by Hillary Hardcore and EW Wilder
1.Lo-Cajun
2.Astronomical Brindle Tarts
3.Spud Handle
4.Kredit-Müncher
5.Cranberry Battleship
6.Nip-Slip Weekend
7.Tabloid Brainphärt
8.The Dongle Kitties
9.Rogue’s Collar
10.Smugbanquer
11.damndirtyape
12.The Fluffycake Conspiracy
13.Mustard N?z
14.Paralegalz Nite Out
15.Simonize ur Sister
16.The Gland Bellies
17.Blood Muffin
18.Turnip Transit
19.Tinkül Balle
20.Tinker-Tron
21.Buck Sandwich
22.Butane Overcoat
23.Klesmer vs. Cthulu
24.The Tinsel-Fanciers
25.Glass Nickel
26.Bourgeois Pencil-Sharpener
27.Slaw Coaster
28.Dastardly Digital
29.Rick Ray Ban
30.Frosted Kumquat
31.Freez-R-Bürn
32.Necro-Klüster
33.The Drool-Mobsters
34.Kill Button
35.Kraken Charmer
36.B?n-Spindle
37.Jizz Mönkie
38.Thümbreth
39.Stürm Dancer
40.Lobster Bris
41.The Insect Crescendo
42.Hotpants Conspiracy
43.The Violation
44.Fistluvur
45.The Fur Dancers
46.Drooling Privileges
47.Scröt Candy
48.Strepto-Scrötus
49.Sizzle-Puppy
50.Loose Snooze
51.Spider Bucket
52.The Slender Whistle
53.Blat-tasm
54.Roar-Gasm
55.Gunny Snak
56.Scroatia
57.The Fur Burglars
The linden tree north of the administration building on the campus of Hesston College is one of those sprawling old souls that seems, in its weary sort of way, to be holding up the sky. The bigger branches vault above the green; the trunk is more round than tall—a stout, barrel-chested sort of fellow.
Until I noticed the plaque below, naming the tree as a linden, I’d never known what a linden looked like. The linden is the kind of tree that you read about as taking on some symbolic meaning or other. Perhaps the founders of a new nation met beneath a linden; maybe a new philosophy was born there.
I can see why: the boughs are rooflike and protective, the leaves like greaves of armor. It’s a very reassuring tree, the linden, and so a good place for those who may be unsure about their new ventures toward solidarity, toward solace.
I associate the linden not with Kansas but with the Old World and the East Coast. It seems like it might not be well suited to harsh winds and drought; out here, to survive as a tree is to lose parts of yourself in the process like the cottonwood or to grow small and gnarled, too twisted to care, like the Osage Orange. But this particular linden has been nurtured. And maybe that’s the lesson: you’ve got to cultivate that upon which you rely. This is the lesson of agriculture—of culture in general—of good governance, of responsive, responsible citizenship. The linden, with its greybrown bark and dark green leaves and forthright shape, could be a good symbol for us.
Not that we need a symbol. But we do need an idea about how we can cultivate citizenship, how we can work at becoming more strong instead of more fractious. We need an idea about how we are going to deal with our problems through individual agency, through responsibility that’s backed by support, through empowerment and mutual assistance instead of constant struggle. That’s the model for a functioning liberal democracy; it’s one that enlists the government as an asset, an arm making real, making strong, the will of the people, uplifting them and aiding their endeavors, “promot[ing] the general welfare, not sacrificing the individual at the altar of profit or security, power or privilege.
–Lael Ewy
Almost our entire response to mental health is reactive: we create hospitals and mental health centers; we develop drugs and apply therapies. Our response assumes that mental health problems come out of nowhere, have no discernable etiology other than perhaps a ”genetic propensity” that’s “poorly understood.”
Some “strengths-based” models have tried to correct the traditional “illness-based” approach to the understanding of psychological processes by asking what a healthy mind looks like. However, like the illness model, it is simply too limited: the strengths model places the locus of mental health too completely on the individual. It is not far to go from the strengths-based standpoint right back to a morality model in which suffering people are blamed for not maintaining their mental health, even in light of obvious stressors and triggers in their cultural environment.
If we approached the treatment of, say, cholera this way, we would spend incredible effort and copious amounts of cash coming up with drugs and treatments and therapies while utterly ignoring the place where the crap meets the well.
What I am suggesting is an approach that asks a simple question: “What are we doing to create mentally healthy communities?”
Progressive thinkers have long asked this of physical health and have influenced city planners to produce bike paths and green spaces, walkable town centers and recreation-friendly workplaces.
But a mentally healthy environment goes beyond these (though it does include them). In order for it to work, we must also look at how our public services deal with people. We must look at what our public schools do to our sense of self and agency, how they present the matter of possibility in our intellectual and social development. A mentally healthy environment would be one in which there are places for reflection, in which noise is smartly managed, in which public space is both welcoming and safe.
More controversially, a mentally healthy environment would be one in which work is organized so that people can manage its stresses, in which people’s livelihoods are, as much as possible, stabilized, but their aspirations are honored. A mentally healthy environment would therefore necessarily be one of managed risk and of individual control over how that risk is managed. A mentally healthy environment would be one in which the common abuses of the public sector are minimized not merely because they’re bad business but also because they’re bad form, properly the subject of social opprobrium, not lauded as the way “tough-minded” business people ought, really, to act.
This vision is far from utopian: our lives will never be perfect. There will still be disagreement and misunderstanding; there will still be conflicting egos and disease and privation and sadness and strife. A mentally healthy environment won’t keep us from being heartbroken or accident-free.
But it will make things easier when those difficult inevitabilities arise. And as humans, equipped with this great tool that is culture, is that not what we have worked eons to do?
–Lael Ewy
–Lael Ewy
What is often viewed as a crisis of economics is often a crisis of values. The current debate about whether or not to raise the US debt limit is an example of this. At heart is not who has the money or how it should be distributed but why. The conservative politicians who have resolved to protect the wealthy from taxes even at the risk of putting the US government into default are simply operating out of a different set of values than than those who seek to raise the debt ceiling and combat further indebtedness with tax increases on the wealthy.
It comes down to what we think of as “earned” income and what we think of as “deserving” wealth. Facts are almost immaterial here; values determine the most important thing: the interpretation of the facts. What is at issue is what Stephen Toulmin would call the warrant for the claims made when interpreting the data (facts). In this case, neither side will take the time or risk the exposure of actually expressing the warrant, the set of values or principles being applied.
Here they are in simplified form:
For a conservative, income is earned by virtue of having been acquired through legal means. Markets exist in order to provide opportunities to make money, and whatever means present themselves for that to happen legitimize the possession of wealth by definition. Because of this, conservatives claim that taxes are theft: income earned by virtue of its possession through market forces is legitimate, and taxes represent income from outside the market. Further, because that money is taken outside the market by the system of taxation, conservatives consider it no longer earnable; all that the government possesses that cannot be brought back into the market (through tax breaks, royalty reductions, government contracts) are lost earnings opportunities.
The liberal view of wealth is that some value must be added to goods or services through application of labor or assumption of risk through capital investment in order for wealth to be earned. You earn money as a worker by having added the value of your labor to the service or object. You earn money as an investor through risking your capital on a venture. In either case, there is something at stake: time, sweat, money, skill. Value can be measured in monetary terms, but the availability of value-added services or products creates a good. From this perspective, then, taxes are an investment in a public good. In the case of the current debate, the public good is dealing with public debt. Asking the wealthy to pay more in taxes is legitimized because the rich are better equipped than other segments of society to add value to that public good, and they have been rewarded at a disproportionate rate for their investment of labor or risked capital.
Since conservatives fundamentally do not believe in the public good under this formulation (it is not “earned” on the market), allowing the government to default is perfectly legitimate as well; the public debt, as well as public wealth, was ill-gotten to begin with. Their only real concern is that a default on public debt might have ramifications for the private market and thereby threaten earning opportunities.
The matter is considerably complicated by electoral politics, in this case, and, in fact, that is probably the most immediate concern of the parties involved. Obama and by extension the Democrats want to be seen as the more responsible “grown up” party; the Republicans are trying to present themselves as stalwart and principled. They are also trying to prove their contention that government is broken by making it so.
The “job creation” argument for keeping taxes low is historically unprovable, but, again, that is not the point; values drive the claims. For conservatives, the only valid way to create jobs is through the market since the market creates legitimacy in earnings, and, by extension, in jobs. Because of this, government jobs are not legitimate, not “real” jobs because they represent market earnings opportunities lost. Certain conservative economists even go so far as to call government jobs “parasitic.”
A liberal perspective does not make this distinction. Since labor and capital add value by their application to a service or object, the origin of the object or service is immaterial. A public good is a good; a private good is a good—the difference is in how they are accessed. Money spent by a government employee spends the same as that spent by a private sector employee.
Again, this is an oversimplification of what is actually going on, of course, but it demonstrates how making clear the warrants—the values and principles that underly a claim—can explain how seemingly simple negotiations can quickly take on the trappings of impossibility.