Too optimistic to be happy

According to Buddhist tradition, being born as a human is a rare privilege. Other states of being may be more or less pleasant but the human state is said to be the only one in which one can attain enlightenment. It is even rarer and more fortunate to be a human and be exposed however briefly to the Buddha and his teaching.

By those standards, I guess I'm pretty lucky. Due to a traveling grandfather who died before I was born, I don't remember a time when I didn't know about Buddha or at least recognize his image, thanks to a statue and a prayer wheel he brought back from China in the 1920s. Learning about Buddhist teachings came later, partially through my study of martial arts.

For the record, I'm not a card-carrying Buddhist but more like a Buddhist sympathizer. Seated meditation drives me nuts and I'm way too fond of wine to sign on to the Fifth Precept. But I've been struck over and over again by the practicality of some Buddhist teachings to working for social justice--and not going crazy in the process.

Here's one to start with: life is suffering. Some people seem to have this magical idea that if only this or that could be made to happen or stopped from happening then everything would be just peachy. If the desired state does not come about, they can make themselves pretty miserable. Paradoxically, they are too optimistic--in the sense of thinking everything can be fixed--to be happy.

Buddhism isn't pessimistic but it is realistic. Things aren't all bad all the time but living and suffering are intertwined. Such a view is entirely compatible with happiness, strange as that may seem. We can do things to increase or decrease the amount of suffering in the world but not eliminate it. That insight makes me grateful for little victories and for all the things that aren't terrible at any given moment.

Here's a suggestion: try to make it a practice to notice it when you don't have a toothache.

DEJA VU. This New Yorker piece by Sean Wilentz traces Glenn Beck's outlook to old, hard right groups like the John Birch Society.

JUST SAY NO to more foreclosures. Dean Baker calls for a moratorium here.

YOU CAN READ THIS LATER. It's another New Yorker item about procrastination.

DROP EVERYTHING and watch this video clip from Stephen Colbert about how goats are stealing American jobs.

SPEAKING OF SUFFERING, elite athletes train to push past pain and other people can learn to do this too.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

One would have thought

Random animal picture.

One would have thought that market fundamentalism, the worship of "unleashed" unregulated capitalism, would have taken a mortal blow after 30 years of deregulation finally resulted in the worst financial crash since the Great Depression. The Gentle Reader may have noticed that this has not come to pass.

One dogma of the cult of the market god you still hear a lot today is that government action cannot do anything to promote economic vitality (other than cutting taxes for the rich).

Lately I've been reading Felix Rohatyn's Bold Endeavors: How Our Government Built America and Whit It Must Rebuild Now. In that book he points out numerous examples of how government action helped spur economic growth throughout our history. Examples include the Louisiana Purchase, the Erie Canal, the transcontinental railroad, land grant universities, the interstate highway system, the GI Bill and more.

Not all of those were pretty at the time and some we might now wish we did differently but all show that public investments and policies have always had a major role in moving the economy.

On a different but related subject, he also includes a great anecdote in the book about what it was like to go to college with veterans who had just returned from WWII and were taking advantage of the GI Bill. Rohatyn's family were Jewish refugees from Nazi occupied Europe before the war. While he attended college after the war was over, a representative from his national fraternity visited and warned that their charter could be expelled because they had "unsuitable" members, one black and one Jewish.

As he tells it,

Then the two veterans intervened. Politely yet forcefully, they explained to the visitor that they had not fought a war against the Nazis in Europe to see racial laws enacted in the United States. With the shocked national representative wedged stiffly between them, the two veterans escorted the man out of the house and to the railroad station.

They wound up losing the charter but keeping the house. And their dignity.

THE FORECLOSURE CRISIS was bad enough. The bogus foreclosure crisis is a real mess.

CUT THE CUTS. Yet another poll shows overwhelming support for allowing Bush era tax cuts to expire.

I'M STILL NOT SHOPPING THERE, but in the spirit of budo and fair play, let it be noted that Wal-Mart is going to start buying more local produce.

THE NOT SO SELFISH GENE. Some research suggests an evolutionary basis for altruistic behavior (short version: it's a turn on).

DOUBLE SHOT OF LOVE. A new study suggests that intense, passionate love can be an effective pain reliever. Another study found that couples that had been together for a long time--say 40 years--knew less about their partner's preferences than couples who had been together for a much shorter periond, although they expressed more contentment with the relationship than did younger couples. Maybe Dylan was right when he said, "True love tends to forget."

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Jack tale

The liberation of those 33 Chilean miners who were trapped deep underground for 69 days was truly inspiring. I can't even imagine what spending that long days in a place like that would be like. I wonder what it felt like for the last miner as he waited alone for his turn.

That real life story reminds me of an old Appalachian Jack tale. Jack tales are stories about a character named Jack (as in the one of beanstalk fame) which were told in the British isles long ago. Settlers in Appalachia brought a whole cycle of stories about this character with them and over time they morphed to reflect the culture of the mountains.

In the stories, Jack is the youngest of three brothers, the first two of which are bad news. He frequently sets off to seek his fortune. Like Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire, Jack always depends on the kindness of strangers. On his adventures, he helps those in need and is helped in return and usually prevails against the odds with the help of his wits, luck, and help from his friends.

In one story, Jack runs up against a giant who can turn into a dragon. After he finds the hole leading to its underground lair, he is lowered to the center of the earth by his rotten brothers and liberates three young women who were held captive by the giant.

He gets stranded at the bottom with no way out when his brothers throw the rope down the hole in a fit of jealousy over his luck with the ladies. In the end, he only makes it out thanks to a forgotten magic ring that has the power to grant wishes to those who deserve them.

Too bad they can't issues those to everyone who has to work underground. That would be the ultimate mine safety device.

ON THAT NOTE, it looks like diet, exercise and social support and organization kept them in amazingly good shape.

AN UGLY SPIRIT. This op-ed on the current racially charged political climate appeared earlier this week in the Charleston Gazette.

GOOD QUESTIONS. This item asks why the US right isn't upset about bogus foreclosures. Whatever happened to defending property rights?

CULTURAL EVOLUTION. Here's an interesting item on cultural evolution.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A law of nature

Charles Darwin's ideas of evolution by means of natural selection were first taken up (with many misunderstandings) by those on the political right. Part of the reason for this was that early expositions of Darwinism emphasized competition. It would take a while for evolutionary biologists to look at the other side of the equation by investigating cooperation and altruism.

More to the point, in the Gilded Age, robber barons and financial aristocrats found in them a great rationalization for their own wealth and power.

Steel magnate Andrew Carnegie wrote that while capitalist competition may harm some individuals, "it is best for the race, because it insures the survival of the fittest in every department."

(That phrase "survival of the fittest," by the way, has its origin in the writings of British philosopher Herbert Spencer rather than Darwin himself.)

In a similar vein, John D. Rockefeller Jr. wrote that

The growth of large business is merely a survival of the fittest...This is not an evil tendency in business. It is merely the working our of a law of nature and a law of God.

As the Church Lady would say on the old Saturday Night Live, "Isn't that convenient?"

SPEAKING OF EVOLUTION, this article suggests that our relationships with animals helped make us human.

FORECLOSURES. Here's Dean Baker and what the government could do about the foreclosure crisis but isn't (so far).

FUN LIST. From The Nation, here's a list of the 50 most influential progressive leaders of the 20th century.

CHARLOTTE'S WEB ON STEROIDS. A spider in Madagascar weaves the world's biggest webs with the toughest natural material yet discovered.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

The readiness is all

Certain lines from a work like Hamlet are bound to stick in one's head. One that has stuck in mine for years and years is "the readiness is all."

In another lifetime, when I was mired in poverty and stuck in a pretty much dead end job, a friend asked me what I wanted out of life. I answered, "To be ready." I think that's my final answer.

In context, however, those words are really about death rather than life. They appear in the play as things are headed towards the climax. Claudius and Laertes have conspired to poison Hamlet during a fencing match and the challenge has just been delivered.

Hamlet admits to Horatio about misgivings but refuses to cancel the engagement:

...we defy augury: there's a special
providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now,
'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be
now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the
readiness is all...

Methinks he has a point.

JUST DO IT. Pass health care reform, that is.

ECONOMIC RECOVERY. Nobel economics laureate Joseph Stiglitz warns that cutting public expenditures too soon could make the recession worse.

FORECLOSURES. A new wave could be on the way.

GOOD NEWS, BAD NEWS. The WV Senate Finance Committee advanced a bill that would provide for public funding of state supreme court races, but gutted the provisions which would adequately fund it. This legislation was in part a response to the 2004 fiasco.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Taking over

From an 1884 production.

It sometimes happens that a creative work takes on a life of its own and escapes the control of its creator. That was the plot in Frankenstein, but it happens sometimes in real life.

Moby-Dick is a classic example of this. Herman Melville may have begun with the intention of writing another popular travelogue but wound up trying to reel in a devilish metaphysical white whale of a novel that basically destroyed his career as a successful author. It was only in the devilish 20th century that it came to be appreciated.

Sometimes the plot itself runs away from the author; sometimes the characters do. El Cabrero was a big fan of the HBO series Deadwood before its demise. One of the things that made it interesting was that the characters seemed to take on a life of their own and run away with the show.

The same thing seems to have happened with a vengeance in Hamlet. At some early point in its composition, the Prince of Denmark seems to have rudely elbowed the Bard of Stratford out of the way and taken the wheel.

JOBS, JOBS, JOBS. Here's AFLCIO president Rich Trumka and Bill Moyers on the need for action to address unemployment.

BUDGET. Here's Robert Greenstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities on President Obama's proposed federal budget.

ONE WAY OUT of the foreclosure mess is the "right to rent" idea as proposed by economist Dean Baker.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Been there, done that

The Gadarene swine take a dive in this Anglo-Saxon tapestry.

Well, I guess I can scratch "contract swine flu" off my to-do list. My case must have been a mild one, but it seems to have passed and I've been fever free since Friday (sorry about the alliteration in the last part of that sentence, although Anglo-Saxons were kind of into that).

Here's the official Goat Rope verdict on H1N1: if it doesn't kill you, it's not that bad. I guess you can say that about lots of things, but in this case it fits. IF your fever doesn't spike and IF you don't develop trouble breathing, it's pretty much like any other flu. The thing I remember most about it is how it made my body feel like I'd been in a pretty decent car wreck, which is something I'm pretty used to as a martial arts person.

I learned one thing from the experience: blogging can be good for your health. After mentioning symptoms in a post last week, a friend and co-worker emailed me about a medicine that could help if taken within 48 hours. I tried it and it helped. Thanks to her and to others who send good wishes.

On the down side, I missed a couple of events I'd been looking forward to. On the bright side, I got to sleep a little more and finish season 5 of The Sopranos.

Now, once more unto the breach...

DEMOGRAPHIC UPDATE. Among those swelling the ranks of the homeless are those who lost everything due to foreclosures.

WAGES are taking a dive.

ARDI'S POLITICS. A leading primatologist ponders human origins here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Who got a raise?

Random animal picture featuring Arpad and Mini-me.

Earlier this week, I mentioned the increase in the federal minimum wage that took place last Friday. Here's a little information about who will benefit.

An analysis of national data shows that

*Around 10 percent of the workers (430.000 individuals) who will receive an increase are single parents with children under 18 years of age. 2.2 million children will benefit;

*More than three quarters of affected workers are adults aged 20 or over;

*About half of these (47 percent) work full time and another third (34 percent) work 20 to 34 hours a week;

*Most of those who benefit (63 percent) are women;

*Proportionally more members of minority groups will benefit from the increase. While African Americans make up 11 percent of the workforce, 18 percent will be affected by the raise. For Hispanics, the rates are 14 and 19 percent, respectively.

While the increase is good news for those who get it, the minimum wage (perhaps like the ole gray mare and some of us) ain't what it used to be. When adjusted for inflation, the 2009 minimum wage is 17 percent lower than in 1968. As a general trend, the purchasing power of the minimum wage was higher in the period between 1960and 1980 than it is in 2009.

There's more from the Economic Policy Institute about the issue here.

WHAT DO YOU WEAR AT AN "EXTINCTION EVENT?" Maybe whatever we have on now.

RACIAL PROFILING. Here's an op-ed by a friend of mine, the Rev. Matthew Watts, on some possible good things that could come out of the incident in which WV native and Harvard professor Skip Gates was arrested (aside from the beer at the White House thing).

HEALTH CARE. And here's an op-ed about health care from another friend, Marshall psychology professor Joseph Wyatt.

YOU'VE HEARD OF RENT TO OWN. Here's Dean Baker on "Own to Rent" as a step towards solving the foreclosure crisis. It makes way more sense.

IF YOU THOUGHT DRINKING AND DRIVING WAS BAD, check out texting.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

"It's all about the kids"

Pious platitudes about children are a mainstay of American politics, although in this as well as other things there's generally way more to the talk than the walk. This is especially true when it comes to children in poverty, which can have lifelong affects.

This item comes from Wired Science:

The biological legacy of childhood poverty may linger for decades, leaving adults who grew up poor more likely to get sick.

Genome scans of 103 adults found altered patterns of stress-related gene activity in those from low-income backgrounds. The patterns persisted even when poverty was left behind.

The findings, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could explain why heart disease, cancer and other diseases of aging appear to be unusually common in adults who grew up poor, regardless of their current income or lifestyles.

The best response, however, isn't pity. As William Blake put it,

Pity would be no more
If we did not make somebody poor...

A BOOST. The Economic Policy Institute argues that the coming increase in the federal minimum wage will provide a real stimulus to the economy.

SPEAKING OF WHICH, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities corrects misconceptions about the stimulus.

BLINDED BY THE LIGHT. Here's a personal reaction to President Obama's pledge to eliminate nuclear weapons by a survivor of Hiroshima.

FORECLOSURES are still increasing.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Tragedy or action movie?

Antigoneby Frederic Leighton, 1882. Image courtesy of wikipedia.

It seems to El Cabrero that the kinds of stories a culture tells itself shapes the way the people within it view the world. US residents, alas, have been fed a bit overmuch on a diet of action movies and french (freedom?) fries.

In action movies, there are definite good guys and bad guys with little or no ambiguity. The good guys usually win (in the US version anyway) and the bad guys lose and there's a happy ending.

Real life, however, is often more like a Greek tragedy than an action movie. There may be some better or worse characters, but it often involves clashes of rights and wrongs--and there will be some casualties by the time it's over.

Sophocles Antigone is a case in point. Antigone is a daughter of Oedipus. Her brother was slain outside the gates of Thebes for trying to overthrow the ruler Creon. Creon decrees that his body is to be left unburied. For ancient Greeks and other Mediterranean cultures, not being buried was considered to be worse than dying.

Antigone is torn between duties to the state--Creon, after all, was a legitimate ruler and her brother had no claim to power--and those to her conscience, her family and the gods. She can't keep all of them happy. In an act that some have described as world literature's first instance of civil disobedience, she buries her brother but must face the consequences by being buried alive under orders from Creon.

The ruler Creon suffers in turn. His beloved son Haemon was betrothed to Antigone and kills himself when he finds that she is dead. Creon's wife Eurydice likewise kills herself on learning of the death of her son, cursing Creon with her last breath. In the end, Creon is disgraced and despised by all Greece for his arrogance.

(I never said Greek tragedies weren't a downer. The same, however, could be said about much of real life.)

Former President George Bush was all about action movies--smoking the bad guys out of their holes. That worked out pretty well, huh? But people use the action movie frame across the political spectrum.

Occasionally the gods may give us an action movie type fight--a struggle with little or no ambiguity. Such fights are rare and precious. Much more often, however, we live in the realm of the tragic.

OH GOOD, HE SAID, WITH IRONY. Here's an item on coal to liquids and some of the problems that go with it.

A LITTLE GOOD NEWS. Blair Mountain in Logan County WV, the site of a 1921 historic battle between coal companies and miners fighting for the right to organize, has been added to the National Register of Historic Places.

SPEAKING OF GOAT ROPES, here's something to think about regarding Iraq.

SHELTER FROM THE STORM? Maybe not. Six million American families may face losing their homes through foreclosure in the next three years.

WHILE WE'RE AT IT, the NY Times reported yesterday that things are getting so bad that some banks are walking away from houses they foreclosed.

RUNNING AND EVOLUTION. There is a connection.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: TRAGIC

The little sacrifice of vanity

Benjamin Franklin, whatever else you can say about him, possessed a lot of social intelligence which he used to great effect in pursuing his various interests.

Yet another example of this can be found in how he approached gaining support for a lending library. At first, when he solicited subscriptions, he presented the library as his own idea (which it kind of was). But...

The objections and reluctances I met with in soliciting the subscriptions, made me soon feel the impropriety of presenting one's self as the proposer of any useful project, that might be suppos'd to raise one's reputation in the smallest degree above that of one's neighbors, when one has need of their assistance to accomplish that project.

From then on,

I therefore put myself as much as I could out of sight, and stated it as a scheme of a number of friends, who had requested me to go about and propose it to such as they thought lovers of reading. In this way my affair went on smoothly, and I ever after practis'd it on such occasions; and, from my frequent successes, can heartily recommend it. The present little sacrifice of vanity will be amply repaid.

According to Lao Tzu,

...the sage works without recognition.
He achieves what has to be done without dwelling on it.
He does not try to show his knowledge.

CLASS WARFARE? Jim Hightower thinks conservatives don't have a clue about it.

SPEAKING OF WHICH, here's another take on it.

GOING TO WASHINGTON. El Cabrero just finished and highly recommends Van Jones' book The Green Collar Economy. I just found out he's on his was to DC to work with the Obama administration. Here's an interview.

FORECLOSURES were up in Feb. over last year's levels.

HEALTH CARE. A business group issued a report that shows the US health care system is a liability.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

States of mind

Random picture.

El Cabrero has been giving a shout out this week to Laurence Gonzales' book, Deep Survival: Who Live, Who Dies, and Why, which looks at how people do (or don't) make it through extreme situations.

It seems to me that some of what he has to say applies to ordinary situations as well. Here's today's sample:

Al Siebert, a psychologist, writes in The Survivor Personality that the survivor (a category including people who avoid accidents) "does not impose pre-existing patterns on new information, but rather allows new information to reshape [his mental models]. The person who has the best chance of handling a situation well is usually the one with the best...mental pictures or images of what is occurring outside of the body."

The map really doesn't necessarily correspond to the territory.

IF IT'S ANY CONSOLATION, IT AIN'T JUST US. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that the economies of the world's major developed countries will shrink in 2009.

THE UNION PREMIUM. Unions provide better wages and conditions for workers in every state. Check out your own state data here.

FORECLOSURES. Here's a first look at President Obama's proposal to deal with the housing crisis.

PENTAGON CUTS? Maybe.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

The rectification of names

Master Kung. Image courtesy of wikipedia.

Last week, I was asked to give a talk to a graduate class on the failure of conservative economic policy. I was up for the occasion, but it seems to me that recent years haven't been very kind to the word "conservative."

When the ancient Chinese sage Confucius (aka Kǒng Fūzǐ or K'ung-fu-tzu) was asked what he would do first on acquiring a position of political influence, he said he would begin with "the rectification of names."

Then as now, public life had a shortage of honest speech and a surplus of BS. He believed that a great deal of harm was done when things weren't called by their true names.

I think George Orwell was thinking along the same lines in his great essay "Politics and the English Language."

If any word needs some serious rectification, it is "conservatism," which these days has come to mean some combination of the support of plutocratic policies and the politics of cultural jihad.

That's too bad, because conservatism in the best sense of the word implies a dislike of waste, a respect for the past, a cautious approach to change and and a rejection of Utopian schemes--none of which has a whole lot to do with the recent fare.

PUBLIC INVESTMENTS are more effective ways of stimulating the economy than another round of tax cuts, argues Lawrence Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute.

MORE ON THAT TRACK. Paul Krugman takes on tax cutters and obstructionists that are aiming to sabotage the recovery package here.

A STRUGGLE FOR THE SOUL of capitalism is the subject of this item by Benjamin Barber. El Cabrero isn't sure it has one.

RESISTANCE TO FORECLOSURES, a staple of the 1930s, may be growing again.

CLIMATE CHANGE is killing American trees.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

I herd that

Don't even think about it.

Sometimes one good book will lead to another. I recently read and highly recommend Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate, even though I'm sure it will bust the bubbles of many readers who are uncomfortable about our animal origins.

In that book, he pretty much demolishes some cherished ideas, such as the belief that all human behaviors are purely social constructions ("the blank slate"), that all nasty human traits are the result of culture ("the noble savage"), and that our minds are somehow floating ghosts that haunt the region of our heads ("the ghost in the machine").

In one part of the book, Pinker revisited the ideas of Thomas Hobbes and referred to a study by Richard Nisbett and Dov Cohen that found that

violent cultures arise in societies that are beyond the reach of law and in which precious assets are easily stolen. Societies that herd animals meet both conditions. Herders tend to live in territories that are unsuitable for growing crops and thus far from the centers of government. And their major asset, livestock, is easier to steal than the major asset of farmers, land. In herding societies a man can be stripped of his wealth (and of his ability to acquire wealth) in a blink. Men in that milieu cultivate a hair trigger for violent retaliation, not just against rustlers, but against anyone who would test their resolve by signs of disrespect that could reveal them to be easy pickings for rustlers.

Golly willikers, I wonder what it would be like to grow up in a culture like that? And keep your hands of my goats, bub...

But seriously, that is an interesting idea. Sometimes cultural norms often long outlive the situation that gave birth to them. But if you think about it, many people all over the US and the world live in situations where there is no positive relationship with a governing authority and where all the perceived good things of life--from respect and status to money and valuables--can be taken away.

CRYSTAL BALL. Here is one prediction about the near future of the economy in El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia. Short version: bad but maybe not as bad as the nation as a whole. That'd be a switch.

OWN TO RENT. Economist Deal Baker proposes a simple solution to the foreclosure crisis here.

URGENT MUMMY UPDATE here.

THE SOUL IN THE STONE. An archaeological artifact reveals ancient attitudes towards immortality.


GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Fortune and faith

El Cabrero has been thinking about luck, chance and randomness lately. In the Roman era, this was personified by the goddess Fortuna, who was about the only pagan deity to flourish in the Christian era.

This was more a matter of popular folklore than orthodox theology. It was hard to reconcile the idea of arbitrary chance with divine providence, although some managed to do it.

A case in point was Dante. In Canto 7 of the Inferno, Virgil explains to the pilgrim that God appointed Fortuna to be his agent in bringing change to the world:

He whose omniscience everything transcends
The heavens created, and gave who should guide them,
That every part to every part may shine,

Distributing the light in equal measure;
He in like manner to the mundane splendours
Ordained a general ministress and guide,

That she might change at times the empty treasures
From race to race, from one blood to another,
Beyond resistance of all human wisdom.

Therefore one people triumphs, and another
Languishes, in pursuance of her judgment,
Which hidden is, as in the grass a serpent.

Your knowledge has no counterstand against her;
She makes provision, judges, and pursues
Her governance, as theirs the other gods.

Her permutations have not any truce;
Necessity makes her precipitate,
So often cometh who his turn obtains.

And this is she who is so crucified
Even by those who ought to give her praise,
Giving her blame amiss, and bad repute.

But she is blissful, and she hears it not;
Among the other primal creatures gladsome
She turns her sphere, and blissful she rejoices.

She's still with us today and is as changeable as ever, which isn't always a bad thing.

81,312 HOMES were lost to foreclosure in September.

GETTING IT RIGHT THIS TIME. If another stimulus package is going to happen, here's how to get more bang for the buck.

MISTAKES WERE MADE. Alan Greenspan has apparently acknowledged that unregulated markets might actually not be divine. El Cabrero would like to ask, "What was your first clue?"

MOUNTAINTOP REMOVAL MINING isn't very popular with the American people, as a new poll reveals.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Metaphor and reality

El Cabrero would like to thank regular readers of Goat Rope for putting up with a long series on the Odyssey of Homer. As I've written before, I think this epic of homecoming has universal human appeal but also can shed light on the difficulty many veterans have on returning from war.

I happened to grow up between the wars, but my father served in World War II, having enlisted shortly after asking, and I quote, "Where the #*%@ is Pearl Harbor?" He made it back in one piece but had trouble with his homecoming throughout his life. So have some other people I know who served in Vietnam or Iraq.

To recap, many of the misadventures Odysseus had on his long way home can be seen as metaphors for the many different ways people can lose their homecoming. Indeed, Odysseus can be seen as an example of how not to do it. As Jonathan Shay, a psychiatrist who works with veterans dealing with post-traumatic stress syndrome, wrote

Odysseus was absent from home for twenty years. Ten of those were the Trojan War itself. The remaining ten years were...what? The only account we have of them is Odysseus' fabulous tales told to the Phaeacian courtiers in Books 9-12. Might they have been ten years at home, but not home? Ten years of wildness, drinking, drugging, living on the edge, violence, sex addiction, not-so-petty crime, and of "bunkering in," becoming unapproachable and withdrawn? If so would not Odysseus have been just as "absent" a son to Anticleia, just as "absent" a husband to Penelope, and "absent" a father to Telemachus as if he still had been overseas? Could not these ten years have been told in metaphor as the very same story told in the Odyssey?

Get ready for the sirens...

THE DEBT OF NATIONS. Here's a view from Canada on the current US financial crisis. And here's Paul Krugman with more of the same.

HOW MANY ECONOMISTS DOES IT TAKE to change a light bulb? For many, the answer until recently was "None. The market will take care of it." As this item from the UK points out, it won't.

LOSING IT. The number of foreclosures in West Virginia has been greatly underreported, according to an investigation by the Charleston Gazette.

FEAR THIS. Here's more on the recent study of the psychology and politics of fear mentioned here last week.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

DID THEY BELIEVE IT?

Raphael's School of Athens, courtesy of wikipedia.

(Note for first time visitors: The theme here lately is the Odyssey of Homer, along with links and comments about current events. If you like this kind of thing, please click on earlier posts.)

The American writer H.L. Mencken defined puritanism as "The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy." Puritanism as a turn of mind has been around a lot longer than the dissenters from the Church of England in the 1600s.

It was a major factor in some schools of Greek philosophy, especially that of Socrates and Plato (judging by what we know of the former from the latter). Along with some other killjoys, these people criticized Homer and other poets and purveyors of Greek myth and tragedy for teaching immorality by portraying the gods as behaving badly.

They just didn't get it. As noted previously, several of these gods were at least in part personifications of natural forces: storms, the sea, wild animals, sexual desire, earthquakes, etc. And nature is not known for being moralistic. For that matter, the whole point of many myths is that humans should not try to overreach or act like gods lest they bring about their own destruction.

Socrates liked to torment lovers of myths and poetry by asking them logic-chopping questions and dismissing them if they had trouble answering...as if the whole point of art, song and story was not to speak to the conscious and unconscious and rational and irrational parts of the human psyche. And as if it was all taken literally.

Plato went farther than his teacher. In the Republic, he wanted to ban poets and only teach edifying state-approved stories to its citizens, something that has been the dream of tyrants through the ages.

Goat Rope verdict: there is arguably more enduring and useful wisdom in the Greek tragedies than the whole of Plato's corpus. Get over it, dudes, or drink the hemlock.

For many Greeks, however, there was little room for doubt. To experience awe over storms or fear over breaking oaths and mistreating hosts or guests was to experience Zeus. To experience desire was to experience Aphrodite. To cultivate the land was to honor Demeter and receive her gifts. To drink wine was to experience Dionysus. And so on.

Some of the other gods were derived from and represented human experiences, such as marriage, sickness and healing, exchanges, music and poetry, metal-working etc.

Athena, the main divine character of the Odyssey, is a special case. In that story (and to a lesser extent in the Iliad), she is experienced either openly or, more often, in disguise. Directly or indirectly, she is who/what restrains people from taking rash actions and who/what brings hope, stength and wisdom to people who were tired, forlorn or hopeless. Next time you get a boost when you need it, consider that an Athena moment.

All these examples are derived just from daily life, not counting sacred festivals or holidays. All religions make sense from the inside, and Greek religion was no exception.

ILLUSIONS OF WAR. Here's Krugman on what the war in Georgia might mean.

WAL-MART: EVERYDAY WORKER INTIMIDATION. Labor groups are urging the Federal Election Commission to investigate whether the retail giant broke any laws by telling employees the world would come to an end if they voted the wrong way.

HOME FORECLOSURES are up 55 percent from this time last year.

BAD BALLOON. Meanwhile, inflation is at its highest rate in 17 years.

VERY COOL HOT IDEA. Researchers think they've found a way to turn roads and parking lots into solar energy collectors.

IT'S OFFICIAL. Joggers live longer than people who don't exercise (most of the time).

IS THAT A BIGFOOT IN YOUR FREEZER or are you just happy to be here? Two searchers in Georgia claim to have found a dead one.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

DOJO KUN

Gichin Funakoshi.

The theme of this week's Goat Rope is strategy and what people who want to make the world less violent and more just can learn from the theory and history of conflict. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier entries.

El Cabrero admits to being a fan of Sun Tzu from way back. I first learned about his Art of War when I began became interested in martial arts as a child. At the time, there were no classes in my little town and we couldn't afford the tae kwon do school in a nearby city, which charged high payments and made you sign contracts. (I've always been grateful to Lady Poverty for saving me from going that route.)

So for a few years, I just read whatever I could find about it. In the process, I learned about different religions, philosophies and traditions. Eventually, we found a non-commercial dojo which taught shotokan, a strict traditional Japanese/Okinawan style. Practice sessions are a mixture of ritual and drill, part boot camp and part high church.

Shotokan was founded by Gichin Funakoshi, an Okinawan schoolteacher, scholar, and calligrapher (Shoto was his pen name, and kan means school). A sickly child, he studied from the leading masters of his day and was a pioneer in introducing the Okinawan art to Japan and ultimately the world. His writings and example have probably influenced my moral and spiritual development (such as it is) as much as the Bible and the church I sometimes attend. Probably more.

In one of his earlier manuals, he wrote the following:

Deep within the shadows of human culture lurk seeds of destruction, just as rain and thunder follow in the wake of fair weather. History is the story of the rise and fall of nations. Change is the order of heaven and earth; the sword and pen are as inseparable as the two wheels of a cart. Thus, a man must encompass both fields if he is to be considered a man of accomplishment. If he is overly complacent, trusting that fair weather will last forever, he will one day be caught off guard by terrible floods and storms. So it is essential for all of us to prepare each day for any unexpected emergency.

Funakoshi drilled his students in ethics and courtesy as much as physical techniques. The result combined strong inhibitions against the use of force with a fierce, linear, all-out fighting style.

His master text, Karate-Do Kyohan, contains a section of maxims for the trainee which includes quotes from Sun Tzu as well as Confucian and Buddhist sources. They are quoted without attribution since it was presumed that readers would know the source.

Here are two well known ones. They are pretty basic but if you only keep two from Sun Tzu, they'd be a good choice:

For to win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the highest skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the highest skill.

In other words, the ultimate level of skill in understanding conflict or strife is to accomplish what you need to without it. Understood metaphorically, it also means one should use the least possible energy and do the least possible harm in responding to situations.

Funakoshi also quoted Sun Tzu on the importance of knowledge:

Know the enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles you will never be in peril.

When you are ignorant of the enemy but know yourself, your chances of winning or losing are equal.

If ignorant of both your enemy and of yourself, you are certain in every battle to be in peril.

In other words, understanding one's own capacities and limitations as well as those of one's opponent can help one anticipate developments and/or take advantage of openings in a given situation or avoid engagement altogether. Those two sayings taken together are pretty good advice for the most peace loving people, whether they are trying to effect some change or just deal with the ordinary collisions of life.

CITIES FIGHT BACK. Here's an interesting item from Business Week about how some cities are dealing with home foreclosures. It seems that many banks abandon homes after they force out the former owners for not being able to keep up with payments. The abandoned housing causes all kinds of problems. Some cities are taking banks to court to force them to keep up the property, demolish it or otherwise take some responsibility for the mess they created.

THE DIETARY DIVIDE reflects the economic one. The rich get organic and the poor get diabetes.

MASSEY IN COURT. Here's the latest on Massey Energy's most recent legal battle.

STATE OF THE STATE. Here's the text of Gov. Manchin's speech.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED