05 August 2013

Snowden's Disclosures Could Spark Real USian Solidarity

“Tea Partiers: You Should Be Here Too,” another of my Occupy Tacoma pictures, this one originally published by Reader Supported News. Pentax MX, 100mm f/2.8 SMCP-M, Fujicolor 800, exposure not recorded. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2011.
 
*
 
(NOTE: Changes in the circumstances of my life – a welcome increase in activities unrelated to this blog – mandate I now make Sundays or early Monday mornings the time of my weekly posting. Please accept my apology for any resultant inconvenience.)

***
 
EDWARD SNOWDEN'S GREAT GIFT to us, We the People of the United States, is the dawning realization our love for what used to be “our” country transcends the divisiveness that denies us the solidarity we need if we are to prevail against the One Percent. The Ruling Class is thus trembling, possibly as never before in my 73-year lifetime. Little by slow, more and more of us – even some of the most pampered politicians – are awakening to the personal dangers implicit in the hideous truth our government has been captured by a cabal of morally imbecilic plutocrats whose greed is infinite, whose potential for tyranny knows no limits and whose imperial ambitions have no earthly boundaries.

But it remains to be seen whether this fledgling coalition of patriots can thrive and mature. President Obama is already demonstrating his slithery skill at backstabbing  those who oppose his worse-than-Nixon despotism,  and far too many Democrats have abandoned their pretense of progressive values in nauseatingly hypocritical efforts to remain faithful to their leader and the total-surveillance police-state he has created. It is exactly as if they were fascists in some lockstep cult of personality, and Obama's title were führer rather than chief executive. 

Yet in this newly emergent, post-Snowden context, it seems there are nearly as many of us, myself among them, who would willingly sidestep our instinctive distrust of Ron Paul and even refrain from expressing our contempt for the Teabag faction, if only it would help form a united front for the restoration of constitutional governance. Such face-to-face, human-to-human political re-integration would probably be good medicine for us all. Though it would undoubtedly be revolutionary, it probably would not result in revolution per se, because it might go revolution one better and make it unnecessary. 

Nor is Snowden's protection by Russia without its own (obscure) pro-democracy precedent. It was Mother Russia, in the person of Tsar Alexander II with the might of the Russian Imperial Navy's Baltic and Far Eastern fleets, that saved the federal Union  by protecting our coasts from British, French and Confederate attack during the Civil War. (My profound thanks to my late father, Donald R. Bliss [1910-1971], more learned in history than anyone I have ever known, who when I was age 10 or 11 and in fifth grade studying the Civil War, revealed to me the long-suppressed facts of these nation-preserving events.) 

Could it be that, by granting Snowden temporary asylum, Vladimir Putin, Russian president and de facto Tsar, has given the restoration of USian constitutional democracy the international protection it needs to succeed? If this is indeed what obtains, if Putin thus empowers Snowden and his disclosures, the irony – and some would say the karmic or poetic justice – would be profound, establishing a subtle parallel between the events of 1861-1865 and 2013. Meanwhile, the Josef Goebbels clones of the corporate propaganda media not withstanding, Russia already helps the United States in a surprising number of ways, as reported by Juan Cole

Yes, the Russians are clearly acting in their own interests – but so was France in the events of 1775-1783

***

Unfortunately the odds of forming a united front of patriots for the restoration of constitutional governance are considerably diminished by two large groups within the body politic. 

One of these is the growing cult of Christian theocrats, about which I sound the alarm as often as I can and usually in detail I hope is genuinely frightening. (If you're reading this via TypePad, click on “Archives,” then click on “Religion.” If you're on Blogger, it's more of a pain because you have to do it year by year: look under “Blog Archives,” click on a year, wait for for the search-engine blank to appear at the upper left corner of the page, then type in “theocracy” without quotation marks.) In any case, suffice it to say these “born again” followers of Jesus jeopardize us all. They are defined by their fanatical opposition to sexual freedom, female personhood, science, the primacy of Nature and anything remotely resembling political or economic democracy. They are as uncompromisingly hateful, particularly toward women, as any member of the Taliban.

The other obstacle to patriotic solidarity is the dominant majority within the USian Left, the demonstrably self-defeating, hopelessly white-bourgeois, Ayn-Rand-tainted arrogance of which continues to astound me, even though by now – having watched it destroy the Occupy Movement  – I should expect no better. Never mind its characteristic loathing of intellectuals, union members and blue-collar people, its ignorant rejection of class-struggle or any other formalized ideology or analysis, and its unthinking acceptance of Randite elitism long ago reduced it to nothing more than a pseudo-Left. Loud and petulant enough to shout down any attempt to re-form the genuine Left that was fatally weakened by the post-World-War-II purges  and slain by the class conflicts exacerbated by the Vietnam War,  its primary political contribution is sustainment of the angry divisiveness that protects the Ruling Class by discouraging solidarity amongst the 99 Percent. Thus, hiding its Randite instincts behind its progressive rhetoric, this pseudo-Left routinely wages vocal and sometimes violent warfare against loggers, commercial fishers, oilfield riggers, long-haul truck-drivers, mass transport workers  and anyone else whose job or lack thereof is deemed politically “incorrect,” which of course includes nearly all of us whose annual income damns us as “the poor.” Note how the prefatory article isolates us – the homeless, the elderly, the disabled, the minorities – the better to facilitate the genocide-by-abandonment  President “Slick Willie” Clinton peddled as welfare reform and the cutbacks in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid Barack the Betrayer continues to defiantly tout as a grand bargain.

Admittedly, my attitudes toward the pseudo-Left, which used to call itself the "New Left," are profoundly influenced by the late Jack Newfield. It's a tragedy his superb Village Voice reporting on the death of the New Deal coalition has apparently never been made available on-line. But it was through those stories of the late 1960s and early 1970s I acquired the tools to recognize the escalation of class warfare that, as I entered old age, would bring about the wholly dire half-fulfillment of my own father's oft-repeated prophecy: “the time will come when things in this country get so bad, the Red Army will be welcomed as an army of liberation.” Throughout the years after 1973 and everywhere in the nation, the costs of living had skyrocketed as wages stagnated or declined. But my editors demanded I remain silent. The closest I ever came to reporting what was really happening was a piece headlined “New York Creativity: An Uncertain Future.” Published in the August 1986 issue of Art Direction magazine – the last edition for which I myself was editor-in-chief – the report's boldface summary denounced “greedy landlords” for “jeopardizing the city's position on the cutting edge.” The text elaborated: “(T)he economics of New York living are becoming increasingly inhospitable...The situation in the photo district has become so critical that many established photographers have added their voices to a growing demand for commercial rent control...Village Voice writer Erika Munk predicted (three months earlier) that 'without a drastic change of direction, Manhattan will be finished as America's creative center'” – as in fact it has been.

But it is not just capitalist economics that killed the American Dream and overthrew the USian experiment in constitutional democracy. It was also the breathtaking stupidity of the pseudo-Left. As a press officer for an Office of Economic Opportunity program in 1971 – apart from the Army, the only government job I ever had – I remember all too well how the snooty condescension of the (white bourgeois) feminists doomed their efforts to organize welfare mothers, how the pampered collegians then damned all women on welfare as “hopelessly reactionary,” vowed to infiltrate the welfare bureaucracy and thereby make feminist consciousness-raising a mandatory prerequisite for receiving stipends and services. Of a kind with the draft-exempt academic elite who yet despise those of us who served in the Vietnam Era military, these sorority-house radicals soon joined with their male counterparts to foment the still-raging campaign for forcible civilian disarmament – the imposition of mandatory pacifism and compulsory victimhood that is one of the many forms of USian class warfare.

A decade later, the impending bankruptcy of a newspaper flung me jobless into the Reagan Recession and a hunt for employment that by 1982 had turned me into a commercial fisher – engineer/deckhand aboard a 96-foot purse seiner. Thus at age 42 a mostly benevolent fate allowed me to experience firsthand not only the quiet ecstasies and high-pucker-factor hazards of working at sea but the darker truths of USian blue-collar economics, realities about which I had hitherto only written from afar. One such sociological encounter, with a trust-funded student from Western Washington University's Huxley College of Environmental Studies, was particularly enlightening. The student, who could not see beyond the grease-stains on my engine-room jeans and therefore had no idea who or what I might be, presumptuously lectured me on the new paradigm of ecological economics: “you people,” he said, “are going to have to learn to live with less.” It was the same übermenschen mentality that in its most extreme form calls for spiking trees and threatening the lives and livelihoods of loggers – the sneering pomposity that, beginning in the Vietnam Era, has driven most  blue-collar men and women into the manipulative arms of the Republican Party.

Nevertheless I had thought the collapse of the Occupy Movement, which in large measure was the byproduct of college-age Caucasians who proudly label themselves as “progressives” but are as anti-intellectual as the late Sen. Joe McCarthy and as anti-union as the late Ayn Rand, had perhaps taught these pseudo-Leftists to at least partially muzzle their self-contradictory haughtiness. Not so, as Laura Gottesdiener demonstrated by implicitly dismissing all white victims of foreclosure as somehow magically immune to its heartbreaking, gut-wrenching horrors. “(T)he difficulties white America has faced during the foreclosure crisis,” she wrote, “don't compare with what Wall Street and the banks have inflicted, physically and psychologically, on African American neighborhoods.” In other words, despite the story's misleadingly inclusive headline (“Backyard Shock Doctrine: Wall Street's Destruction Comes Home”), Gottesdiener, herself Caucasian, says white folks just don't feel the pain.

As I (unpopularly) replied in the associated comment thread, “by defining foreclosure and eviction as a racial problem, she guarantees the indifference if not the overt hostility of the white majority – the approximately 75 percent of the USian Caucasians who are definitively racist.” Hence I feel she owes her readers a triple apology: to foreclosed, evicted and homeless whites for minimizing their misery; to foreclosed and evicted Blacks for marginalizing their sufferings by setting them apart from other class-war victims; and to the entire 99 Percent for re-inflaming the racial obstacles to solidarity.

To get a clearer picture of what Gottesdiener did wrong, it is useful to compare her above-linked prose with a new essay written by Chris Hedges.  Gottesdiener's research was seemingly detailed and in considerable depth, but she mis-assembled her facts into a lament for African Americans that simultaneously (and not very subtly) demonizes whites and thereby furthers the Ruling Class purpose of sustaining maximum 99 Percent divisiveness. Hedges meanwhile assembled similar and equally credible facts that, because of his reportorial thoughtfulness, does not minimize the significance of race but nevertheless becomes a lamentation for us all. Precisely because of its portrait of the universal suffering imposed by capitalism's transformation into Ayn Rand fascism, it furthers the evolution of 99 Percent solidarity.

Perhaps the difference between Gottesdiener on one hand and Hedges and myself on the other is a difference in backgrounds. Though Hedges is as famous as I am obscure, he is, as I am, a declared libertarian socialist, an unapologetic intellectual and a journalist of several decades' experience. Gottesdiener meanwhile labels herself a “freelance journalist” and declares herself “an organizer with Occupy Wall Street” – the latter a decidedly curious description, since I as an early activist in Occupy Tacoma know the entire Occupy Movement has been effectively dead since the spring of 2012. Moreover, since it was through Occupy I met some of the indescribably bitter adolescent children of white families who had been thrown out of work, foreclosed and evicted into homelessness – the kids themselves coalesced into an unspeakably angry subculture that will either form the core of a genuinely revolutionary movement or destroy itself in criminality – I am doubly perplexed by how she could be so dismissive of the associated trauma.

LB/4 August 2013

-30-

No comments:

Post a Comment