Left behind in rural America

There is some good news about incomes nationally. For the first time since 2015, US households saw a decent bump in incomes. However, as this Vox item shows, incomes actually went down in rural areas.  As one of the most rural states (the others are Maine, Vermont and Mississippi), the outlook isn't too good for West Virginia. But you already knew that.

Meanwhile, here's an interesting review by a WV-born writer about a certain demographic group that is getting a lot of ink these days.

Untangling a knot

He did it with a sword. "Alexander cuts the Gordian Knot," by Jean-Simon Berthélemy (1743–1811)

When it comes to health and well being, there are a lot of issues to untangle. Obviously one is the lack of health care at all, which is a serious problem in the US and one that is getting worse in the wake of the recession. In yesterday's post, I linked a recent news item about a report that found that 45,000 Americans die prematurely each year because they don't have it.

Obviously, moving towards universal health care is way overdue. But there are some things about health and longevity that go beyond mere health coverage. As I've mentioned in the last several posts, status matters. People in higher social positions enjoy better health and longer lives than people in lower positions.

Typically, people try to explain this in terms of bad habits of people down the status scale, particularly among poor people, but this is missing a major point. According to Michael Marmot, author of The Status Syndrome: How Social Standing Affects our Health and Longevity, two key factors are autonomy and social participation:

...social conditions affect the degree of autonomy and control individuals have and their opportunities for full social engagement. These needs, for control and participation are more adequately met the higher your social position. As a result, health is better.

Conversely,

Lack of social participation and inadequate control over your life, in the sense of not being able to lead the life you want to lead, will lead to chronic stress, which in turn increases risk of a number of diseases, heart disease among them.

Marmot argues that this lack of control and full participation may lead to behaviors that are bad for health in the long term, but those things seem like small potatoes when one is just trying to get by in the short term.

ON THAT NOTE, here's another take on the link between health and social conditions.

RECESSION NATION. The latest Census data shows that the recession has had a major impact on Americans.

MEANWHILE, BACK ON THE PARANOID RANCH. Here's an interview between Bill Moyers and Max Blumenthal about today's rabid right and here's former religious right leader Frank Schaeffer on far right versions of politicized religion.

HOW WE GONNA KEEP HIM DOWN ON THE FARM NOW? Gazette reporter and uberblogger Ken Ward of Coal Tattoo fame was featured on NPR's Living on Earth.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

OLD HABITS ARE HARD TO BREAK

J.G. Trautmann's version of the fall of Troy, courtesy of wikipedia.

Welcome to Goat Rope's ongoing series on the Odyssey of Homer. You'll also find news and links about current events. If you like the classics, click on earlier posts.

As mentioned before, the Odyssey is in part about what it takes for someone who has spent years in warfare--ten in the case of Odysseus--to go home and be fully integrated into peacetime life. Then as now, lots of people never make it home and Odysseus himself is an example of how not to do it.

Imagine for a moment that you have spent that many at a war you didn't particularly want to participate in and it's finally over. Most people would probably picture themselves taking the shortest possible route back home.

Not our boy. When the wind blows his ships to Ismarus, he engages in a gratuitous raid on the Circones, a people who did nothing to provoke the attack. In his own words,

...There I sacked the city,
killed the men, but as for the wives and plunder,
that rich haul we dragged away from the place--
we shared it round so no one, not on my account,
would go deprived of his fair share of the spoils.

To put it mildly, he's stuck in combat mode and clearly not ready for a peaceful homecoming. Not surprisingly, the situation goes south from there. His men get drunk and disorderly:

there was too much wine to swill, too many sheep to slaughter

Soon other Circones rally to support the raided village and drive them off, after Odysseus' men suffer significant casualties.

As Jonathan Shay, author of Odysseus in America, puts it,

...Homer shows us the first way that combat soldiers lose their homecoming, having left the war zone physically--they may simply remain in combat mode, although not necessarily against the original enemy.

Shay knows whereof he speaks, having spent many years working with Vietnam combat veterans traumatized by their experiences. He has found both that the epics of Homer shed light on the experiences of veterans and vice versa. Some of the people he worked with, like Odysseus, have trouble turning off the switch.

While the military sometimes presents itself as a vast vocational school, the skills learned in prolonged combat--such as controlling fear, cunning, skill in using lethal force and weaponry, etc.--are very real and highly specialized--they just sometimes don't transfer well to civilian life.

He quotes the World War I veteran Willard Waller:

Most of the skills that soldiers acquire in their training for war are irrelevant to civilian life...The picture is one of men who struggle very hard to learn certain things and to acquire certain distinctions, and then find that with the end of the war these things completely lose their utility...Digging a fine fox-hole or throwing hand grenades with dexterity, they are entirely valueless...

The boss, who hired and fires him, writes recommendations for him, raises or lowers his pay, and otherwise disposes of his destiny is nothing but a soft civilian. The foreman thinks he is tough...While the veteran was risking his life for his country, the boss and the foremen were having an easy time of it...The veteran cannot help reflecting that a smash of a gun-butt, ore even a well-directed blow at the bridge of the nose...might easily dispose of such a man forever.

Shay gets the last word today:

Homer put first the pirate raid on Ismarus. I take this as a metaphor for all the ways a veteran may lose his homecoming by remaining in combat mode...Everyone knows that war can wreck the body, but repeatedly forget that it can wreck the soul as well. The sacrifice that citizens make when they serve their country's military is not simply the risk of death, dismemberment, disfigurement, and paralysis--as terrible as these realities are. They risk their peace of mind--please hear this familiar phrase, "peace of mind," fresh again in all its richness! They risk losing their capacity to participate in democratic process. They risk losing the sense that human virtues are still possible. These are psychological and moral injuries--war wounds--that are no less of a sacrifice than the sacrifice of the armless, or legless, or sightless veteran. One of my former patients, a combat medic in Vietnam, has said, "Just acknowledge the sacrifice!"

WITH MY MIND ON MY MONEY AND MY MONEY ON MY MIND, I might not play nicely with others. Here's an interesting item by Peter Singer on some recent experiments showing how money affects human interactions. Holy alienation, Batman!

WHAT THE CENSUS DATA DIDN'T SHOW. Here's an item from McClatchy about disturbing economic trends.

SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURS are trying to combin welle doing with doing good.

URGENT GIANT SQUID UPDATE. The largest one ever caught has been described by a scientist as "a giant, gelatinous blob."

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

ENTERTAINING THE CIVILIANS

Athena telling Diomedes to chill out. Image courtesy of wikipedia.

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

It is a fact of life that war has for thousands of years been a kind of entertainment, particularly for those not engaged in it at the time. This is also true when Odysseus finally makes it to his next-to-the-last stop on his lengthy journey home from the Trojan War.

He is hosted, pretty graciously, by the prosperous and peaceful Phaeacians. His hosts even offer games in his honor, although not those involving the fighting arts. As his host the ruler Alcinous put it,

We're hardly world-class boxers or wrestlers, I admit,
but we can race like the wind, we're champion sailors too,
and always dear to our hearts, the feast, the lyre and dance
and changes of fresh clothes, our warm baths and beds.

While they're not much for fighting, they love hearing about it. The blind bard Demodocus (see yesterday's post) enthralls his listeners, although his all-too-realistic songs of the Trojan War cause cause the battle-weary Odysseus to hide his face and cry.

As Jonathan Shay, author of Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming, put it,

The gulf between Odysseus and his civilian hosts is visible in their drastically different responses to the songs of Demodocus. This bard is the genuine article--the Muse whispers the truth of the war at Troy in his ear when he composes his songs. His songs, narrative poems like the Iliad, reduce Odysseus to tears, which he tries to hide. Afterward he proclaims that Demodocus sings with the truth of someone who was there himself. The Phaeacian civilians love these epic poems of war...--along with the harper's dance music and his bedroom farces...It's all the same to them. It's all entertainment. But for Odysseus, the truth-filled stories of the Trojan War open the gates of grief.

The Phaeacians aren't bad people. They just don't get it. Shay uses an example from the present to make his point:

Picture this scene: A Vietnam combat veteran goes to a family wedding some ten years after his service. (Odysseus is ten years out from Troy.) The band plays a Jimi Hendrix piece that reminds him of a dead friend, blindsiding him with emotion. He tries to conceal his tears, but a rich relative notices and says, "Why aren't you over that Vietnam stuff yet?..."

The song of Demodocus causes Odysseus to reveal himself and he finally begins to tell his own tale of the long way home. About which more tomorrow.

SPEAKING OF HOMER, here's an item on the evolutionary psychology of the Iliad and one on its use of humor.

POVERTY DAY. Yesterday the Census Bureau released information on poverty, income and health coverage for 2000. Here's some commentary by Robert Greenstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, along with a link to the Census data and here's an analysis of state data from the WV Center on Budget and Policy.

Short version of the data: poverty didn't change much. There was a small increase in median incomes and a small drop in the number of people without health coverage--BUT, and this is a big but--the numbers don't reflect the effects of the current recession. Also, if 2007 was the peak year of the economic expansion, the health care and poverty numbers are still worse than those of 2000.

AN ECONOMY FOR EVERYBODY? Three out of four Americans think the economy is getting worse. Here are some options for getting there.

MONKEY EMPATHY. Capuchin monkeys enjoy giving to other monkeys. Could it be the monastic influence?

URGENT NEANDERTHAL UPDATE. They might have been smarter than we thought.

MEDICAID. West Virginia's redesigned Medicaid program, called Mountain Health Choices, continues to be controversial. This Gazette article discusses a survey that showed most people in the program don't understand the two-tiered program, which offers a Basic and Enhanced set of benefits. Many people wind up in the basic program, which limits services and prescriptions, by default.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

THE TURN OF A PHRASE

Icon of the Archangel Michael.

This week on Goat Rope, El Cabrero is responding to a challenge from a reader to write about the five things I admire most about Jesus. The hardest part was figuring out where to start.

If this is your first visit, please click on earlier posts.

The fourth thing I'm going to write about is Jesus' way with words. Official Goat Rope verdict: he had one. Big time. Whole libraries have been written on the sayings of Jesus and more could and will be written. I'm going to focus today on his awesome one liners.

My personal favorites include some of his comic visual images, like when he nailed hypocrites who made a show of religion while neglecting simple justice and compassion:

You blind guides, who strain out a gnat and swallow a camel!

And speaking of camels, let's not forget this one:

It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God

.

How about these for cutting through the #$&%:

No one who puts his hand on the plow and looks back is fit for the Kingdom of God.

What goes into your mouth will not defile you, but what comes out of your mouth, that will defile you.

Be wise as serpents and harmless as doves.

To save your life is to lose it; to lose your life is to save it.

Follow me and let the dead bury their dead.

The first shall be last and the last shall be first.

Exalt yourself and you will be humbled; humble yourself and you will be exalted.

I could go on and on but I'm sure the Gentle Reader knows where to find more.

WHERE YOUR TREASURE IS. In light of the new Census report on poverty, health coverage, and incomes, the American Friends Service Committee calls for new priorities:

Congress should redirect the $720 million a day the U.S. is spending on the Iraq war to programs that reduce poverty at home, urged the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), responding to Census Bureau data released today.

“For $720 million, we could provide over 400,000 children with health care, or over a million children with free school lunches,” notes Joyce Miller, the American Friends Service Committee assistant general secretary for justice and human rights. “America’s shameful poverty rate should lead everyone to ask ourselves how we want to spend our tax dollars — on war or on education, health care, job training, affordable housing, and the like.”

CONSIDER THE LILIES. Did you ever want your own Spiderman suit? As in a real one? A group of Italian scientists say nanotechnology could make it happen.

MORE ON THE CAMEL/NEEDLE'S EYE THING. CEOs of major U.S. companies made more in a day than the average worker in a year.

MORE ON THE WHERE YOUR TREASURE IS THING. Here's an interesting essay by David Korten on rethinking the meaning of wealth in terms of life.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

THE WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN

A while back, El Cabrero was challenged by a Goat Rope reader to write about five things I most admire about Jesus. This is the third installation. If this is your first visit, please click on the earlier posts.

The third thing I'm going to highlight is what could be called Jesus' program. He called it the Kingdom (Greek: basileia) of God. As the Gospel of Mark puts it,

Now after that John was put in prison, Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God, and saying, The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel.

Then as now, there was all kinds of debate on what the term meant. For John the Baptist and many others before and after, it was God's coming apocalyptic judgment of the world, a cataclysmic divine intervention in history. It seems that for Jesus, the Kingdom had a present as well as future aspect. At least in part, it was something not just to wait for but to do. The Kingdom is a verb...

As John Dominic Crossan wrote,

In the beginning was the performance; not the word alone, not the deed alone, but both, each indelibly marked with the other forever.

For Jesus, the Kingdom meant the rule of the God of justice and compassion. It was the opposite of the kingdom or empire of men which was based on state violence, political oppression, economic exploitation, and religiously sanctioned injustice.

In the reign of God, the poor were blessed and the rich were cursed (Luke, ch. 6); the first were last and the last were first; women, children, the unclean, the sick, the outcasts and sinners were welcome, while the self-righteous were self-excluded. Equality replaced hierarchy and service/mutual aid replaced domination.

Jesus taught a subversive wisdom that turned the world upside down. But it wasn't all teaching. Jesus and his followers, together and in pairs, would go from village to village in Galilee proclaiming and enacting the kingdom.

What did it look like? People ate together, sharing whatever they had. The hungry were fed. The sick, who were often considered to be ritually unclean and isolated, were healed. Whatever that meant physically, it meant they were once again included in the life of the community. Those believed to be possessed with evil spirits were exorcised and restored to mental health.

As Marcus Borg puts it,

...the kingdom of God referred to what life would be like on earth if God were king and the kingdoms of the world, the domination systems of the world, were not.

And it involved acting as if that were already the case.

Obviously, this could be dangerous even if we didn't know the rest of the story. It would be dangerous today. Jesus warned his disciples, "If you follow me, you carry a cross."

HUNGERING AND THIRSTING FOR WHAT IS RIGHT. Here's a piece on the right to organize by economist Dean Baker, who recently visited El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia.

GOOD NEWS TO THE POOR. There actually was a little in WV. When the Census Bureau released its annual report on poverty, income, and health coverage, it reported that the poverty rate here dropped. El Cabrero is still going through the data but it looks like poverty fell in WV at more than twice the rate than it did for the nation as a whole--.7 percent compared with .3 percent.

We're still very poor compared to the rest of the country and have lots of problems and work to do, but ingratitude is a sin. We just need to build on this progress in the future. And this is another reminder that the Chicken Littles of WV, who have made a business of saying that everything is all bad here all the time, are off. We are the Little Engine that Could.

COUNT THE COST. But when you look at what Census figures say about the nation as a whole, it's easy to see we have major problems. The slight drop in poverty at the national level still leaves us below where we were in 2001. There was a slight increase in median household income, although wages of year round individual workers actually declined. The big news is the jump in the number and percentage of the uninsured, which went up 5 percent to 47 million Americans or 12.3 percent. The number of uninsured children went up from 8 to 8.7 million or from 10. to 11.7 percent of all children.

Here's a summary statement from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

And by the way, the $720 million we are spending (or will spend) every day of the Iraq war would go a long way towards dealing with some of these problems.

WOE UNTO YOU in the Bush administration who want to make it harder for children to receive coverage from the Children's Health Insurance Program.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO (REAL) CONSERVATISM?

This rooster was a stalwart conservative (until the possum got him).

Lately El Cabrero has been thinking about conservatism.

One of the weird things for me about living through the Bush era (or trying to) is the realization (a.) that I'm pretty conservative in several ways and that (b.) the right wing extremism and utopianism we've been force-fed the last six years is a perversion of that tradition.

In literature, politics, education religion, and even hobbies, I draw heavily on ancient sources and resources. I don't like waste and my first instinct is to repair something old rather than replace it with something new. I don't equate change with improvement.

I'm not a Calvinist, but no one has ever accused me of having an overly optimistic view of humanity or the possibilities of either political or personal perfectionism. I'm not a literalist, but "sinful" and "fallen" seem like pretty good adjectives to describe our world.

I don't mind authority as long as it's rational and legitimate. My main quarrel with power, wealth and property is that they are not widely distributed enough to promote a stable, healthy society.

I understand conservatism at its best to mean or at least include respect for the past and for old traditions, a cautious approach to social change, a suspicion of utopian schemes, and a dislike of wastefulness.

Somehow, contempt for the constitution and Bill of Rights; a reckless domestic and foreign policy; neocon blueprints of a glorious imperial export of democracy to the middle east (there are any number of oxymorons in that phrase); and the squandering human lives, the natural environment, and public resources doesn't seem to fit that description.

In the next few posts, I'm going to try to follow a thread of reflections on conservatism, both of what it used to mean and what it has come to mean today. (There will also be random links and other commentary as appropriate.)

Next time: a look at a founding manifesto of American conservatism, The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot by Russell Kirk.

WORTH CHECKING OUT: For a good summary of unhealthy economic trends based on a McClatchy analysis of Census data, check this post from the AFLCIO blog.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED