Groan

(This is what libraries looked like when I started working in them.)

All we need these days is another embarrassing story about West Virginia. Well, guess what? We got one. This one hit a little close to home.

First a digression. By an accident of fate, I spent 10 years working in public libraries in WV. I started out as a part time janitor after high school. In fact, I got some of my best reading done when I was supposed to be cleaning the little library in my home town.

After the big flood of 1978 trashed my town, including the library, there was a lot of extra work. Eventually I started working with the public. I really loved bantering with people, waiting on kids, helping people find the information they needed (even if they weren't very clear on it sometimes) and putting on programs people wanted to come to.

Aside from the whole poverty thing, it was a good gig.

Libraries are like little liberated areas carved out in the midst of the reign of greed. They are refuges for people of all ages and passports of the mind.They are places where people can make a fresh start on education, careers, and personal development. They are places that provide a venue for many diverse viewpoints.

They're also outposts of free speech and bulwarks against book banning. Or were meant to be.

That's where the groan comes in. A national news story recently broke about the library director in Berkeley Springs who tried to keep a copy of Bob Woodward's Fear off the shelves. Fortunately, the library board lost no time in reversing the decision.

I'm hoping that the exposure this incident has gotten sends a loud and clear message that this kind of **** is not to be tolerated.

The distance between book banning and book burning isn't that far.

Curiouser and curiouser

Earlier this year a friendly librarian changed my life. Again. She told me about this cool online service, Hoopla, which among other things allows you to download audiobooks to your smartphone or other devise.

I've always been a big fan of audio books, but used to listen to them in the Paleolithic era on cassettes and in the Neolithic era on compact discs... all of which had an irritating tendency to disappear or get damaged. Thanks to Hoopla I've been able to burn through dozens of books while driving, mowing or other tasks.

I took a classic wisdom bath and listened to unabridged recordings of Herodotus, Thucydides and Plutarch. I binged on my beloved (and admittedly crazy Nietzsche). I caught up a bit with my old friend Freud.

Just lately, to clear the palate, I listened to Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. I've been a fan of the Disney movie forever, the more recent version not so much though I like the actors, but it had been a while since I read the book.

Think Kafka for kids.

It was even more delightfully trippy than I remembered it, dreamlike and full of playing with language and logic.

Since we've gone down the rabbit hole lately, with and Orange King instead of a Red Queen screaming "off with their heads," it's even kind of timely. Electronically or otherwise, I highly recommend giving it another look.

Heads up!

It's understandable that a lot of attention is focused on the...stuff rolling out of Washington these days. But there's a huge threat at the state level and politicians of both parties talk about the need to slash the state budget, which has already been cut for the last several years.

Now it's even more serious. We're talking serious damage to the things that make life livable here..

There's no such need. They can easily raise revenue to protect schools, kids, seniors, higher ed, job training, parks, tourism, public safety and all that. It's a matter of choice.

I urge everyone in WV who cares about any of that to check out www.protectwv.org, learn about what's at stake, sign up to keep up and show up.

For West Virginians, this crosses divides. Whether you love or hate Trump, you probably know someone who goes to or works at a public school or college, have a favorite state park, go to a library, drive on roads, and care about public safety. Etc.

It's on. Now.

#protectWV #nofailedstate

Noble savages

People seem to be genetically wired to make, tell and see stories and we often tend to endlessly recycle a few basic kinds of story types.

One that's particularly popular in America today is the action movie, with clear good guys and bad guys and a happy ending. That can be entertaining, but it's not always the best lens to look at social problems. As I've argued earlier this week, a lot of life is more like a tragedy of conflicting rights and wrongs.

The coal industry version of the action movie is that coal mining, including mountaintop removal, is the best thing that ever happened to West Virginia and that environmentalists or people serious about regulation are the serpent in this Garden of Eden. (Coal is also clean and carbon neutral, which is kind of like booze without alcohol.) Which is, of course, a product of bovine digestion.

I dislike mountaintop removal, support stronger regulation of the industry, and would like to see it phased out. But I've noticed that some articles on the subject by out of state environmental writers have an action movie of their own going on. According to this one, the good guys are a bunch of Appalachian Noble Savages standing as one against the evil coal companies. The assumption is that if the practice just ended today, everything would be great.

I'm not that worried about the evil coal company part of this action movie frame (which kind of works in some cases) but the rest is over-simplified. While probably a majority of West Virginians oppose the practice according to the public opinion research I've seen, this is a contested issue all the way down. There are noble and ignoble savages and non-savages on different sides of the issue.

There are no doubt people who work on mountaintop removal jobs who don't like it deep down inside. And there are people who personally oppose it but accept it for economic or political reasons. Lots of people are conflicted to one degree or another for various reasons.

The happy ending part is also over-simplified. I think the results for southern West Virginia are going to be tragic no matter what happens. If it goes on as it has in the past, there will be huge environmental devastation, water contamination, floods, coal-related health problems, etc., not to mention more climate change impacts. And if it stops, there will be some job losses and a loss of revenue for public services from coal severance taxes.

According to the US Energy Information Agency, in 2007 there were 6,608 surface mining jobs in West Virginia.

While I don't think coal companies have historically paid enough in taxes in light of the damage they've done and the wealth they've extracted, revenues generated from severance taxes make up an important part of West Virginia's budget, lately bringing over $300 million per year to the state's general revenue fund. According to a state tax official, around 85 percent of that is from coal.

Severance taxes are part of the reason why the state was slower to experience the fiscal impact of the current recession. And around 80 percent of state general revenue funds go to public and higher education and human services. And even if nothing changes as far as coal regulation goes, when it's gone it's gone.

El Cabrero is not seeing a whole lot of happy endings. Whatever happens, I'm seeing more of a tragedy than an action movie.

I'm reminded of a quote attributed to Woody Allen:

“Today we are at a crossroads. One road leads to hopelessness and despair; the other, to total extinction. Let us pray we choose wisely.”

I'll try to find a silver lining tomorrow....

WHILE WE'RE AT IT, here's Ken Wards latest blog post on the Obama administration's approach to the issue.

AND THEN THERE'S THIS. This article looks at research on carbon capture.

THE PATH TO WAR (BUT WHERE'S THE EXIT?). The latest edition of the Rev. Jim Lewis' Notes From Under the Fig Tree looks at the war in Iraq and especially Afghanistan.

SIGN OF THE TIMES. The recession is filling and stressing libraries.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

An accidental librarian

Before stumbling into my current career, I spent 10 happy if ill-paid years working in public libraries. Believe it or not, it turned out to be a pretty good preparation for working on social justice issues.

It was pretty much an accident. The local library in my small town needed a part time custodial engineer when I started taking college classes. The job mostly involved coming in after hours. I cannot say that I pursued this task with heroic diligence, but they kept me around. It was on evenings like those when I should have been running the vacuum that I made the acquaintance of Langston Hughes' poetry and the more radical political writings of Mark Twain.

Then a huge flood trashed the library and most of the town and I got plenty of extra work. At some point, they figured out I could read and write and had me start working with the public. It was kind of like being a bartender with books.

I discovered I enjoyed bantering with people of all ages, hearing all kinds of juicy gossip and hunting for hard to find information. The elementary school was just a block or so away, and it wasn't unusual to have six or seven classes a day roll in like little sailors on shore leave.

The main librarian there lacked a degree but had this remarkable gift for making it a place that was welcoming to everyone. She was also a coal miner's daughter and a yellow dog Democrat with deep union sympathies. Her basic philosophy was to find out what people want or need and figure out a way to get it to them.

The job market being what it was in the 1980s, I stuck around. Later on, I wound up working in the reference department at a city library, which was a whole different game. Talk about dealing with all kinds of people, some of whom had major issues... The thing I liked about reference was the challenge of having to hunt up all kinds of bizarre and random information. Recall, Gentle Reader, that this was WAY before Google. On really tough questions, I liked to Zen it, which involved emptying the mind of preconceptions and chasing it down.

One thing I really enjoyed doing was programming, which is to say thinking of weird and entertaining things to get people to come in. Kids had to go to school, but generally nobody has to go to a library. You gotta make em want it. A few such efforts that come to mind involve visiting elementary schools in a monkey suit and staging worm races.

I still view public libraries as vital resources in many ways for anyone interested in working on public issues or finding out what is going on in a community. Each well run library is a little liberated area, a public space open to all where "from each according to his [or her] abilities, to each according to his needs" pretty much applies.

TOWARDS SUSTAINABILITY. Which is more important, well-being or growth? (This article raises interesting points, but Aristotle got there first.)

WONKY BUT GOOD. Here's Jacob Hacker discussing health care reform and how to get where we need to go.

ANOTHER EVOLUTION BATTLE is heating up in Texas. Next stop...Copernicus? After all, the Bible clearly says that Joshua made the sun stand still, not the earth. So there.

ANOTHER PUBLIC SERVICE. Poetry reading in the US hit a 16 year low, according to the National Endowment for the Arts. In order to help reverse this trend, El Cabrero has composed the following poem:

ON THE READING OF POETRY

Read some, read some. Yes, you should.
Some of it is pretty good.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Book it

The Library Company of Philadelphia. Image courtesy of wikipedia.

El Cabrero has been musing lately on the long, active and generally useful life of Benjamin Franklin. His life is, among other things, a textbook example of the usefulness of social capital in making good things happen.

As mentioned in previous posts, Franklin and friends formed a discussion group called the Junto to discuss important issues of morals, politics, and such. Sometimes these discussions yielded very practical results. One such discussion mentioned yesterday led to the formation of a pretty sophisticated volunteer fire department.

Another such outgrowth was a lending library. During one of the Junto meetings around 1731, Franklin recalled that

a proposition was made by me, that, since our books were often referr'd to in our disquisitions upon the queries, it might be convenient to us to have them altogether where we met, that upon occasion they might be consulted; and by thus clubbing our books to a common library, we should, while we lik'd to keep them together, have each of us the advantage of using the books of all the other members, which would be nearly as beneficial as if each owned the whole.

That arrangement worked well enough for around a year, at which time he took the idea to a different level:

And now I set on foot my first project of a public nature, that for a subscription library. I drew up the proposals, got them put into form...and, by the help of my friends in the Junto, procured fifty subscribers of forty shillings each to begin with, and ten shillings a year for fifty years, the term our company was to continue. We afterwards obtain'd a charter, the company being increased to one hundred: this was the mother of all the North American subscription libraries, now so numerous. It has become a great thing itself, and continually increasing. These libraries have improved the general conversation of the Americans, made the common tradesmen and farmers as intelligent as most gentlemen from other countries, and perhaps have contributed in some degree to the stand so generally made throughout the colonies in defence of their privileges.

The Library Company of Philadelphia is still in existence today and these early subscription libraries helped pave the way for US public libraries as we know them today.

Not too shabby.

A GOOD FIRST STEP. The recovery package recently passed by Congress might help stem some job losses in the states, but more remains to be done.

UNCOVERED. A new report from Families USA found that one out of three Americans under 65 was uninsured at some point last year.

SPEAKING OF WHICH, there is also the issue of the under-insured, i.e. those with some coverage but not enough to cover basic health care costs.

WORKING WITH THE MEDIA. Here's a how-to guide to getting attention to issues that you think are important.

LOSING ONE'S EDGE. Sometimes mindfulness can be boring.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: IMPASSABLE

THE CYCLOPS, CONSIDERED AS CHEESEMAKER

The Odyssey series continues, along with links and comments about current events. We're just now at the part where he meets the cyclops.

Speaking of which, sometimes El Cabrero's Spousal Unit reminds me of a cyclops. I'm not saying that she's a one-eyed giant cannibalistic monster, necessarily. Let's just say they have common interests. He's got goats (and sheep) and is a cheese maker.

When Odysseus and his men visit the cyclops Polyphemus cave, he is still out with his herd. It sounds a bit like Goat Rope Farm, only on a much larger scale. As Odysseus puts it,

'So we explored his den, gazing wide-eyed at it all,
the large flack racks loaded with drying cheeses,
the folds crowded with young lambs and kids...
And all his vessels, pails and hammered buckets
he used for milking, where brimming full with whey.'

We get a glimpse of the giant at work:

Back he came from the pasture, late in the day,
herding his flocks home...
Then down he squatted to milk his sheep and bleating goats,
each in order, and put a suckling underneath each dam.
And half of the fresh white mile he curdled quickly,
set it aside in wicker racks to press for cheese,
the other half let stand in pails and buckets,
ready at hand to wash his supper down...

It sounds kinda like home to me...

But I digress. As mentioned earlier, a major theme in Homer's epics is that of xenia, the sacred guest host relationship. Odyseus and his men get off on a bad foot, entering his cave without asking or being invited. They build a fire and started chowing down on the cheese before he even gets home. Didn't these guys ever hear of Miss Manners?

Polyphemus doesn't like surprises:

'Strangers!' he thundered out, 'now who are you?
Where did you sail from, over the running sea-lanes?
Out on a raiding spree or roving the waves like pirates,
sea-wolves raiding at will, who risk their lives
to plunder other men?'

Based on their past behavior, that's pretty much exactly what Odysseus and his men are. It's just about supper time...

More tomorrow.

NOT SO GOOD. A Rutgers University scorecard on the state of American workers found some disturbing--but not surprising--trends.

REDISCOVERING AN OLD FRIEND. AP reports that more Americans are using public libraries in hard economic times. I can't imagine how people could do without them in the best of times. At any given moment, El Cabrero is abusing the borrowing privileges of about four different library systems.

SPEAKING OF WHICH, here is an item on books that changed history.

STILL MORE on CEO pay.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED