16 December 2013

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 LayAbu 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

-30-

No comments:

Post a Comment