To wind and tide

OK. Or Hwaet if you want to get Anglo-Saxon about it. Let it be duly noted that when I pass over to the Great Perhaps, I don't want a fancy funeral. I'll settle for one just like that given to Scyld Scefing, the ruler of the Spear-Danes in the early part of Beowulf.

In lieu of flowers, here's how it should be done, by way of Seamus Heaney's translation. First, take me out to a Viking ship like this:

they shouldered him out to the sea's flood,
the chief they revered who had long ruled them.
A ring-whorled prow rode in the harbour,
ice-clad, outbound, a craft for a prince.
They stretched their beloved lord in his boat,
laid out by the mast, amidships,
the great ring-giver. .

But make sure it's decked out like this:

Far-fetched treasures
were piled upon him, and precious gear
I never heard before of a ship so well furbished
with battle tackle, bladed weapons
and coats of mail.

Then pile it on:

The massed treasure
was loaded on top of him: it would travel far
on out into the ocean's sway.

And deck me out:

They decked his body no less bountifully
with offerings than those first ones did
who cast him away when he was a child
and launched him alone out over the waves.

Then raise a standard and shove me off:

And they set a gold standard up
high above his head and let him drift
to wind and tide, bewailing him
and mourning their loss. No man can tell,
no wise man in hall or weathered veteran
knows for certain who salvaged that load

Any questions?

ON THE AGENDA. WV advocates for survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault highlighted their public policy agenda yesterday. One of these priorities is modernizing unemployment to cover people who have lost employment due to domestic violence, stalking and sexual assault when they are again available for and seeking work.

FOR FOR THOUGHT and for the future.

NOT IF SOME PEOPLE I KNOW CAN HELP IT. It is suggested here that clean energy sources could meet most of our needs by 2050.

SPEAKING OF ENERGY, a draft study by the Department of the Interior on the future of mountaintop removal mining is stirring up predictable controversy here. Here's Ken Ward on the topic in the Gazette and in Coal Tattoo.

THIS COULD REALLY HAPPEN. For your amusement from The Onion.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Fashion

El Cabrero has been wandering through Thoreau's Walden again lately and this time around particularly enjoyed his comments on clothing, a topic towards which I have been pretty oblivious.

The main things I look for in an outfit is that it not be too formal or dressy as such forms of raiment generally suck my will to live. Beyond that, I'm pretty content if what I have to wear is something I can run, kick or generally move around in. Old clothes work particularly well for these purposes.

For that reason, I've always loved this saying of his:

I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. If there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made to fit? If you have any enterprise before you, try it in your old clothes. All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be. Perhaps we should never procure a new suit, however ragged or dirty the old, until we have so conducted, so enterprised or sailed in some way, that we feel like new men in the old, and that to retain it would be like keeping new wine in old bottles.

(I did buy new karate gis for the Okinawa trip, but I think that would meet his criteria.)

Historically speaking, clothing has often been more about displaying social status than protection from the elements, comfort or even aesthetics. Some societies even had sumptuary laws, which specified exactly who could wear what. Thoreau once again had a great zinger on this point:

It is an interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes. Could you, in such a case, tell surely of any company of civilized men, which belonged to the most respected class?

(That reminds me of an old joke which suggests that such a practice at weddings might lead to a re-evaluation of the term "best man.")

Here's one last jab at the world of high fashion, which may or may not have changed all that much since his time (not that I would know):

The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveler's cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same.

AN OXYMORON? In the wake of the BP Gulf disaster, Presidenet Obama has vowed to push for a clean energy bill.

DISPARITIES. A new report highlights a huge wealth gap along gender and racial lines.

EDUCATION REFORM is all the rage these days. Here are some things to think about during the "race to the top." Meanwhile,it looks like the rush to reform has slowed down in West Virginia.

WONK TALL. West Virginia policy wonks have a new blog to follow. It's brought to you by the WV Center on Budget and Policy.

A GRAND ILLUSION. One study suggests that the morning coffee boost may be an illusion. Fine. I need at least three cups of illusion each morning.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A good deed for the day

Last month's health care rally in DC.

If you're casting about for something to do today or have a few minutes to spare in a good cause, today is a national call in day to Congress to support health care reform.

This is a critical time to weigh in on the issue. Big guns and loud voices are trying to kill meaningful health care reform. But here's a good reality check: the Center for American Progress estimates that while Congress is in recess in August, 400,000 more Americans will lose health coverage.

From the AFLCIO blog:

Now it’s time for Congress to hear the voices of America’s workers. Together with Health Care for America Now! (HCAN), AFL-CIO unions, state federations, central labor councils, community allies and health care advocates are mobilizing for a National Call-In Day for Health Care tomorrow, July 28, from 9 a.m. EDT to 5 p.m. EDT.

Call 1-877-264- HCAN (1-877-264-4226) and tell your representative in the U.S. House to support the House health care reform bill, (H.R. 3200). You also can e-mail or fax your lawmaker with the same message. Click here to find your representative and his or her contact information.

The House bill contains a public health insurance plan option and shared responsibility, including an employer “pay or play” requirement—and does not tax health care benefits working families receive through their jobs.

The word is that despite public opinion research that shows major support for reform, calls against it are outnumbering those in favor by two to one.

SPEAKING OF WHICH, here's a commentary on the subject I did for WV Public Broadcasting.

THIS IS WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT. Tennessee is using part of its share of stimulus money for direct New Deal style job creation for unemployed workers. That's what we need all over the country.

GUT FEELINGS. Here's an interesting article about scientific research into hunches and intuition.

OH THE WATER. Here's an interesting green energy possibility using ocean currents. I guess we won't be doing a lot of that in El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia (unless climate change gets really bad).

BUT WAIT--NOT TO WORRY. Ken Ward's Coal Tattoo describes a coal industry confab in which climate change was denied. That's a relief. Guess I can scratch that one off the list. I wonder whether they talked about how many dinosaurs were in Noah's ark...I bet you could fit a lot in if you used babies.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

No easy way out

Iphigenia by Anselm Feuerbach (1862), by way of wikipedia.

One of the things that makes Greek tragedy so compelling is its stark realism. For all the gods, heroes and mythological elements upon which it draws, its basic themes of inherent and unavoidable conflicts are all too common.

In the words of Martha Nussbaum, writing in The Fragility of Goodness,

Greek tragedy shows good people being ruined because of things that just happen to them, things that they do not control. This is certainly sad; but it is an ordinary fact of human life, and no one would deny that it happens...Tragedy also shows something more deeply disturbing: it shows good people doing bad things, things otherwise repugnant to their ethical character and commitments, because of circumstances whose origin does not lie with them.

Even more disturbing, however is the fact that tragedies

also show us, and dwell upon, another more intractable sort of case--one which has come to be called, as a result, the situation of 'tragic conflict'. In such cases we see a wrong action committed without any direct physical compulsion and in full knowledge of its nature, by a person whose ethical character or commitments would otherwise dispose him to reject the act. The constraint comes from the presence of circumstances that prevent the adequate fulfillment of two valid ethical claims. Tragedy tends, on the whole, to take such situations very seriously.

In popular parlance, it looks at situations in which you're "damned if you do and damned if you don't." If you've never been in one, may your luck hold out.

WHAT ABOUT THE ALREADY POOR? Here's an opinion piece by Barbara Ehrenreich about a group left out of much recent media coverage of the recession.

MORE FALLOUT. Here's the Boston Globe on the recent US Supreme Court decision on a judicial travesty in El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia.

INTERESTING IDEA. High altitude wind machines could generate a lot of clean energy.

BEGINNINGS. Here's an interesting item on the origin of life.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED