When a god comes to town, be nice

Modern Chinese sculpture of Dionysus. Image courtesy of wikipedia.

"...he will know too late Dionysus, god most benevolent to mortals, yet if his blessing is scorned into curse, god of inhuman terror."--the Bacchae

Goat Rope's series on Everything You Always Wanted to Know (or not) about Greek Tragedy continues. If you like this kind of thing, please click on earlier posts. If you're just interested in links and comments about current events, scroll on down.

Earlier posts in the week looked at the background of tragedy and Dionysus, the god at whose festival these were performed. It only seems fitting to start looking at specific tragedies with one in which he has the starring role. That would be the Bacchae, which may have been the last play written by Euripides, the most recent of the three tragedians whose work survives.

In it, Dionysus is newly arrived from Asia to Thebes, the home of his mother Semele. The former king of Thebes was Kadmos, Dionysus' grandfather, who was pious enough to recognize that Zeus was the new god's father and to honor his mother with a shrine. Semele's sisters, however, disbelieve and have spread rumors that his father was human.

The new ruler of Thebes is Kadmos' grandson Pentheus, who is...well...a bit of a wanker: young and arrogant, he is dismissive of the new cult and prepared to suppress it.

Dionysus, looking like a dissolute and androgynous youth, strikes the women of Thebes with his divine mania. They abandon their homes and revel in the mountains, tearing calves to pieces in their frenzy. Pentheus tries to arrest the youth, but you can't arrest a god. The city is destroyed by an earthquake. Not able to take a hint, Pentheus threatens to send soldiers to suppress the revelers.

Still, he kind of wants to watch. Dionysus tempts him by offering to lead him to a safe place to view the scene. The wild women or maenads, lead by his mother Agave, see him and think he is a mountain lion. They tear him to pieces in their mania and triumphantly bring the remains back to the city in triumph. Only when the madness fades does she realize what she has done.

"Humility and respect for the gods is the only wisdom. Yes, and for us mortals, the only weapon in hand--if only we used it."

GOOD LOOKS can boost your paycheck.

DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS. This is the article about the mismatch between new jobs and workers seeking work that I meant to link yesterday.

NEANDERTHALS may have been pretty smart after all.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

The new god on the block

Welcome to Goat Rope's ongoing series on Everything You Always Wanted to Know (or not) About Greek Tragedy. If you want to skip that part, there are links and comments about current events below. If you like this kind of thing, please click on earlier entries.

As mentioned before, Athenian tragedy was performed as part of the festival of the god Dionysus, the god associated with the vine, wine, growing things, ecstasy and other fun stuff. The situation of his birth was described in yesterday's post.

His childhood was a bit rough as well. According to some myths, Hera, the jealous wife of Zeus had him ripped to pieces (like a grape maybe?), but he was reassembled by his grandmother Rhea.

Once he was mature, he went from place to place introducing grape cultivation. He was followed by wild women or maenads who flouted social conventions, tore wild animals to pieces for food and carried a rod tipped with pine cones which was a symbol of the cult.

I kind of picture Dionysus as being a bit like Jim Morrison in his prime. And when he came to town, it was kinda like a really wild Doors concert, only more so. Women would abandon hearth and home to head out to the wild places.

He was also one of the few gods who had the power to bring people back from the dead. He rescued his mother Semele from the underworld and secured immortality for her. For this reason, he was sometimes associated with mystery cults aimed at securing some kind of decent life after death for humans.

He was not a war god or even overly sexual (by Olympian standards), but woe to anyone to tried to obstruct the progress of his cult. That's the subject of a tragedy by Euripides, about which more tomorrow.

SOCIAL SECURITY. Here's Robert Reich on the health of this New Deal program.

HELP WANTED? Here's Business Week on the mismatch between workers seeking work and the jobs that are out there.

PERFORMANCE PAY isn't all that common in the private sector, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

URGENT ANCIENT ART UPDATE here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Twice born

Gustave Moreau's "Zeus and Semele." Image courtesy of wikipedia.

Welcome to the latest installment of Goat Rope's Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Greek Tragedy (or not) series. Below you'll find links and comments about current events and the occasional random item.

As mentioned previously, tragedies in Athens were performed during the spring festival of the god Dionysus, who is associated with wine, the vine, growing things, mass frenzy, and other cool stuff.

Dionysus is interesting among the gods. According to some evidence, his cult is ancient and may even go back to the heyday of Cretan civilization. But in the myths, he is generally portrayed as a recent arrival.

As the story goes, he was the product of an affair between Zeus and the human woman Semele, daughter of King Kadmos of Thebes. His jealous wife Hera got wind of the tryst and disguised herself as an old woman who told Semele that she should require her mysterious lover to reveal himself in his true nature and form. When Zeus paid another visit, she begged for this favor and denied him access to her bed with he refused it.

In another example of a Be-Careful-What-You-Ask-For myth, Zeus in anger and frustration appeared as thunder and lightning and burned her to a crisp. With the help of the god Hermes, Zeus sewed the six month old fetus of the future god into his thigh, from whence he was born in three months. This earned him the title of the "twice born."

He thus stands in marked contrast to the wisdom goddess Athena, who was born from Zeus' head. He works on a lower level, but is not without wisdom and power of his own.

More of his story to come.

FIVE TO ONE. That's the number of job seekers for every new job, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

TRICKLING DOWN (FOR REAL). Stimulus money has started flowing to states but only about six percent has been spent so far.

DAY DREAMING OR PROBLEM SOLVING? Maybe both.

DON'T PLAY THEIR GAME. According to Malcolm Gladwell, underdogs can win if they don't play by the big guy's rules.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Master of those who know

The dude abides. A statue of the Greek philosopher Aristotle, courtesy of wikipedia.

In Dante's Divine Comedy, the Greek philosopher Aristotle is referred to as "master of those who know." In the 14th century, when Dante wrote his masterpiece, Aristotle's long lost teachings had been rediscovered fairly recently and seemed to many to be the last word on subjects of science, art, ethics, metaphysics and politics.

You could say that this says more about the state of human knowledge in the late medieval period than about Aristotle. It is kind of sad that knowledge, philosophy and science in Europe had fairly stagnated for centuries.

Part of the reason for that can probably be explained by what has been called "the terror of history," i.e. the massive disruptions caused by the fall of the western Roman empire, massive invasions and migrations, and all that. And it's hard to deny that the Christian religion in its first several centuries was singularly uninterested in the advance of earthly knowledge and that it held a commanding place in the lives of most people.

Having said all that, Aristotle was no slouch and much of his writing can be profitably read today, particularly his Ethics, Politics, and Poetics. (El Cabrero must admit that his acquaintance with his works on metaphysics and logic is second and third handed.)

My recently reinvigorated interest in Greek tragedy inspired me to take another look at his Poetics, which still has a vast influence over how people look at literature and the nature of poetry, drama and plot.

More on that to come.

ONE BIG UNION of unions may be on the way.

A PLANETARY SHIFT in American politics?

HATE GROUPS are ramping up again.

DIONYSUS is still here. He was all about people getting together and acting as one.

JUST FOR FUN, this article asks which movie bad guy does a certain vice president more closely resemble.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

BAD CROWD, GOOD CROWD

This is a very bad crowd.

As noted in yesterday's post, crowds have a generally bad reputation--one that is not altogether undeserved. But two fairly recent books talk about the good side of groups.

Let's start with the most recent. Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed, recently came out with Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy.

Her main thesis is that for most of human history, until the lamentable rise of the Protestant work ethic (from which El Cabrero is striving manfully to free himself) and the subsequent bureaucratization and commodification of the world, people used to get together and get down in group celebrations that often strike modern observers as "savage."

Relics of this tradition still survive in some sports situations, in carnival (as in Mardi Gras) celebrations, and occasionally in other settings. She argues that "we need much more of this on our crowded planet, to acknowledge the miracle of our simultaneous existence with some sort of celebration."

Our old friend Nietzsche, Goat Rope's mascot of the week, pointed out long ago the two poles of human existence and culture: the Apollonian, based on individuation, reason, and moderation (named for the Greek god of music, prophecy, and measure); and the Dionysian (named for the god of the vine), in which people loose their sense of separateness through group revelry.

(While totally appreciative of the gift of the vine, I lean towards the Apollonian.)

The other book on the good side of group behavior is a little older: James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economics, Societies, and Nations, which came out in 2004.

Surowiecki writes the financial column for the "New Yorker" and this book deserves the same wide circulation as those of his fellow writer Malcolm Gladwell, who wrote Blink and The Tipping Point.

I was shocked by the title, since "wisdom" and "crowd" are two words that I rarely associate. His main thesis is that large groups of people--including people who aren't necessarily the "smartest guys in the room"--often arrive at better decisions than experts:

If you put together a big enough and diverse enough group of people and ask them to "make decisions affecting matters of general interest," that group's decisions will, over time, be "intellectually [superior] to the isolated individual," no matter how smart or well-informed he is.

And again:

The argument of this book is that chasing the expert is a mistake, and a costly one at that. We should stop hunting and ask the crowd (which of course, includes geniuses as well as everyone else)instead. Chances are it knows.

But there's a catch: it doesn't work in herds. It seems to work better if you have a diverse group of people (by almost any measure) who arrive at their decisions independently, with the results compiled and aggregated. I'd say that' s aggregated Apollonianism (with no disrespect for Dionysus). There's lots of interesting data from experiments and experience in the book that make it worth a look.

SUSPICIOUS MIDDLE EASTERN CHARACTERS. I'm talking, of course, about cats. This from the NY Times:

Some 10,000 years ago, somewhere in the Near East, an audacious wildcat crept into one of the crude villages of early human settlers, the first to domesticate wheat and barley. There she felt safe from her many predators in the region, such as hyenas and larger cats.

The rodents that infested the settlers’ homes and granaries were sufficient prey. Seeing that she was earning her keep, the settlers tolerated her, and their children greeted her kittens with delight.

That's just how it starts, however. After a few thousand years, they start horfing up hairballs on your rug and waking you up in the middle of the night. It's a conspiracy....

(If you check the picture of the Middle Eastern cat on the link and check the gratuitous animal picture in yesterday's post, you will notice a strong similarity between that cat and Goat Rope Farm's Seamus McGoogle. I'm gonna call Homeland Security...)

WHY IS IT that I'm writing more about animals than economic justice issues these days? I don't even like them all that much. I'm kind of tired of them--they're a pain in the @$$. Maybe it's because justice is elusive but animals are inescapable...at least around here.

MSHA CITES ITS OWN SHORTCOMINGS. This from Ken Ward at the Charleston Gazette:

Federal inspectors and their supervisors displayed an "unacceptable lack of accountability and oversight" prior to three major coal-mining accidents last year, the nation's top mine safety regulator said Thursday.

Inspectors missed or ignored obvious violations, agency managers failed to ensure inspectors did their jobs, and repeated safety problems were not hit with escalating enforcement actions, according to three lengthy internal reviews issued Thursday by the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration.

Richard Stickler, assistant labor secretary for MSHA, said such oversights will "not be tolerated" and announced an improvement plan the agency said "ushers in [a] new era of accountability."

Comment: fair is fair. Lots of people, including myself, criticized Stickler when he was nominated for this post by the Bush administration. I apologize: he seems to take safety very seriously and is a welcome change from the past.

Question: do you believe that things like coal mine safety should be left to the "market" or the whim of corporations? Some people do...

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED