A weekend drinking poem

The thirsty earth soaks up the rain,
And drinks and gapes for drink again ;
The plants suck in the earth, and are
With constant drinking fresh and fair ;
The sea itself (which one would think
Should have but little need of drink)
Drinks ten thousand rivers up,
So filled that they o’erflow the cup.
The busy Sun (and one would guess
By’s drunken fiery face no less)
Drinks up the sea, and when he’s done,
The Moon and Stars drink up the Sun :
They drink and dance by their own light,
They drink and revel all the night :
Nothing in Nature’s sober found,
But an eternal health goes round.
Fill up the bowl, then, fill it high,
Fill all the glasses there—for why
Should every creature drink but I ?
Why, man of morals, tell me why ?--Abraham Cowley, 1618-1667

Philosophical dead ends

I have a great love of philosophy, although certain schools of it don't do anything for me. Some of the ones I have no use for are logical positivism, analytical philosophy, and the philosophy of language.

I have a new one to add to the list: the philosophy of mind. There is something inherently absurd to me about conscious people intentionally spending a lot of time arguing about whether consciousness and intentionality exist. Another favorite topic of such thinkers is whether consciousness is entirely physical and whether mental phenomena, if they exist, can influence physical phenomena. It occurs to me they could ask any doctor about that one.

If I'm going to spend any time reading about the mind, whatever it is, I'll probably try to stick either to the sciences devoted to such things or to real philosophers like Kant and Hegel, who may not have been right but were at least interesting. The main point of philosophy is not so much to be right as to be interestingly but creatively wrong.

Of course, I could be wrong about all this.

BIG LIES about government spending, according to Robert Reich, are hiding the bigger truth about growing inequality.

GREEN JOBS aren't just for blue states.

LANDMARK. Massey Energy reached a settlement in a lawsuit with the Labor Department over major safety problems in a Kentucky mine. Too bad something like this didn't happen at Upper Big Branch before last April.

NO COMMENT. Could exercising make you want to drink more alcohol?

TWO FOR THE BIRDS. Crows...the other tool using animal. And, while we're at it, some ancient flightless birds apparently used wings as clubs. Would that count?

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

This and that

Random animal picture.

El Cabrero is attempting to play holiday catch up from the storm today but here are a few items that caught my eye:

ONE GOOD THING about the Senate health care reform bill, according to WV Senator Jay Rockefeller, is that it limits the amount insurance companies can spend on administration and profits.

SPEAKING OF WV SENATORS, here's the Washington Post on Senator Byrd.

DON'T BE ABSURD. No wait, cancel that. A new study suggests that reading absurdist literature may be good for your brain.

PLANTS apparently don't like to be eaten either.

ATTENTION HOLIDAY DRINKERS. Darker liquors may lead to worse hangovers. (El Cabrero prefers red wine.)

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Apocalyptic visions

This week the theme at Goat Rope is political paranoia. In particular, I'm revisiting a classic essay by historian Richard Hofstadter, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" in light of current events, including the health care debate.

Hofstadter, following sociologist Daniel Bell, found a sense of being dispossessed to lie at the root of the modern form of political paranoia. Its proponents believe that:

“America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialistic and communistic schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but major statesmen who are at the very centers of American power. Their predecessors had discovered conspiracies; the modern radical right finds conspiracy to be betrayal from on high.”

(Again, this was written in 1964.)

Adherents of this view see the world in apocalyptic terms. They see themselves to be at the barricades at the last battle, with everything at stake. Political conflicts are not seen as routine differences of viewpoints to be mediated in a rational way. Rather, they are wars between absolute good and absolute evil:

“Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated—if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention.”

This unrealistic approach to social conflict and the desire for absolute victory over the perceived forces of darkness only increases the sense of frustration felt by the true believers, even if they experience partial success. The enemy is always elusive and dangerous. The triumph is never complete.

This may explain why some hard core right wingers were outraged and angry not so long ago even when their allies controlled all branches of the federal government.

MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE HEALTH CARE FORUM. I may be a glutton for punishment, but I attended another health care town meeting yesterday in southern West Virginia held by Congressman Nick Rahall. This time around supporters of reform seemed to outnumber opponents, but a loud and disruptive contingent of teabaggers attended. In what was a new low in my experience, one of them actually heckled a priest during the opening prayers. When in the course of the prayer the priest mentioned some obviously Bolshevik idea such as caring for one's neighbor, someone shouted something like "How much are you getting paid?"

I'm guessing that must have come from a charm school dropout.

SPEAKING OF HEALTH CARE, the Economic Policy Institute is stressing the need for a public health insurance option to hold down costs.

SPEAKING OF POLITICAL PARANOIA, this item from West Virginians for Affordable Health Care debunks distortions and whackadoodle ideas about health care reform.

YOUNG WORKERS are still losing ground, according to the AFLCIO. From their blog,

Something bad happened in the past 10 years to young workers in this country: Since 1999, more of them now have lower-paying jobs, if they can get a job at all; health care is a rare luxury and retirement security is something for their parents, not them. In fact, many—younger than 35—still live at home with their parents because they can’t afford to be on their own.

BOTTOMING OUT. Some economists are suggesting the recession has passed a turning point and that the economy is beginning to expand again.

A LITTLE GOOD NEWS (FOR ME). Alcohol consumption (in moderation, whatever that is) may be good for aging brains.

IN CASE YOU WERE WONDERING ABOUT THE MUSICAL TASTES OF MONKEYS, click here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Game on

A street action in favor of health care reform in Huntington, WV this Saturday.

Goat Rope is back in regular operating mode this week following a two week furlough. Thanks to people for the comments and emails over the last stretch about the favorite books series. I haven't responded yet as I wasn't supposed to have access to email and such during those two weeks.

One thing I didn't do was take a break from the struggle over health care reform. In WV as around the country there have been many town hall meetings and public events and actions.

This season may well be remembered as Whackadoodle Summer as astroturf crowds tried to shout down public meetings and bizarre conspiracy theories about the diabolical idea of covering all Americans grew like mushrooms after a summer rain.

It all kinda reminded me of a famous essay by historian Richard Hofstadter titled The Paranoid Style in American Politics, which is alive and well.

All of which is to say, if want to have something to say when your grandkids ask you what you did in the big fight over health care, now would be the time to speak out, write letters, contact your congressional delegation, participate in forums and actions and all that.

BULL COOKIES. Here's a bull cookie-free op-ed on health care by one of the most progressive members of the WV legislature.

THE GHOST OF REAGAN still haunts the land.

THIS IS YOUR BRAIN under stress.

VODKA AND GOALS don't mix very well.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

THE MERRY DANCE OF DEATH AND TRADE

Caption: Image courtesy of wikipedia.

Recently El Cabrero re-read Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. I was struck more than ever by the force of its denunciation of colonialism and imperialism. It was set in the Congo of a century ago, where the "Christian" king Leopold of Belgium and his minions perpetrated a holocaust that rivaled Hitler's. (See yesterday's post.)

I know that the interpretation of this short novel remains controversial. A colleague who is a native of Congo pointed out to me recently that the great writer Chinua Achebe thought that the novel de-humanized Africans by denying them language and culture.

Achebe has a point, but in fairness Conrad would probably get clobbered these days for presuming to speak for Africans as a European. And, with the exception of the narrator, the Europeans in the novel who do speak talk nonsense. Conrad went as far as he could go in this novel, which was pretty far. It is an unmistakable and explosive condemnation of the atrocities perpetrated not so long ago.

I first became aware of Conrad's brutal gem in the late 1970s with the release of the film Apocalypse Now, which is still one of my favorites. The film, as the reader will no doubt recall, was set not in Africa but in Vietnam, but it seems to me to be pretty close in spirit to the novel that inspired it.

But while Apocalypse Now was a film about war, Leopold's holocaust was perpetuated in a time of official "peace" in the name of Christianity, commerce and humanitarianism. Conrad described it best ironically in the tile of this post: "the merry dance of death and trade" whereby millions of people were exploited, exterminated and/or mutilated, physically or otherwise.

Sad to say, the merry dance continues, although generally in a more subtle form.

SHOCK AND ALL. Here's an interesting piece on neocons and the roots of the "shock doctrine" of disaster capitalism which was the subject of Naomi Klein's recent book.

SOCIAL EUTHANASIA. A few years ago, a dear friend and comrade applied for Social Security disability. By the time she finally got it, death was near. As this New York Times article shows, her case was not an isolated one:

Steadily lengthening delays in the resolution of Social Security disability claims have left hundreds of thousands of people in a kind of purgatory, now waiting as long as three years for a decision...

But in the meantime, more and more people have lost their homes, declared bankruptcy or even died while awaiting an appeals hearing, say lawyers representing claimants and officials of the Social Security Administration, which administers disability benefits for those judged unable to work or who face terminal illness.

WHAT DUMB ANIMALS? In lieu of Goat Rope's usual gratuitous animal picture, here's an item on animal intelligence. And here's one about the longstanding bond between animals and fermentation. Drink up!

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED