THE WEEPING PHILOSOPHER AND THE CHINESE SAGE

Heraclitus, by way of wikipedia.

It may be that a person's choice of worldview is as much a result of temperament as rational persuasion. El Cabrero inclines to a view of the world as something in constant flux, with things colliding and combining all the time.

I don't think it's all chaos. Instead, it seems that much of the art of life consists of trying to understand the patterns of change and the array of forces and working with them.

That's probably why one of my favorite philosophers is the ancient Greek sage Heraclitus, whose enigmatic teachings only survive in fragments.

He is perhaps best known for cryptic sayings like "you can't step in the same river twice" and "the way up and the way down are the same thing."

Two of his signature statements are panta rei--all things flow--and polemos panton pater--war is the father of all things (note: my Greek is pretty pathetic). He was using the term war metaphorically. Strife would probably be a better term. He also said dike eris--strife is justice, meaning that harmony arises from the interaction and conflict of forces.

All this is another way of saying that understanding the nature of strife and how to deal with it wouldn't be a bad idea for even the most nonviolent people. Scott Ritter makes the same argument in his book Waging Peace: The Art of War for the Antiwar Movement:

I start with the premise that life is conflict, given that I define conflict as the existence of friction created when two or more forces interact...Conflict is constant, and ongoing. Conflict is life... Accept this and you're on the path to dealing effectively with conflict.

Strife doesn't have to be violent or even nasty. It's pretty much the norm. I think the more we learn about it the less nasty it will be.

One ancient text dealing with conflict is Sun Tzu's Art of War. It has been studied for centuries not only by warriors but by people in many walks of life engaged in peaceful pursuits. About which more tomorrow.

THE MIDDLE CLASS. Speaking of ancient Greeks, El Cabrero's amigo Aristotle stressed in his Politics that republics are most stable when the middle classes make up the majority of the population. The role of unions in creating and sustaining the middle class was the subject of a recent talk by economist and columnist Paul Krugman. A major step on the road to rebuilding the middle class is restoring the right to organize by the passage of the Employee Free Choice Act.

SPEAKING OF LABOR, here's an item from The Nation about the anti-labor NLRB and possible ways around it.

RESPONDING TO RECESSION. As signs of a recession increase, there is more talk about some kind of economic stimulus. This new paper from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities lays out a rational approach-one that is timely, temporary and targeted to bring the most bang for the proverbial buck (in the parlance of our times). Sneak preview: more tax cuts for people who don't need them aren't going to get it.

WV MEDICAID FLAP. Some readers may remember the struggle in 2006 to restore cuts in-home care for elderly Medicaid recipients. Here's a summary of the coverage of a recent legislative audit from Lincoln Walks at Midnight.

TORTURE is the subject of this Gazette op-ed by Carli Mareneck.

WHERE'S WALLACE? The British scientist and co-discoverer of natural selection Alfred Russel Wallace, that is.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

THE STYGIAN MARSH

Caption: That's where these guys are going to end up.

The theme of this week's Goat Rope is gratitude and its opposite, what with Thanksgiving coming up and all. You will also find links to and comments about current events. If this is your first visit, please click on yesterday's post.

As mentioned yesterday, St. Thomas Aquinas regarded ingratitude as a sin. However, if you want to find out just how bad a sin it is, you need to crack open some Dante.

In Canto VII of his Inferno, Dante and his guide, the poet Virgil, enter the Fifth Circle of Hell, wherein a rather nasty fountain spews its contents of dark water into a marsh named Styx.

This nasty piece of real estate is occupied by two varieties of sinners: the wrathful and the sullen or ungrateful. The former eternally hit, kick, bite and otherwise maim each other. The latter are a little harder to see.

Virgil tells Dante that

I would have thee believe for certain,

that there are people underneath the water, who sob, and make it bubble at the surface, as thy eye may tell the, whichever way it turns.

Fixed in the slime, they say: 'Sullen were we in the sweet air, that is gladdened by the Sun, carrying lazy smoke within our hearts;

now lie we sullen here in the black mire.' This hymn they gurgle in their throats, for they cannot speak it in full words.

I don't know about y'all, but I'll pass on that one.

SPEAKING OF STYGIAN MARSHES, check out this item from Reuters:

The number of Americans in prison has risen eight-fold since 1970, with little impact on crime but at great cost to taxpayers and society, researchers said in a report calling for a major justice-system overhaul.

That's just the first sentence. There's plenty more.

WARREN BUFFETT ON THE ESTATE TAX: Billionaire and philanthropist Warren Buffett continues his efforts to persuade Congress to retain the estate tax. This is from alternet:

Billionaire Warren Buffett testified before the Senate Finance Committee on Wednesday in defense of the federal estate tax, the nation's only tax on inherited wealth.

Buffett invoked the historical roots of the estate tax, established in 1916 during the Gilded Age to put a brake on anti-democratic concentrations of wealth and power. "Dynastic wealth, the enemy of meritocracy, is on the rise," Buffett told the panel. "Equality of opportunity has been on the decline. A progressive and meaningful estate tax is needed to curb the movement of a democracy toward plutocracy."

SPEAKING OF PREVENTING PLUTOCRACY, the Bush labor relations board or NLRB favors employers at the expense of workers and needs to be "closed for repairs." Here's a link to a video of UMWA president Cecil Roberts speaking on the issue.

SPACING OUT. There's plenty of confusion among most Americans about where, exactly, the money in the federal budget goes. Here's a recent example: many believe the US spends one fourth of its budget on the space program.

HANNIBAL WHO? Anyone who has seen Silence of the Lambs or its sequels or read the novels will remember the criminal profilers. In a recent New Yorker article, Malcolm Gladwell takes a skeptical look at this approach. He's always worth reading.

AS IF. Denial may be the glue that holds people together.

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