CHARLESTON, W.Va. -

Safety violations by prominent eastern U.S. coal mine operators Massey Energy Co. and International Coal Group contributed to the deaths of two miners in accidents last May, West Virginia officials said Tuesday.

Each company has been cited, though fines have not been assessed yet, according to the state Office of Miners’ Health, Safety and Training. Contributing violations can carry fines up to $10,000.

Massey violated state mining regulations because no one cut off power to an electric-powered shuttle car before electrician Nathan Dove started repairs, state mine inspector Eugene White told the Board of Coal Mine Health and Safety.

The 24-year-old Dove, a certified mine electrician in three states, was electrocuted when he cut into a live wire on the shuttle car, which quit while loaded with coal it was to haul to the conveyer belt at Massey’s Aracoma Alma No. 1 Mine. The Logan County mine was the scene of a fire that killed two miners in January 2006 and helped convince Congress to adopt sweeping mine safety legislation that year.

Though power should have been locked out so the vehicle couldn’t be re-energized and it should have been tagged to alert miners that it was being repaired, neither was done, White said.

Massey spokesman Jeff Gillenwater said it’s unclear why Dove, who had received “extensive” training on locking and tagging, didn’t follow procedure.

“It is required and we are not sure why Mr. Dove did not lock and tag out this piece of equipment prior to working on it,” Gillenwater said in an e-mail. “Electricians understand that it is their duty to lock and tag any piece of equipment they are working on.”

Dove had locked another shuttle he was repairing shortly before the fatal accident, though it was not tagged, White said.

State inspectors also issued Massey eight citations for noncontributing violations found during the investigation.

ICG, meanwhile, was cited for two violations that state investigators say contributed to the May 30 death of apprentice miner Adam Lanham. The 18-year-old Lanham was working for an outside contractor when he was run over by a scoop hauling at ICG’s underground Sentinel Mine in Barbour County.

One citation charges an ICG foreman drove the scoop in an unsafe manner because he was too close to Lanham and allowed him to walk in front of the vehicle.

Lanham had been behind the scoop, but had walked around to the front when he was struck, state inspector Alan Lander said.

The other citation charges the foreman violated regulations by operating equipment while supervising Lanham, who had 33 days of mining experience. Regulations don’t allow supervisors to operate equipment while supervising apprentices, Lander said.

ICG plans to contest the violations.

“International Coal Group disagrees with the West Virginia Office of Miners’ Health, Safety & Training’s findings of two contributory violations,” spokesman Ira Gamm said in an e-mail.

The deaths of Lanham and Dove remain under investigation by the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration, a spokeswoman said.

Four West Virginians are among the 16 U.S. coal miners killed on the job in 2008.

So with that in mind, reading establishment press gives me a strange feeling. I’m used to alternative media, with the palpable undertone of panic and rage informing even the most mundane coverage. But when I read The Economist, or the Wall Street Journal, or any other unreservedly “elitist” communications, the sense of calm and permanene has an undeniable appeal. There’s just so much deep-seated security in the tone of commentators who write as if the world were on their side. With anarchists and primitivists and any other kind of radical or revolutionary discourse, all sides of the debate are so fraught with peril and anxiety that it’s tough to take solace in any perspective, or to put your faith in any proposal.

Every radical writer speaks as if they have no one to rely on but themselves, and the insecurity and uncertainty seems to infect their judgment, instilling an absolutism that reduces the world to medieval polarities of good and evil, rich and poor, landed gentry and exploited laborer. And I know the modern world is more complex. If I renounced society and lived like a primate, then such a simplistic view of life and humanity may be adequate for my needs; but I feel an internal compulsion to stay engaged with the world and all its complexities, every beating heart and sidelong glance, and that requires a more comprehensive analysis. I’ve personally met dozens of people who live the freegan lifestyle with religious zeal, and they respond to any subject matter associated with global finance or international relations as if it were an obscenity, if not an absurdity completely outside their frame of reference. Ignorance may have been bliss, but that’s simply not an option for me now.

I don’t even have the expertise to understand what these financial analysts are talking about; I don’t have the background to evaluate or critique what they’re saying. But when I listen to them it’s as if I can hear this quiet voice saying, “Don’t worry, it’ll be alright. You’ve got the whole dad-blamed establishment on your side.” When they go to the bank, they smile at a teller who’s on their side. When their computer breaks down, they make eye contact with a specialist who’s looking out for them. When they deal with a claims adjuster, they’re talking to someone who’s in their corner. There’s an endless series of reassuring voices, like an echo down a bottomless pit. The entire social system is reconfigured in your favor. The weight of the world shifts from your shoulders to everyone’s, and we are all Atlas together. At least in the American South, revolutionaries are such die-hard individualists that we all assume out-of-hand there’s no one we can rely on but ourselves. We’re all slightly insane, and it only takes one misplaced term or gesture for us to turn against one another as if we were mortal enemies. Every meeting I’m at, we’re always walking on eggshells. I think that’s why my reputation as an outspoken hotshot is welcome among the more begrudgingly reserved elders, but most of them are just closet dictators more at home with the thought of solitary survival than the practice of a global movement for sustainable societies. Thank you, but I haven’t given up on the whole of humanity. And it takes more than distance to escape that.

So I think I’ll keep reading these mainstream publications. If nothing else, it helps me correct for the selection bias of always going to radical leftist news sources first. I’ll hold onto my Post-Marxist world systems analysis to inform my theoretical framework, but within the abstractions that structure my thoughts, I’ll listen to the economists as attentively as the anthropologists. It’s irrevocable that every culture and person alive on the planet today is connected, if there even was a honeycomb of vacuums dividing us at all to begin with, so in this postlapsarian world of complex societal interpenetration, it’s helpful to attempt a global perspective, allowing for the attendant dangers.

The line between the two moods manifested in elitist and radical media is impossibly difficult to put my finger, something like the time I tried to compare the mind of children to the mind of adults. Of course, any adult can tell you that children are infinitely wiser than their more mature prototypes; I’m somewhat sympathetic to the Kuhnian argument that more advanced insights proliferate only after the death of the previous generation. But to step aside from such unreflective absolutism, I think there are advantages to both a wisened and a nascent outlook on life, and while there are countless ways to define the duality, the dialectic line is undeniable. I just hope I have the agility to occupy both positions.