ON BEING CAREFUL WITH PRAYER

Eos chasing Tithonus in happier times. Urn courtesy of wikipedia.

It is pretty well established that one should be careful in what one asks for when petitioning the gods for a favor. One should also be specific.

Take the case of Tithonus in Greek mythology. He was the lover of Eos or Dawn. Eos asked Zeus to grant him immortality, but she forgot to ask for eternal youth. He kept getting older and older but wasn't able to die. According to the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite,

... when the first strands of gray hair started growing
from his beautiful head and his noble chin,
then the Lady Eos stopped coming to his bed.
But she nourished him, keeping him in her palace,
with grain and ambrosia. And she gave him beautiful clothes.
But when hateful old age was pressing hard on him, with all its might,
and he couldn’t move his limbs, much less lift them up,
then...she thought up this plan, a very good one indeed:
she put him in her chamber, and she closed the shining doors over him.
From there his voice pours out—it seems never to end—and he has no strength at all, the kind he used to have in his limbs when they could still bend.

In another version, he shrivels up and turns into a cicada who constantly begs for death.

Doh! I hate it when that happens.

When El Cabrero was younger, I petitioned the gods to let me be a writer. The petition was granted, sort of. I've written a lot of stuff, some of which may have been marginally useful in a few smallish campaigns but none of which is particularly memorable.

I should have been more specific....something like "Let me be as good a writer as Melville in his prime but more commercially successful and with a much less miserable personal and family life than he had...Oh, yeah, and let some of it make a difference."

That would have been awesome.

YOU SOO ALREADY KNEW THIS. The economy is like bad or something.

VENGEANCE IS WHOSE? Jared Diamond, author of Collapse and Guns, Germs and Steel reflects on the drive for revenge in this New Yorker article.

FALLEN IDOL. The International Monetary Fund, which Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research calls a "creditors cartel," has seen better days...which might not be such a bad thing. Economist Jeffrey Sachs is quoted in this piece as saying that "the IMF has become the Typhoid Mary of emerging markets, spreading recessions in country after country."

HUNGRY PLANET. This item from The Nation discusses the global food crisis.

GET MOVING. Exercise, dammit.

URGENT FROZEN COLOSSAL SQUID UPDATE here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

SWEET REVENGE, SWEET REVENGE WITHOUT FAIL

Caption: This man avenges slight by a toy monkey who stepped on his Nikes.

MINIMUM WAGE UPDATE: Before El Cabrero gets down to other business, here's a quick reminder to please call the U.S. Senate today if you haven't already to urge the passage of a "clean" minimum wage bill without fiscally irresponsible tax cuts and/or other measures to undermine workers rights.

The toll-free number provided by the American Friends Service Committee is 1-800-459-1887.

Also yours at no extra cost is a rant of mine on the subject from yesterday's Sunday Gazette-Mail

For more information on the vote in the Senate, scroll down to Friday's post.

REVENGE. OK, back to the headline topic. The Jan. 22 issue of Business Week's cover story had the delightful title, "Revenge: The power of retribution, spite, and loathing in the world of business." Short summary: it plays more of a role than you might think.

But then, why should business be any different from any other human endeavour? The theme of revenge is as old as Cain and Abel, the Iliad, Romulus and Remus, etc.

Lately scientists have been examining the physiology and psychology of vengeance. Here's an excerpt from the article:

Ernst Fehr, a behavioral economist at the University of Zurich, studies how our brains react when "social norms" are violated. In Fehr's research, two players are asked to exchange money according to various scenarios. When one player hoards the cash for himself, the other has an opportunity to punish him financially. The player who got burned is hooked up to a brain scan while he's considering whether to retaliate. Fehr found that the part of our brains associated with feeling satisfaction was more strongly activated while players contemplated getting even. "There is a hedonic force behind the punishment," says Fehr. Put simply: Revenge is biologically, scientifically sweet.

There's something delicious about getting back at someone who has hurt us. Or doing well as that person looks on. Savoring the balm of revenge does not require active stabs at retribution; it can also be a byproduct of success. "We hold the illusion that if the other person is as venomous as we think, [even] their knowledge of our success is psychologically damaging to them," says Jeffrey A. Sonnenfeld, senior associate dean at the Yale School of Management.

I don't know about you guys, but I was kind of glad to hear it wasn't all about greed.

Leaving aside specific cases, one problem about revenge is that it often tends to be out of all proportion to the original offense due to the what has been called the "magnitude gap." That's the difference in perception between offender and offended in just how big a deal the original offense was.

(Good thing that doesn't happen very often huh?)

Then there's the whole "collateral damage" thing.

I guess one function of a good social order is to limit the amount of damage we can do to each other, preferably sooner rather than later.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED