After Occupy, a Newly Evolving Eco-Socialist Spirituality?

THE APPARENT CONFLICT between our desperate need for the economic democracy promised by socialism and our equally desperate need for spiritual sustenance has traditionally been a major barrier to building a revolutionary socialist movement in the United States. But the conflict is an illusion – the result of a colossal misunderstanding on one side and a diabolical campaign of misrepresentation on the other. Theoretically, it could therefore be resolved by socialist declarations of tolerance guaranteeing the spiritual freedom of all persons – believers and unbelievers alike – within the revolutionary community. Implicit in the declarations would be socialist recognition of the need for spiritual anarchy: that one's spiritual quest – assuming one is so inclined – is ultimately (exactly as First Nations peoples understood), an individual and therefore intensely private matter.

But that re-assertion of our First Amendment right would be only half the battle. The vast majority of Abrahamic ecclesiastical authorities would denounce such guarantees as devilish lies. This is because most ecclesiastics whether Christian, Jewish or Muslim are as much a part of the Ruling Class as the Wall Street barons and their corps of wholly owned politicians and bureaucrats. The Ruling Class priests, ministers, rabbis and mullahs are therefore bound to serve the earthly One Percent at least as devoutly as they serve their god – which means any socialist attempt at defending our constitutional guarantee of religious and spiritual freedom is bound to trigger new frenzies of slander and oppression from church, mosque and temple – particularly now as the United States deliberately morphs ever closer to unabashed fascism reinforced by Christian theocracy.

Barbara Mor succinctly summarizes the problem in the opening pages of The Great Cosmic Mother (Harper & Row: 1987), an epic work that is (or should be) indispensable in the formulation of the new socialism toward which so much of the post-Occupy Left seems to be instinctively moving. “Marx and Engels,” wrote Mor, “confused spirit with established religion – as their doctrinaire followers continue to do – because, as Western white males, they could not see the total paradigm of ancient women's original communism.” Their error, she stated, “has given fuel to the propaganda engines of the reactionary systems in all countries, so that the world is ripped apart in a false dichotomy between 'Godless communism' and 'divine capitalism.' For if communism is atheistic, its opponents can claim to be mandated by God, however phony this claim might be...Both systems – Western capitalism and Soviet communism – are based on the denial of communal celebration...Neither the God of the Dollar nor the God of the State – nor any of the alienating patriarchal gods from which they descent – allow for this participation.” (Quotes are from Mor's second edition, pgs. 15-17). 

Mor's text of 26 years ago is relevant today for many reasons, but its significance here is as an inadvertent prelude to the Occupy Movement. This is because the quest for a new politics of community and celebration that satisfies hungers both physical and emotional was perhaps Occupy's deepest yet most unarticulated yearning. Indeed it is at least arguable the movement's refusal to state explicit goals was tacit recognition, no matter how subconscious, of the limitations imposed by (patriarchal) language on our ability to express our most profound needs. In this context, what might be termed the “old socialism” – that is, the Stalinist pseudo-socialism Mor so rightfully deplored – was (correctly) viewed as merely another rationale for (patriarchal) tyranny and was thus rejected as no more liberating than capitalism. But at the same time there was within Occupy a passionate interest in the potential of combining socialist principles with the communal, environmental and spiritual values implicit in recognition of the sacredness of Earth. Two years later, similarly minded Seattle voters elected Kshama Sawant,  a declared Marxist, to the City Council. 

Recognizably part of this same accelerated process of political evolution is Truthout's posting of a Chris Williams piece  entitled “Capitalism, Ecology and the Official Invisibility of Women,” which notes how capitalism “has fueled a world in which women are rendered invisible and saddled with the majority of labor.” The subsequent discussion enlarged upon Williams' theme. As I said in response, “Williams seems to be drawing ever closer to the consciousness-changing recognition that capitalism is in fact a logical outgrowth of patriarchy...This lineage is clearly traceable through the advent and maturity of capitalism during the 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, and it concludes with capitalism's final-stage, apocalyptic imposition of fascism on the world today. Thus our ultimate challenge is whether capitalism's inevitable maturity into fascism will be the end of our species. Will the One Percenters obliterate our world in fascist wars of conquest, or we will manage to mobilize sufficient resistance to replace fascism with an egalitarian, cooperative, sustaining and therefore necessarily socialist society?” 

*****

More Relevant Remarks on the Comment Threads of Other Websites

 

“Homeless Couple Gets a Home on Christmas Eve, Thanks to 'Occupy' Group”  A homeless couple in Madison, Wisconsin gets a tiny, 96-foot square house, a poster on the comment thread wonders what has gone wrong and fears we will all soon be living in such shrunken quarters. I explain how capitalism applauds such wretchedness precisely because it means even bigger profits. 

“Q&A: Libyan Women Were Handed Over as Spoils of War”  Karlos Zurutuza reports from Tripoli on Libya's post-Gaddafy oppression of women. I note that “whenever and wherever the USian Empire intervenes in an alleged Middle Eastern 'revolution,' the victors are invariably the most misogynistic of the religious fundamentalists. Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya -- in fact anywhere women have managed to gain some rights -- their gains are quickly and totally undone. Does the USian Empire -- despite all the lip service it gives to female equality -- actually support the re-imposition of official misogyny? As the old intelligence adage puts it, once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.” 

LB/30 December 2013 

-30-

Capitalism's Deeds Reveal Its Intrinsic Evil; Identity Politics Exemplify the Cunning by Which We Are Kept in Slavery

CAPITALISM DEFTLY CAMOUFLAGES its evil behind innumerable Big Lies and a facade of constitutional democracy. But we see its hideous truth in the atrocities the U.S. Empire commits abroad.  Here at home we see the same capitalist savagery manifest in the eviction of that older woman I wrote about  four  weeks ago. 

 

We also see it in ever more glaring evidence of the desperate poverty that now oppresses fully half the USian population: young workers missing teeth due to the definitively capitalist combination of sweatshop wages and prohibitive dental costs; formerly middle-class parents whose jobs were outsourced, whose mortgages were foreclosed, who were evicted into homelessness and whose children now live as street urchins; formerly secure elders now dependent on soup kitchens as their only defense against starvation. 

All these atrocities and innumerable more – think Bhopal or Deepwater Horizon  or Bangladesh – are the essence of capitalism in action. Capitalism's defining premise is infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue – the deliberate rejection of every humanitarian principle our species ever asserted, the ultimate example of the biblical exhortation, “by their deeds shall ye know them.” Though I am not a Christian – though I can never be a Christian – these words attributed to Jesus surely apply to recognizing the evil capitalism inflicts on all but the obscenely privileged few. 

*** 

 

Witnessing that eviction four weeks ago was wrenching for many reasons, but the most painful was the extent to which the woman's frantic scurrying about the ruins of her life reminded me of my own helpless behavior after the times my identity was violently obliterated.

I write this statement knowing it will be challenged by anyone who stubbornly clings to identity politics. How could I, a so-called “privileged white male,” presume to imagine suffering a loss such as that Tacoma woman suffered. (Yes, despite the socioeconomic lessons of the past several decades, there is still a legion of useful identity-politics idiots who serve the Ruling Class by fostering the hostility of one Working Class identity group toward all other Working Class groups.) 

The hypothetical identity-politics question – and I have no doubt it will be asked in real time – reminds of an incident in Manhattan c. 1983, when a white female personnel executive rejected my employment application because it had taken me until I was 36 years old to earn my bachelor of arts degree. According to this personnel officer, the duration of my educational effort combined with the fact I “had all the advantages of being a white male” to prove I was “obviously not serious about doing college-level work.” Therefore – or so she reasoned from her (genuinely) privileged Ivy League background as she looked down upon me from her managerial throne – I was unsuitable for editorial employment.

By the diplomas and certificates on her office wall, this young woman had undoubtedly lived a sheltered, pampered life – a prerequisite of graduation from any of the prohibitively expensive Ivy League schools that train the sons and daughters of the One Percenters and their most valued Ruling Class servants. Moreover, her reference to white male advantage made it clear she was blinded by identity-politics resentments. She could not imagine any seemingly successful, apparently middle-class white male encountering genuinely insurmountable obstacles. Hers was the same Ayn Rand/New Age hybrid of presumptuousness that believes unemployability is merely a state of mind: “change your thinking and you change your reality,” no revolution required. From her perspective, there was nothing in the world so daunting it could delay a white male's baccalaureate degree by 14 years, unless of course the male in question was “not serious” – that is, too lazy. 

Thus does identity politics eliminate empathy, which in turn eliminates class solidarity, blinding huge segments of the 99 Percent to the fact all USian Empire subjects whether proletarians or peasants and regardless of our gender or race or ethnicity are sisters and brothers of the Working Class. 

***

The bitter truth of my own life is that I was never middle-class enough, much less successful enough, to be financially secure. Even at the height of my journalism career, whether as a daily-newspaper news-editor in Northern New Jersey or as the editor-in-chief of an international trade-journal in Manhattan, I was never more than a paycheck or two away from financial ruin. 

Though I have never been thrown into the street with all my possessions, I was ousted by family treachery from a place where I had lived for 11 years and assumed I would spend the remainder of my life. The ouster, which occurred in 2004, is a perfect example of why to me the term “family” is a synonym for all sorts of unpleasantness including rejection and betrayal, which were the everyday norms of my childhood, and genuine risks of bodily harm or death, which thank Goddess occurred only rarely. 

But you can only lose your home once, and I lost mine – and my family as well – on the Summer Solstice Eve of 1945, when my mother sought to kill me. Based on independent evidence I gathered as a middle-aged adult, my death was to have climaxed a sequence of events my mother had been scheming since before my conception. I was not a love-child; in fact I was its opposite, a hate-child deliberately conceived to entrap my father into marriage. Though my father saved my life – a canceled meeting brought him home early on that pivotal Solstice Eve – now that I know the larger circumstances, I can understand and almost forgive what he did next. As if he were overwhelmed by the parental equivalent of buyer's remorse, a few weeks later he sought closed-door judicial permission to dump me in a state orphanage, but the judge forbade it. From then until I turned 18, I was never more than an albatross around the necks of my father and my new stepmother, his former executive secretary.

Meanwhile, to escape the looming public scandal of judicial actions in open court, my mother's wealthy parents paid for her confinement in a posh private insane asylum. She remained there until 1947, after which she obtained a court order decreeing I would spend the summers with her and spend the school years with my father and his wife. But from the moment my mother tried to celebrate the 1945 Solstice by her intended sacrificial act of post-partum abortion, all but one of her kin regarded me as an unwelcome reminder of bad times and scandalous events. The one exception was the blessed aunt whose later intervention saved me from dyslexia. In the eyes of my other maternal relatives, I was never more than a worm in the shining apple of the hypocritical bourgeois respectability they so carefully cultivated and so diligently maintained. 

Albatross and worm – so I remained until I moved out of my father's house and was freed from the judicial indenture of obligatory summertime visits to the domain of my mother. Thanks to my aunt, who in the summer of 1948 got me the tutoring that laid the foundation for all I later became; thanks to my father's books, which filled a wall 22 feet long and 10 feet high from floor to ceiling and overflowed into several glass-front bookcases; thanks even to my father himself, a master of Socratic method despite his rejection of me as a son and his failure as a parent; and thanks most of all to an inner strength I often cursed in please-let-me-die adolescent despair – I had managed to survive. Eventually I even thrived, though only for a bit. 

But then at age 43, just as it seemed I was approaching a peak of journalistic achievement, I was robbed of my life's work, stripped of all my identity and denied any further potential for anything humanly recognizable as success. The mechanism of my ruin was a fire I do not doubt but cannot prove was government arson – the event of 1 September 1983 that obliterated all my life's work and has ever since defined who I am, what I am and all that I will never be. 

In other words, I am no stranger to losses of the magnitude suffered by that shockingly unfortunate woman who was evicted from her home in Tacoma on what should have been called not an “anniversary” but rather our 50th annual day of mourning. There is not one scintilla of hyperbole in my assertion of empathy with her. But at least I have thus far survived all that has been done to me, and with all my heart I wish the same for the woman who was evicted. 

That is why, in the face of all that is being done to all of us, I long ago recognized survival as an act of revolutionary defiance – the very point at which the personal becomes political. 

It is a realization now made all the more poignant by a “happy holidays” convergence of complex medical problems that promise to reduce my 2014 to a year of unrelenting misery even before its arrival: Merry Christmas to me from a relentlessly hostile Jesus. 

*****

Relevant Remarks on the Comment Threads of Other Websites 

“NSA Surveillance Program: It's Going to Get Worse”  Dave Eggers of The Guardian notes how the National Security Agency and its kindred secret-police agencies have effectively nullified all U.S. constitutional protections against illegal search and seizure. Moreover, he warns, history – specifically the post-World-War-II purge – proves that anything the government can employ to oppress us, it will eventually use without mercy. I agree, noting that a government does not collect such material without malevolent purpose. I also note it is increasingly obvious an enemy of the USian state is anyone who objects to capitalist savagery, whether they seek to abolish capitalism or merely reform it. “(F)rom the perspective of the One Percenters who own the government and the politicians, bureaucrats, cops, soldiers and religious authorities who make up the Ruling Class -- the enemy is anyone who dares challenge the present socioeconomic order.” 

“Barack Obama Is Not George Bush”  Jonathan Chait of the Ruling Class journal New York Magazine pens a clever piece of Democratic Party propaganda, and I refute it as another of the party's pre-Congressional-election efforts to make us forget how Obama the Orator became Barack the Betrayer and thus revealed the party's new strategy for serving the One Percent: campaign as Democrats, rule as Republicans. Challenged to provide an alternative to capitalist governance by the One Party of Two Names – to posit a means of relief from the policies of absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for the rest of us – I answer that the winning methods of Councilwoman Sawant in Seattle teach us everything we need to build an effective 

resistance.

*****

Winter Solstice Greetings and happy holidays to all, even amidst this time of political strife and personal wretchedness.

LB/22 December 2013 

-30-

Bus Incident Bares USian Empire's Nazified Heartlessness

ANYTIME I RELAX into thinking there might yet be hope for this country – that Kshama Sawant or somebody equally heroic might somehow transform us into something other than the Moron Nation we've become – I am yanked back into pessimism by the Ayn Rand moral imbecility that is now, amongst the One Percent and the 99 Percent alike, the ruling ethos of the white majority in the United States.

Here is how it happened:

It was foggy and raining hard when I boarded the bus at the stop that serves one of Tacoma's Fred Meyer superstores. My clothing was wet, but the bus was not crowded. To anyone who bothered to look, it was obvious I had been shopping. I carried a white cotton grocery bag that bulged with two big bunches of bananas, and I wore an old khaki-colored canvas British Army shoulder bag slung by its strap diagonally across my shoulders, hanging on my left side like a city woman's purse. The shoulder bag also bulged; it held my omnipresent camera and notebook plus a half dozen cans of tomatoes I had bought at the same time I purchased the bananas.

I took a seat at the front of the bus in what those of us who are not ashamed of our ages call the geezer section – the seats reserved for elderly and disabled people. As I sat I swiveled my shoulder bag around so it rested on my lap. I was on the right side of the bus in the forward-most of four seats in a row that runs fore and aft and faces inward so the seats can be folded up out of the way to accommodate wheel chairs. The two middle seats in the row were empty. A thickly mustached, ruggedly handsome African-American man who was probably in his middle 30s occupied the rearmost of the four seats.

After I was seated and had repositioned my shoulder bag, I wrapped the banana bag's handles around my left wrist so no one could snatch the bag away. Then I carefully set the bag on the empty seat next to me. I buy such large quantities of bananas because the prescription drugs I need to sustain my life also radically deplete my body's potassium, and I have to eat one big banana a day to make up for the loss. I'm always protective of the bananas because my food budget is very limited and I know how easily bananas can be bruised into garbage. A banana so destroyed is like stolen money I cannot replace until I get my next month's Social Security retirement stipend and a small allotment from the food stamp program.

Obviously I am not a street person but my age and poverty are undeniable. My hair is nearly all gray. My beard, which I long ago trimmed into a Van Dyke because when I went fully unshaven children invariably mistook me for Santa Claus, is snowy white. I wore a waterproof forest green parka of the sort common to the Pacific Northwest, beneath that a heavy olive-colored wool shirt and under that a black cotton turtleneck. My heavy cotton trousers were a darker shade of olive. For additional warmth but also to add a touch of color, I had wrapped a red-and-yellow plaid wool scarf around my neck. On my head was a wide-brimmed rust-brown felt Akubra hat that will keep my aviator bifocals dry in all but the most torrential rain. What revealed my financial status was the simple fact I was riding a bus in a city notorious for its terrible bus service.

I ride these herky-jerky buses because I have no other means of transport. I had driven my own carefully maintained automobile until mid-2009, when the car died of old age at 260,000 miles. That was also the year capitalism forever denied me any income beyond Social Security. I know the American dream is dead and will never be resurrected, which means no matter how much longer I live, I will never again have enough money to own and operate an automobile and will always have to worry about running out of money before the end of the month. But I no longer think about my losses all that much; I suppose I have gotten used to being hopelessly poor and utterly powerless in the wealthiest and most powerful nation in human history. I have become indifferent to the contempt of relatives and former friends who believe their lives are defined by their money and their possessions, and I ignore the unforgiving national credo that states to be car-less in the United States is to be a socioeconomic degenerate if not a common bum. Never mind my alleged degeneracy is underscored every time I board a bus – that the nation in which I was born and in whose military I voluntarily and honorably served three years of active duty and three more years in the reserves views my dependence on public transport as an admission of abject worthlessness.

***

Because Tacoma is a seaport, reportedly the fourth busiest on the West Coast, and because it has a population of 200,000 people, the inadequacy of its bus service shocks even people from elsewhere in the notoriously anti-transit USian homeland. Tacoma's bus service is bad – to call it “wretched” would be generous – even in comparison to that provided by USian towns one-half its size. I am authoritatively told that now, after two anti-transit votes, it is the worst of any comparable U.S. city. I know for a fact it is far worse than the bus service provided by Knoxville, Tennessee and Grand Rapids, Michigan during the 1950s – cities where the buses ran until 1 or 2 a.m. By contrast, most bus routes in Tacoma shut down at 8 p.m. or earlier – some as early as 5:20 p.m.

Tacoma's bus service is as bad as it is because the local voters regard mass transit as a form of welfare  – a government handout to those they believe are too lazy to earn the money necessary to operate and maintain a car. Many of these voters believe automobile ownership should be mandatory – “get a job and get a car” is one of their favorite public exhortations. Thus they rage with disproportionate fury against the tiny fraction of the sales tax that subsidizes transit. By the magnitude of their tantrums and the venomousness of their invective, you'd think all the troubles in the world are caused by those of us who need mass transit to survive.

When you study the rhetoric that accompanied Tacoma's anti-transit votes, you are forced to conclude they are blatant expressions of hatred for lower-income people. The voters' preference – were they able to impose it – would be to shut down Pierce Transit completely and cleanse the region of all the bus-dependent poor. The irony is that most of the anti-transit voters are themselves lower-income people, as are somewhat more than half the populations of both the city and the larger transit-authority service area. What is exemplified by the anti-transit majority's self-defeating stupidity is how the USian 99 Percent is trapped by its own ignorance in an irreversible rush to socioeconomic suicide. Just as its national expression means the eventual end of Social Security and Medicare and food stamps and all the other deceptively humanitarian gestures scripted by capitalists to thwart the advance of socialism, so does its local expression mean bus service here will only get worse until finally there is no bus service at all.

***

An elderly friend who still owns an automobile and to whom I am eternally grateful always drives me to a Fred Meyer superstore for the big first-of-the-month shopping expedition during which I buy nearly all my month's groceries and household supplies. But bananas spoil too quickly for storage in quantity, and I do not want to burden my generous friend with requests for additional rides. Hence I ride the bus whenever I need more bananas, usually about four times each month.

Fred Meyer has, by nearly 40 percent, the cheapest bananas in Tacoma. The Freddy's at which I do my first-of-month shopping is only 1.9 miles from where I live, but Tacoma's alpine-steep grades make the 3.8 mile round trip too arthritically painfully for me to walk, and because of Pierce Transit's disorganized route system and uncoordinated schedules, it's a two-and-one-half hour, two-bus odyssey in each direction: six hours total for a chore that used to take maybe 30 minutes when I had a car. However there's another Fred Meyer on the bus line that runs closest to my dwelling. This store is nearly six miles away, but it is the option I choose because it is only a one-hour journey on one bus each way, which means I can usually complete the entire task in less than three hours. My time by car, for comparison, was never more than 45 minutes.

Last Thursday to my great delight this particular Freddy's had green bananas, a bit of good fortune that enabled me to buy an 11-day supply instead of my usual six or seven day supply. I hate shopping, which because of my poverty is invariably a misery-inducing tour through a vast storehouse of things I cannot afford. But I find it especially detestable during the December holidays, when the stores are overrun by shoppers whose surly aggressiveness express their justifiable fear and resentment of being forced ever deeper into debt-slavery – the true sentiments of the season, the gift-wrapped mania dealt us by capitalist perversions of spiritual celebrations that were formerly dedicated to hope and renewal. Four or five extra days of bananas during such a dismal time is therefore a blessed and deeply appreciated gift from fate.

***

Now after riding the bus to the store and making my purchases and boarding the return bus and riding it for nearly an hour, I was almost home. But the bus stopped once more on its hard-springed passage over Tacoma's notoriously potholed streets and picked up a another passenger. A 20-something white woman boarded and took the seat between the bag-seat and the black man's seat.

Half asleep despite the rough ride, I ignored her until a white woman of about the same age, blonde, a bit overweight and wearing a tan winter coat over blue jeans, darted forward from where she had been seated amongst several young men at the back of the bus. She greeted the new passenger and stood over her talking as the bus resumed its journey.

The two women conversed in that irritating, definitively West Coast dialect of illiterate English in which “I'm like” is a synonym for “I said” and exclamations such as “ohmygod” or “awesome” that have been rendered meaningless by inappropriate over-usage nevertheless provide a semblance of oral punctuation. I could not help but overhear, yet the conversation was so inarticulate it was effectively eavesdrop-proof, and I began to wonder if perhaps such non-disclosing language is a subconsciously evolved defense against the omnipresent electronic surveillance by which we are everywhere oppressed – though it is surely difficult to credit the dialect's speakers with the intellectual acumen necessary for even the most simple encryptions.

Suddenly the standing woman turned and jammed herself into the seat occupied by my bananas. She ignored my protests (“No! Wait! Lemme move my bag”) and shoved the banana bag aside with her right hip, a hard antagonistic thrust that rammed the bag of bananas into the bag of canned goods on my lap, crushing the fruit against the impromptu anvil of the cans. Then – as if to make sure I knew her rudeness was deliberate – she did it again, wedging herself further into the seat (“Hey! Hey! You're sitting on my groceries!”) and mashing the bananas beneath the unyielding right cheek of her invasive ass. Now I couldn't move the bag out of her way, which meant she could inflict additional damage at will.

“Jeezus Christ lady,” I growled. “Why'nt you just ask me to move the damn bag? Now would you please lemme get it outa your way?”

Again she acted as if she did not hear a word I said. But I knew she was deliberately ignoring me because the African-American man at the other end of the row of seats clearly heard me and was just as clearly surprised by her unprovoked rudeness.

Finally the bus reached my stop. I levered himself into a standing position, swiveled the shoulder bag of canned goods from my lap over to my left hip, violently yanked the banana bag out from under the woman's intruding buttocks, leaned on my cane, bent down into her face and spoke in the loudest, harshest voice I could muster: “Goddamn you,” I said, “not that you give a shit – but you just crushed a five dollar bag of bananas.”

She glanced up at me with the same disdain one might view a cockroach on a ceiling. “Oh, sorry,” she said. “I didn't know.” But her lips shaped a gleeful smirk that said her aggression had been deliberate, and the sadistic defiance that glared from her eyes said she was not sorry at all.

A 20-something white male shouted from the back of the bus: “You don't need em anyway, you're already way too fat.” Another less-audible young white male wished me dead: “Go have a heart attack,” he mumbled. “Make more room on the bus.” Because I had the distinct impression both members of the banana-crushers's jeering section were eager to escalate to physical violence, I said nothing in response. Instead I turned away in disgust, cane in my white-knuckled right hand, bag of crushed bananas dangling loosely from my left.

I limped the few steps to front door of the bus. I said “thank you” to the bus driver as, in conformity with local protocol, I always do. But the cowardly silence of the driver, a middle-aged Caucasian, had countenanced and thereby encouraged the entire incident, and this time my tone was coldly sarcastic, so chilly even an ignoramus would have recognized the intended insult. Then, using my cane as a fulcrum, I lurched down from the bus and onto the sidewalk. Because I wondered if one of the young males might try to assault me from behind, I waited to see who else might debark. No one did; perhaps the hooligans understood that a cane, even when wielded by a fat old cripple, can be a formidable weapon when you know how to use it.

The bus door closed. The jeers and laughter continued within. The bus pulled away.

Seething with anger, I began the quarter-mile hobble through the fog and rain, bearing my crushed bananas to my dwelling.

*** 

My socialist consciousness fervently wishes I could describe my abusers as the sons and daughters of smirking Wall Street aristocrats, the sorts of too-rich-to-jail  princelings and débutantes whose parents openly scheme to kill elderly and disabled people by eliminating our pensions and health care. But the young adults who bullied me on the bus were not One Percenters. They were Working Class whites – members of the very generation Councilwoman Sawant and Chris Hedges and Edward Snowden and all the other heroes of the resistance hope to mobilize into peaceful rebellion.

Ultimately what these young Working Class whites taught me last Thursday evening in this Working Class seaport city on a Pierce Transit bus is – as I said in my opening paragraph – the terrifying extent to which the Ayn Rand moral imbecility that was once the predatory coda unique to the capitalist Ruling Class has now been metastasized throughout the 99 Percent. Note the array of data that shows how obviously poor people of all races are increasingly the target of Caucasian thuggery. The most common perpetrator of an assault on a homeless person is a young white middle-class male.  Though as I said, it's pretty obvious I'm not homeless, my presence on the bus nevertheless proclaimed my extreme poverty. And as I have written here so many times before, if we (correctly) recognize the USian Empire as the de facto Fourth Reich, then it is increasingly evident we who are elderly, disabled and obviously poor are methodically being scapegoated into the USian equivalents of those who were on the Third Reich's death lists, not just Jews, but Slavs, gypsies, homosexuals and – yes – disabled and long-term unemployed people too.

There's an additional irony – a rather subtle one – lurking in the fact the incident occurred on a bus. Note again the USian view that anyone who does not own and operate an automobile is a failure and a bum. Riding public transport is thus changed from a positive assertion of economic sensibility and environmental mindfulness into a humbling admission of failure. Ultimately it therefore becomes a source of self-hatred. Nor is this associated transformation of good into bad accidental; it is a deliberate tactic within the truly diabolical Madison Avenue psychological-warfare strategy that ensures the obscene profits of Big Oil and Big Automotive will continue in perpetuity. Its significance in this context is that those who bullied me no doubt hated themselves for riding the the bus and chose me as their victim not just because I appeared to be weaker and more vulnerable than they, but because I represent the sum of all their fears: being old and alone and too poor for anything but a Pierce Transit bus. To attack me as a symbol was, subconsciously, to fight off the reality they most dread and deplore. Their behavior is therefore a perfect example of the capitalism-fueled bullying that now despite all the contrary rhetoric defines every institution in the USian Empire: household, schoolyard, prison, workplace, military drill field, Internet, wherever, it's all the same. It is also, as proven by the history of Nazi Germany, a telling preliminary to the imposition of fascism.

As a part of this proto-fascist conditioning, Caucasian youth are being taught to despise their elders, not the least because we white seniors are defined as dangerously subversive merely by our memories of the long-dead United States – the nation in which we enjoyed freedom and comfort unthinkable in today's USian imperial homeland. I'm not entirely sure how the conditioning is being done – some of it is achieved by Madison Avenue's eternally youthful image of “a real American” – but I see the results everywhere. The young male's muttered hope I would drop dead of a heart attack and “make more room on the bus” was merely another variant on the “hurry-up-and-die” insults I hear so often in check-out lines whenever impatient Caucasian youths – and they are always Caucasians, never blacks, Hispanics or Asiatics – are grumbling about slow and obviously fragile elders, people way older than I am, folks who have difficulty operating card-readers and other alien mysteries imposed by the ever-more-daunting world of high-tech. In years past I have sometimes rebuked the grumblers, usually with words like “hey, back off. Someday you're gonna be old too – if you live that long.” But now that I am car-less and so much more exposed to the elements – elements that include ruffians who in their fealty to Ruling Class norms would rather see me dead because I am elderly and crippled and poor and no longer exploitable for profit – I say nothing, lest I be beaten to death at a bus stop or in some shopping-center parking lot.

Liberals and even many genuine Leftists excuse white Working Class violence as the product of identification with the oppressor, the Madison-Avenue-induced syndrome that stupefies USian 99 Percenters into believing they too have a chance to win the pot of gold that supposedly awaits us all at the end of the capitalist rainbow. As an Occupy Tacoma activist named Francesca so memorably said to me in early 2012, “the 99 Percent is terribly broken.”

While I agree that far too many USians unthinkingly identify with the oppressor, I vehemently reject the notion such identification excuses their Moron Nation aggressiveness and violence. I don't know if the banana-smashing behavior of the young white woman was merely the product of the impenetrable self-obsession that seems ever more definitive of the younger USian mindset, or if it was something darker – perhaps a sadistic “prank” schemed between the woman and her male colleagues before she moved to the front of the bus. But the mere possibility of the latter is another measurement of the extent to which we have already been subsumed by capitalist evil.

What I do know is the incident on the bus is a classic example of Ayn Rand sociopathy in action. The young white female reduced me to nonpersonhood and trashed my possessions. Her response to my protests made it obvious she regarded whatever hardship, injury or damage she had inflicted as redemptive proof of her self-worth, and her white male supporters openly applauded her viciousness. Thus – in perfect compliance with Ayn Rand's precise articulation of capitalism's true dynamic – are elderly people reduced to prey.

***

The core truth of what occurred last Thursday on a Pierce Transit bus is that it is another example – small but declarative – of the extent to which the white USian Working Class is learning to think and react like Nazis. Research confirms the lack of conscience exhibited by the white males' instant readiness for violence and the white female's triumphant yet anticipatory gloating is becoming a defining USian trait, as if entire generations of potential thugs are waiting to be mobilized and Teabaggered into genocidal frenzies, unleashed overseas in the name of world conquest,  encouraged to run amok here at home in neo-pogroms against homeless people  and then eventually turned against everyone who is poor, elderly, disabled or inclined to protest. Conditioned to reflexive, Nazi-like conformity by what the USian Empire passes off as public education,  this new generation of wanna-be storm troopers will reliably assault whomever their leaders decide to persecute or exterminate. And they will not only follow orders but get erect penises and wet vaginas doing it because they have come to believe the most evil falsehood of all time – that life's greatest most empowering pleasure is to inflict suffering and death on someone who can't fight back. Enron's Kenneth Lay,  Abu Ghraib's Lynndie England  and the nameless female on the bus who smashed my bananas, it's exactly the same moral imbecility.

Of all the movements that seek to restrain this human penchant for savagery, only socialism dares acknowledge the malevolent absence of conscience that's the defining characteristic of capitalism – infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue – the deliberate rejection of every humanitarian principle our species has ever asserted. And only socialists are willing to explore the possibility such behavior is conditioned rather than innate – that perhaps its origin lies not in the legend of “original sin” but in the imposition of patriarchy some 5000 years ago and the subsequent evolution of patriarchal belligerence into capitalism and its final forms, fascism and imperialism.

 

Now because of the failure of all other movements to successfully resist capitalism's everywhere-escalating onslaught, there remains only the resurrected socialist movement again demanding a new society built on the most humanitarian, most democratic socioeconomic precept ever conceived: “From each according to ability, to each according to need.” But the capitalist enemies of this ultimate assertion of human potential are so omnipotently powerful, it often seems socialism's life-affirming cause is doomed – that we are defeated even before the struggle begins. Yet history is defined by its surprises, as it was in Petrograd of February and October 1917. That's why Councilwoman Sawant is so presciently correct in her bold insistence we never surrender.  Even when our efforts for societal change are seemingly reduced to nothing more than individual quests for personal redemption, we should draw sustenance from the historical truth that by becoming better socialists at heart, we strengthen our abilities to build a socialist world. Thus may our individual struggles become the prelude to the collective transformation by which the personal and the political become one.

*****

Essays Elsewhere: My Contributions to Other Sites Since 8 December

“Elizabeth Warren, Third Way and the Battle Over American Liberalism”  Joshua Holland of Moyers and Company describes the (bogus) fight within the Democratic Party between a dwindling handful of New Deal advocates and the numerically superior, financially omnipotent proponents of the corporatist, neo-liberal “Third Way.” Recognizing the latter as an elaborate scheme for surrendering to the unapologetic fascism of the One Percent and the Republican Party, I reply that Sen. Warren “will be marginalized as long as she stays in the Democratic Party...the shill by which the One Percent perpetuates the Big Lie of USian democracy.” I add that “where Sen. Warren belongs...is in the leadership of a new, avowedly socialist third party.” Then, having brandished the Red Banner, I become involved in a somewhat abbreviated discussion of why only socialism can save us from extinction.

“Why Some Republicans Are Opposing the Murray-Ryan Plan”  Thom Hartmann notes how “Once again, we've somehow ended up debating how much austerity should be imposed on our nation, rather than how much we should be investing.” I respond by pointing out that, just as Mr. Hartmann implies, “the revision of the national domestic policy debate from humanitarianism to austerity is perhaps the greatest and most democracy-killing triumph the forces of capitalism have imposed on the United States.” Then I trace the revision's history, beginning with President Nixon's 1974 declaration of war against the 99 Percent, via a Page One, William Randolph Hearst Jr. interview that has since been ruthlessly suppressed.

“Yet Another Austerity Budget” Mr. Hartmann reveals there's damn little for 99 Percenters to celebrate in in the Murray-Ryan budget and demands the politicians “stop this pattern of taking from those who have the least while never asking those at the top to pay their fair share." I say “the only way that will ever happen – and surely, Mr. Hartman, you already know this in your heart if not in your mind – is to replace capitalism with democratic socialism.” Then I note how “U.,S. Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) has again revealed herself to be a military-industrial Republican at heart. At home in Washington state, she of course talks like a Democrat, but back in the Capital she rules like an Ayn Rand fascist: absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation for all the  rest of us.”

“How George Bush Failed the GOP”  Rachel Maddow reports on the Republican Party's apparent post-Bush lack of leadership, then uses it to promote the Big Lie of the Democratic Party as an instrument of progressive change. My response is predictable: I recall how Ms. Maddow “had shown herself to have the skills of a real journalist by her unflinching coverage of how BP savaged the Gulf of Mexico and the people who were dependent on its ecosystem,” but now “has surrendered self and potential to the closet Republicans who have captured the Democratic Party and are now serving the One Percent by forever eradicating all traces of the New Deal.” Then I point out that – given the Democrats' role in the One Party of Two Names by which we are ruled – the only true alternative is socialism. The legion of Democratic operatives who had climbed aboard for Ms. Maddow's performance also respond predictably – by blasting me with 38 thumbs-down, which I believe is my all-time record.

LB/15 December 2013

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Can Sawant and Socialism End the Seattle Freeze?

Photojournalist W. Eugene Smith in Seattle, 1976. When I asked Gene whether skyrocketing costs of equipment and supplies might gentrify photography into a medium only the rich could afford, thereby purging it of its humanitarian vision, a few of Seattle's vindictively intolerant Ansel Adams disciples shouted both of us down, denouncing us for our mutual recognition that art and politics are inseparable. (The negatives from which this hitherto unpublished image is made miraculously survived the 1983 fire and were dug out of the rubble the following year.) M2 Leica, 35mm f/2 Summicron, Tri-X at 800 in D-76, exposure unrecorded. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2013. (Click on image to view it full size.)

*

SOCIALIST KSHAMA SAWANT'S stunning victory in a Seattle city council election is forcing me to reconsider my longstanding hatred of what was undoubtedly the most xenophobic and politically hypocritical town in the United States.

Seattle's xenophobia, specifically its legendary hostility to people not born locally, was so venomous it has given birth to at least three web sites, I Hate Seattle,  Seattle Shmeng and the original, Seattle Sucks, which is seemingly no longer available on-line. The townspeople's hypocrisy, even more glaring, was measured by the huge gap between their haughty claims to progressive politics and environmental enlightenment versus the ugly reality of their malice toward lower-income people – particularly as demonstrated by their (carefully closeted) bigotry and their relentless opposition to tax reform and adequate mass transit.

The results of Seattle's bogus progressiveness, which because of the way the town dominates the state legislature actually afflict the entire state, include the most regressive state tax structure in the nation and a regional transit system that, as I noted in a comment on the aforelinked article's discussion thread, is nearly a half-century behind those of comparable areas.

One of these areas is metropolitan Portland, Oregon, which has a transit system that is considered a national model of forward-looking effectiveness.

But the fact newly elected Seattle City Councilwoman Sawant is not only a declared Marxian socialist who makes no secret of her radicalism but is an immigrant as well suggests a sociological change in Seattle that may be of unprecedented magnitude. Indeed it suggests Seattle is at last on the brink of evolving into a genuine city, with all the cosmopolitan open-mindedness that gives urban living its great potential.

That said, my loathing of Seattle is too justified by ugly facts, too long-standing and too intense for me to set it aside without a lot of further reflection.

I first wrote of my animosity toward Seattle in a 1984 Village Voice piece, a brief but bitterly truthful summation of the four bottomlessly miserable years I dwelt there, 1972-1976. In terms of unabated loneliness, these were by far the worst years of my life.

The Voice account provoked Seattleites to an unsurprising frenzy of censorship, angry headlines and venomous letters to local editors. In predictable submission to the malignant Scandinavian/Lutheran puritanism that lurked beneath Seattle's seemingly benign surface, the local reprints suppressed my best turns of phrase – especially those describing Seattle from the perspective of a shunned and ostracized outlander. Some of the better passages are thus restored here:

(Seattle is) no place for dedicated urbanites. Indeed, anyone tempted to move there should first read Raymond Gastil's Cultural Regions of the United States, a University of Washington press book which accurately equates the xenophobic quagmires of Puget Sound with the intellectual barrens of Ohio.

There are the wonderfully enlightened, culture-loving middle-class professionals who will call you to your face a “fucking East Coast intellectual” and invite you to “go back where you belong,” with even stronger language, occasionally accompanied by threats of physical violence. And then there's the prevalent ethos of “mellow,”  which means any conversation beyond a rudimentary cataloging of new possessions and recent conquests – his new wife, her new man, his new skis, her new boat – is “too heavy, man.”

New York males should be especially wary. Seattle women – they're still called “girls”  out in the Evergreen state – won't look at you twice unless you're blond, tall and built like a lumberjack. But that only gets you in the door. You've also got to wow the ladies with body language, man, which means dancing like John Travolta and never forgetting the taboo on conversation. Otherwise you'll spend the night (which ends promptly at 1:45 a.m.) getting sloshed on 3.2 salmon piss while you watch some plad-shirted executive cowboy try to seduce his prom-queen secretary out of her lip-reader jeans.

Like so many others who have encountered the infamous Seattle Freeze, at first I blamed myself. Then I met other outlanders and began to realize we were all despised merely because we had moved there from somewhere else. That I was born in the Borough of Brooklyn and came to Washington state from Manhattan made the locals' hatefulness that much worse. In Seattle, someone whose birth certificate was issued by the City of “Jew York” – a term I first heard during an unpleasant exchange of insults with a self-proclaimed Seattle “poet” in 1972 – is even more reviled than someone from California.

***

My initial encounter with the region's carefully closeted but nevertheless intense bigotry – in this instance, the same anti-Semitism revealed by the damning of my birthplace as “Jew York,”  was in Bellingham rather than Seattle. It was November of 1970 and I had just learned to my horror I was homeless – that an unreliable sub-lessor had abandoned my wonderful Chelsea apartment five months earlier, that it had thus reverted to the landlord and left me without a place to live. Now with only a little money remaining after a summer and fall of chasing the Back-to-the-Land-Movement/agricultural-commune/resurrection-of-the-Goddess story through the rural Pacific Northwest, I had rented a room in a Bellingham boarding house and was desperately looking for work.

Obviously my first choice was the local daily, The Bellingham Herald. Because this was not the South, where my Civil Rights Movement activities had made me persona non grata at every mainstream paper but The Oak Ridger, I assumed that even if I did not find immediate employment, I'd be welcomed as a fellow professional, just as I had been on every Northeastern paper to which I had ever applied. Hence I typed up a resume, then phoned the lover who had managed to save my files and books from the Manhattan apartment debacle and asked her to please send me the recent clippings of my work. 

When they arrived a few days later, I phoned The Herald's managing editor, a guy named Fowler, and asked if he had any openings for reporters, as in those pre-Watergate days most newspapers did. He said yes, we made an appointment for an interview, and I assumed I would soon be on my way toward earning the exit money that would get me back to the City.

But as soon as Fowler saw where I had worked, he bristled with rejection. “We don't like your kind out here,” he said. “Do yourself a favor and catch the next flight back to New York.”

At the time I dismissed his reaction as that of a small-minded managing editor of a small newspaper in a small town that – despite its reputation as a “hippie Mecca” (a description famously applied by The Seattle Post-Intelligencer in 1970) – obviously remained as small-minded as any Southern Klanville.

Now of course I recognize the Seattle Freeze is misnamed – that with the notable exception of Tacoma, it should include the entire Puget Sound area.

To encounter that same hostility from the newsroom boss of the state's largest-circulation newspaper, as I did in 1973, was particularly shocking; I had repeatedly found the better newspapers – note again my experience at The Oak Ridger – to be sanctuaries of reason even in realms of unabashed prejudice. But the managing editor of The Seattle Times, Henry MacLeod, rejected me with essentially the same message that had been snarled at me by Fowler. MacLeod was perfectly polite, as Seattleites usually are when they're deliberately inflicting psychological injury, but the sentiments were identical. “All your experience is East Coast experience,” MacLeod said, “and that doesn't count out here. We do things differently. You'll be a lot happier if you go back where you came from.”

***

The we-don't-want-you-here vandalism to which I was subjected so many times in Seattle began in Bellingham too, though there was only one major incident in the two years I resided there. While I never learned the identity of the perpetrator(s), it was already clear to me there were people in the local Counterculture community who vindictively envied my photographic and verbal skills, fervently hated me for my New York origin and were probably infuriated by my classroom performance as an unapologetic intellectual at Western Washington State College as well. Whatever my alleged offense,  it prompted some unknown person(s) to break into my rental house, disconnect the oil-burning heater's chimney-pipe, turn the stove up to high, leave my dog Dingo locked inside and nearly murder him with the stove's sooty outpouring of carbon monoxide.

It was New Years Eve, the last day of 1971, a night I remember as improbably clear and invigoratingly cold. I was attending a big party at a local tavern, was photographing the festivities, had connected with a young woman there and under normal circumstances would not have been home until late the next morning. But – fortunately for Dingo – I ran out of film. So about 12:30 a.m., I went back to the house for more. Thus an exigency of photography saved his life. But the house itself, everything in it blackened by soot and reeking of partially combusted petroleum, was rendered unlivable for the entire month of January. Happy 1972.

Dingo was a very protective half Malemute/half German shepherd, about 85 pounds of no-nonsense canine, and obviously the perpetrator(s) knew him well enough to fool him with phony friendship – a dishonest skill Seattlites seem to possess in abundance. Just as obviously, the intent of the crime was to kill Dingo and frighten me into leaving town. But as the Ku Klux Klan learned in East Tennessee, I'm not easily scared into retreat. Instead I contacted my real friends – a locally born Jewish businessman named Les and his Chicago-born fiancée Gabrielle, also a single mother named Billie who shortly afterward moved to California for graduate school and whom I regret to say I later lost track of (as I remember she too was from someplace in the Middle West) – and they willingly granted dog and man the necessary accommodations until I made the house habitable again.

In subsequent years, while I worked, resided and attended school in Seattle, all four of the tires on my automobile were slashed twice, once in 1974 and once in 1976, and the two right-side tires of a Volkswagen belonging to my then-lover, a woman from California, were cut beyond repair in 1975. Scribbled notes stuck under my windshield-wipers in the '74 and '76 incidents made the vandals' intent unmistakable: one said “go back where you came from,” the other said “we don't want you here.”

***

In 1975 I was assaulted during a post-opening party at which I was one of the honored guests. I was one of three participants in a show at King and King, a Seattle gallery that flourished during the mid-'70s but closed years ago. My presence in the exhibition was a courageous act on the part of the proprietors given that all my photography in those days was social-documentary work – an utterly taboo medium in a town where Ansel Adams is a cult messiah, his Zone System is the cult's biblical or qur'anic equivalent and any use of film to depict the human condition is considered a sacrilegious mixing of politics and art.

However it was not my photos that triggered the assailant's rage. Those he merely scorned, his “why don't you go back where you belong” routine a typical expression of Seattle xenophobia. Now, eavesdropping on my conversation with other guests, he somehow got the utterly mistaken notion I was badmouthing the hostess and tried to ambush me with a wild right hook aimed at the side of my face. He was at least a foot taller than I, built like a runner or a bicycle racer who also lifted weights, a blond, handsome, obviously athletic specimen of Homo Sapiens Seattlus, equally suitable for a Nazi recruiting poster or an advertisement for a trendy health club. If his wrecking-ball fist had landed with its intended force, I have no doubt he would have knocked me down if not out cold.

But in those days my peripheral vision was still good and I saw the punch coming and stepped inside his reach and all he did was knock my glasses off my face and send them flying across the room. I poked a couple of intentionally distracting left jabs upward toward his chin and launched a full-power karate kick at his balls. Yes I intended to hurt him – badly. The viciousness of his sneak attack warranted no less. I assumed the kick would drop him to the floor, where I would kick him again as he screamed and writhed and clutched his ruptured nuts: welcome to the jungle, motherfucker.

Alas the kick foundered in the tsunami of onlookers who washed over both of us and pulled us apart.

One of these onlookers was a pretty woman whose eloquent reaction to my photographic collages – see “Sandwiches for Mind and Spirit” – had aroused my interest both intellectually and physically. But now she turned on me, exactly the sort of treachery I had come to expect from Seattleites of whatever gender. She shrilly denounced me for my attempt at self-defense, yelling something like “you bastard you tried to kick him you fucking New Yorkers always fight dirty,” at which point I sensed I was in danger of becoming the object of a lynching and quickly departed.

As in this incident, Seattle-born women often seemed breathtakingly cruel to me. This was a profound shock because women elsewhere, particularly in the Northeast but even in the South, had generally regarded me as good company. Many Northeastern women – I can say it now at age 73 without seeming boastful – forthrightly acknowledged they were sexually aroused by my intellect and my ability to share its content. There's also the fact I genuinely like women, that I regard women as intrinsically better human beings than men and usually more interesting as well. 

But in Seattle, even if the women managed to be somewhat intellectually accomplished, they viewed intellectuality as an exclusively female domain. They dismissed male intellectuals – especially those of us who genuinely relish female companionship – as repulsively effeminate. Thus they retained the mating habits of high-school prom queens, insisting on men with the bodies of professional athletes and jock-strapped minds to match. Most of these women also made no secret of their contempt for what they considered “East-Coast-type” males – smallish, slight of build, with dark eyes, curly dark brown hair, coal-black beard and Manhattan's signature intensity – in other words, men much like myself.

Because Seattleites so often assumed I was Jewish, I soon recognized this almost fanatical aversion to physical features like mine as implicitly anti-Semitic – yet another of the fascist instincts that lurked beneath the allegedly “progressive” facade of Pugetopolis politics.

***

By the spring of 1974 I was beginning to sing to myself that Bob Dylan line that goes, “I'm going back to New York City, I do believe I've had enough,” but then by a strange quirk of fate I was offered the opportunity to became the founding photographer of The Seattle Sun, which would enable me to showcase my camera work as never before. It also put me more or less at the town's (pseudo) bohemian center, which I assumed would open doors both professionally and socially.

But the hatred actually intensified.

One of the unsuccessful contenders for my job was a smugly handsome local boy of about age 20, a typical Ansel Adams disciple named Nick who had no discernible photojournalistic talent and even less verbal skill but had the physique, carriage and blond cowlick of a male model. The local women on the staff didn't give a damn he was professionally incompetent; they merely wanted him around as a boy-toy to pretty up the office. Eventually – over vehement protests of two of The Sun's three outlander women (one of whom was my source inside the struggle) – the local women prevailed. They didn't care it flushed the paper's photographic quality down the toilet. For them, alternative journalism was more about having fun than producing great work. In any case, being from Seattle – or Texas – they wouldn't have recognized or understood quality social documentary photography even if it were handed them as the visual epic entitled The Family of Man. Just like Barbie wants Ken, and just as mindlessly, they wanted Nick no matter what. And when they finally got him – when his mediocre pictures began replacing my work on the cover – I knew The Sun had started to set.

So it was back to singing that Bob Dylan line. It took me another 18 months to get out of Seattle – I still had five quarters of school to complete before I got my bachelor of arts degree from Fairhaven College, and along the way I had acquired some private photography students to whom I felt strongly obligated – but by the fall of 1976 I was gone from Emeraldville. I was never there again save for occasional visits with friends, never more than an overnight stay.

***

The South, where I spent about two thirds of my boyhood, was despite its xenophobic history infinitely more accepting of me than Seattle ever was. In 1957, obviously a Yankee, I immediately found part-time work on The Knoxville Journal with samples of writing I had done in Michigan for The Grand Rapids Herald and later for The Grand Rapids Press. Though I was the carpet-bagger son of a carpet-bagger mortgage-banker, though I bore the odium of a child of divorce, I was nevertheless during my senior year at Knox County's Holston High School voted “Boy Most Likely to Succeed.”

Seattle was therefore hands down the most viciously hostile place I have ever been. Considering those places include several locales in the the Ku Klux South –  one of which is this same Jacksonville that still honors slave-trader, Confederate general and KKK-Founder Nathan Bedford Forest – Seattle's hatefulness was surely without peer anywhere in the United States.

Since then I have continued to criticize Seattle relentlessly, focusing on its political deficiencies as revealed by its opposition to adequate transit and tax reform.

In fairness, I should note that Tacoma and its suburbs, formerly staunchly pro-transit, have now become more anti-transit than Seattle, actually damning public transport as a form of welfare, denouncing transit users as parasites and voting two years in a row to kill the local transit authority by ruinously downsizing its bus service.  But I still regard Tacoma as infinitely more cosmopolitan than Seattle. I have lived in Tacoma twice, 1978-1982 and again from late 2004 onward, and never once have Tacomans made me feel unwelcome.

Indeed three of my closest longtime friends are Tacomans, Mary whom I met at Western in 1971; Jim whom I met immediately after I moved to Tacoma in 1978; and another woman, Gretchen, a working artist, whom I met here in 1979. (After I sort of nudged Jim and Mary toward one another, they were wed in 1983. Not only do they remain happily married; they are also, for me, de facto family.) Thus Tacoma has become my home – that is, the closest approximation to home I will ever know in this lifetime after gentrification permanently exiled me from New York City.

But the point here is that now after the election of City Councilwoman Kshama Sawant, whose open affiliation with the revolutionary Socialist Alternative Party proves her to be what I consider a real socialist, I have to reconsider my attitude toward Seattle. No matter how repugnant I have found it in the past, Seattle now seems to be transcending its xenopobic bigotry and reaching out to the peoples of the nation and the world by offering a true alternative to capitalism. Perhaps Emeraldville is at last approaching the sociological maturity that will make it a genuine Emerald City. Let us hope – especially for Councilwoman Sawant's sake – this turn of events is not merely another Seattle deception.

*****

My Contributions to Last Week's Dialogues on Other Websites

“Does Hillary's Silence on Iran Show Neocon Pull on Her Presidential Run?”  Truthout's Robert Naiman challenges Hillary to declare her true self. Applauding Naiman's astute analysis, I cite the facts revealed by Jeff Sharlet in The Family, which prove Hillary to be not just a closet Republican but a secret collaborator in the JesuNazi effort to make the United States a Christian theocracy.

“We Need More Than Words” Thom Hartmann discusses how a recent speech by President Obama “cut right to the core of some of the biggest issues in our nation, but we need more than words to fix this broken system.” I reply the only sure lesson of the past six years is that any promise uttered or implied by Obama the Orator is sure to be a Big Lie – that to imagine he will not again always serve the One Percent by shape-shifting into Barack the Betrayer is to prove one's self a fool. The result is a notably civilized discussion on one of the Internet's  best news blogs.

LB/8 December 2013 

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