Okinawa dreamin'

Looking at a calendar and counting with my fingers, I noticed that six months have passed since I traveled to Okinawa to study real karate in the land of its birth. This was something I'd dreamed of doing for longer than quite a few people have been on the planet.

The trip did not disappoint. It was truly a peak experience to study with some of the greatest living masters of dento or traditional karate. The trip was organized as a seminar, so we had the opportunity to practice with a real range of teachers. We were taught by masters of several styles and traditions, including more than one version of the Uechi-Ryu, Goju-Ryu and Shorin-Ryu styles.

Karate has become very distorted as it spread around the world. In the US, it has degraded to the point of a sport engaged in by people obsessed with getting the next promotion or collecting more plastic. I learned in the last year, though, that the process of mutation began before those post-World War II years when Americans were first exposed to it--it started when karate was introduced to the main Japanese islands in the late teens and early twenties of the 20th century.

When the Okinawan karate master Gichin Funakoshi, someone I have long admired, began to teach in Japan, he began to change the art to fit the new environment. Traditional katas were renamed and changed; traditional training practices and advanced techniques were de-emphasized and gradually dropped. He taught quite a bit in university settings, which had highly competitive cultures. Worse, he attempted to "Japanize" karate at a time when Japanese nationalism, fascism and imperialism were at their height.

Ironically, what many people think of as the culture of karate, as in a highly regimented militaristic regimen, is really more the culture of 1930s Japanese fascism than that of the real Okinawan art. The resulting art was highly athletic, but very different from the original. Most Okinawan masters are too polite to say it, but they think that most of what passes for karate today is suitable only for children.

It was great to see, and finally to start to practice, the real thing.

THE COST OF WAR. The Washington Post has an interactive feature on the kinds of traumatic brain injuries often suffered by US military personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan.

GOING (FATIGUE) GREEN. The US military is moving towards renewable energy in an effort to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels. (Suggestion: fewer wars might help.)

UNLAMENTED. The TARP aka Wall Street bailout program expired yesterday. It turned out not to be as costly in the end as people, including me, thought, and it may have really helped prevent a financial collapse, but that doesn't seem to have won it any love.

SLEAZY MONEY. Here's a look at the big money from shadowy groups that is being pumped into the 2010 elections.

ANIMAL FRIEND VIDEO FEST here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Marching on--updated

Note to email subscribers: I apologize for flooding your mailbox, but a reader pointed out that some of the phrasing in the original needed some work.

Also, I like to encourage readers to contact their senators to support the health care vote scheduled for tomorrow which would bring the bill to the Senate floor. The bill itself is far from perfect, but there will be time to improve it later and doing nothing would be worse.

For contact information, click here. If you can't get through on the DC number, please consider calling their local office.)

Here's the original and edited post:

"Against an enemy. How good bad music and bad reasons sound when one marches against an enemy!"--Friedrich Nietzsche, The Dawn

SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE. Health care reform faces a crucial vote in the Senate this weekend.

SQUANDERED TRUST. Being too nice to bad banks may have more than financial costs.

THIS COULD BE AMUSING. Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship is set to debate Robert Kennedy Jr. in January. My guess is that this won't be the only entertainment that night.

URGENT INDONESIAN HOBBIT UPDATE here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A little British snark

D.H. Lawrence was not a big Franklin fan. Image courtesy of wikipedia.

El Cabrero has been amusing himself, and, he devoutly hopes, the Gentle Reader, lately by thumbing through the pages of Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography. This week I've been looking at his quest for moral perfection.

It's hard not to like Franklin, even when he's taking the whole Protestant Ethic/Spirit of capitalism thing too far. But there are those who manage to dislike him. One such person was the British writer D.H. Lawrence.

When he was able to tear himself away from writing about sex, Lawrence put together an amusing but venomous look at American literature in which he singles "sturdy, snuff-coloured Doctor Franklin" out for singular abuse.

In his discussion of Franklin's list of virtues and his practice of them, Lawrence accused him of attempting to fence in the human soul:

Who knows what will come out of the soul of man? The soul of man is a dark vast forest, with wild life in it. Think of Benjamin fencing it off!

Oh, but Benjamin fenced a little tract that he called the soul of man and proceeded to get it into cultivation. Providence, forsooth! And they think that bit of barbed wire is going to keep us in pound forever? More fools them...

And now I, at least, know why I can't stand Benjamin. He tries to take away my wholeness and my dark forest, my freedom. For how can any man be free, without an illimitable back-ground? And Benjamin tries to shove me into a barbed-wire paddock and make me grow potatoes or Chicagoes.

Chicagoes?

Rave on, D.H. For all his quirks, old Ben lived a full and generally useful life. I'm not sure it would have been better spent writing highbrow erotica.

VOLUNTEERING AGAIN. Here's an interesting news story about the growing number of veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan volunteering to help civilians displaced and harmed by the war.

TAKING IT PERSONALLY. Here's an interesting article about how AIG executives who received post-bailout bonuses are feeling the scorn and ire of many people.

EAT IT. Are big changes coming to America's industrial food system? When an organic garden is about to be planted at the White House, anything is possible.

URGENT WHALE GENEALOGY UPDATE. Hippos may be their closest living relative. I was thinking maybe wolverines...

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Sparring as a spiritual practice

As I mentioned yesterday, I think people who want to make the world a less nasty place could do worse things than study some martial arts, especially those that practice realistic sparring with skillful opponents.

After all, most efforts to change or preserve things involve some kind of struggle, however nonviolent, with powerful people and institutions who are not there to grant one's every wish.

One lesson I will always remember came early in my karate career. I had just found a new dojo after the one I started in closed. These people LOVED to spar, in class, in tournaments and elsewhere. While control was emphasized, it could get pretty rough as consenting adults moved up in rank and experience. And, although I didn't realize it at they time, their "rules" were pretty realistic.

This was the first time I did any serious sparring with a woman black belt. At the time, I was a green belt, which is to say someone who knows just enough to be a danger to himself.

I decided to dazzle her with high kicks, my speciality at the time. While my feet were flying around at head level, one of hers landed in my nether regions. This was the closest I ever came to qualifying for the Vienna Boy's Choir. I hit the ground like a ton of bricks, but must have gotten up at some point.

This is one of the invaluable lessons you learn by sparring with people who know how to fight: you learn to think defensively. Specifically, you make it a habit to always think what a good opponent could do to you if you did this or that technique.

That's one that carries over well into organizing. It is a good practice to always think what an intelligent opponent would be able to say or do in reaction to anything you say, do or write. I've often seen groups undertake actions that make it easy for opponents to attack or dismiss them.

I learned the hard way that if you present your opponent with an opening, you shouldn't be surprised if they take it. And I'm not above returning the favor.

THE BUTCHER'S BILL. Here's an estimate of the human cost of the Iraq war.

I MEANT TO BLOG THIS YESTERDAY. Here's Krugman on bailout blunders.

CULTURAL CHANGES accompany this recession, not all of which are bad.

THE DAY THE MUSIC DIED. "American Pie" songwriter Don McLean discusses Buddy Holly here. So that's what the song really was about. Kind of.

TEARS AND SUCH. Here's an item on how early experience shapes our views of crying.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Is it over yet?

I always felt that through some kind of cosmic paperwork mixup I was born in the wrong time. Given the choice, I think a birth sometime around 1915 or a little earlier might have worked.

For most of my life, I was right there with Hamlet: "The time is out of joint..."

I've always felt more affinity for the world of the 1930s and 1940s, as hard as those times were, than the world I was born in--and was always a little jealous of my parents for having the chance to live under a president like FDR.

It seemed that it was my fate that during all my adult life, the political forces that I hated the most would be triumphant: market fundamentalism, one-sided class warfare from above, with divisive cultural issues providing a smokescreen. The first election I could vote in was 1980 and I still recall what a miserable night that was. The decade the followed was disastrous for West Virginia, with double digit unemployment and a crashing standard of living.

The 1990s were a little better, but the dominant ideology was still that of pseudo-conservatism, a toxic mix of plutocracy and prejudice. And those were the good old days...

It is the peculiar distinction of the Bush years that by comparison, almost any administration of the past looks pretty good.

At many points over the last 30 years, I kept wondering if it was ever going to be over. Every ebb of the tide seemed to be followed by another peak. Like one of the bad guys in a slasher movie, it seemed to revive every time you thought it was dead.

I guess we had to drink the cup to the dregs before the bankruptcy of the agenda became apparent.

Is it over? Lots of people think so, but I'm not going to drop my guard. Meanwhile, here's to the changing of the guard.

IT'S ON. The fight over the Employee Free Choice Act and the role of the labor movement in rebuilding the middle class, that is.

NEEDED: a better bailout.

TOOL USING ANIMALS. You might be surprised at the list.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ....

Talking poetry at the Head Start center

For about eight years, I taught pre-GED classes in Head Start centers in southern West Virginia. Most of those who attended were mothers of young children in the program, although it was open to anyone who was interested. Some were on public assistance and most if not all were living in or near poverty.

In a bit of a strange turn, I found that I enjoyed teaching math although I was pretty bad at it. In fact, it was only in my second year of teaching that I finally figured out how to do ratio and proportion problems: cross multiply and divide.

(I think the students thought I was playing dumb to make them look good but that was not the case.)

And while I've done a lot of writing, I found that subject much harder to teach. At least math at that level had rules, whereas it always seemed to me that writing had infinite possibilities.

One thing I did make an effort to do was not just stick to the GED study books but to bring in at least some major works of literature for students to read and discuss. As noted in earlier posts this week, I believe that the humanities can be especially important for disadvantaged people.

Among the things we'd read aloud and discuss were poetry by Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes, and William Blake, stories by Poe (I once even tortured them with Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown") and works like the Declaration of Independence and speeches by Lincoln.

Of all the things I brought in, selections from Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience seemed to have the deepest impact. Some would cry over the chimney sweeper poems or make the political connections from "London." One very young mother in a tough situation seemed to find in "The Sick Rose" an inspiration for a proto-feminist awakening.

Something really powerful happens when people who haven't had the opportunity get a chance to read, reflect, think and talk about ideas. I would argue that it's even profoundly political in the broad sense.

THE AGE OF PONZI. Here's Krugman's latest.

BAILOUT MESS. In this piece, David Sirota argues that we've been had and suggests things to do about it.

CAPITALISM ON THE BRAIN. Here's an item about how unregulated capitalism short circuits the moral sense. My favorite part is a quote by the great primatologist Frans B.M. de Waal: "You need to indoctrinate empathy out of people in order to arrive at extreme capitalist positions."

A PEACE OFFENSIVE, if it happens, might look like this.

IN THE EVENT THAT YOU WERE WONDERING ABOUT THE TUSKS OF BEAKED WHALES, click here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

I saw a sign there

El Cabrero has been musing lately about how sometimes I've been deeply influenced by brief and random conversations. It kind of makes me wonder how much more I might have learned if I'd been paying attention...

When I was in junior high, there was an art teacher who was the master of random comments. Come to think of it, the making of random comments is one reason why we keep art teachers around.

Somehow, when the topic or Arlo or Woody Guthrie came up, he told me that there were some verses of "This Land is Your Land" that didn't make into the school music books. I was curious and looked them up and have since been a big fan of musical subversion.

These are the ones he was talking about:

As I was walkin' - I saw a sign there
And that sign said - no tresspassin'
But on the other side .... it didn't say nothin!
Now that side was made for you and me!

In the squares of the city - In the shadow of the steeple
Near the relief office - I see my people
And some are grumblin' and some are wonderin'
If this land's still made for you and me.

HARD TIMES FOR COLLEGES and for people trying to go.

WHERE'S JOE THE PLUMBER WHEN YOU NEED HIM? Here's economist Dean Baker on the bailout, which is spreading the wealth around to those who don't need it.

HERE WE SIT, BROKEN HEARTED. The U.S. Supreme Court refused an appeal from Massey Energy to overturn a $260 million verdict won by Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel.

WORKING WEST VIRGINIA. El Cabrero was one of the co-authors of a new report from the WV Center on Budget and Policy looking at the state of working people in West Virginia over the last 30 years. Here's the press release with a link to the full report.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Atlas begged

Image courtesy of wikipedia.

BB&T, a large multi-state bank, has given away millions of dollars through its "charitable" fund to promote the ideology of Ayn Rand. You know, unfettered capitalism, keep the government out of everything, and all that.

This was the subject of an earlier op-ed of mine in the Charleston Gazette and this story by NPR.

Well, the latest:

BB&T, the largest bank in West Virginia, announced on Oct. 27 it would receive $3.1 billion in federal rescue plan money.

Uhhhh...do you think they'll issue a clarifying statement to the effect that government intervention is OK if it goes to big corporations but not to anybody else?

WHILE WE'RE AT IT, here's a glimpse into the worldview of Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship.

FOR THE RECORD, I didn't make any of this stuff up.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

"Experimental ethnography"

An insult to his honor is something up with which this rooster will not put.

Lately, Goat Rope has been exploring cultural factors that may influence attitudes on the use of violence. As noted previously, societies in which the good things of life are easily stolen tend to develop cultures of honor which view violence as permissible in the face of insults as well as theft and self defense.

Researcher Richard Nisbett and Dov Cohen in their 1996 book Culture of Honor: The Psychology of Violence in the South, argue that much of the American south and Appalachia were settled by people from herding cultures, which tend to develop cultures of honor. As noted in yesterday's post, they found regional differences between white males both in homicide rates and in attitudes regarding the use of violence in defense of honor.

Again, I don't want to overgeneralize about any region, especially one that has changed as rapidly in as many ways as the American south, and the data from the book in question is seriously dated, but I think the ideas posed by the authors is at least interesting enough to kill a week's worth of blogging.

Full disclosure: El Cabrero is himself the product of polite but occasionally belligerent Scotch Irish hillbilly ancestry.

To test their hypothesis, Nisbett, Cohen and other researchers designed an experiment that exposed northern and southern students to a situation in which they where deliberately pushed and insulted by a--pardon the expression--confederate in the study.

They found that southerners responded differently to the insult than northerners in their emotional and physiological response and in how they interpreted the events. They were more likely to be angered than amused by the insult, showed higher levels of the hormones cortisol and testosterone after the event, and interpreted it as a direct attack on their manhood.

Nisbett and Cohen found support for three points based on the results of the experiment:

...(1) the insult is a much more serious matter to the southerner than the northerner. (2) It is more serious because an insult makes the affronted southerner feel diminished. (3) Consequently the affronted southern may use aggressive or domineering behavior to reestablish his masculine status.

All I know is the experimenters are lucky they didn't get their clock cleaned.

PRIORITIES. Governments in the US and Western Europe are spending 40 times more on bailing out the financial system than on climate change or fighting poverty in the developing world.

ROBOSOLDIERS may have a role in the future of warfare.

CHILDREN OF KATRINA are suffering from serious health problems, particularly those who lived in FEMA-provided trailers.

RANDY RANDITES. From New York magazine, here are some personal ads by followers of Ayn Rand who are looking for love.

IX-NAY ON THE OGA-YAY. Malaysian clerics have issued a fatwa against the practice of yoga. They have plenty of company in the US, where the "Christian" religious right has raised similar objections. So like does that mean no stretching exercises?

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Maps and territories

Medieval map of the world. Image courtesy of wikipedia.

One way that people can get in big trouble is by falling in love with their theories (or believing their own propaganda). In The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Nassim Nicholas Taleb refers to this as Platonizing or Platonicity.

For the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, Ideas or Forms were more real than the world of the senses. Most people wouldn't go that far these days, but there is a persistent tendency for people to take their model of the world for the world itself.

It's an all too human thing to construct working models of how the world works. In fact, most of the time, these models may work pretty well. But the tricky thing about our world is that it is under no obligation to act in a way that meets our expectations.

As the Polish-American scientist Alfred Korzybski famously put it, "the map is not the territory." The Gentle Reader may have discovered this for him- or herself while attempting to drive to a new destination with a map downloaded from the internet.

As Taleb puts it, Platonicity

is our tendency to mistake the map for the territory, to focus on pure and well-defined "forms," whether objects, like triangles, or social notions, like utopias (societies built according to some blueprint of what "makes sense"), even nationalities. When these ideas and crisp constructs inhabit our minds, we privilege them over other less elegant objects, those with messier and less tractable structures...

Platonicity is what makes us think that we understand more than we actually do...Models and constructions, these intellectual maps of reality, are not always wrong; they are wrong only in some specific applications. The difficult is that a) you do not know before hand (only after the fact) where the map will be wrong, and b) the mistakes can lead to severe consequences. These models are like potentially helpful medicines that carry random but very severe side effects.

Some healthy skepticism is called for, even about our most cherished ideas.

OH GOOD. Wall Street securities firms still have plenty on hand for executive bonuses.

SHOP TILL WE DROP? That may have just happened, according to the latest reports on consumer spending.

SPEAKING OF WHICH, here's economist Dean Baker's take on the data.

THE BIOLOGY OF HATE. Scientists may have identified the brain's "hate circuit." Meanwhile, lots of people seem to have already found it.

URGENT ANCIENT PHOENICIAN UPDATE here. Short version: they got around.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Black swans

Cygnus atratus, courtesy of wikipedia.

Every so often, a reader may have the good luck to stumble on a book that articulates things he or she has been musing about.

That happened to me a while back when I listened to a recorded version of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Taleb's background is part philosopher, part trader. While I don't know if I'd be on the same page with him on every economic policy issue, I'm totally down with his general view of how the world works--to wit, randomly and unpredictably.

The title in itself is significant. For centuries, it was an article of faith in the western world that all swans were white--until a species of black ones was discovered in Australia. Actually, though, it would only taken one mutant black swan to falsify that whole dogma.

Taleb goes from there to talk about Black Swan events, i.e. unexpected happenings that have big consequences. Such an event has the following attributes:

First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme impact. Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.

I stop and summarize the triplet: rarity, extreme impact, and retrospective (though not prospective) predictability. A small number of Black Swans explain almost everything in our world, from the success of ideas and religions, to the dynamics of historical events, to the elements of our own personal lives...

Think about it. What were the odds that a giant meteor 65 million years ago would have ended the dinosaur's winning streak? Life and history are full of low probability/high impact events. These can be either good or bad but they can't be perfectly anticipated

I guess you could say that's what makes things interesting. It also means that we need to recognize that there are a lot of vitally important things we just don't know.

NOT A BLACK SWAN EVENT. Who could have known about the Wall Street bubble? Lots of people, argues economist Dean Baker. While we're at it, here's another item by Baker that takes a broader perspective on the crisis.

IT'S ONLY MONEY. The Bank of England estimates the cost of the August financial meltdown to be $2.8 trillion. So far.

THE NEXT WAVE of the economic crisis is likely to hit credit cards.

THE FIRST DIXIE CHICKS. Here's an item from the Smithsonian about the Salem Witch Trials.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Known unknowns and unknown unknowns

I'm not sure what this picture has to do with the topic at hand.

El Cabrero is not a big fan of the policies of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, but I must say I dig his poetry. And sometimes he really nailed it, as long as you don't apply what he said to the particular topic he was talking about at the time.

Here is my all time favorite Rumsfeldism:

there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know.

Without the slightest trace of irony or sarcasm, let it be said that I'm totally with him on this one. That's pretty much exactly the way history works although we usually aren't honest or aware enough to admit it unless we are shocked out of our complacency.

Many of the events that have had a great impact on history were not the kinds of things most people would have expected to happen.

I doubt that any educated Romans living in the early first century would have expected a world religion to arise in Judea. If you fast forward a few centuries, the same could be said of the rise of Islam and the Arab conquest of much of the known world.

The Civil War battle of Antietam (aka Sharpsburg), which provided President Lincoln with the opportunity to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, was shaped by a truly random incident. Someone found Robert E. Lee's orders for a Confederate invasion of the North wrapped around some cigars and passed them on to the high command.

I could go on and on. As Blaise Pascal noted in his Pensees, much of the history of the ancient world might have been different had Cleopatra's nose been an inch longer.

Real life and history are full of surprises and we should never forget that.

POETRY IN MOTION. It is a truth universally acknowledged that when an economist analyses the current situation by referring to Yeats' poem "The Second Coming" things are bad.

BEYOND THE CRISIS, here's what the American economy could look like.

SOLID GONE. Here's an obituary for Ayn Rand's fictional hero. Long may he stay dead.

OH GOOD. The Wall Street bailout may actually increase compensation and bonuses for CEOs and such.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A turning of the wheel

Imagine having it all--fame, status, respect, wealth and more--and then suddenly losing it. (Some people are going through that right now.) How do you think you would deal with a big reversal of fortune (or Fortuna)?

That was pretty much the real situation of the Roman patrician Boethius (circa 480-535), who held high office in that twilight zone between the fall of the Roman Empire and the beginning of the Middle Ages.

Rome had fallen under the power of the Ostrogoths, although for a time much of daily life remained unchanged. Boethius fell afoul of King Theodoric and was stripped of wealth and position, imprisoned and executed in what no doubt was a pretty nasty way.

It was during this period of imprisonment that he composed a classic work, The Consolation of Philosophy. As he bemoans his fate, Lady Philosophy visits him in prison and instructs him in wisdom so that he can face his end with composure. While that might sound contrived in a work of fiction, Boethius' situation was all too real.

The book is interesting to me largely for its view of the role of Fortune in human affairs. As Richard Green wrote in the introduction to his translation,

The conception of Fortune as the feminine personification of changeable, unpredictable fate is drawn from pagan sources, notably from the Roman poets and moralists, where she is described as blind, vagrant, inconstant, meretricious. But, as Seneca had observed, there are limits to her power: she cannot give a man virtue, nor deprive him of it, and so virtue becomes the wise man's weapon against her. She represented fate as a random, uncontrollable force, to be feared or courted, opposed or despised, according to the theological and philosophical dispositions of those who, largely through the experience of misfortune, felt her power.

A basic point of the book is that it is the very nature of Fortune to change. Those who put themselves in its/her power by basing our happiness on things that aren't within our own power to keep are helpless when things change--as they will.

Fortune herself is quoted by Philosophy as saying

Here is the source of my power, the game I always play: I spin my wheel and find pleasure in raising the low to a high place and lowering those who were on tip. Go up, if you like, but only on condition that you will not feel abused when my sport requires your fall.

There is a very old wisdom tradition among many cultures that while we can't control everything that happens to us, we can control our own responses and thus acquire a degree of independence from fortune.

Too bad that's easier said than done.

THE AMERICAN DREAM of social mobility seems to have migrated to northern Europe, according to a new report on economic inequality.

A GOOD QUESTION. Have there been any pay cuts on Wall Street for CEOs since the bailout?

NOT TO BE. The US suicide rate is increasing for the first time in a decade. Women have shown the largest increase.

URGENT ANCIENT DINOSAUR/BIRD UPDATE here. You really have to see the picture.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

One more road trip for the road!

The last round is on Odysseus.

Welcome to the very last day of Goat Rope's long running series on the Odyssey of Homer. You'll also find links and comments about current events. If you are a classics geek like El Cabrero, check the blog archives. The series started Aug. 4 and has run on weekdays since then, hitting the major stops of his journey.

I've argued all along that this epic has a lot to say both about the difficulties veterans returning from combat have in coming home and the human condition in general. It has often been noted in this series that Odysseus was a deeply flawed character and a disastrous leader. Still, I have a soft spot for the old buzzard and can relate to many of his misadventures. Perhaps the Gentle Reader can too.

As mentioned before, writers long after Homer have been fascinated by the character of Ulysses/Odysseus. Some of them had trouble believing that the hero of the epic would be content to stay at home in Ithaca. That is the theme of Tennyson's poem Ulysses, which I'll quote in its entirety. I was going to highlight my favorite parts but I just discovered I like it all. Here goes:

It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.

I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: all times I have enjoyed
Greatly, have suffered greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when
Through scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vexed the dim sea: I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honoured of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers;
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!
As though to breathe were life. Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this grey spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

This is my son, mine own Telemachus,
To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle —
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil
This labour, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and through soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness, and pay
Meet adoration to my household gods,
When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.

There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:
There gloom the dark broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me —
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads — you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

So there you have it, folks. We may not be spring chickens anymore but we're not dead yet either. To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield--let's roll!

CORRECTION DEPARTMENT. Email subscribers to Goat Rope may have accidentally gotten an earlier version of a post planned for the weekend yesterday afternoon. My bad.

AFTER THE BAILOUT, the work is just beginning. Here is an analysis from the American Friends Service Committee.

SPEAKING OF WHICH, here's economist Dean Baker on the latest developments and here's Paul Krugman on the same.

BULLYING. Why are some children targets? Here are some counter intuitive findings from current research.

JUST HANG ON TILL 2208. Physicist Stephen Hawking thinks that if the human race can hold on for another 200 years, we just might make it. Of course, this may involve leaving the planet.

GENTLEMEN PUPPIES. In a display of unparalleled gallantry and chivalry, young male puppies will often allow females to win when they play their puppy games. Now that's updog. (Could they have ulterior motives? Do they thing that far ahead?)

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: INTERPLANETARY

The afterlife of an epic

Plato (left) and Aristotle in a detail from Raphael's The School of Athens. Image courtesy of wikipedia.

This is the very last week here of a long running series on the Odyssey of Homer and what it has to say to us today. You'll also find links and comments about (some) current events. If you like the classics, check the blog archives. The series started August 4 and has run on weekdays since then, hitting most of the stops of Odysseus on his 10 year journey home.

Given the popularity of this story over the ages, it's no surprise that people would have a hard time leaving it alone. The figure of Odysseus keeps showing up in works of literature over the ages.

One place where he showed up in classical Greece was in Plato's Republic. This is a little ironic since Plato didn't have a very high impression of Homer or at least of the moral value of his epics (probably because he didn't get it).

Toward the end of Plato's most famous dialogue comes a discussion of the afterlife commonly known as "the myth of Er." In the story, Er is a soldier who has what we would call a near death experience in which he gets to explore the afterlife and return to tell the tale.

In the afterlife, souls are rewarded or punished for their deeds on earth. For the very wicked, the punishment seems to last forever. Others, after a suitable interval, have a chance to choose their next life. Some humans choose to live as animals and vice versa. Many souls make grave mistakes at this point, choosing what seems to be a pleasant life even though it may lead to further punishment and sufferings.

After all his travels and sufferings, Odysseus has had his fill of adventure and the quest for glory. He chooses a dull life that others rejected. As Plato put it,

There came also the soul of Odysseus having yet to make a choice, and his lot happened to be the last of them all. Now the recollection of former tolls had disenchanted him of ambition, and he went about for a considerable time in search of the life of a private man who had no cares; he had some difficulty in finding this, which was lying about and had been neglected by everybody else; and when he saw it, he said that he would have done the had his lot been first instead of last, and that he was delighted to have it.

As we'll see tomorrow, Dante envisioned a whole different scenario for Odysseus...in hell.

WEIGHING IN ON THE MELTDOWN. Here are the views of five economists on where the economic mess is likely to go from, of all places, al Jazeera.

COAL STRUGGLE MAKES CNN. Some coalfield groups and residents are proposing wind energy as an alternative to mountaintop removal mining. The story is going national.

LATIN LIVES. Who said it was a dead language anyway?

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Dream weaver, Penelope, the bailout and more

Along with links and comments about current events, Goat Rope is winding down a long series on the Odyssey of Homer. Much of the series has focused on the misadventures of Odysseus' homecoming and how these shed light both on ordinary life and particularly on veterans coming home from war.

One character who has not received her due here has been the faithful wife Penelope, who in her own was was as crafty as her husband. Incidentally, Margaret Atwood wrote The Penelopiad to tell the whole story from her point of view.

With Odysseus gone and presumed dead, her status was unclear. There was little or now place in that society for an independent woman of child-bearing years. Now that her son Telemachus is coming of age, she is under enormous pressure to remarry. Over 100 suitors are basically camped out at her home and are devouring the family's estate. They even plot the murder of Telemachus.

To gain time, she says she must complete her duties by weaving a burial shroud for Odysseus' father Laertes, which she secretly unravels at night until her secret is revealed by a treacherous maid.

In the epic cycle, she is seen as the ideal wife, in direct contrast to Clytemnestra, the wife of Agamemnon who murders her husband on his homecoming to revenge his sacrifice of her daughter Iphigenia (although there are many here among us who would say Agamemnon had it coming).

My favorite scene with Penelope in the Odyssey is her discussion of the nature of dreams. As you may have noticed, some dreams make sense and some don't. Here's her explanation:

"Ah my friend," seasoned Penelope dissented,
"dreams are hard to unravel, wayward, drifting things--
not all we glimpse in them will come to pass...
Two gates there are for our evanescent dreams,
one is made of ivory, the other made of horn.
Those that pass through the ivory cleanly carved
are will-o'-the-wisps, their message bears no fruit.
The dreams that pass through the gates of polished horn
are fraught with truth, for the dreamer who can see them..."

The problem is it's kind of hard to tell true dreams and false ones apart sometimes, whether we're awake or asleep.

WELFARE FOR WALL STREET UPDATE. The House is likely to vote today on the Wall Street bailout. Here's an action alert and analysis from the American Friends Service Committee.

SCAPEGOAT. Right wingers are trying to blame the Community Reinvestment Act (and minorities) for the Wall Street meltdown. That would be another dog that don't hunt.

URBAN PLOWBOY. Here's an interesting item on the future of urban farming.

SCORE ONE FOR SIGMUND. A new medical study finds that old school psychodynamic therapy works as well as other treatments for certain mental disorders.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: WHO KNOWS?

Man's best friend and an important action alert on the bailout

Note: The Goat Rope is nearing the end of a series of posts about the Odyssey of Homer, although you'll also find links and comments about current events. If you like this kind of thing, please click on earlier posts.

What person born with a living soul isn't a sucker for a dog story? There's a great little dog nugget towards the end of the Odyssey. Odysseus, after 10 years of war and 10 more years of wandering, has finally made it home to Ithaca. He is disguised as a beggar as he approaches his home, where over 100 insolent suitors are devouring the resources of his family.

Odysseus is generally pretty good at self-control in a dangerous situation and at hiding his emotions, but he wasn't prepared for this:

Now, as they talked on, a dog that lay there
lifted up his muzzle, pricked his ears...
It was Argos, long-enduring Odysseus' dog
he trained as a puppy once, but little joy he got
since all too soon he shipped to sacred Troy.
In the old days young hunters loved to set him
coursing after the wild goats and deer and hares.
But now with his master gone he lay there, castaway,
on piles of dung from mules and cattle, heaps collecting
out before the gates till Odysseus' self-serving men
could cart it off to manure the king's estates.
Infested with ticks, half-dead from neglect,
here lay the hound, old Argos.

Out of everyone Odysseus meets during his homecoming, the only critter who recognizes and greets him right away is the dog:

But the moment he sensed Odysseus standing by
he thumped his tail, nuzzling low, and his ears dropped,
though he had no strength to drag himself an inch
toward his master.

Odysseus can't run up to greet the dog, because this would reveal his identity to the murderous suitors. So he turns his head, sheds a tear, and asks the swineherd Eumaeus about him. He replies

"Here--it's all too true--here's the dog of a man
who died in foreign parts. But if he had now
the form and flair he had in his glory days--
as Odysseus left him, sailing off to Troy--
you'd be amazed to see such speed, such strength.
No quarry he chased in the deepest, darkest woods
could ever slip this hound. A champion tracker too!
Ah, but he's run out of luck now, poor fellow...
his master's dead and gone, so far from home,
and the heartless women tend him not at all....."

Odysseus never got the chance to try to make up for lost time:

...the dark shadow of death closed down on Argos' eyes
the instant he saw Odysseus, twenty years away.

A little dog-reality note: the point of this story is about the loyalty and love of the dog and about his neglect. However, El Cabrero can vouch for the fact that lying on a manure pile is not a sign of neglect. The dogs of my acquaintance love to lay in, roll around upon, and sometimes eat all kinds of stinky stuff, manure and dead things included. And any dog--then or now--that lived 20 years couldn't have had it all that bad. But I still fell for it.

SPEAKING OF DOGS, the Senate's bailout bill may have passed, but it don't hunt. The House may vote on it by Friday at latest word. Here's the full text of an action alert urging people to contact their representatives and ask them to fill in the blanks in the legislation:

Take Action: Let Congress Know the Bailout Solution Should not be Driven by Fear

The financial crisis in the United States today is not in the Dow Jones but in our communities, where millions of people are threatened by home foreclosures and a sluggish economy. This is a deep and wide crisis that should receive thoughtful attention, not a panicked response driven by fear.

Today the Senate will vote on a revised version of the Emergency Economic Recovery Act of 2008, which the House of Representatives rejected on Sept. 29 by a 228-205 margin. Although it is likely to pass in the Senate, this bill still fails to address the causes of the crisis or its impact on most people. The House is likely to take up the issue again on Friday.

Congress should develop and pass stronger legislation that meets the following principles:

Bankruptcy Protection - This bill must grant authority for bankruptcy judges to restructure mortgages and allow government to work with loan servicers on new mortgage terms, thereby providing stability and security for local communities and the economy as a whole.

A Strong Economic Recovery Package - Congress must adopt measures that will create jobs for workers who have lost their employment and invest in the needs of local communities.

Taxpayer Protection - The public’s massive investment in our financial institutions must be vigorously protected. Tough independent oversight, transparency, and an assurance of repayment from the financial service companies must be mandatory. The public must receive significant return for the assets we acquire.

Regulatory Framework – To address the causes of recent financial failures, the financial system should be regulated in ways that support sound lending and investment, and that also protect taxpayers and consumers. The regulatory framework should be revisited to restore good governance in our financial institutions.

Limitations on Executive Compensation - Strict limits on compensation and severance packages for senior executives must be enacted on any institution receiving taxpayer-funded assistance.

Your Voice is Needed! Call your House Representative Today.

The Congressional switchboard, fax and email systems are crashing do to volume, so the only way to reach your Representative is to call their DC office directly. Click here to enter your address and find your Representative and their direct phone number.

Ask your Representative not to act out of fear and take the time to do this right for the long-term well-being of your community.

The American Friends Service Committee is providing a toll-free number to the congressional switchboard: 1-800-473-6711.

ONE MORE THING ON THAT: Here's an opinion piece from AFSC General Secretary Mary Ellen McNish about the values that should guide a response to the crisis.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Is a court-martial in order?

Image courtesy of wikipedia.

The theme at Goat Rope lately has been the Odyssey of Homer, along with links and comments about current events. We're almost done, but there are a few loose ends.

One of which is about Odysseus' style as a leader. It's tempting to wonder how a contemporary military officer would be treated after performing as badly as he did during his homecoming (my guess is the Bush administration would probably promote him).

To recap, he lost 12 ships and 600 or so men--after the fighting was over. As Jonathan Shay sums it up in Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming reminds us,

*he loses control of his troops and suffers 72 casualties in a botched and unnecessary pirate raid on the Circoneans;

*he puts himself and his men at risk needlessly and impulsively (the whole Cyclops thing);

*he protects his own ship but loses the rest when they approach the land of the Laestrygonians;

*he can't even be bothered to count his men when he leaves the island of Circe;

*he can't control his men when they violate the command not to kill and eat the sun god Helios' cattle. (Note: all of these have been the subjects of previous posts.)

As Shay puts it after looking over the evidence from the Iliad and the Odyssey,

As a staff officer, strategist, independent intelligence operative, and solo fighter, Odysseus was brilliant. As a troop leader, he was a catastrophe. Homer's great epics show him in full depth and perspective.

One thing hasn't changed from then to now in war as well as "peace," ordinary people pay the price for bad leadership.

SPEAKING OF PAYING FOR BAD LEADERSHIP, it looks like the Senate will vote today on the Wall Street bailout bill. The new version raises FDIC depositor's insurance from $100,000 to $250,000 and includes more business tax cuts--as if blowing $700 billion on corporate welfare wasn't enough.

Many groups around the country are opposing the bailout as it now stands for its lack of support for ordinary Americans. Here's an alternate vision that a number of groups have supported. Actions opposing the bailout will occur in several states today and progressive groups have been scrambling to keep up with the latest developments.

WHILE WE'RE TRYING TO FIGURE OUT THE ECONOMIC CRISIS, we could always buy local.

HERE'S A LITTLE REMINDER that whatever happens with the bailout, there's nothing new about corporate welfare.

SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT. I've said this before and I'll say it again: what if everyone's Social Security was privately invested on Wall Street? Some people, who shall remain nameless, still want to do that.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

The wolf himself

Image courtesy of wikipedia.

Goat Rope is in the process of winding up a long series of reflections on the Odyssey of Homer, although you'll also find links and comments about current events.

Odysseus, the eponymous main character, is a hero in the ancient Greek sense of someone who lived a larger than normal life and whose deeds are remembered after his death. The word did not imply moral superiority and some of the most famous Greek heroes did some pretty nasty things.

Such is the case with our boy. As we've seen along the way, he's a terrible commander who is directly or indirectly responsible for the death of around 600 of his men on 12 ships--and that was after the war was over. He is secretive, totally lacking in social trust, excessive in his desire for revenge, and impulsive. He lies nearly every time he speaks, even when there's no good reason to do so. What's his deal, anyway?

The VA psychiatrist and classical scholar Jonathan Shay has some interesting thoughts about this. First, while Odysseus has been through many grueling ordeals at war and on his way home, he doesn't seem to have suffered from the classic symptoms of war-related post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as a direct result. But there are interesting clues of an earlier trauma.

In his homecoming, he is recognized by his nurse Eurycleia by a scar on his thigh that he received as a child:

Bending closer
she started to bathe her master...then,
in a flash, she knew the scar--
that old wound
made years ago by a boar's white tusk when Odysseus
went to Parnassus, out to see [his grandfather] Autolycus and his sons.
The man was his mother's noble father, one who excelled
the world at thievery, that and subtle, shifty oaths.

Autolycus means something like "wolf-like" or "the wolf himself" or even "werewolf." It was he who gave him the name Odysseus, which means something like "man of pain" or "he who gives and receives pain."

When he was a boy, he went to visit Autolycus and nearly died on that hunt. Some commentators have seen this as a turning point in his development. This may have given him a sense that those who were responsible for his well-being couldn't be trusted. As Shay put it,

I see it as a darker transformation, when Odysseus concluded that no one was to be trusted, when he concluded that unless you beat them to it or get over on them first, other people only want to hurt, exploit, or humiliate you...

Shay notes that some of his patients who had the most difficult symptoms experienced abuse and neglect in childhood and adolescence prior to their military service.

...If the expectation that other people plan only harm, exploitation, and humiliation produces a cynical "strike first" attitude, trauma can produce an active, self-starting predator. Odysseus' scar alerts us to the interconnection of childhood trauma, combat trauma, and a veteran's character.

El Cabrero is well aware of the limited practical utility of psychoanalyzing literary characters, but there you have it. Let's just say he had issues.

THE BIG NEWS of course is the failure of the Wall Street bailout bill in the House. El Cabrero has mixed feelings about that. The bill was a vast improvement over what was originally proposed but didn't go far enough in helping ordinary Americans. The best advice I've heard is for people to take a deep breath and then start advocating again for a package that provides more protection for homeowners, an ownership state in every firm that receives public assistance and increased regulation of the financial industry. Congress also needs to consider another targeted stimulus package aimed at the hardest hit Americans.

RETHINKING "FREE" TRADE. Lots of economists are.

STALEMATE. A BBC poll conducted in 23 nations found that 59 percent of respondents believed that the Bush administration's "war on terror" either hasn't weakened al-Qaeda or made it stronger. Let me guess...the decision to invade Iraq didn't help.

URGENT DEEP SEA FISH COMMUNICATION UPDATE. Stop the presses! It appears that the cusk-eel uses some form of sonic communication, which is to say it makes noises to other cusk-eels. Take that, all you cusk-eel communication skeptics out there!

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Meanwhile, back at the ranch

Odysseus and Telemachus open a can on the suitors. Image courtesy of wikipedia.

Along with links and comments about current events, the theme at Goat Rope lately has been the Odyssey of Homer and what it has to say to us today. We're almost done. So far we've followed his wanderings from Troy to his home at Ithaca. It has involved 10 years of fighting and 10 more of various adventures and (largely self-inflicted) disasters.

Now, like many veterans returning from war, he finds himself at home but doesn't recognize the place. Disguised as a beggar, he will be abused by arrogant suitors even within his own house.

You probably remember how the story ends. In the home stretch, Odysseus will wreak terrible vengeance on the suitors who have been devouring his substance, abusing the hospitality (xenia) of his house, harassing his faithful wife Penelope, and plotting the murder of his son Telemachus. In the end the people of Ithaca are so upset by the carnage that another battle almost ensues until the gods intervene and make peace.

But first he must alternately deceive and then reveal himself to those he knew, including the swineherd Eumaeus, Telemachus, his nurse Euraycleia, Penelope herself, and his father Laertes.

He is clearly in a dangerous position. Aside from the 108 suitors, many in Ithaca are angry over the fact that not a single one of his fellow countrymen survived the journey, largely due to the mistakes of their commander. But so ingrained is his tendency to resort to lies and stratagems (Greek: metis) that he often lies even when he has no reason to do so.

Not only that, but we've seen all the way along that he is secretive to a fault, that he conceals vital information from his men, and that he has absolutely no social trust. What is his major malfunction?

Maybe a scar holds the key. More on that tomorrow.

BAILOUT. Here's the latest on the compromise version of the Wall Street bailout, which is likely to be voted on in the House today. Short version: it's a little better than that originally proposed but leaves out a lot. Holy free market, Batman!

INJUSTICE KILLS. This article reviews research on inequality and health.

THE POLITICS OF RACE is the topic of this op-ed by yours truly.

MOTHER GOOSE! 50 million years ago, giant geese-like birds with a 5 meter wingspan and bony teeth flew over England. I want one!

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ?????