Squash it

Gardening provides its own way of marking the passage of time. Ours began on Christmas Day when the garlic was planted, along with a healthy cover of old hay and goat manure. Before and after that, we'd cover the garden-to-be with fallen leaves and more donations from the goat barn.

When the weather got warmer, we borrowed the neighbor's tiller several times to work the soil. As spring approached, we planted lettuce, spinach, arugula and radishes in a cold frame. By the time the weather was warm, we had a good haul of those early bloomers on the way as we planned and planted the rest.

By the time summer was in full force, tomatoes came in like crazy, followed by eggplants and peppers. (We have bad bean and corn karma for some reason.) One mark of the end of summer is the maturing of squashes. We got a pretty good haul this year. A few Georgia candy roasters are still straggling in but the garden is pretty much on automatic pilot from here on out. We're still holding out hope for some figs, which aren't altogether crazy about the West Virginia climate. Somewhere in the midst of it all are few buried potato plants.

Much of what hasn't been eaten already is canned or otherwise put away. It won't be long until we pull it all out and start again piling on the compost again.

I HIGHLY RECOMMEND THIS item on the triumph of unreason.

THE GRASS MAY BE GREENER over there.

CLIMATE CHANGE. Would you get on a plane that had a 10 percent chance of crashing? Probably not. With climate change, the certainty of major changes, mostly nasty, is closer to 90 percent.

THIS IS GROSS but interesting.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A FREE SOUL IN PRISON

Photo credit: Chicago Daily News negatives collection, DN-0003451. Courtesy of the Chicago Historical Society, by way of the Library of Congress.

Welcome to the last day of Eugene Debs Week at Goat Rope. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier entries.

Despite his status as a national spokesman for labor and the socialist movement (not to mention a perennial candidate) Debs did not aspire to be a conventional "leader" but rather encouraged ordinary people to take the lead:

I am not a Labor Leader; I do not want you to follow me or anyone else; if you are looking for a Moses to lead you out of this capitalist wilderness, you will stay right where you are. I would not lead you into this promised land if I could, because if I could lead you in, someone else would lead you out. YOU MUST use your heads as well as your hands, and get yourselves out of your present condition; as it is now the capitalists use your heads, and your hands.

His biggest brush with the Powers that Were came in the wake of the First World War, which many socialists and others believed was a disastrous slaughter driven by imperialism--a view that many later mainstream historians came to endorse.

In a famous 1918 anti-war speech in Canton, Ohio, he said:

...that is war in a nutshell. The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and all to lose — especially their lives.

Making an ant-war speech at that time carried considerable risks given repressive wartime legislation. He noted that

...it is extremely dangerous to exercise the constitutional right of free speech in a country fighting to make democracy safe in the world... I would rather a thousand times be a free soul in jail than to be a sycophant and coward in the streets.

(Golly, it's a good thing we don't have to worry about restrictions on liberty during wartime any more, isn't it?)

Debs was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 1919 for that speech. Never one to pass on a chance to make a statement, he saved some of his best for the trial. This is what he told the judge during his sentencing hearing:

Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

Debs eventually had his sentence commuted by Republican President Warren G. Harding in 1921 after serving time in Moundsville, WV and the federal prison in Atlanta. He lived until 1926, but was unable to regain his own vitality or that of the movement he dedicated his life to serve.

Wartime repression dealt organizations like the Socialist Party and the IWW a blow from which they never recovered. In addition to persecution and defection, a rival communist movement sprang up in the wake of the Russian Revolution, about which the staunchly democratic Debs became more and more critical.

While in some respects the ending was tragic, Debs remains an inspirational figure for his courage and idealism. And indirectly, many of the reforms he and his comrades supported were eventually enacted into legislation. Finally, he inspired the next generation, including such labor leaders as WV's own Reuther brothers.

Requiescat in pace.

PROTESTING THE NLRB. El Cabrero was in DC this week and drove by one of the protests against the Bush National Labor Relations Board described here. I wanted to hop out and join them.

MEGAN WILLIAMS CASE. Here's the latest.

DINOSAUR UPDATE. They found a new one that ate like a cow.

IT'S NOT JUST US. It looks like cockroaches also have conformity and peer pressure issues.

CENSORSHIP UPDATE. It looks like Pat Conroy's novel Beach Music has survived an attempt of censorship at Nitro High School. I'm sure there is gnashing of teeth in the domestic Taliban camp.

MORE ON ARCHIVEGATE, the WV tempest about the bizarre and unjust firing of a state archivist and future plans for the state archive can be found at the Uberblog of WV news, Lincoln Walks at Midnight. A protest is planned for today.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

AAARRRGHHH, MATIES--IT'S PIRATE TIME!

Photo credit: WPA poster from the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Detroit Publishing Company Collection.

Welcome to Pirate Week at Goat Rope. So hoist the Jolly Roger, stock up on grog and plan to stop by this week.

El Cabrero is not always in sync with popular culture, but I'll give it this one. Old school pirates can be entertaining.

I first started thinking about piracy as an adult while reading Patrick O'Brian's novels about the Napoleonic Wars, the series that inspired Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. The main characters, Captain Jack Aubrey and Dr. Stephen Maturin, were funny and fascinating. It was kind of like Jane Austen with naval battles.

One thing the Royal Navy at the time had in common with piracy was the prize system, whereby every sailor got a share of the value of an enemy ship captured or sunk. O'Brian would frequently speak of the "piratical gleam" in Aubrey's eyes while he pursued a prize. Of course, those with more rank got most of the prize money; as we'll see later, real pirates got a better deal.

It occurred to me at the time that people who try to work for social justice could use a piratical streak.

A little bit closer to real pirates were privateers, which you can think of as an early form of military contractors. The captain of a privateer would be issued a Letter of Marque allowing him to pursue legitimate targets and keep the rewards.

Real pirates were total freelancers, where loyalty was often reserved to the pirate band, which was surprisingly democratic and egalitarian. When you look at the Powers That Were in those days--despotic monarchies, slaveholders and slave-traders, greedy merchantmen--it makes you wonder who the real pirates were.

More on that tomorrow...

HARD TIMES. The news from this AP story probably won't come as much of a surprise to anyone: it's getter harder for lots of people to make ends meet:

What used to last four days might last half that long now. Pay the gas bill, but skip breakfast. Eat less for lunch so the kids can have a healthy dinner.

Across the nation, Americans are increasingly unable to stretch their dollars to the next payday as they juggle higher rent, food and energy bills. It's starting to affect middle-income working families as well as the poor, and has reached the point of affecting day-to-day calculations of merchants like Wal-Mart Stores Inc., 7-Eleven Inc. and Family Dollar Stores Inc.

Food pantries, which distribute foodstuffs to the needy, are reporting severe shortages and reduced government funding at the very time that they are seeing a surge of new people seeking their help.

NEW FIG TREE NOTES OFF THE "PRESSES." Jim Lewis muses about Minnesota, mortality and more in his latest Notes from Under the Fig Tree. Here's a nugget from there that I had missed:

Just recently, the Pentagon airdropped soccer balls into Afghanistan in an effort to win the “hearts and minds” of the people. The balls had verses of the Koran printed on them. The people were furious. It’s insulting to put Koranic verses on the ground and then kick them around. An apology from the Pentagon was forthcoming. That’s fact, not fiction.

Doh!

TO MARKET, TO MARKET. This op-ed of El Cabrero's about the Nobel Prize in economics ran in yesterday's Sunday Gazette-Mail. It also got picked up by Common Dreams.

PROBLEM CHILDREN. I'm a big fan of fellow Gazette op-ed writer Perry Mann. Here's his latest on the simplistic take on the problems of children and families these days.

PRIVATIZATION. Here's Naomi Klein on the outsourcing of government services.

WHY DIDN'T I THINK OF THAT? The University of California, Riverside has come up with a novel recruiting method:

UC Riverside is using a cockroach petting zoo to attract students and parents to an upcoming recruitment fair. The zoo will include several species, including cockroaches that emit a foul, ammonia-like scent and the famous, palm-sized Madagascar hissing cockroach.

I bet the competition between the stinking and hissing cockroaches is fierce...

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED