The dream cure

Healing temple of Asclepius at Kos, by way of wikipedia

The ancient Greeks had some interesting ideas about healing illnesses. One of these was the custom of using dreams to find cures. It worked like this: the patient would visit  and sleep in an Asclepeion or temple dedicated to the semi-divine physician Asclepius, son of the Apollo. The dreams of the patient would be used as the basis of the treatment.

I've always been interested in dreams and tried to pay attention to them. Sometimes they're just static, sometimes funny or scary, sometimes transparent wish fulfillment a la Freud. But sometimes, as Freud's renegade disciple Carl Jung argued, they're very deep. They can represent the insights of our unconscious mind, the oldest and biggest part of our mental apparatus.

I had a pretty good one last night that speaks to our current situation. In it, I was working to repair the roof of a house pretty far from the ground, something I'd never be able to pull off in real life. The slope of the roof was steep and I was in danger of falling off.

It occurred to me that I needed some kind of supporting connection, like a rope tied to something secure to keep from going over the edge. There were images of different kinds of knots--bowlines, square knots, slipknots and others I've long since forgotten from my volunteer firefighting and scouting days. Obviously, the knots and connections represented relations with others.

I think that's a pretty good metaphor for the social connections we need during this outbreak to keep from going over the edge, even if they involve social distancing or occur over long distances. Even if they're just remembered.

I'll take that. Thanks, Asclepius!

G(r)eeking out

The ancient Greek writer Herodotus has been called “the father of history.” And “the father of lies.”

He is remembered today for his Histories, a sprawling account of the origins and outcome of the clash between the Greek city-states and the mighty Persian Empire in the fifth-century B.C.

It’s also stuffed with moral instruction, folklore, palace gossip, wild speculations and incredible tales of floating islands, giant gold-digging ants and flying serpents.

It also has some dark wisdom about happiness and the changeability of human fortunes.

One story involves two people whose names have become words, Solon and Croesus. Solon was an Athenian lawgiver who laid the foundation for that city’s democracy, while Croesus was the wealthy king of Lydia, in what is now Turkey.

A solon is a wise legislator, although you don’t hear the term around West Virginia much these days for some reason. Someone who is fabulously wealthy can be said to be “as rich as Croesus.”

The story goes that after Solon reformed Athenian laws, he left the city for 10 years after making the citizens swear an oath to abide by his measures for that period of time.

He visited Lydia, said to be the first country to mint coins, and stayed with Croesus. Eager to impress his guest, who was reputed to be wise, Croesus showed Solon his many treasures and asked him who he thought was the happiest man.

As my wife would say, he was fishing for a compliment.

He didn’t get one.

To Croesus’ surprise, Solon’s answer was someone he’d never heard of, an apparent Athenian nobody named Tellus, who had a decent life, a good family and who died fighting for his city and was honored with a funeral at public expense.

Croesus then asked who was next happiest. Once again, the answer wasn’t what he was looking for. Solon gave the names of two brothers from Argos named Kleobus and Biton.

They were the sons of a priestess of the goddess Hera. When the time came for her to go to the temple, the oxen who drew the cart had wandered off. Her sons put the yoke around themselves and pulled her several miles to the temple, where they were praised for their devotion to their mother and the gods who protected their city.

When the exhausted boys fell asleep, their proud mother prayed that they would receive whatever was best.

They never woke up. Let’s just say they went out on a high note.

Solon went on to explain to an angry Croesus that, since human life is subject to major reversals, he made it a practice not to say a person had a happy one until he saw how it ended. He said, “Until he is dead, keep the word ‘happy’ in reserve. Till then, he is not happy, but only lucky.”

Croesus wasn’t having it. Solon soon left, while he continued to pursue wealth and power. He sent fabulous gifts to the major temples and oracles, including the famous oracle of the god Apollo, at Delphi.

As if you could buy the favor of the gods.

Croesus became concerned about the rise to power on his eastern frontier of the Medo- Persians under Cyrus. He asked the oracle at Delphi if he should go to war with Cyrus.

He was told that, if he did, a mighty empire would fall. Another oracle told him that he had nothing to fear until a mule, a cross between a donkey and a horse, ruled over the Medes and Persians empire.

He did go to war with Cyrus, but the empire that fell was his own. The mule, it turned out, was Cyrus himself, whose mother was a Mede and father was a Persian.

Apollo’s oracle was pretty funny that way, but the blame for the disaster belonged to Croesus and not the god.

After losing everything, Croesus was about to be burned alive as Cyrus watched. He cried out “Solon, Solon, Solon” as the flames burned higher. Cyrus, who was a pretty nice guy as world conquerors go, asked through an interpreter what he was saying and spared his life when Croesus told the story.

As he put it later, “Human life is like a revolving wheel and never allows the same man to continue long in prosperity.”

The point Herodotus and the Greek tragic poets were trying to make was that power, wealth and pride can lead to arrogance (Hubris) and moral blindness (Ate), which, in turn, can invite disaster, often personified as the vengeance of Nemesis, goddess of justice and retribution, who renders that which is due.

The biblical Book of Proverbs makes a similar point, “Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.”

Meanwhile, the wheel still turns.

(This appeared as an op-ed in today's Gazette-Mail.)

Prison nation

On the latest Front Porch program/podcast, we spoke with my friend Pastor Matthew Watts of Grace Bible Church and Hope Community Development on Charleston WV's west side. This is a heavily edited version of a long conversation we had about prisons, race, mass incarceration, social changes and more.

WISDOM BOOKS. Regular readers of this blog know I'm a sucker for ancient Greek and Roman classics. Right now, I've made a decent start at rereading three classics that I plan on going through again and again: Plutarch's Lives, Herodotus' Histories and Thucydides' Peloponnesian War. (I'm about 320 pages through the first and just finished the life of Timoleon, the Corinthian leader who liberated Sicily from the rule of tyrants.) So it's no wonder that this Gazette-Mail op-ed on Thucydides caught my eye.

SAD SIGN OF THE TIMES. It's no secret that WV has a drug overdose problem and that my county of Cabell is ground zero. It was really sad for me to read that school nurses in that county are preparing to administer naxolone for opioid overdoses.

Another eclipse

I tried to take a picture of the eclipse with my phone but it obviously didn't turn out well. Still the lunar eclipse reminded me of a time long ago when a similar event brought disaster.

It happened during the Peloponnesian War between ancient Athens and Sparta and its  allies . The war lasted from 431 to 404 BC and sped the decline of Greece. It went through several fits and starts.

One of the worst turns was the Athenian decision to send an expedition to Syracuse, a fabulously wealth city in Sicily. For all kinds of reasons let's just say it turned out bad.

But when the Athenians were finally about to cut their losses and head for home, a lunar eclipse occurred. The Athenian general Nicias was given to believe in omens and, after consulting priests, decided to way 27 days.

That was just enough time for the Syracusans to seal their doom. With few exceptions, those of the Athenians who weren't massacred wound up dying in the stone quarries where they were kept in appalling conditions.

I draw two lessons from this:

1. just because you can go to war doesn't mean it's a good idea; and

2. when it's time to go, get the hell out.

Classical ways of handling classes

Regular readers of this blog know that El Cabrero is a total Greco-Roman classics geek. Homer, Hesiod, Aeschylus, Virgil, Plutarch, name it. Bring it.

When I first started reading about Greek  and Roman history, I was struck by how much of it was shaped by class conflict and how they found different ways of working it out, at least for a while. I remember thinking "wow, the history of all hitherto existing society REALLY is the history of class struggles, at least a good part of the time" to paraphrase a certain out of vogue political economist whose name escapes me at the moment.

Anyhow, from the NY Times, here's an interesting look at classical approaches to class conflicts by way of Athenian democracy, the Roman republic and the politics of Aristotle.

One thing has been clear to me for a long time: the doom of the Roman republic came when they lost the ability or will to work out class compromises. Good thing that would never happen here, huh?

It's personal

The last time I posted on this blog (Monday morning) the topic was endurance sports as a metaphor for the struggle for human justice and progress. At the time, I had no idea that a vile terrorist attack would occur targeting the Boston Marathon. Maybe I'm a little more sensitive to the issue with my legs still on fire from running a half marathon this Saturday on trails. Maybe not.

But I've always considered the marathon to be a sacred event, one the celebrates an ancient victory between the nascent forces of an open society against the forces of monolithic despotism. For what it's worth, and in honor of those who were wounded, killed or maimed in Monday's despicable attack, here is an old post from this blog about the marathon and what it means dating back to August 2007:

Of all endurance events, the marathon is special to El Cabrero. Sacred even.

The event takes its name from the place of a battle between a huge force of invading Persians and a hastily assembled Athenian force in 490 BC.

According to Herodotus, Pheidippides was a professional runner who covered the distance between Athens and Sparta (around 150 miles) in two days in an effort to urge the Spartans to resist the invaders. Along the way, he had an encounter with the god Pan, who pledged friendship to the Athenians.

The Spartans were sympathetic, but for religious reasons could not send an army until the moon was full. So he had to slog back.

A much later legend has it that after the Athenians defeated the numerically superior Persian force, Pheidippides ran the 25+ miles back to Athens to deliver the news. As the story goes, he said something like, "Rejoice, we conquer" and fell dead.

(This is what happens when you overdo it.)

This story was the subject of a poem by Robert Browning. Here's a stanza:

"Yes, he fought on the Marathon day:
So, when Persia was dust, all cried "To Akropolis...!
Run, Pheidippides, one race more! the meed is thy due!
'Athens is saved, thank Pan,' go shout!" He flung down his shield,
Ran like fire once more: and the space 'twixt the Fennel-field
And Athens was stubble again, a field which a fire runs through,
Till in he broke: "Rejoice, we conquer!" Like wine thro' clay,
Joy in his blood bursting his heart, he died--the bliss!"

Whether it happened or not, it's a good story. And the consequences of the eventual Greek triumph were really great. It permitted the full flowering of Greek science, art, literature, philosophy and democracy. They had plenty of shortcomings--but they also helped to give us the tools with which to criticize them.

When the great tragedian Aeschylus died, his grave marker said nothing about all the prizes he won for drama. Instead, it simply said

"Beneath this stone lies Aeschylus, son of Euphorion, the Athenian, who perished in the wheat-bearing land of Gela; of his noble prowess the grove of Marathon can speak, or the long-haired Persian who knows it well."

It was a big deal. No wonder that when the Olympic games were revived in 1896 they included a long run of 40 K (24.8) miles. Now the distance is 26.2.

Running a marathon is kind of a big deal too. Running for more than 25 miles isn't normal. Aside from the obvious, the body tends to run out of readily available fuel after about 20 miles. This is known among marathoners as "hitting the wall." Basically, you just have to gut it through the rest.

Training for one isn't as hard as it might seem. You don't need to run 100 or more miles a week. Three days of hard training, with an easy day between, are enough. One day should be a long run, culminating in one of at least 20 miles around 2 weeks before the race. Another day should include tempo runs, which start slow but include several faster segments.

The day that REALLY builds character is interval training, which often consists of a mile or two warmup followed by repeated hard 800 meter intervals with a brief jog between each. Six, eight, ten, twelve, whatever, striving to finish each in the same time. Pushing yourself over and over. I love it. I hate it. It hurts. It's awesome, even if your interval is a whole lot slower than anyone else's.

Then comes the race. I've done three. One good, one bad, and one ugly. The worst was when my knee blew out halfway through and I had to limp the last 13 miles.

(Note: the line between endurance and idiocy is fine and El Cabrero is not the best judge of where it starts and stops. With my corazon in the shape it's in, I may not have another one in me.)

But here's my best advice: run it one mile at a time and don't worry about who passes you or who you pass.

In the long run, we run against ourselves.

What if?

Greek hoplite versus Persian warrior. Image courtesy of wikipedia.

Have you ever racked your brain wondering what if? What if you or I had done something differently at a critical point in our lives?

For that matter, what if, say, Lincoln or Julius Caesar weren't assassinated? What if Alexander the Great lived another 40 years? What if Trotsky won out over Stalin in the early USSR? What if Hitler had died in a mortar attack during World War I? What if....

That kind of thinking can drive you crazy, but it does serve to point out that personal and world history has lots of places where things could have gone lots of different ways.

One such turning point in the ancient world was the war between Greece and the Persian empire. If anyone was taking bets then, the smart money would have been on the might of Persia rather than on Greece, which was not a nation but a number of independent city states that spent much of their time warring against each other.

Greek tragedy, the theme lately here at Goat Rope, came into its own in the aftermath of the Greek victory over the might of Persia. Aeschylus, the earliest tragedian whose works survive, was himself a veteran of that war. He fought at the battle of Marathon and possibly at Salamis and Plataea.

Although he wrote as many as 90 plays (of which only seven survive) and won many honors for this, his epitaph mentions none of this. Instead, it says:

Aeschylus, Euphorion's son, this tablet hides
Who passed away in Gela where the wheat fields grow:
His bravery the glorious shrine of Marathon can tell
Where the deep-maned Medes had learnt it well.

Interestingly, one of Aeschylus' surviving tragedies portrays this world historic conflict from the point of view of his enemies--and he does it well and respectfully. We seem to have lost that ability.

More on that tomorrow.

CLIMATE CHANGE. Here's something else for the coal industry to deny.

CENTER WHAT? This article argues that American attitudes are leaning in a progressive direction.

DEREGULATION. In this op-ed, Paul Krugman suggests that the roots of the current economic crisis can be traced to the explosion of debt from Reagan era deregulation.

SUSTAIN THIS. Four animals from Goat Rope Farm (eight counting humans) were represented at Charleston WV's Sustainabilty Fair.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Lessons unlearned

Artist's image of the theater of Dionysus.

The theme at Goat Rope lately is Greek tragedy. You'll also find links and comments about current events below.

As mentioned yesterday, democracy and tragedy grew together in ancient Athens and the latter was seen as vital to the former. I'd argue that this is still true today.

All kinds of themes and lessons run through Athenian drama, with implications for public (and private) life. One that comes to mind is the fragility of good things, to paraphrase classical scholar Martha Nussbaum. Good fortune and all that comes with it can be too easily lost.

Sometimes this happens through our own hubris and over-reaching. Sometimes we can be caught up in and brought down by a long chain of events we don't understand until too late. And then there are the times when the harder we try to avoid something, the more surely we bring it on ourselves. I hate it when that happens...

Tragedy tends to reinforce the words carved on the temple of Apollo at Delphi: Know Thyself and Nothing in Excess.

Unfortunately, the Athenians didn't heed the lessons of tragedy. Intoxicated by the wealth, prestige and power they had gained by defeating the Persian invasion, they went from being leaders of the Greek world to masters of an empire. This led to a disastrous and seemingly endless war with Sparta (search this blog for Peloponnesian War) which brought their glory days to an end.

It would be nice if we could do better.

FEELING PARANOID? Here's a guide to popular conspiracy theories.

REAL LIFE HORROR MOVIES here.

POLITICS ON THE BRAIN. Here's another look at this topic by Nicholas Kristof.

STATE BUDGET. It looks like the use of federal stimulus money may prevent major cuts to jobs, programs and services in El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia.

URGENT RECENTLY DISCOVERED WEIRD ANIMAL UPDATE here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

TAKING THE LONG WAY HOME

Odysseus, courtesy of wikipedia.

"Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns
driven time and again off course, once he had plundered
the hallowed heights of Troy.
Many cities of men he saw and learned their minds,
many pains he suffered, heartsick on the open sea,
fighting to save his life and bring his comrades home.
But he could not save them from disaster, hard as he strove--
the recklessness of their own ways destroyed them all,
the blind fools, they devoured the cattle of the Sun
and the Sungod blotted out the day of their return.
Launch out on his story, Muse, daughter of Zeus,
start from where you will--sing for our time too."

It's been a long time since El Cabrero went on an extended ancient Greek jag, but I can't resist any longer. Lately I have been revisiting Homer's epic poem The Odyssey and have been struck again by its power.

For nearly 3000 years, the saga of "long tried, noble Odysseus" and his ordeals has been a favorite for people of all ages. It has given us several words, including odyssey itself, mentor (a character who befriended Odysseus' son Telemachus while his father was away), siren, cyclops, calypso, and probably more.

It has inspired many other literary works and films, including Virgil's Aeneid, James Joyce's Ulysses, the film O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Charles Frazier's powerful Civil War novel Cold Mountain, and more. Odysseus has shown up in places like Dante's Divine Comedy and the poetry of Tennyson. The Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis (1883-1957) even wrote an epic sequel. I'm sure I'm leaving out plenty of other examples of its enduring influence.

There are lots of reasons for its popularity. For one thing, it really is a great story as Odysseus suffers ordeal after ordeal on his way home from Troy. Although most of us haven't spent 10 years besieging a sacred city and finally sacking it, we can probably all identify with the desire to go home, i.e. to reach a place of peace, security, and safety. We probably don't run across too many cyclopes or cannibalistic giants or make pilgrimages to the Underworld, but everyone has problems and challenges that have to be overcome with courage and strategy.

Finally, the real subject matter of the Odyssey is an urgent issue today in America: how is it possible for veterans who have endured incredible hardships and survived the ravages of war make or miss their homecoming? As the Odyssey shows and the experience of generations of combat veterans shows, the challenges and dangers don't stop when the war ends.

Way more to come.

WAL-MART--EVERYDAY LOW ACTIONS. A certain retail giant is warning its employees that the world will come to an end if giant corporations don't continue to completely dominate everything, especially elections and labor law. Where's the thunderbolt of Zeus when you need it?

HOW LOW WILL IT GO? Here's the Economic Policy Institutes's latest take on the state of the recession.

UNSPORTSMANLIKE CONDUCT. Some US hospitals have taken to deporting sick or injured immigrants.

LET US CULTIVATE OUR GARDEN. Words of wisdom from Gazette columnist Perry Mann.

TALKING SENSE ON HEALTH CARE. Click 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

VIOLENCE AND TRAGEDY

Orestes at Delphi, courtesy of wikipedia.

It's an interesting fact that great literature and social science seem to agree about the nature of violence: it usually doesn't just come out of nowhere.

While I'm not interesting in excusing any violent behavior, numerous studies show that perpetrators of violence tend to have been its victims in the past (and often in the future) and that today's victim may be tomorrow's perpetrator.

In the great tragedies of literature, the violence that occurs or is alluded to onstage is usually only the latest link in a chain of events. The bloody scene that Fortinbras stumbles upon at the end of Hamlet was preceded by murders and betrayals.

This is also true of group violence such as armed conflict. Wars, too, have their family trees.

The ancient Greeks had a word for the dangerous pollution that could be unleashed by violence: miasma. It was almost like a toxic substance that could infect people who had nothing to do with the original acts and could play out over the generations.

One strand of Greek mythology that shows how the miasma of violence can play out over time is that of the terrible house of Atreus, which figures in Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, the Oresteia of Aeschylus and elsewhere.

Atreus, king of Mycenae, committed an act of sacrilege against the gods and the sacred nature of food and family when he killed the children of his brother and rival Thyeses and fed them to their unknowing father. His son, Agamemnon, was fated to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia to Artemis to gain favorable winds to invade Troy, where bloody warfare raged for ten years.

His wife, Clytemnestra, was outraged by this murder and takes Aegisthus, son of Thyeses as lover. When Agamemnon returns from the bloody sack of Troy, they kill him. Agamemnon's son Orestes is driven to kill his mother and Aegisthus to avenge his father. He is then pursued by the Furies, the dark goddesses who personify vengeance.

So it went. So it goes.

In the end, it took divine intervention by Apollo and Athena to end the cycle of violence and placate the Furies. What will it take to end ours--or even slow it down a little?

SPEAKING OF WHICH, here's an AP article that shows how neighbors can intervene to help dispell the miasma of domestic violence.

BROTHER, CAN YOU SPARE SOME RICE? Here's more on the global food crisis.

THE G.I. BILL helped create the American middle class. The latest Economic Policy Institute snapshot highlights the value of the proposed 21st Century G.I. Bill.

URGENT ANCIENT AMPHIBIAN UPDATE. This critter, found in Texas, was a little bit frog and a little bit salamander.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

IN THIS CORNER...

El Cabrero is on another ancient Greek jag this week, with a special focus on the tragic Peloponnesian War that ended the "Golden Age" of Athens (there's also lots of stuff on current events).

If this is your first visit, please click on earlier entries.

The two principle powers that collided in that 27 year long war provided a huge contrast. Sparta was a warlike, aristocratic,conservative, fairly closed society. To their credit, they were not particularly acquisitive after wealth or a large empire. Athens was creative, chaotic, democratic, and imperialist. As mentioned yesterday, Athenian imperialism was the main cause of the war, although the Spartans were the first to invade their rival's territory.

Early on in Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian War, a Corinthian ambassador describes the contrast to the Spartans:

The Athenians are addicted to innovation, and their designs are characterized by swiftness alike in conception and execution; you have a genius for keeping what you have got, accompanied by a total want of invention, and when forced to act you never go far enough. Again, they are adventurous beyond their power, and daring beyond their judgment, and in danger they are sanguine: your wont is to attempt less than is justified by your power, to mistrust even what is sanctioned by your judgment, and to fancy that from danger then is no release. Further, there is promptitude on their side against procrastination on yours; they an never at home, you are never from it: for they hope by their absence to extend their acquisitions,you fear by your advance to endanger what you have left behind.

The Athenians were bold, even reckless:

They are swift to follow up a success, and slow to recoil from a reverse. Their bodies they spend ungrudgingly in their country’s cause; their intellect they jealously husband to be employed in her service. A scheme unexecuted is with them a positive loss... they toil on in trouble and danger all the days of their lives, with little opportunity for enjoying, being ever engaged in getting: their only idea of a holiday is to do what the occasion demands, and to them laborious occupation is less of a misfortune than the peace of a quiet life. To describe their character in a word, one might truly say that they were born into the world to take no rest themselves and to give none to others.

In a word, they could be dangerous not only to their enemies but to themselves.

(Uhhh, do they sound like anybody we know? I didn't think so.)

AFSC CALLS FOR STRONGER MINE SAFETY LAWS. In the wake of the Utah mine disaster, the American Friends Service Committee calls for stronger mine safety rules:

Congress should move swiftly to pass recently introduced legislation that, among other things, immediately requires mining companies to use systems that can track and communicate with miners," says Rick Wilson, director of the American Friends Service Committee West Virginia Economic Justice Project. "The law would also require companies to upgrade to better communications systems as they become available."

That legislation, HR 2768 and 2769 and S. 1655, introduced in June of this year by Representatives George Miller (D-CA), Nick Rahall (D-WV), and Lynn Woolsey (D-CA), and Senators Edward Kennedy (D-MA), Robert Byrd (D-WV) and Patty Murray (D-WA), would improve health and safety in U.S. mines and immediately require companies to use the best available technology to stay in contact with miners.

THE COAL INDUSTRY'S BEST FRIEND. The NY Times reports that the Bush administration is about to issue a regulation expanding mountaintop removal mining, a practice that literally blows their tops off and fills in valleys with debris. El Cabrero is of the opinion that this is not what Isaiah was talking about when he said that every mountain should be brought down and every valley exalted.

CHILDREN'S HEALTH SMACKDOWN. This post from the AFLCIO blog asks a pertinent question: "If Stomping on Children’s Health Care Is OK, Why Do Bushies Bury News on Weekend?"

INEQUALITY GONE WILD. Does this sound good?

The top 10 percent of income earners in the United States now owns 70 percent of the wealth, and the wealthiest one percent owns more than the bottom 95 percent, according to the Federal Reserve. In 2005, the top 300,000 Americans enjoyed about the same share of the nation's income -- 21.8 percent -- as the bottom 150 million.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

THINGS START SMALL

It's sad to realize that ancient Greek civilization self destructed at the height of its creativity, but that's pretty much what happened.

Fifty years after diverse city states united to fend of the massive Persian invasion, a war began between Athens and Sparta and their allies which would rage off an on for 27 years between 431 and 404 BC.

That was a long time ago but there's something modern about the war. It also had the first "modern" historian, the Athenian general Thucydides, who attempted to write a neutral and objective account of the debacle, although he died before he completed it. He was aiming for posterity, writing in it that

My work is not a piece of writing designed to meet the taste of an immediate public, but was done to last forever.

I don't know about the "forever" part but it has done pretty well for the last 2,400 years.

The story of this extended goat rope is long and complicated. Interested people not inclined to wade through Thucydides 600+ pages may want to check out some novels about it, such as Mary Renault's Last of the Wine and Steven Pressfield's Tides of War.

People often imagine it as a conflict between democratic Athens (the good guys) and authoritarian and militaristic Sparta (the bad guys), but that doesn't work very well. Both societies owned slaves. To the extent that Athens was democratic, it was very democratic, but Sparta itself had a mixed government that combined two kings with republican features such as a council of elders and a citizen's assembly. Spartan women were probably the freest in all Greece.

Athens was democratic but imperialist. Its empire began as a league against the Persians, with allied states contributing ships and men. It became an extractor of tribute. And while the Athenians often supported popular governments, they were not averse to massacring and enslaving those who resisted them.

Spartans were authoritarian and warlike but they disliked long wars and had no far flung imperial ambitions. They had long ago conquered neighboring Messinians who became an oppressed class of helots which might revolt at any time. Given the choice, Spartans didn't like to be away for too long.

The Athenian position was basically this: we got an empire by fair or foul means and we'd be stupid to give it up--deal with it. As Thucydides narrates it, an Athenian leader put it this way to Spartan envoys seeking a resolution of a dispute involving cities that attempted to revolt from Athens:

We have done nothing extraordinary, nothing contrary to human nature in accepting an empire when it was offered to us and then in refusing to give it up. Three very powerful motives prevent us from doing so--security, honor, and self-interest. And we are not the first to act this way. It has always been a rule that the weak should be subject to the strong; and besides, we consider that we are worthy of our power.

Attitudes like that are not conducive to conflict resolution. The die was cast when the Athenians rejected arbitration. Sparta made the first military moves, but Athens seems to El Cabrero to be the moral aggressor.

And they would pay a terrible price.

ON A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT SUBJECT, Reuters reports that:

More than half of top U.S. foreign policy experts oppose President George W. Bush’s troop increase as a strategy for stabilizing Baghdad, saying the plan has harmed U.S. national security, according to a new survey.As Congress and the White House await the September release of a key progress report on Iraq, 53 percent of the experts polled by Foreign Policy magazine and the Center for American Progress said they now oppose Bush’s troop build-up.

Ninety-one percent believe the world has grown more dangerous for Americans and the United States, up 10 percent from February. More than 80 percent of the experts said they expected another major terrorist attack over the next decade. Fifty eight percent of those polled expected that the Middle East would still be reeling from the negative effects of the war a decade from now. Only 3 percent believed Iraq would be "beacon of democracy" in the next 10 years.

WE'LL CROSS THAT BRIDGE. The latest snapshot from the Economic Policy Institute focuses on declining investments in infrastructure, which can be lethal.

FREEDOM OF SPEECH DEPARTMENT. A Texas couple arrested for protesting at an appearance by President Bush in West Virginia in 2004 won $80,000 from the White House. What makes the whole thing really interesting is the administration's "sensitive" manual that provides instructions on how to stifle free speech.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

GLORY DAYS

Caption: Venus, a Latin scholar, says "Sic transit gloria mundi."

El Cabrero is on another ancient Greece jag this week. If this is your first visit, please click on yesterday's post.

While I am officially in favor of world peace at all times and places, one of the more inspiring stories I know from ancient history is that of the diverse Greek city states that were the cradle of science, philosophy, tragedy, and (admittedly limited) democracy uniting to fend off the vast Persian invasions.

The first was in 490 BC when the forces of Darius were defeated by the Athenians at the battle of Marathon. A much larger force invaded ten years later under Xerxes. A small force of 300 Spartans under Leonidas and a few thousand of their allies held off the invaders for three days at Thermopylae before being defeated.

Athens was burned, although the population was mostly evacuated. An oracle from Apollo at Delphi told them that they would be safe behind wooden walls, which turned out to be the walls of their ships. The Greek navies defeated the Persian fleet at the battle of Salamis shortly thereafter. The following year, combined Greek armies again defeated the invading force at Plataea.

In the wake of the victory came a period of great creativity. Athens was rebuilt on a much grander scale. This period saw the full flowering of Greek philosophy and art.

It would have been nice to think that the Greek city states would form some kind of federation which would have enabled their culture to flourish for centuries...but that didn't happen.

One should never underestimate the human capacity for self destruction.

Fifty years after the defeat of the Persian invasion, two of the principle Greek cities, Athens and Sparta, with allies in tow, would begin a fratricidal war that would rage off and on for 27 miserable years and would include imperialism, arrogance (hubris), massacres and mass enslavements, plague, an early concentration camp, civil and class warfare, etc. The war wiped out Athens as a major political power in Greece and permanently damaged the Hellenic world.

It's a (literally) classical example of how easily things can spiral out of control. One would hope it's not too late to learn that lesson.

HOW WOULD YOU SPEND IT? We don't know how much wealth the Greeks blew on the Peloponnesian War, but according to Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and his colleague Linda Bilmes, the Iraq war in its first four years has (or will) cost the U.S. $720 million per day. According to the American Friends Service Committee

For that price, the United States could have provided: 34,904 Four-Year Scholarships for University Students; 1,153,846 Children with Free School Lunches; 6,482 Families with Homes and 163,525 People with Healthcare.

The AFSC has set up a new blog called How Would You Spend It?. You are cordially invited to log in and have your say.

UTAH MINING TRAGEDY. Here's an article from the Washington Post on the Utah mine disaster. Another tragedy is that the reforms passed in the wake of the Sago disaster had been fully implemented, it would at least have been possible to communicate with any survivors.

INCOMES DOWN FOR MOST AMERICANS. From the NY Times

Americans earned a smaller average income in 2005 than in 2000, the fifth consecutive year that they had to make ends meet with less money than at the peak of the last economic expansion, new government data shows.

While incomes have been on the rise since 2002, the average income in 2005 was $55,238, still nearly 1 percent less than the $55,714 in 2000, after adjusting for inflation, analysis of new tax statistics show...

Total income listed on tax returns grew every year after World War II, with a single one-year exception, until 2001, making the five-year period of lower average incomes and four years of lower total incomes a new experience for the majority of Americans born since 1945.

Thanks, guys! If you want more evidence of the Bush (mis)administration's class war from above, check out this story on their heroic war...against health care for America's children.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

THE GODDESS STRIFE

Caption: This isn't one of her better pictures.

El Cabrero is a big fan of ancient Greece. Philosophy, art, literature, politics, history, a pluralistic approach to religion, name it. Unfortunately, the objects of my admiration sometimes had the self-destructive tendencies of the heroes of their tragedies.

They were like the Ziggy Stardusts of the ancient world. They took it all too far, but boy could they play guitar--or kithara, as the case may be.

Back in the heyday, Greece wasn't a unified country like a modern nation or an empire like those of Alexander the Macedonian or the Romans. It was a diverse collection of city-states which took political forms ranging from democracy to monarchy to tyranny to mixed governments. To the extent they were united at all, it was by language, myths, religion, and custom, including the famous panhellenic games which were the forerunners of our Olympics.

They had plenty of shortcomings but one of the biggest was an addiction to strife or Eris,which/who was also a goddess. According to the poet Hesiod in Works and Days, there were actually two goddesses of strife, one good one bad. The bad one led to war and destruction:

So, after all, there was not one kind of Strife alone, but all over the earth there are two. As for the one, a man would praise her when he came to understand her; but the other is blameworthy: and they are wholly different in nature. For one fosters evil war and battle, being cruel: her no man loves; but perforce, through the will of the deathless gods, men pay harsh Strife her honour due.

The other, theoretically at least, to led healthy competition:

But the other is the elder daughter of dark Night, and the son of Cronos who sits above and dwells in the aether, set her in the roots of the earth: and she is far kinder to men. She stirs up even the shiftless to toil; for a man grows eager to work when he considers his neighbour, a rich man who hastens to plough and plant and put his house in good order; and neighbour vies with is neighbour as he hurries after wealth. This Strife is wholesome for men. And potter is angry with potter, and craftsman with craftsman, and beggar is jealous of beggar, and minstrel of minstrel.

In practice, the two often get muddled together, as you may have noticed.

According to another mythological strand, the whole Trojan war grew out of the spite of the vengeful goddess Eris at not being invited to a wedding (although, in my experience, strife is usually at most weddings anyway, invited or not). She makes an appearance in Homer's Iliad with a particularly apt description:

Strife whose wrath is relentless, she is the sister and companion of murderous Ares [god of war], she who is only a little thing at the first, but thereafter grows until she strides on the earth with her head striking heaven. She then hurled down bitterness equally between both sides as she walked through the onslaught making men's pain heavier. She also has a son whom she named Strife.

Anyway, strife or Eris, whether personified or not, brought down classical Greek civilization. The fall was long and slow, but a major step on the way was the long and fratricidal Pelopponesian War, masterfully recounted by Thucydides. That will be the guiding threat through this week's posts.

I don't plan on working the parallels between the Greeks and us too hard but I think it's safe to say that this goddess is still with us.

ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT. William Schweke of the Center for Enterprise Development recently published this op-ed about a rational approach to economic development for West Virginia (and elsewhere). He warns that

the state should not be frightened into radical proposals by the dogmatic anti-government crowd to cut regulation, taxation and other responsibilities to the bone.

WORTH READING. The latest edition of Jim Lewis' Notes from Under the Fig Tree is available. Jim, an Episcopal priest (yay team!), is a master of metaphors and this issue is full of them.

UNLEASHING WHATEVER DEPARTMENT. Meanwhile, over at West Virgina Blue, Antipode has published a good critique of Unleashing Capitalism, a libertarian tract that has become the Holy Writ of the WV right wing.

CALLING ALL WEST VIRGINIANS. I've noticed that readers of Goat Rope come from all over, but I'd like to ask those who live in El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia to read this and respond appropriately in this economic justice campaign. Short version: please check out the link and contact the legislature (it's easy if you go there) to preserve access to education for welfare recipients. It's the best way for people to permanently escape poverty.

THREE ITEMS. For those who don't get the Charleston Gazette or the Sunday Gazette Mail, there are three items in there I highly recommend. One is an article by Paul Nyden on economist Dean Baker, who will be giving a talk in Charleston today on the theme of The Conservative Nanny State. Another is an op-ed by Perry Mann on a lifetime of reading. Finally, there is the heart-rending story by Tara Tuckwiller about a young girl from WV who is doing her part to stop the war in Iraq. Her mother is about to be sent there.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

REJOICE, WE CONQUER

Caption: This is my pace.

Of all endurance events, the marathon is special to El Cabrero. Sacred even.

The event takes its name from the place of a battle between a huge force of invading Persians and a hastily assembled Athenian force in 490 BC.

According to Herodotus, Pheidippides was a professional runner who covered the distance between Athens and Sparta (around 150 miles) in two days in an effort to urge the Spartans to resist the invaders. Along the way, he had an encounter with the god Pan, who pledged friendship to the Athenians.

The Spartans were sympathetic, but for religious reasons could not send an army until the moon was full. So he had to slog back.

A much later legend has it that after the Athenians defeated the numerically superior Persian force, Pheidippides ran the 25+ miles back to Athens to deliver the news. As the story goes, he said something like, "Rejoice, we conquer" and fell dead.

(This is what happens when you overdo it.)

This story was the subject of a poem by Robert Browning. Here's a stanza:

Yes, he fought on the Marathon day:
So, when Persia was dust, all cried "To Akropolis...!
Run, Pheidippides, one race more! the meed is thy due!
'Athens is saved, thank Pan,' go shout!" He flung down his shield,
Ran like fire once more: and the space 'twixt the Fennel-field
And Athens was stubble again, a field which a fire runs through,
Till in he broke: "Rejoice, we conquer!" Like wine thro' clay,
Joy in his blood bursting his heart, he died--the bliss!

Whether it happened or not, it's a good story. And the consequences of the eventual Greek triumph were really great. It permitted the full flowering of Greek science, art, literature, philosophy and democracy. They had plenty of shortcomings--but they also helped to give us the tools with which to criticize them.

When the great tragedian Aeschylus died, his grave marker said nothing about all the prizes he won for drama. Instead, it simply said

Beneath this stone lies Aeschylus, son of Euphorion, the Athenian, who perished in the wheat-bearing land of Gela; of his noble prowess the grove of Marathon can speak, or the long-haired Persian who knows it well.

It was a big deal. No wonder that when the Olympic games were revived in 1896 they included a long run of 40 K (24.8) miles. Now the distance is 26.2.

Running a marathon is kind of a big deal too. Running for more than 25 miles isn't normal. Aside from the obvious, the body tends to run out of readily available fuel after about 20 miles. This is known among marathoners as "hitting the wall." Basically, you just have to gut it through the rest.

Training for one isn't as hard as it might seem. You don't need to run 100 or more miles a week. Three days of hard training, with an easy day between, are enough. One day should be a long run, culminating in one of at least 20 miles around 2 weeks before the race. Another day should include tempo runs, which start slow but include several faster segments.

The day that REALLY builds character is interval training, which often consists of a mile or two warmup followed by repeated hard 800 meter intervals with a brief jog between each. Six, eight, ten, twelve, whatever, striving to finish each in the same time. Pushing yourself over and over. I love it. I hate it. It hurts. It's awesome, even if your interval is a whole lot slower than anyone else's.

Then comes the race. I've done three. One good, one bad, and one ugly. The worst was when my knee blew out halfway through and I had to limp the last 13 miles.

(Note: the line between endurance and idiocy is fine and El Cabrero is not the best judge of where it starts and stops. With my corazon in the shape it's in, I may not have another one in me.)

But here's my best advice: run it one mile at a time and don't worry about who passes you or who you pass.

In the long run, we run against ourselves.

A STEP ON THE HIGH ROAD. This article from the AP stresses the need for making education affordable to more WV adults.

UHHH...THIS DOESN'T SOUND GOOD. The Department of Defense says it can't account for 190,000 firearms intended for Iraqi security forces, not to mention a comparable number of accessories such as helmets and body armor.

READ MORE, LIVE LONGER. I really think there's something to this. Here's a brief item about how better reading skills contributes to a longer life. Which is good, since it gives you more time to read.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

HAPPY OR LUCKY?

Caption: It's hard to say if this couple is happy, but they're probably going to get lucky pretty soon.


You can find lots of topics in this week's Goat Rope but the guiding thread is a story about happiness from the Histories of Herodotus. If this is your first visit, please scroll down to the earlier posts.

The story goes that when the very wealthy King Croesus of Lydia (in modern Turkey) entertained the Athenian sage Solon as guest, he had his servants display his vast wealth and then asked Solon who was the happiest of men.

He was fishing for a compliment, as La Cabra sometimes says (although she's not above doing that herself).

And, like many fishermen, he was disappointed. As discussed in the last two posts, Croesus wasn't a winner or even a runner up on Solon's list. Finally in anger, he said

That's all very well, my Athenian fried; but what of my own happiness? Is it so utterly contemptible that you won't even compare me with mere common folk like those you have mentioned?

Solon replied

My lord, I know God is envious of human prosperity and likes to trouble us; and you question me about the lot of man. Listen then: as the years lengthen out, there is much both to see and to suffer which one would wish otherwise...You can see from that, Croesus, what a chancy thing life is. You are very rich, and you rule a numerous people; but the question you asked me I will not answer, until I know that you have died happily. Great wealth can make a man no happier than moderate means, unless he has the luck to continue in prosperity to the end. Many very rich men have been unfortunate, and many with a modest competence have had good luck...mark this: until he is dead, keep the word "happy" in reserve. Till then, he is not happy but lucky...

Look to the end, no matter what it is you are considering. Often enough God gives a man a glimpse of happiness, and then utterly ruins him.

Croesus sent Solon on his way, convinced that he was a fool. But that wasn't the end of the story, as we'll see tomorrow.

GRATUITOUS ANIMAL FEATURE FILM: Fresh from Goat Rope Studios, here is a brief feature film called Dueling Peacocks. (Fear not, the duel involves voices rather than pistols or sabres.) By the way, this is a talking picture. Just don't turn it up too loud.

TAX PROPAGANDA. Don't tell him I said anything nice about him, but Antipode had a good post about "Tax Freedom Day" in his Mountain State Review blog.

EXPANDING THE MIDDLE CLASS is an idea that resonates with many Americans. According to Shawn Fremstad and Margy Waller of the virtual think tank Inclusion, the best way to do that is to improve low wage jobs.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

SECOND PLACE, plus stuff on Wal-Mart

Caption: It's not yet clear how happy these brothers are, but they have eight more lives than the people discussed here today.

You can find all kinds of things in this week's Goat Rope, but the guiding thread is the story of a conversation about happiness that took place between the ancient Greek sage Solon and Croesus, the wealthy and arrogant king of Lydia in what is now Turkey.

If this is your first visit, please scroll down to the earlier entries.

Croesus was miffed to find out that Solon did not consider him to be the happiest of mortals, but he thought surely that he had to come in a close second. When he asked who was the next happiest, Solon, who was obviously trying to teach Croesus a moral lesson, replied

Two young men of Argos, Cleobis and Biton. They had enough to live on comfortably; and their physical strength is proved not merely by their success in athletics, but much more by the following incident. The Argives were celebrating the festival of Hera, and it was most important that the mother of the two young men should drive to the temple in her ox-cart; but it so happened that the oxen were late in coming back from the fields. Her two sons therefore, as there was no time to lose, harnessed themselves to the cart and dragged it along, with their mother inside, for a distance of nearly six miles, until they reached the temple. After this exploit, which was witnessed by the assembled crowd, they had a most enviable death--a heaven-sent proof of how much better it is to be dead than alive. Men kept crowding round them and congratulating them on their strength, and women kept telling the mother how lucky she was to have such sons, when, in sheer pleasure at this public recognition of her sons' act, she prayed the goddess Hera, before whose shrine she stood, to grant Cleobis and Biton, who had brought her such honour, the greatest blessing that can fall to mortal man.

After her prayer came the ceremonies of sacrifice and feasting; and the two lads, when all was over, fell asleep in the temple--and that was the end of them, for they never woke again.

The Argives had statues made of them, which they sent to Delphi, as a mark of their particular respect.

That sounds pretty grim to people today, but part of Solon's point was that happiness (eudamonia) is not a matter of life's quantity but its quality. A happy life is one that is honorable and socially useful and concluded with dignity. Fortune is changeable and until it's over one can't say with certainty whether a person is happy or just lucky.

Croesus still didn't get it, as we'll see tomorrow.

OUR OLD FRIEND WAL-MART. It's too soon to tell whether the retail giant Wal-Mart, which is a rich as Croesus (even if its workers aren't) is happy or just lucky. A recent article in the NY Times describes the company's take-no-prisoners approach to investigating employees with a team composed in part by former FBI, CIA, and Justice Department officials.

The April 2 New Yorker has a fascinating article on the company's corporate culture. The latest twist involves hiring liberal/Democratic political operatives to help bolster its somewhat tarnished image.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: WE CAN'T SAY FOR SURE UNTIL IT'S DEAD

THE HAPPIEST MAN

Caption: Seamus McGoogle would be the happiest of cats if he could get through this window to the birds.

When Solon, the lawgiver of Athens who laid the foundations for its democracy, traveled to Lydia in Asia Minor around 600 BC, he was a guest of Croesus, its fabulously wealthy king.

Herodotus tells us that Croesus had his servants take Solon on a tour of his royal treasuries "and point out the richness and magnificence of everything."

When the inspection was complete, Croesus said,

Well, my Athenian friend, I have heard a great deal about your wisdom, and how widely you have traveled in the pursuit of knowledge. I cannot resist my desire to ask you a question: who is the happiest man you have ever seen?

He was obviously hoping Solon would say "Gee, dude, it's you." (It occurs to El Cabrero that if this guy needed someone else to certify his happiness, it may not have been that great.)

Solon wasn't the flattering kind. He answered simply, "An Athenian named Tellus."

Croesus was taken aback at this answer and the idea of an Athenian nobody being happier than him. He sharply asked "And what is your reason for this choice?"

Solon replied

There are two good reasons. First, his city was prosperous, and he had fine sons, and lived to see children born to each of them, and all these children surviving: secondly, he had wealth enough by our standards; and he had a glorious death. In a battle with the neighboring town of Eleusis, he fought for his countrymen, routed the enemy, and died like a soldier; and the Athenians paid him the high honor of a public funeral on the spot where he fell.

In other words, the happiest mortals have decent and socially useful lives and a dignified death.

Croesus couldn't take the hint and persisted in asking who won the second prize. He didn't like the answer any better, as we'll see tomorrow.

NEW PROGRESSIVE WV BLOG. An amigo of El Cabrero who has adopted the cyber name Antipode has started a new blog with a focus on policy called Mountain State Review, in which he will plumb the nether regions of wonkdom, guiding us through these dark regions in much the manner that Virgil guided Dante in the Divine Comedy. I tried to get him to call it Wonkabilly but he wouldn't. So far there are no gratuitous animal pictures.

AN INTERESTING ITEM on health care appeared in the Sunday NY Times Magazine. It's about the growing but surprising alliance between labor and business in support of universal health care. The author is Jonathan Cohn, who writes regularly and well on policy issues in the New Republic.

THE LUCIFER EFFECT. Over the last few weeks, El Cabrero has been musing over some famous psychology experiments and what they can tell us about ourselves. I was planning on writing about Philip Zimbardo's famous Stanford Prison Experiment. It turns out that Zimbardo has just written a book called The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. That's going on the list. Here is an interview with the author courtesy of the Times.

NEGLECTED FRIENDS. El Cabrero feels that he has neglected his old friend Wal-Mart lately. I'll try to atone for this lapse tomorrow.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

CALL NO ONE HAPPY UNTIL...

Caption: This kid looks pretty happy now, but it's too soon to tell.

El Cabrero just finished a second slow slog through The Histories of Herodotus, which is a long, rambling account of the conflict between ancient Greece and the Persian empire, complete with any number of random digressions.

Herodotus has been called "the father of history." The book jacket notes that he's also been called "the father of lies."

(I would suggest "the father of BS" as a reasonable compromise, but I have a feeling that BS was already pretty old by the time of the battle of Marathon.)

For my money, such as it is, one of the best parts is the story of a conversation and its aftermath between Croesus, the fabulously wealthy king of Lydia (in what is now Turkey), and the Athenian sage and statesman Solon on the perennially interesting subject of happiness.

Both of their names have since become proverbial, as in to be "rich as Croesus" or a Solon or wise lawgiver.

That story will be the thread that holds this week's Goat Rope together.

Sneak preview: Croesus, fishing for a compliment, asks Solon who is the happiest of mortals and gets a wise answer he never expected. Solon answers in effect that the wisest course is to call no one happy until he or she has died and you know the whole course of the life in question. Things change and happiness or virtue can often be mistaken for luck.

TOUGH DAYS FOR MASSEY ENERGY. Speaking of which, Massey Energy has had a run of bad luck lately. Gee, I'm really torn up about that. Please wait while I try to compose myself. OK, I'm back. Here's why:

FIRST, as mentioned last week, Massey received the biggest fine in U.S. history for its "reckless disregard" for safety at the Aracoma fire that killed two miners in Jan. 2006. The fine was $1.5 million, the maximum allowed by law.

Here's the link to the MSHA report and here's a sample from their press release:

WASHINGTON - The U.S. Department of Labor's Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) today announced that it has fined the operator of the Aracoma Alma Mine No. 1 in Logan County, W.Va., where two miners perished in a fire on Jan. 19, 2006, $1.5 million for contributory safety violations. The fine is the largest ever assessed by MSHA in a coal mine accident. MSHA's investigation team determined that 25 violations of mandatory health and safety laws contributed to the accident.

"The number and severity of safety violations at the mine at the time of the fire demonstrated reckless disregard for safety, warranting the highest fine MSHA has levied for a fatal coal mining accident," said Richard E. Stickler, assistant secretary of labor for mine safety and health. "MSHA has referred this case to the U.S. Attorney's Office for possible criminal charges."

Stickler added: "We at MSHA extend our thoughts and prayers to the families for their losses, and we thank them for their patience as we worked to complete our investigation. We appreciate the cooperative working relationship we have had with the West Virginia Office of Miners' Health, Safety and Training and the West Virginia Governor's Office, as represented by Davitt McAteer."

In March 2006, MSHA referred the Aracoma case to the U.S. Attorney's Office for possible criminal charges (assuming any of them still have their jobs).


SECOND, Ken Ward reported Sunday in the Charleston Gazette-Mail that

More than a year after two miners died in a conveyor belt fire, federal inspectors continue to find serious safety violations at Massey Energy’s Aracoma Alma No. 1 Mine.

In the last six months, U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration inspectors have cited the Logan County operation for more than 170 violations, agency records show.

Actually, Ward also shows that mine inspectors before the fire "missed or ignored major violations that agency officials say were key factors in the deaths."

FINALLY, a March 23 decision by U.S. District Judge Robert C. "Chuck" Chambers, former speaker of the WV House of Delegates rescinded the valley fill permits of four large surface mines, all of which were, according to The State Journal, subsidiaries of Massey Energy.

Maybe if Solon were with us today, he'd urge us to call no corporation happy until we see how it all shakes out.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED