Another Inspection Again Wrenches My Life

I CAN'T OBJECT to the idea behind the federally mandated quarterly inspections of the individual dwelling units in any lower-income senior housing complex that was built with even a tiny percentage of public funds. Officially the purpose is to make certain the facilities are fully functional – that the plumbing, exhaust fans, alarm systems and electric ranges are all operational.

(I should note here we seniors are forbidden gas cooking, which means that 10 years after encountering my first electric range, I still can't successfully cook even the most simple meals. Indeed I despise electric ranges, which as far as I am concerned are worthless for anything save boiling water or heating soup. With a gas flame, you can see what you're doing; with electricity, you can only guess, which in my case means everything has to be burned on the outside to make sure it is not raw in the middle. But that is another issue for another time.)

Unofficially, the purpose of the quarterly inspections is to monitor the mental health of the occupants: detection of an unkempt or dirty apartment that might indicate the onset of Alzheimer's, hoarding that might endanger an occupant or create fire hazards for an entire complex, that sort of thing.

 

Nevertheless and in reality I resent these intrusions more than anything that fate and bureaucratic tyranny has ever dealt me. This is not just because of the violation of my privacy; the medical truth is that each inspection literally steals six or seven days from my life. Four of these days are taken by the preparatory cleanup, which for me – because of my arthritic spine, shoulders, left wrist and right knee – is an excruciatingly painful ordeal of dusting, vacuuming, mopping and, finally, on the morning of the inspection, neatening my bed into semi-military, Suzi-homemaker presentableness. This is in fact the most agonizing chore of all, which due to its hurtful extremes of bending and reaching takes me at least 30 minutes and sometimes half again that, the very reason I do it as seldom as possible. The remainder of the stolen time – the post-inspection hours of inspection day plus one or two days afterward – is required for recovery, most of it in my newly made bed.

But I have not verbalized these objections – at least not emphatically – until now, when the combination of the surprise state inspection inflicted on us at the end of last month and the upcoming regular inspection Tuesday is stealing 12 whole days from my life. (The interval between the first inspection and the second was just long enough all the cleaning had to be repeated.) The result – because the time-theft occurs at a peak of volunteer obligations (this blog; the monthly newsletter I produce for my fellow tenants; work for the organizing committee of 15 Now Tacoma; public relations for a friend who is a playwrite and musician) – is I am more frantically jammed up and therefore more jaggedly stressed than I have been at any time in memory, including the many years I worked at two and sometimes three jobs.

Another very big part of the problem is the wrenching time-theft imposed by my dependence on Pierce Transit. PT's bus service was only marginally adequate in 2009, the year my car died, and now after five years of anti-transit-user downsizing, it has been shrunken by least 70 percent. The transit authority bureaucracy will no longer disclose the actual size of the cuts, but the result is unquestionably the worst bus service I have ever seen anywhere in the urban U.S. Indeed there was more frequent bus service – far more frequent – provided by Knoxville Transit Lines in Knoxville, Tennessee during the 1950s. (For example, KTL buses ran until 1 a.m.; most PT buses cease operations at 9 p.m., some as early as 5 p.m. – and Knoxville in 1954 had half the population of Tacoma in 2014.) Bottom line, because of the bus service here – or rather the abysmal lack thereof – an errand that took me maybe 45 minutes when I had an automobile can now take up to an entire day.

 

I was of course prepared for the interruption inflicted by this month's quarterly inspection, but the additional seven days stolen by the surprise state inspection was the proverbial straw that broke the metaphorical camel's back. Such are the punishments capitalism maliciously inflicts on those of us it exploited into inescapable poverty.

******

In Case You Missed It: Outside Agitation Elsewhere

Because so much time during these past few weeks has been stolen by inspections, OAN again gets shortchanged; again no real essay, and only five Internet posts during the past seven days:

Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker wrote about the mix of theocratic Christianity and Hard Right populism that enabled a Teabagger to beat House Majority Leader Eric Cantor last week. But “David Brat: Free-Market Purist, Ayn Rand Devotee” said nothing about the campaign's historical precedent, and I responded accordingly:

What we are witnessing in David Brat – and mark my word (because you read it here first) – is the combination of strategy, tactics and rhetoric that will leverage the USian Homeland's final transition to unabashed neo-Nazism.

Doubt me? Read William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (Simon and Schuster: 1959, 1960, 1987, 1988, 1990).

It's by studying Shirer we see what we might aptly dub the "Bratley Method" is precisely how the Nazis sold themselves and their programs to the seemingly ultra-civilized German people as Germany suffered from the devastation inflicted by the Treaty of Versailles and the Great Depression.

***

Yes (Rise and Fall) is long, but it's vividly written, and its well worth the effort. For me it was the perfect sea-cruise book, and I had lots of time to read it – on the troopship returning from Korea, the U.S.N.S. Sultan, which in 1962 made the passage from Inchon to Oakland Army Terminal in about three weeks. For me, that was the blessed passage of return to civilian life after the three-year, Regular-Army active-duty portion of a six-year enlistment. (The remainder was in the reserves, but – luck of the draw or blessing of the Goddess – I was not recalled for Vietnam.) And of course I've reviewed Rise and Fall many times, as it's been part of my library ever since.

******

Alan Pyke exposed another atrocity of USian governance  in “Impoverished Mother Dies in Jail Cell Over Unpaid Fines for Her Kids Missing School.” I noted how it exemplifies capitalism in action:

What this Dickensian tragedy tells us is that in the merciless new world of the former United States – a realm transmogrified into the de facto Fourth Reich – any one of us who is not part of the Ruling Class could suffer the fate of Eileen DeNino

Indeed the death of Eileen DeNino – and the deaths of so many others like her, always from the denial of basic human needs that now under the savagery of Ayn Rand economics have become privileges of wealth – makes me think perhaps the Hans Christian Anderson story of the “Little Match Girl” is replacing the Horatio Alger tales as the epic that properly symbolizes our present and future. (Indeed, recast in a 21st Century setting by cinematographer Filip Matevski's 12-minute film, it becomes just that.)

Apropos which, perhaps (an anti DeNino poster) would say the Match Girl too "refused to help herself" when, as in Matevski's work, the child chose to spend the night in the freezing cold rather than submit to sexual abuse, or – as in the older versions of the story – refused to go home to be beaten by her father.

Meanwhile let us all mourn Eileen DeNino, a mother dead in debtor's prison, another victim of capitalism's New World Order.

******

Trevor Timm of Guardian UK revealed another of the dark and menacing secrets of Obamanoid tyranny in “The US Government Doesn't Want You to Know How the Cops Are Tracking You.” I pointed out an even darker truth:

It is a great irony the wanna-be Nazis of the Confederate-Flag/Swastika-Banner Hard Right – the Christians who claim the U.S. Constitution gives them the right to persecute non-believers; the white racists who believe their god gives them dominion over non-whites; the misogynists who think all women are sluts at heart – were the first to caricature Obama as another Hitler.

Perhaps it was just one of those oddball examples of accidental prophecy from a wildly incongruous source.

More likely it was a case of psychological projection, the mechanism of recognition embodied in a taunt once commonplace on Southern schoolyards: “it takes one to know one.”

However it came about, its terrifying truth becomes more evident every day. Barack Obama is worse than Bush, even worse than Nixon. He is the first genuine tyrant to hold the office of President of the United States, and by his embrace of the modalities of tyranny, he is methodically transforming this nation and its empire into the de facto Fourth Reich.

But the greatest irony of all is how it is his own race – more than any other group of us who, because we are lower-income people, are being scapegoated into equivalents of Nazi Germany's Jews – that is already bearing the brunt of this looming new holocaust in which federalized local police are trained and equipped to function as the new Gestapo.

******

Charles E. Cobb Jr. discussed his forthcoming book, which boldly defies the USian Left's rabid, froth-at-the-mouth hatred of firearms and firearms owners, a cultoid malice so hysterically envenomed, its disciples reflexively damn gun-owning progressives as “Nazis.” Reader Supported News titled Cobb's important essay “Guns Made Civil Rights Possible: Breaking Down the Myth of Nonviolent Change,” but some RSN editor (deliberately?) omitted the actual title of the book, perhaps expressing the very hatefulness I just cited. Thus I had to ferret out the title for myself. It's a long one – too long for any competent editor to accidentally overlook: This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible (Basic Books: 2014). Then my comment-thread response got right to the point:

A similar volume, Lance Hill's The Deacons for Defense (University of North Carolina Press: 2004), was marginalized by the same zero-tolerance codas of political correctness with which the U.S. Left fanatically suppresses all positive references to firearms.

Meanwhile, with the Working Class more in jeopardy than ever, the USian Left's signature effort to impose forcible civilian disarmament – i.e., mandatory pacifism and compulsory victimhood – is surely amongst the greatest ironies of human history.

Contrary to its claims, pacifism cannot succeed without the threat of violence. The British surrendered to Gandhi's pacifism only because it was backed by the potential of armed revolution organized by the Soviet Union. The same is true of Rev. King's nonviolence.

Indeed all the humanitarian gains of the 20th Century – unions, labor rights, civil rights, safety-net programs – were wrested from the capitalists only by the Soviet threat. That's why, now the U.S.S.R. is dead, capitalism is methodically abolishing all those concessions.

But with the USian Left embracing pacifism and thus functioning as the chief spokesperson for the One Percent's effort to disarm the 99 Percent, these bitter truths are now also tabooed.

***

It was the armed Anglo-Saxon and Cymru yeomanry with their deadly longbows – the massed repetitive firepower of which was not equaled until the invention of the machine gun – that eventually brought the invading Norman kings (of England) to heel. Nevertheless it took what amounted to 300 years of intermittent civil war, some of which is immortalized in the epic of Robin Hood.

Though it is another truth suppressed by political correctness, the most important historical difference between Britain and the continental nations originated from Roman forcible disarmament of conquered peoples. Universal throughout the imperial mainland, it was for a number of reasons never successful in the province of Britannia. Hence even before the Anglo-Saxon conquest, the British peasantry was always at least minimally armed, which is why the remnants of what we know today as "democracy" were never totally exterminated there, seeds that began thriving in the so-called Age of Enlightenment.

******

Juan Cole wrote a piece on the criminality of the Iraq War,  but “Blair-Bush & Iraq: It’s Not Just the Quagmire But the Lawbreaking & Deception” ignored what may be the most important aspects of the story:

(1)-That it was the perfect distraction from the questions about 9/11 that were then gathering momentum;

(2)-That, apart from Turkey (which is now hopelessly lapsing back into Islamic theocracy), Iran was the only genuinely secular society Islamic culture has ever produced. Thus its destruction brought about the immediate re-imposition of zero-tolerance theocracy, whether Sunni or Shiite, with all its misogynistic savagery. This is an obvious victory for the One Percenters whose intent is to make capitalism safe by imposing Abrahamic theocracy – Jewish in Israel, Christian or Islamic everywhere else – on the entire world.

I keep hoping maybe next week won't be so grim, but then I remember we're all residents of a dying planet – a world we ourselves are killing. 

LB/15 June 2014

-30-