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

Medicine for the mind

Daruma dolls for everyone! Image courtesy of wikipedia.

Lately Goat Rope has been about Buddhist lore, although you'll also find links and comments about current events. For the last week or so, the focus has been on legends about the figure of Bodhidharma or Daruma, who is said to have brought Zen from India to China and is also associated with the martial arts.

While the legends show Daruma as a pretty fierce figure, he has become a beloved figure in Japanese popular culture and his stylized image is featured in dolls, toys, kites, tops and many other forms.

As mentioned yesterday, one particularly popular form is the Daruma okiagari doll, which bounces back up when it has been pushed over, in accord with the popular saying, "seven falls, eight rises."

H. Neill McFarland in his book Daruma: The Founder of Zen in Japanese Art and Popular Culture explains the deeper meaning of both the toy and the saying this way:

The tactics thought to be implicit in this combination of image and adage, though also enigmatic, are of the essence of Asian philosophy and strategy, either for coping with life's vicissitudes or for practicing the martial arts. Maintain a low center of gravity. This enables one to rise up repeatedly, utilizing the momentum generated by the act of falling. Yield without breaking. Like the supple bamboo bending before the wind, one may practice the resistance of nonresistance (muteiko no teiko).

Thus, one who knows and ponders the cryptic little motto "Seven falls, eight rises" may view the bobbing motion of an okiagari Daruma as a symbolic enactment of life's experiences and contrasts--the ups and downs, the highs and lows, the successes and failures--and prepare to face them with perseverance and resilience. For this purpose, Daruma is said to be a kind of medicine for the mind (shinyaku).

STIMULATING. The economic recovery package unveiled by the US House yesterday actually does a lot of the things this blog has been screaming for over the past few years.

LESS WORK FOR MORE WORKERS. The number of involuntary part-time workers has doubled in the last year, according to the latest snapshot by the Economic Policy Institute.

SMILE AWAY. It might help.

FRIENDLY SKIES? It's hard to believe that all 155 passengers survived a flight that crash landed in the Hudson River.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

John Brown's body...

Image courtesy of wikipedia.

Today--or rather this evening--marks the anniversary of John Brown's 1859 raid on Harper's Ferry in what is now West Virginia. Brown to me is one of the most fascinating figures in American history, someone who struck his time like some kind of karmic meteor.

The aim was to seize weapons at the armory there and distribute them to the slaves he believed would rally to his standard. From there, they would wage low key guerrilla warfare in the Appalachian mountains and provide a haven for runaways which would presumably deplete Virginia of its supply of slave labor. He had even drawn up a provisional constitution for the republic of former slaves that he hoped to inaugurate.

Like most of the specific things Brown attempted in his life, the raid in purely military terms was a disaster. Ironically, its first casualty was Hayward Shepherd, an African-American railroad baggage handler. It was over by Oct. 18, when he was captured by a military party that included Robert E. Lee and J.E.B. Stuart.

Altogether, Brown's force consisted of 22 men, 19 of which participated in the raid. Of these, five were African-American. Of these, 10, including two of Brown's sons, died during the attack. Seven more, including Brown himself, were eventually hanged.

The thing that strikes me most about that whole episode was the fact that although he failed at everything he attempted, in the end he seemed to get what he wanted. The raid further polarized North and South and seemed to drive the situation to the point of no return.

He told the court:

Had I interfered in the manner which I admit, and which I admit has been fairly proved... in behalf of the rich, the powerful, the intelligent, the so-called great, or in behalf of any of their friends, either father, mother, brother, sister, wife, or children, or any of that class, and suffered and sacrificed what I have in this interference, it would have been all right; and every man in this court would have deemed it an act worthy of reward rather than punishment.

This court acknowledges, as I suppose, the validity of the law of God. I see a book kissed here which I suppose to be the Bible, or at least the New Testament. That teaches me that all things whatsoever I would that men should do to me, I should do even so to them. It teaches me, further, to "remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them." I endeavored to act up to that instruction. I say, I am yet too young to understand that God is any respecter of persons. I believe that to have interfered as I have done as I have always freely admitted I have done in behalf of His despised poor, was not wrong, but right. Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I submit; so let it be done!"

Brown remains a controversial figure to this day. People still argue about whether he was a madman, a fanatic, a killer, a martyr, or a freedom fighter. I'm leaning toward "some combination thereof."

He reminds me of some cryptic lines from Bob Dylan's song "Idiot Wind:"

There's a lone soldier on the cross, smoke pourin' out of a boxcar door,
You didn't know it, you didn't think it could be done, in the final end he won the wars
After losin' every battle.

HOW'S THAT STIMULUS COMING? The latest snapshot from the Economic Policy Institute finds that underemployment is at a 14 year high.

WATERBOARD SURFING. This item from the Washington Post reports that the Bush White House explicitly endorsed interrogation techniques that people who don't torture the English language would refer to as torture in 2003 and 2004.

GRUNTING FOR WORMS. No, I'm not going to explain what that means. You need to click here to find out.

ADVICE FOR THE NEWLY POOR can be found here.

URGENT FOSSIL FISH UPDATE here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A RELIGION OF THE HEART

Camp meeting, circa 1839, courtesy of wikipedia.

The theme this week at Goat Rope is a paradox of the American religious experience: while the US is among the most religious and religiously diverse countries in the world, many residents measure pretty low on surveys of religious literacy--both of the religions they profess and of those they don't.

One thing that may have set the tone for this was the popularity of revivalism on the American frontier, of which the Second Great Awakening of the first half of the 1800s is a prime example. As the historian Richard Hofstadter wrote,

Long before America was discovered, the Christian community was perennially divided between those who believed that the intellect must have a vital place in religion and those who believed that intellect should be subordinated to emotion, or in effect abandoned at the dictates of emotion...under American conditions the balance between traditional establishments and revivalist or enthusiastic movements drastically shifted in favor of the latter. In consequence, the learned professional clergy suffered a loss of position, and the rational style of religion they found congenial suffered accordingly. At an early stage in its history, America, with its Protestant and dissenting inheritance, became the scene of an unusually keen local variation of this universal historical struggle over the character of religion; and here the forces of enthusiasm and revivalism had their most impressive victories.

Of course, given the hardships of farm and frontier life, this kind of religion provided relief from toil, a chance to socialize, and a welcome form of entertainment. Abraham Lincoln, who was pretty unorthodox in religious matters, enjoyed such spectacles while growing up. He once said "When I see a man preach, I like to see him act as if he were fighting bees."

The effects of the Second Great Awakening can still be felt in El Cabrero's neck of the woods. I remember many conversations I had growing up about religion with people for whom religion was preaching and who suspected educated clergy to be instruments of the devil. They believed every word of the Bible, even if they were a little hazy on what these might actually be.

As Stephen Prothero notes in Religious Literacy, this religion of the heart was a marked change from the kind that prevailed before when the nation was founded:

As has been noted, religious faith and religious knowledge were inseparable in the colonies and the early republic...But early Americans didn't just know Jesus; they knew the Sermon on the Mount (often by heart). They believed, as the Reverend John Lathrop of Boston's Second Church wrote, that "the connexion between knowledge and faith, is such, that the latter cannot exist without the former."...All that changed, however, with the rise to public power in the early nineteenth century of a new form of Protestantism called evangelicalism. By the end of that century a lack of elementary knowledge of Christianity would constitute evidence of authentic faith. What for generations had been shameful--religious illiteracy--would become a badge of honor in a nation besotted with the self-made man and the spirit-filled preacher.

The triumph had unintended consequences:

In the name of heartfelt faith, unmediated experience, and Jesus himself, they actively discouraged religious learning. To evangelicalism, therefore, we owe both the vitality of religion in contemporary American and our impoverished understanding of it.

LEAVING A RECORD...DEFICIT. President Bush will leave his successor the biggest one yet.

THAT'S JUST SWELL. The US has reassured Israel that it might whack Iran. Here's more on the subject from Scott Ritter.

LOSING TIME. This doesn't show up on official unemployment statistics, but millions of American workers have had the hours of work cut.

IF "SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN" RAN HOROSCOPES, here's what they would look like.

OLD SCHOOL COMPUTING. This is an interesting look at an ancient Greek computational device. Where did they plug it in?

HYPERION TO A SATYR. A professor from El Cabrero's alma mater Marshall University will write a biography of George W. Bush. The author, Jean Edward Smith, has previously written 12 books, including a prize-winning and bestselling biography of FDR--peace be unto him. The contrast between the two is mind boggling.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED