Different drums

A while back, I killed some blog time with my version of Henry David Thoreau's Greatest Hits from Walden. On perusing the final pages I noticed that I left out a couple.

Here goes:

The universe is wider than our views of it.

And somehow I missed this one:

If a man does not keep pace wit his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

BIG VOTE TODAY. The US House is expected to vote today on a bill (finally) passed by the Senate that would extend fiscal aid to the states. Here's a report that shows what this will mean to each state in terms of preserving jobs and services. It wouldn't hurt to contact your representative and urge a yes vote.

LEFT BEHIND. Thirty two states have modernized their unemployment insurance system and drawn down extra Recovery Act money. El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia, alas, isn't one of them.

SPEAKING OF UNEMPLOYMENT. It's bad out there.

NOT DEAD YET. Reports of the imminent demise of Social Security have been greatly exaggerated.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Meet it and live it

El Cabrero has been winding his way through Thoreau's Walden again and I'm just about at the end of it. Sometimes funny, sometimes inspiring and insightful and sometimes exasperating, I've never failed to get something out of it.

Here's another little gem, extracted from a passage where he talks nonsense about poverty:

However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise.

Odd as he was, Thoreau pretty much did that. It's harder than it sounds.

DEMOCRACY. Here are some tips on making it work.

A PROGRAM THAT WORKS. A little-known program of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is putting people to work.

TWO DEFICITS. Here's yet another call for addressing the jobs deficit first.

ALBION. Evidence from an archaeological dig suggests that early humans or their relatives inhabited England much earlier than previously believed.

THE POLITICS OF VIDEO GAMES is discussed here. Much seems to involve blowing up people and things and accumulating stuff.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Castles in the air

Some passages from literature seem to suffer from being quoted too often. But this one from Thoreau towards the end of Walden keeps its power for me because it rings true with at least a few of my own experiments.

Here goes:

I learned this, at least by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty, poverty, nor weakness, weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put foundations under them.

SO MUCH FOR THE WISDOM OF CROWDS. A study suggests home team performance can influence voting behavior.

A DIRECT APPROACH. From the Northwest, here's a call for direct job creation along New Deal lines.

SO MUCH FOR "CLIMATEGATE." A British investigation has exonerated scientists from falsifying climate change data.

EARLY HUMANS may have traveled to Europe earlier than previously believed.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

The ruts of tradition and conformity

There are lots of reasons to like Thoreau's Walden (and some to drive the reader up the wall). Some things I've gotten from it are very practical insights that I have found to hold up well in real situations.

Here's an example: I suspect that one reason why people who want to improve conditions may fall short is the human tendency to fall into ruts or predictable patterns. Every situation, every moment, is different and may require a different response. Unfortunately, our minds, like trains, tend to run along the same tracks.

As Thoreau noted in Walden,

It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves….The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity!

Rituals are great; ritualism isn't. It seems to me that the compulsion to repeat is more a symptom than a strategy.

WHAT WOULD ALINSKY SAY? Here are some guesses by someone who knew him.

JOBS FIRST, then deficits, argues John Irons of the Economic Policy Institute here.

KING CARBON. Would the founders of the USA declare independence from it?

YOUR INNER FISH. Get in touch with it here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

The fuel that heats twice

There is a room at Goat Rope Farm that was large, damp and inhospitable for much of the year until we added a wood stove. Now, in those seemingly distant days of cold, it's the best place to be on a chilly evening. I totally understand the pagan veneration of the hearth and have poured my libations to Hestia, the goddess who presides over such things.

It also provides year round opportunities for exercise and scavenging. I spent a good part of the last Christmas holiday cutting up some trees that fell from our hill to a neighbor's yard (while the Spousal Unit was kayaking in a warmer clime, incidentally). I didn't really mind though, as long as I could get the chainsaws started. I looked upon it as a kind of weight training boot camp.

The wood was removed in pieces to our yard, where I'm still chopping it up. The wood pile is getting bigger and bigger, although I can't really tell that the pile of yet to be cut wood is getting any smaller. As a martial artist, I view chopping wood as a kind of hojo undo, or supplementary exercise.

I found this passage in Walden that speaks to my condition:

Every man looks at his wood-pile with a kind of affection. I loved to have mine before my window, and the more chips the better to remind me of my pleasing work....they warmed me twice, once while I was splitting them, and again when they were in the fire, so that no fuel could give out more heat.

Chopping wood in the summer has the added value of reminding me that change is inevitable, and that even the raging summer is destined to wane in time.

BYRD'S SHOES are likely to go unfilled, whoever occupies his seat in the Senate. Here's Ken Ward in Coal Tattoo looking at his legacy of rationality and realism in coal and climate controversies.

STALEMATE. As noted in earlier posts, efforts to help the unemployed and prevent further layoffs have been stymied in Congress.

DOUBLE DIPPING is a real possibility with the Great Recession, especially if conservatives and deficit hawks continue to block action to help the recovery.

IF THAT HAPPENS, chalk it up to a coalition of "the heartless, the clueless and the confused."

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Dirty institutions

Rosa Parks, 1955. Image by way of wikipedia.

Henry David Thoreau's essay on civil disobedience didn't make much of a splash when first written, but it was destined to have a major worldwide impact. The events that led to the essay took place during his stay at Walden Pond.

Here's how he laconically describes what happened in Walden:

One afternoon, near the end of the first summer, when I went to the village to get a shoe from the cobbler's, I was seized and put into jail, because, as I have elsewhere related, I did not pay a tax to, or recognize the authority of, the state which buys and sells men, women, and children like cattle at the door of its senate-house. I had gone into the woods for other purposes, But, wherever a man goes, men will pursue and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society. It is true, I might have resisted forcibly with more or less effect, might have run "amok" against society; but I preferred that society should run "amok" against me, it being the desperate party. However, I was released the next day, obtained my mended shoe, and returned to the woods in season to get my dinner of huckle-berries on Fair-Haven Hill. I was never molested by any person but those who represented the state.

Of course, people have been resisting unjust laws and governments since ancient times--the Greek tragedy Antigone is a literary example of ancient civil disobedience. The histories of Josephus provide examples of Jewish non-violent resistance against the Romans under Caligula and Pilate. But Thoreau was one of the first to articulate it clearly and his essay about an almost accidental encounter would have a much greater influence than anyone at the time might have dreamed.

It's amazing what people can do sometimes even when they're not trying.

LIVING ON EARTH devoted a program to the changing view of the late WV Senator Robert Byrd on coal issues.

BAKER'S DOZEN (minus ten). Here are two good columns by economist Dean Baker. The first is about the politics of unemployment, while the second is about the growing inequality that is at the root of the economic crisis.

ANOTHER INTERESTING TAKE on the economic crisis can be found here.

GETTING EMOTIONAL can have its benefits.

BIRD BRAINS. They are more similar to those of mammals than previously thought. Having watched the complex behavior of the feathered inhabitants of Goat Rope Farm, I can't say I'm surprised.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Sculpting the body

The Dying Gaul, from a Roman copy of a Hellenistic original.

I have often thought that one of the saddest things about contemporary American life (and the competition is fierce in this arena) is that so many people don't really live in their bodies or seem at most to use them for various kinds of consumption. You can see this everywhere, not least in the epidemic of obesity.

One hillbilly hobby that gets on my last nerve--and I could be drummed out of the tribe for this--is the riding of four wheelers. After my stint on the local volunteer fire department, which responded to many calls involving death or injury from riding them, I sometimes find myself thinking of these as Darwin machines or natural selection devices.

Arpad, our (almost) Great Pyrenees canine, shares my distaste. He's generally laid back, but he's never met an all terrain vehicle he didn't hate.

In fairness, I'm sure they have their uses and I've been told that some of the trails in southern WV are good for economic development. But, as the saying goes, there's no accounting for taste. Just ask Arpad.

For quite a few people, this seems to be the only outdoor activity they engage in, and the closest thing to exercise, which is sad. Judging by the physical specimens that I've seen riding on them, it seems like most would be better off by any measure in walking, jogging or biking.

I have a feeling Thoreau might agree with me on this. Here's what he said about how we relate to the body in Walden:

Every man is the builder of a temple, called his body, to the god he worships, after a style purely his own, nor can he get off by hammering marble instead. We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones.

HONORING A LEGEND. Tonight there will be processions through the streets of Charleston to honor Senator Robert C. Byrd. His memorial service tomorrow will include the president and vice president among those who attend. I plan on going, assuming I can get there, and will share pictures and thoughts afterward. WV Governor Joe Manchin has even given state employees the day off so that those who choose to can attend.

AFTER BYRD. Here's a NY Times article about a visit to Byrd's home town and the political lay of the land.

UNEMPLOYMENT. Congress is likely to vote today on restoring unemployment benefits, a measure which has failed several times in the last week or so. As I've argued here many times, the most immediate deficit we need to deal with is the jobs deficit.

I PREFER COFFEE. Here's an item about the Tea Party and the dangers of underestimating it.

URGENT ANCIENT CARNIVOROUS WHALE UPDATE here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

The wild and the good

Many people, past and present, have written eloquently of the human need for nature and the wild, but Henry David Thoreau was one of the most eloquent and influential. Here's a little nugget I've missed before in my several passes through Walden:

I found in myself, and still find, an instinct toward a higher, or, as it is named, spiritual life, as do most men, and another toward a primitive rank and savage one, and I reverence them both. I love the wild not less than the good.

The wild, alas is getting harder to find these days. Hmmm...could the same be said about the good?

SPEAKING OF THE GOOD, it looks like West Virginia's memorial service for Senator Robert C. Byrd will have a cast of thousands--including President Obama and Vice President Biden. I plan on attending, but getting there may be a challenge.

WHILE WE'RE AT IT, here are memories of Byrd from those who knew him in Washington.

STATE OF THE STATES. It isn't good, thanks in part to the refusal of conservatives in Congress to extend fiscal aid to states.

BETTING ON THE PRIVATE SECTOR to drive the recovery is risky business.

WHICH WAY? Here's an interesting take on the current political landscape for progressives.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Company and solitude

Solitude and loneliness are two entirely different things. It has often occurred to me that human contact and time alone are two more things that don't seem to be well distributed among the population. So many people are starving for human contact, while so many more are being driven crazy by too much of it.

Henry David Thoreau, with whom Goat Rope has been spending time, was a (kind of) social animal who loved solitude. Here's a great line from Walden:

I have a great deal of company in my house; especially in the morning, when nobody calls.

He tries to make a bit more serious point about how we can wear out each other's welcome:

Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other. We meet at meals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are. We have had to agree on a certain set of rules, called etiquette and politeness, to make this frequent meeting tolerable and that we need not come to open war. We meet at the post-office, and at the sociable, and about the fireside every night; we live thick and are in each other's way, and stumble over one another, and I think that we thus lose some respect for one another. Certainly less frequency would suffice for all important and hearty communications...

Needless to say, Thoreau was never married.

STATE OF STATES. If congress refuses to extend some programs of the Recovery Act, many states will take a hit.

BLOCKADE. Here's a post from the AFLCIO blog that calls for breaking the blockade on unemployment benefits.

WHAT'S AT STAKE. Here's a good summary of why a Senate vote to extend Recovery Act provisions matters.

AND GUESS WHAT? Yesterday the bill failed in the Senate for the third time as Republicans once again united to oppose it.

FIGS. Here's the latest edition of the Rev. Jim Lewis' Notes from Under the Fig Tree. This one's about shakeups, tipping points, Afghanistan and something strange to do with stamps.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

The tonic of wildness

It's not snake oil.

El Cabrero has been listening these days to a recording of Paul Hawken's Blessed Unrest: How The Largest Movement In the World Came Into Being. It's not as fun as the gross vampire novel I mentioned earlier this week, but one cannot live on popcorn.

In the book, Hawken credits Henry David Thoreau with being a founder of both the environmental and social justice movements. I think he has a point, although I don't picture Henry as much of a movement guy. He was an enthusiastic abolitionist and critic of the predatory war against Mexico.

There's no way to deny that his writings were very influential in the early environmental movement, especially in terms of consciousness raising. Here's an eloquent example of this from Walden:

We need the tonic of wildness,--to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe; to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground. At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of Nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and Titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander...

The wild, alas, has been taking some major hits lately.

PILING ON. Here's another argument about how deficit mania could actually make the recession worse.

OUR BIGGEST DEFICIT might be one of confidence.

SHELTER FROM THE STORM. The Obama administration this week unveiled and ambitious plan to end homelessness in 10 years.

FEELING PHILOSOPHICAL? Here's a long interview with Martha Nussbaum, who in my book is one of the best.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Alertness

Woody Allen said that eighty percent of success is showing up. I think that's about right. I'd say most of the other twenty percent is paying attention and being ready. The remainder consists of striking skillfully when an opportunity occurs, which itself only takes up a fraction of the overall time (although learning how to do that may take years).

One reason why I've been strip mining Thoreau's Walden these days is that I've really found some of the ideas he expresses to be of great value in trying to change things that need to be changed or preserve things that need to be preserved.

Here's a great line in a great passage. Because it's so good, I want to highlight the key line before the whole passage:

No method nor discipline can supercede the necessity of being forever on the alert.

Here's the rest of it:

What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, now matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen? Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer? Read your fate, see what is before you, and walk on into futurity.

By way of qualification, I don't think this means being hyper vigilant all the time, which can be a kind of mania and is impossible in any case, but at the very least tracking things the way so many animals do, watching changes, observing trends, moving when appropriate.

I never throw a scrap of food into the yard without seeing a some chickens responding right away. Our lazy cats seem to zone out most of the time but tune right in when there's something to see. The goats notice the least little change. Dogs track motion. Maybe we'd be more successful in our undertakings if we were better animals.

GOOD FOR A LAUGH about something that isn't funny: here's Jon Stewart on America's endless quest for an energy policy. Thanks to Ken Ward at Coal Tattoo for including this link.

SOMETHING ELSE THAT ISN'T FUNNY. Here's an interesting blog post from the NY Times Economix about how people think about unemployment.

A HOLE IN THE WORLD. Here's Naomi Klein on the BP Gulf oil disaster.

SLIP-SLIDING AWAY? Here's Bob Herbert from the NY Times on missed opportunities for greatness.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Of reading, classics, vampires and such

I usually keep a pile of several books going at any given time and try to turn a page or two of each per day. Usually these are pretty dense and a page or two is plenty.

At the moment, my pile consists of some stories by Chekhov, The Fall by Camus, Vol. II of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Aristotle's Politics and Eaarth, Bill McKibben's new book about climate change (which is a real downer, by the way). Oh yeah, and Thoreau's Walden.

I don't always see eye to eye with Henry, but I share his fondness for old classics:

Men sometimes speak as if the study of the classics would at length give way for more modern and practical studies; but the adventurous student will always study classics, in whatever language they may be written and however ancient they may be. For what are classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man? They are the only oracles which are not decayed, and there are such answers to the most modern inquiry in them as Delphi and Dodona never gave. We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old. To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader far more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem.

Still and all, sometimes you need to clear the palate and there's nothing to do just that like a vampire novel. For fun, I've been listening to Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan's The Strain. These vampires aren't sexy or teenybopper heart throbs or tragic existentialists. They are totally repulsive viral parasites with totally gross appendages. Listening to it made mowing the lawn a bit more entertaining.

I have a feeling Thoreau wouldn't have been a big fan of vampire novels.

PLAYING WITH FIRE. As I've been ranting for the last week or so, deficit mania could make the recession worse. And Krugman thinks so too.

WHATEVER. This is disappointing.

THIS COULD EXPLAIN A LOT. Research on voting behavior suggests that such decisions are often made on the basis of non-verbal and superficial factors.

A LITTLE GOOD NEWS. Blenko Glass, a WV company that specializes in handmade glassware has fought its way back from the brink after nearly closing for good last year.

MONKEYS like TV too.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Now and here

El Cabrero has been spending time with Henry David Thoreau lately. I'm the first to admit that he was a bit of a crank and that if I spent a week with him on the Concord and Merrimack rivers, I might have pitched him overboard.

But still...he really has his moments. I love the ones where he basically smacks the reader upside the head and challenges him or her to pay attention, something I am only sporadically capable of doing.

Here's today's sample:

Men esteem truth remote, in the outskirts of the system, behind the farthest star, before Adam and after the last man. In eternity there is indeed something true and sublime. But all these times and places and occasions are now and here. God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages.

WE ARE NOT AMUSED. The US Senate fell a few votes short of 60 on an important vote that would have extended unemployment benefits and fiscal relief to states and helped preserve jobs.

1937 BLUES. The victory of the deficit hawks, as in the vote above, could likely extend the slump, as Paul Krugman argues here.

AND BESIDES, a new Gallup/USA Today poll shows public support for more spending to create jobs.

HOW BAD IS IT? According to the Working America blog,

If the 15 million unemployed workers in this country stood side-by-side, literally shoulder to shoulder, they would stretch from Bangor, Maine to Los Angeles, California… and back again.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: REALLY ELEVATED

Meanly, like ants

In this age of multi-tasking, a dose of Thoreau really clears the palate. If he felt out of place in the mid 1800s, what would he think of an era in which people listen to music, carry on a conversation and send text messages while driving a car?

...we live meanly, like ants...Our life is frittered away by detail...Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail.

That's a tall order for an ADHD nation.

IMPORTANT SENATE VOTE. The vote to extend key provisions of the Recovery Act--including unemployment insurance extensions and aid to states--is likely to take place today. It has been scaled back further after a failed vote yesterday. If you haven't contacted your senators, please do so today and urge them to vote yes on "the extender bill." Click here to get started.

MAKING THE CASE. In testimony before Congress, Lawrence Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute urges more aggressive action to deal with unemployment.

THE COMMON DENOMINATOR between BP and Massey Energy is greed, according to union leaders Cecil Roberts and Leo Girard.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

To live deep

I remember having a discussion with some young people about Thoreau's Walden a while back. One person pointed out that he didn't really rough it or live totally off the land, as if he cheated by having occasional dinners at a friend's house.

I tried to point out as tactfully as I could that he didn't go to the woods for commando or survival training. It was more of what we might call today an extended spiritual retreat.

In some of his best known words, he explained his reasons this way:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach; and not, when I came to die, discover that I had never lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear, nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck all the marrow out of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.

Thoreau is at his best in passages like that which challenge the reader. It would be terrible thing to discover at the end of life that one had never lived at all.

CUTTING CORNERS. That would be BP. Here's the Washington Post on the president's speech while we're at it.

STATING THE OBVIOUS. Here's Dean Baker on the obtuseness of some of his fellow economists.

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO boredom?

A DEAL? It looks like the dispute which cost the Rev. Jim Lewis his license to function as a priest in WV is close to resolution.

MAKING EYES. Caterpillars, no doubt after a careful study of The Art of War, make false ones to scare off predators.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Conscious endeavour

Little Edith Ann is all about conscious endeavour.

Lately, I've been meandering through Thoreau's Walden and sifting for nuggets of gold. It's a pretty rich vein.

A line that struck me today expresses one of the great things about human nature, to wit, the fact that as flawed as we are we can with effort get better at almost anything we set our minds to. I tend to be a bit cynical about humankind. I'm no utopian and don't believe in human perfectibility. But it is an astonishing thing that while we can't remake the whole enchilada, we can make huge improvements on any number of specific things.

Here's how he put it:

I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavour.

WE COULD USE A LITTLE CONSCIOUS ENDEAVOUR on energy and climate change policy. The BP mess in the Gulf could lead to a push for major new legislation.

WILL WE BE STUPID OR SMART on dealing with deficits and economic recovery? The smart money may be on stupid but our hopes depend on smart.

ON THAT NOTE, here's a good editorial about the need for quick action for the unemployed.

THE BIG BAD WOLF of the WV policy world is named OPEB.

THE HORMONE OF CONFLICT? Researchers suggest that the hormone oxytocin, sometimes associated with trust, is also related to inter-group conflict.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Of drownings and shoestrings

El Cabrero has long been intrigued by the Taoist idea of wu-wei, which is usually translated as "non-action." It doesn't mean not doing anything but is more like doing what is timely and appropriate when conditions are right without a lot of hoopla or wasted energy.

My guess is that this is something the world's most effective people have always known, even if they didn't think about it in exactly those terms.

I think Henry David Thoreau came up with one of the best expressions of that concept in Walden. It's pretty short and sweet:

Rescue the drowning and tie your shoestrings.

SPEAKING OF RESCUING THE DROWNING, the White House has called on the Senate to extend COBRA benefits so that jobless workers can afford insurance and urged an extension of fiscal aid to states via the federal Medicaid match. These issues may be up for a vote this week. Last week I urged people contact their senators to support these steps. If you haven't done so yet, this would be the time.

WHACKADOODLE FEARS. Here are 10 things that people on the far right are scared of.

A RARE EVENT. It doesn't happen at this blog very often, but I found this op-ed by Thomas Friedman to be worth a link.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Repenting of goodness

There are any number of occupation hazards progressive types are susceptible to. Some of the worst in my book involve moralism and self righteousness, disorders often accompanied by the related condition of earnestness. I find it difficult to breathe in the presence of people without a sense of irony and a healthy dose of cynicism.

But it's not just a matter of taste. People who are overwhelmed by a sense of their own righteousness--or that of the cause which they profess, the two being easily confused--sometimes have zero sense of politics or tactics and are tone deaf and snow blind to even thinking about how their actions might appear to someone not already converted.

Don't get me wrong. I enjoy a good ethical fight, one where you try to correct this or that excess or injustice, but these days I try to think of such occasions less as a matter of righteousness than of getting my ya yas out in a socially acceptable manner. This is more a matter of moral luck than anything else; a different turn of the goddess Fortuna's wheel and I would have wound up in prison or worse.

I guess my thinking on these issues has been heavily shaped by people like William Blake, Nietzsche, Freud, Niebuhr et al who have been suspicious of our moralistic pretensions. But I'm also standing right smack dab in the biblical tradition. Jesus loved whacking self righteousness and the author of the First Epistle of John wrote that "If we say we have no sin we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us."

For reasons like that, I love the parts of Walden where Thoreau is critical of goodness and humanitarianism. Here are a couple of my favorite quotes:

...if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well?

and

There is no odor so bad as that which arises from goodness tainted. It is human, it is divine, carrion. If I knew for certain that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life...

Having said that, y'all be good.

A VOTE FOR SCIENCE. Congratulations to WV Senator Robert C. Byrd for refusing to be buffaloed into a vote to block the EPA from dealing with climate change. Most state politicians seem to have adopted the position that anything which goes against the perceived interests of the coal industry is untrue by definition. Once again, WV's senior senator has stood out from the crowd.

NICE TRY. Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship is trying to shift blame for its Upper Big Branch mine disaster to MSHA ventilation regulations. As the Church Lady on the old SNL would say, "Isn't that convenient?"

FELICITY. Here's another look at the politics of happiness. Thoreau might actually like this one.

BORED OR UNEMPLOYED? Here's a link to keep you busy.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Targets

I think one of the things that people have liked about Thoreau's Walden is that it challenges the reader. Throughout its pages, the author continually argues that we can all do and be so much more than we ever thought possible:

...man's capacities have never been measured; nor are we to judge of what he can do by any precedents, so little has been tried.

One well-known passage puts it this way:

In the long run men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, though they should fail immediately, they had better aim at something high.

I've always loved that quote. It has inspired me now and then to push things a little farther than I thought I could.

(It would be downright nitpicky of me to point out that it isn't literally true and that people hit all kinds of unintended things--as in "friendly fire" and "collateral damage." Last fall, for example, when trying to sight in the old 12 gauge, I hit a strand of our electric fence while aiming at a can, which is another reason why I should probably stick to karate.)

However, I'll concede the main point.

The question is, what, exactly are we aiming at?

STATES WILL BE IN A PICKLE unless the Senate amends H.B. 4213 to extend the federal Medicaid match (FMAP) to states. Also, unemployed people will need a COBRA extension to keep benefits.

If you haven't already done so, please call your US senators and say something like:

"Please amend HB 4213 to extend COBRA benefits for jobless workers and the Medicaid FMAP aid to states.” A toll free number to the US Senate has been provided for this purpose by Families USA: 1-888-340-6521.

WHAT RETIREMENT? The recession has taken a big bite out of workers' retirement savings.

URGENT DOLPHIN COMMUNICATION UPDATE here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Radical minds

It would be hard to think of two people more different than Henry David Thoreau and Karl Marx, but the transcendentalist and the red exile sounded alike in their critique of early capitalism.

Particularly in his early writings, the young Marx denounced the alienation of the workers and their degradation in an industrial system that reduced the individual worker to "an appendage to the machine." The hyper-individualist Henry picked up on the same theme, noting in Walden that

lo! men have become the tools of their tools.

He also noted that

the fall from the farmer to the operative as great and memorable as that from the man to the farmer

This rant about social inequality from Walden could go toe to toe with those in the Communist Manifesto:

The luxury of one class is counterbalanced by the indigence of another. On the one side is the palace, on the other are the almshouse and "silent poor." The myriads who built the pyramids to be the tombs of the Pharaohs were fed on garlic, and it may be were not decently buried themselves. The mason who finishes the cornice of the palace returns at night perchance to a hut not so good as a wigwam. It is a mistake to suppose that, in a country where the usual evidences of civilization exist, the condition of a very large body of the inhabitants may not be as degraded as that of savages. I refer to the degraded poor, not now to the degraded rich. To know this I should not need to look farther than to the shanties which everywhere border our railroads, that last improvement in civilization; where I see in my daily walks human beings living in sties, and all winter with an open door, for the sake of light, without any visible, often imaginable, wood-pile, and the forms of both old and young are permanently contracted by the long habit of shrinking from cold and misery, and the development of all their limbs and faculties is checked. It certainly is fair to look at that class by whose labor the works which distinguish this generation are accomplished. Such too, to a greater or less extent, is the condition of the operatives of every denomination in England, which is the great workhouse of the world.

I'm not sure what he thought could be done about it, given his distaste for collective action, but at least he saw it. It's also interesting that he almost accidentally gave the world a blueprint for nonviolent action in his essay on civil disobedience.

YOUR GOOD DEED FOR THE DAY would be to call your US senators and urge them to pass HB 4213 with an amendment to extend COBRA benefits and help states avoid layoffs and cuts to services by extending the federal Medicaid match for another six months. The bill would extend key provisions of the recovery act, including jobless benefits. Families USA has provided a toll free number: 888-340-6521.

WHILE WE'RE AT IT, the public supports continuing the benefits mentioned above.

MYOPIA. Economist Dean Baker takes another swipe at deficit hawks. If they win, he argues, the recession and accompanying unemployment are likely to linger.

SPIDER GIRL FIGHTS can be deadly.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED