writer doesn't think so.

"THE WAR ON ARITHMETIC." Paul Krugman was not impressed with the "Pledge to America."

SIX MONTHS DOWN. Here's a look at what health care reform means, with a special focus on primary care. And here's is coverage of a press conference on the same from the Gazette and WV Public Radio.

A NOD TO THE BOSS. This book excerpt celebrates Bruce Springsteen.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Weekend special: really easy Bruce Springsteen quiz

The Chicken Man in his house.

The staff of Goat Rope ceaselessly works to make this a full service blog. For your weekend diversion, here's a very easy Bruce Springsteen lyrics quiz.

Enjoy--and remember--Real Men and Women don't google this stuff!

1. What happened to the Chicken Man and his house?

2. What, if anything, do the poets 'round here write?

3. With what, exactly, is the highway jammed?

4. Who was checking out the weather?

5. What would it take to satisfy a king?

6. Name something that will pass you by really quickly (unless you're like Bruce).

7. Where will these two lanes take us?

8. What happened way back in the Bible?

9. What was lining Yellow Creek?

10. Why don't Rosalita's mom like him?

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: SOMEWHERE IN THE DARKNESS ON THE EDGE OF TOWN