Why I'm Dropping Out (an Open Letter to the Few Who Care)

A TERRIFYING ASSAULT on my always-fragile finances by an ongoing plague of so-called "billing errors" combined with attempted thievery by alleged "fraudsters" tells me I am again a target of the extra-legal secret-police malevolence for which the United States is increasingly infamous. 

My alleged sin? I suspect it is writing about what should be obvious:  that the only possible reason the One Percenters are not fighting climate change is they are weaponizing it as the plausibly deniable mechanism of their ultimate Final Solution: reshaping the remnants of human society into a global concentration camp with themselves as commandants, guards and executioners.

 

Thus it would appear I am being told to shut the fuck up, lest everything on which I am dependent -- apartment,  telephone service, Internet connection, health insurance, food stamps, even my Social Security retirement pension --  be taken away from me without notice.

(Question: How do you fight a 76-percent overcharge accompanied by an immediate disconnect notice when [A], you've already paid your monthly bill; when [B] you're a 15-year customer who's never been late with a payment; and when [C], Century Link initially  claims to have no record of either the overcharge or the pending disconnection? Answer: You stay on the phone for nearly seven hours, shouting yourself hoarse and repeatedly threatening legal action until CL employees eventually dig deeply enough into their computers to find the "error" and correct it.) 

How did the "error" happen? The employees insist there is no explanation. 

 

Such harassment is never "explainable"; that is often what identifies it as the product of malice rather than ineptitude. In any case the fact this  allegedly inexplicable Century Link "error" was immediately preceded by a  half-dozen bank-thwarted efforts at electronic "fraud" makes it obvious I am (again) under deliberate attack. 

One or two such incidents might be coincidental, but eight -- the count so far (including a new, ongoing attack by Century Link similar to the first) -- is unquestionably enemy action, especially since I am meticulously protective of the relevant passwords and confirmation-of-identity information.

More to the point, the alleged "fraudsters" were able to access new, hitherto-unused replacement accounts, which means they had information only the credit-bureaus and the bankers -- or the secret police -- are able to obtain. And we already know each of the 17 U.S. secret police agencies are dominated top-to-bottom by the ChristoNazis and their fascist allies. 

As in the Beatles' song, "I get by with a little help from my friends." But the friends and comrades whose caring and generosity sometimes sustain my survival have not the resources to save me from the death-sentence horrors that would result were my Social Security account to "inexplicably" vanish from the government's computers -- exactly as my Washington state unemployment compensation  account vanished in December 1982. 

This happened the height of the Reagan Recession -- here in Washington state a genuine depression with actual joblessness approaching 30 percent. The disaster inflicted by the surprise loss of my unemployment stipends thus reduced me to homelessness long before my repeated, increasingly forceful letters-of-appeal generated sufficient political pressure to compel notoriously recalcitrant bureaucrats to reconstruct and restore my disappeared  account.

 

Significantly, inside sources I had developed during my years covering the legislature  (1977-1981), told me the clerk  who vindictively deleted my account was never punished. Supposedly she acted on her own initiative, in Nazi-minded revenge for my anti-Vietnam-War activities 11 years earlier. But the extent to which she was protected tells me she was obeying the orders of some higher authority or at the very least had been assured of such support. 

    

As would be the case again today were my Social Security pension to suddenly vanish, in December 1982 my lover, friends and acquaintances were all too impoverished to provide more than minimal help. The best these folks could do was offer occasional free meals and a few nights on a living-room couch or in a spare bed. My lover, herself a victim of Reagan-inflicted economic woes, ended our relationship by returning to California. 

     

By the time the state got around to paying my unemployment-insurance stipends,  the money was  nine months overdue. My increasingly desperate hunt for work and shelter had meanwhile forced me back to New York City, where my award-winning journalistic skills netted me immediate employment as a writer and  editor and brought me regular freelance work both as a creative director and a photographer. 

But I was compelled to leave behind in Washington state the photography and manuscripts that were already beginning to achieve recognition as my life's most important work. These filled a pair of four-drawer filing cabinets, their contents including a 150,000-word draft of "Glimpses of a Pale Dancer"  and the tens of thousands of photographs I had made since 1952, when my father honored my 12th birthday by giving me my first camera, a truly life-changing gift. Perhaps a thousand of these photos -- my intent was to edit them down to about 50 images -- provided  the visual backbone of "Dancer," which by then had generated 24 years of file-folders bulging with research notes, outlines, clippings and earlier drafts.  Also within the cabinets were notes, photos, maps and site drawings for a book on Washington state archaeological anomalies, and a comparable files for a third book about the people of the Pacific Northwest salmon fishery. 

Because there was no way I could fit even one of these cabinets into my 1976 Honda Civic for the 2,900-mile drive across the country to Manhattan, I stored both cabinets and all the work they contained with an especially dear friend and trusted colleague; I would send for them as soon as I had achieved permanent housing in the City. 

But my friend's house was destroyed by arson on  1 September 1983 -- a blaze ignited at the exact instant I began a meeting with the book editor who believed "Dancer" to be a  cultural turning-point and had therefore promised to mother it to mainstream publication.

The timing -- literally to the minute -- makes it obvious the fire was no coincidence, that it was clearly an assault by the secret police or their Nazi allies. 

  

And my loss -- as I'm  certain was intended -- was ruinous. The destruction of my life's work was the destruction of my life. No matter how determinedly I tried, I was never able to recover either from the fire or from the preliminary blow dealt me by that vengeful clerk in the Bellingham office of the so-called (and laughably named) Washington Department of Employment Security.   

I was never again able to afford a place of my own -- that is, an apartment without room-mates -- until I returned to Washington state in October 1986. Next a stubborn bout of post-fire traumatic depression -- impossible to conceal from future employers after poverty forced me onto welfare and the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services vindictively shunted me onto Social Security Disability -- ended forever my career as a newspaper and magazine staffer. And I would never again have a lover;  my poverty had become too hopeless to hide. 

  

What saved my life was my excellent physical health; I was in my 40s; my back and knee injuries had not been complicated by arthritis, and the onset of congestive heart failure was two decades in my future. I had  the stamina essential for survival when survival itself becomes -- as it has under Neoliberalism -- an act of revolutionary defiance.

Now, at age 79, severely crippled by arthritis and slowly dying of congestive heart failure, there is no possible way I could  successfully combat such a sudden loss of income. The magnitude of my poverty would again, exactly as it did in 1982-83,  prohibit amelioration by  friends or comrades. Again I would be homeless,  isolated, alone -- and this time soon dead.  

So endeth the lesson.  

***

BUT THIS THREAT of fatal retaliation  is only a small part of what pushed me over the proverbial edge into something that at first glance seems uncomfortably close to the scary intellectual death I fear actual retirement is bound to be. 

Consider:

There is no question the One Percenters and their minions have achieved genuine omnipotence in their tyranny over this planet and its inhabitants. They do as they wish. Their technology has given them  abilities hitherto attributed to the gods alone -- including the power to heal the global wounds inflicted by our man-made socioeconomic and environmental emergencies.

Instead our overlords have allowed these crises to merge and expand into an approximation of the Apocalypse traditionally prophesied by the Abrahamic zealots.

Have no doubt; our masters could have ended austerity anytime they chose to do so.

They could also have begun amelioration of what should be called "terminal climate change" when  Soviet scientists -- freed of the anti-environmental fetters imposed by "the secret fundamentalism at the heart of American power" -- began in the 1950s to warn humanity of global warming and its consequences.

These warnings were of course rejected by the United States, the most earth-raping, atmosphere-poisoning, water-polluting empire ever. 

The misogynistic depth of anti-environmental sentiment in "Christian America" -- the magnitude of its metastasis confirmed when the patriarchy's  "one nation under God" gave the Trump/Pence Regime unfettered access to the doomsday button -- cannot be over-estimated. It is perhaps best exemplified by the startling  messages that began appearing on church reader-boards during the early 1970s. Examples include "Organic Is Satanic" and "Environmental Is Of The Devil."  

    

But since the death of the Soviet Union, no people on earth have demonstrated the leadership, organization and discipline necessary to slow the One Percenters' tyrannical momentum, much less to overthrow the ever-more-obvious One Percent agenda, a shock-doctrine of strategy and tactics cunningly camouflaged by political hurly-burly yet clearly based on the deliberate furtherance of ecocidal genocide and genocidal ecocide.  

 

That is why -- though in ever-deepening despair we press our masters ever more frantically to use their infinite power and wealth to at least reduce the death and destruction wrought by their weaponized Apocalypse -- they respond with naught but dithering, obstructionism, disinformation, outright lies and defiant intensification of all the trumped-up persecutions at the heart of their global assault on democratic process.  

Politics is never more than a euphemism for might-makes-right compulsion. But we the people are already so dis-empowered we cannot even compel our overlords to fling us lifejackets in an already raging sea of disaster. 

At best our masters are sneeringly indifferent to our fate; at worst they want us dead. That's why our traditional democratic methods -- disclosure, dissent and non-violent demonstration -- no longer work. 

And so it shall remain so unless some miraculous cataclysm evens the odds by nullifying the unbeatable technologies of oppression that grant the One Percenters their ever-expanding omnipotence. 

 

Beyond that, we desperately need a new strategy and new tactics, all grounded on the elemental wisdom of Sun Tzu. 

Until such measures evolve -- and the unprecedented creative paralysis inflicted by our powerlessness evokes rational fear that might never happen --  why should I who have already suffered the total destruction of my life persist in wasting energy on a doomed struggle that is not only therefore pointless but which -- if I continue (and as  I have obviously now been warned) -- could result in my extra-legal (and therefore irreversible) condemnation to one of the most degrading fates imaginable. 

  

As the Ku Klux Klan learned 56 years ago, the prospect of sudden death does not scare me. That's why, to the sadly limited extent allowed by worsening physical disability, I will continue volunteering for picket lines and helping discourage the increasingly violent ChristoNazis who are waging war on women's health services.

But slowly starving to death huddled abandoned and alone beneath piss-reeking  blankets in some filthy urban doorway -- which is precisely what would happen to me were all my income to be disappeared as it was 36 years ago -- is more repugnant and frightening than I can describe. 

*** 

SOME OF US -- especially those of us adept enough to transcend even the censorship imposed by price and paywall -- are discovering irrefutable evidence our overlords are indeed exploring how to manipulate the serial disasters inflicted by climate change and Neoliberal economics into plausibly deniable campaigns of ecocidal genocide. 

(To read the rest, go here.)