Xmas Greetings: Why December Is 'the Cruelest Month'

T.S. ELIOT WAS wrong. It's December – not April – that's “the cruelest month.” 

But December's cruelty, unlike April's poignant mixture of “memory and desire,” is not of Nature's making. 

December's cruelty is deliberately manufactured by the One Percent. It began as an expression of aristocratic contempt for lower income people – the notion we the poor, if annually surrounded by an ostentatious display of holiday riches, might be forced by our own hunger and envy to try climbing beyond poverty, as if such wretchedness were no more than a bad rung on the same easy ladder our wealthy detractors had been handed by the pampered circumstances of their births and lives. 

The fact a rare few of us were allowed to succeed in an otherwise impossible ascent gave the Ebenezer Scrooges of capitalism all the data they needed to portray chronic impoverishment as a symptom of laziness and moral degeneracy. 

So it was when Charles Dickens sought to ameliorate December's cruelty with A Christmas Carol. 

But now not even a Shakespeare could carol away December's cruelty. The Ruling Class contempt for lower-income people has toxified into loathing. Its hatefulness is focused like a death ray on elderly and/or disabled persons and anyone who is chronically unemployed. 

Why? Because once we're forever jobless and poor, we're no longer exploitable for profit.

 

The ugly December truth is the One Percenters and their Democrat and Republican toadies want us all dead. They regard us as throw-away workers, useless junk, no different from worn-out machines, each of us a drain on their wealth, each of us an affront to their “fiscal responsibility.”

 

Were this Nazi Germany, their all-time perfect state, they'd march us into death camps and be done with us.

 

But death camps are an international embarrassment. (Look what happened to Hitler.)

Worse, death camps reveal the core truths of capitalism: that capitalism is infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue; that capitalism is the forcible, often violent overthrow of every humanitarian principle our species ever articulated; that capitalism is (therefore) our species' closest-yet approximation of Absolute Evil.

So instead of death camps, the always-diabolical One Percent conjured up a new strategy: to murder us by neglect and abandonment, to murder us also by the gut-wrenching terror evoked by the approach of our certain victimhood.

How much money will be taken from us? How much health care will be denied us? How shall we survive? 

Verily, in the talk of a “grand bargain” to destroy the socioeconomic safety net, we see undeniable proof the Democrats and the Republicans are all the same – that Barack Obama and Mitt Romney and Nancy Pelosi and Eric Cantor and Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell are united in a solidarity of unrelenting murderousness, against us, against anyone who is unexploitable for profit.

Their tactics are now obvious. 

First, with all the deliberate malice, methodical viciousness and gleeful sadism they can muster, these politicians and their One Percenter overlords threaten us with termination of the life-sustaining stipends and services provided by Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment compensation, food stamps, any number of other programs that keep us alive when we're old and/or disabled and/or jobless.

The details of their threats sometimes differ – the Republicans want to shut down all social services immediately and use the ensuing riots to excuse far harsher measures; the Democrats want to kill us more gradually – but the long-term intent is identically homicidal.

 

They know (and they rejoice in the fact) their threats alone are deadly: old hearts do not long tolerate the constant fear of murder by starvation and homelessness and denial of medication.

 

Indeed no one dares say how many lives have already been ended by the climate of terror the One Percent and its Democrat and Republican henchmen have imposed on us all.

 

Next – as the One Percent is already doing via the Democrat and Republican parties – they actually terminate those stipends and services.

 

Note, for example, the following press release from the Social Security Administration:

“Effective November 19, 2012, Social Security field offices nationwide will close to the public 30 minutes early each day.  For example, a field office that is usually open to the public Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. will close daily at 3:00 p.m.  In addition, beginning January 2, 2013, offices will close to the public at noon every Wednesday.”

“While agency employees will continue to work their regular hours, this shorter public window will allow them to complete face-to-face interviews and process claims work without incurring the cost of overtime.  The significantly reduced funding provided by Congress under the continuing resolution for the first six months of the fiscal year makes it impossible for the agency to provide the overtime needed to handle service to the public as it has done in the past” (bold face added for emphasis). 

In other words – if you're a Social Security or Supplemental Security Income recipient with a problem that needs an immediate solution – the Democrats and the Republicans have collaborated on behalf their One Percent masters to make damn sure you're left out in the December cold. 

It also means the annual Social Security award letters – the statements that tell us how little we'll be getting next year – are going out later than ever in living memory. Usually we have them by mid-November; rumor has it they won't be mailed until January.

Unless the local welfare bureaucracy decides to be merciful – and “merciful” has never been part of the welfare bureaucrat's job description – that lack of documentation could inflict ruinous costs.

Why? Because documented income and expenses are the basis of supplementary Medicare stipends, the so-called Medicare Extra Help. No documents, no Extra Help: a loss of at least $104 per month. 

 

The same documentation is necessary to get food stamps, a form of aid slashed so severely its desperate recipients are already going hungry. 

Food stamps aren't stamps anymore; they're now on credit-card-like plastic – which reaps the banks a generous profit of course. The former stamps are now called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or, more accurately, Stealing from Needy Americans for Profit. Whichever, it's SNAP – as in “SNAP: there's that much more money in some damn One Percenter's pocket.”

Because no documentation means no disbursements, many states will leap to take advantage of the “savings.”

In those states, it's a huge windfall for money-hungry welfare bureaucrats – the same kind and caring people who, from 1970 through 1990, feathered their nests with a 5,390 percent administrative-cost increase – this while slashing stipends and services to the poor by 66 percent.

(No, that 5,390 percent is not a typo; nor is the 66 percent. They're real numbers derived from real data in the real bible of USian financial reality, The Statistical Abstract of the United States.)

And it's in December all this bad news comes together for those of us who are old and/or disabled and/or too long out of work.

It's in December we realize there will never again be any good news ever.

It's in December we find out just how meager our next year's stipends will be and just how savagely they will be slashed and just how much worse our circumstances will be as a result.

It's in December we're forced to ask ourselves whether the shrunken remnants of our lives are still worth living.

Mostly it's in December we learn how the ever-cunning One Percenters will target us with the newest tactics in their no-need-for-death-camps strategy of genocide.

Merry Christmas from Jesus, the one true god of capitalism, his anointed aristocrats and their Democrat and Republican minions united as executioners acting out his infinitely vicious Parable of the Talents: “throw out the unprofitable into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

Goddess save us, every one.

LB/1 December 2012

-30-

How Hate-Mongering Wrecked an Urban Transit System

VOTER REJECTION OF a tiny tax increase that would have saved a local transit system in the second most populous county of Washington state exemplifies the grassroots venom that fuels the One Percent's campaign to destroy government services. And the bitterly contested election's dreadful aftermath provides a vivid portrait of the life-disrupting, potentially deadly consequences inflicted on the victims whenever the One Percenters win.

 

Fostered by a disturbingly Karl Rovish “transit is welfare” meme that mysteriously surfaced here in 2010, the defeat of Proposition 1 on the November 2012 ballot will downsize local bus service almost to nothing in Tacoma and surrounding Pierce County. It will impose a 53 percent cutback atop two other devastating contractions: the 35 percent reduction mandated by anti-transit voters last year and the previous eight percent decrease forced by declining tax revenues in 2010.

Even now, with its reduced-frequency buses uncomfortably overcrowded even by New York City standards, Pierce Transit carries an average of 35,737 boardings every weekday. But the pending cuts will strand tens of thousands of these passengers, denying them transportation to jobs, schools, medical appointments and other life-sustaining essentials.

Kate Whiting, who headed the Restore Transit Now campaign, says the loss is already inflicting the terrible anxiety of “an uncertain future” on anyone who lacks other transport options. Local social-service officials expect far more devastating consequences. They predict the termination of access to vital services will eventually be death-dealing, especially for elderly and disabled people.

In response, the gloating victors are “applauding, exalting, congratulating, cheering, celebrating and dancing,” ostensibly because they “beat back a tax increase funded by $125,000 of union money.”  But many of the remarks posted on related Internet threads suggest the real motive for the anti-transit vote is hatred and contempt for transit users and lower-income people in general.

The defeated measure would have added a mere three tenths of one percent – three pennies on a $10 purchase – to local retail sales taxes. Like all government agencies in anti-income-tax Washington state, Pierce Transit is funded mostly by these ad valorem taxes; the proposed increase would have compensated for the ongoing revenue loss inflicted by the economic collapse and the resultant decline in retail sales. Had Proposition 1 been approved, its minuscule tax increase would have restored bus and shuttle operations to the (barely adequate) levels that obtained prior to 2008.

Rejection of an identical tax proposal in February 2011 eliminated 11 bus routes, cut schedules on most other routes to one bus per hour and sharply curtailed PT's operations-day by ending most service at 9 p.m. Now, thanks to this year's anti-transit vote, all weekend buses and evening bus service after 7 p.m. will be terminated, probably in February 2013. Innumerable Saturday, Sunday and night-shift workers throughout the 292-square-mile PT service area will have no way to get to and from their jobs. Shuttle operations – the sole means of transport for 6,948 elderly and/or disabled people – will be abolished at the same time. Most likely – given the permanent end of the American Dream economy and the burgeoning anti-transit-rider venom in the suburbs – the shut-downs will be forever. 

Just as a PT commissioner warned before the election,  the radically reduced service – downsized by a total of 97 percent since 2009 – will impose an additional revenue loss so staggering it will almost certainly kill the entire system. The PT district population of 556,908 persons, 200,678 of whom live within the seaport city of Tacoma, would then be left without any local public transport.

Pierce County with its total population of 807,904 could thus become the largest metropolis in the industrial world without mass transit – probably the only such locale in history to have spawned an anti-transit-user movement so vengeful its contempt and hatred of lower-income people destroyed its entire transit system. The ensuing crisis and its resultant odium is sure to cripple the already wounded local economy.

The longer-term outcome – especially ironic given the anti-transit stance of the Tacoma-Pierce County Chamber of Commerce – is permanent entrapment of the local economy in the same sort of chronic depression that plagued the post-Civil-War, pre-Tennessee-Valley-Authority South. As RTN's Whiting noted, “a reliable public transportation system is a necessity for sustained economic development.” 

Though Proposition 1 passed by a 55 percent majority in Tacoma, it was rejected by 56 percent in the suburbs. The overall anti-transit majority was only 695 votes, but an additional 15,400 under votes – ballots cast by people too disdainful of transit and transit users to mark a preference – indicate the real anti-transit majority is much larger. This approaches an impossible-to-overcome 57 percent in the suburbs, which contain nearly two-thirds of the PT service district's population. The same mode of reckoning – adding Tacoma's under-votes to its “No” votes – reduces Tacoma's pro-transit majority to a barely dependable 53 percent.

In any case the damage is done. The Republicans have focused socioeconomic, racial and ethnic hatred into an anti-transit-user movement, and the anti-transit-user movement has prevailed, mobilizing its Ayn Rand malice into “a vote against human decency.” 

Transit advocates regard this “hate vote” as a new form of gentrification, its vindictive denial of public transport a not-so-subtle eviction notice to all transit-dependent people in the area. With about half Tacoma's total population officially classified as “lower income” – individuals earning no more than $2,793 per month, families of four earning no more than $5,763 per month – the city's poorer neighborhoods provide most of PT's total ridership. Forty-five percent of these riders, PT spokespersons say, have no working vehicle; 56 percent come from households with incomes less than $1,667 per month.

Never mind these figures and the devastation an anti-transit vote would inflict were repeatedly stressed by pre-election news coverage; in the hate-fueled political climate of the present-day United States, appeals to humanitarianism often backfire. Comments on the web site of The News Tribune, the local McClatchy daily, reveal the intensity of the anti-transit-user malice.

Each entry is printed here exactly as it appeared, misspellings, grammatical errors and all:

“You really believe that other people are responsible for supporting you and providing cheap transportation because you are too lazy to work for a living,” wrote gerry0416 in response to a transit supporter. 

“The transit system should be self supporting,” posted Mary Bishop Kellog. “Don't ask me to pay your bus fare.”

“Call a Cab,” said tommy98466. “This should be a private venture not a taxpayer funded operation.” 

“If living in Tacoma becomes life or death to pay there own way on the buss they can just pack up and move out,” wrote TerryTman.

Rage at municipal unions and spiteful envy of the pay and benefits for which union members have successfully struggled was also a big factor:

“Why is it Pierce Transit has to be fed by taxpayers? Let private sector take over it and I am sure it'll be cheaper and more effective service. Of course union will not allow it, because they are like leaches will not survive without supply,” said  Alisa Simson.

“Many of those who vote no,” said crusader, “are expressing their desire to end the quid pro quo that is politicians providing unsustainable compensation to public sector union who in turn donate and vote to perpetuate the cycle.” 

“Agreed 100% on starving the beast,” wrote taxedenoughintacoma. “I live it everyday. If everyone else did we would cripple the unions overnight. We MUST stop enabling the ponzi scheme that is the public sector unions and their bought and paid for political party, the democrats.” Elsewhere in the same thread taxedenough denounced unionism as “thuggery.”

With bus riders and Amalgamated Transit Union members so obviously despised by the suburban majority and the bus system itself therefore almost certainly doomed, it's legitimate to ask how such an atrocity could occur in a state so apparently “blue” – that is, reliably Democratic in its presidential, senatorial, gubernatorial and social-issues votes.

The short answer is Washington's electorate is bitterly divided between forward-looking, secular-minded urbanites and avowedly conservative, often fanatically Christian rural and suburban residents. By about 55 percent, the urbanites are the majority population, and their viewpoint is reflected accordingly in the state's notably “blue” politics.

Moreover the cities typically govern themselves with self-protective policies that sustain progressive values and relative enlightenment in environmental affairs, often extending these attitudes into the adjacent suburbs. 

But in Tacoma this tolerant and generous application of the basic principle of democratic governance – enabling people to do collectively what they cannot accomplish individually – has uniquely resulted in cataclysmic and probably irreversible failure. Tacoma's attempt to extend urban amenities beyond its city limits – the expansion of Tacoma Transit into Pierce Transit via Urban Mass Transit Administration grants in the late 1970s – has given the vindictively reactionary Pierce County suburbs the political power to literally destroy the city.

Because the suburbanites' notion of “the city” symbolizes everything they despise – socioeconomic, racial and gender equality; the paycheck democracy inherent in unions; racial and cultural diversity; sexual and reproductive freedom; every other aspect of progressive thinking – they are now mercilessly employing the deadliest weapon in their arsenal: killing mass transit and thereby killing the city itself.

Additional results from the November 2012 election reveal the true magnitude of the forces arrayed against Tacoma. Though President Obama won re-election statewide by 54 percentage points, the losing Republican presidential ticket won parts of suburban Pierce County by as much as a 70-30 margin. Republican Gubernatorial Candidate Rob McKenna, who lost statewide to Democrat Jay Inslee, carried the same general area by at least a 60-40 margin. Referendum 74, the marriage equality measure that passed statewide by a 55-47, was emphatically rejected by the county's suburbanites, again by as much as 30 percent. 

PT's probably-terminal defeat is also very much in keeping with the region's long ugly history of opposition to public transport, a modern trend that began in Seattle with the defeat of a regional transit proposal in 1968. That measure, labeled Forward Thrust, was denounced as a threat to “the Pacific Northwest lifestyle” and condemned as “Manhattanization.” A whisper campaign by bigots went even further, denouncing Forward Thrust as an effort to make the city another “Jew York.” Xenophobia and bigotry thus quickly trumped Seattle's self-proclaimed environmentalism, reducing it to scarcely more than a blatantly hypocritical lie. (This anti-transit background is further detailed in the “Editor's Pick” response I wrote last April to a transit report in Crosscut, the Seattle online daily, for which scroll down.) 

Though Seattle's hostility to mass transit has in recent years been partially neutralized by an influx of high-tech “outlanders” – the pejorative by which locally born Seattleites eternally damn anyone from elsewhere – the city's transit system is immeasurably behind that of its northern neighbor Vancouver B.C. and is at least 40 years behind that of its southern neighbor Portland, Oregon – gaps that post-American-Dream budget constraints have made permanently unbridgeable. Now the anti-transit pattern established by Seattle prevails throughout the region, with the rejection of at least 11 regional transit proposals since 1968.

In Pierce County the anti-transit forces parlayed all these factors into what is undoubtedly their most destructive victory yet. The “transit is welfare” meme afixed to public transport the same implications of race and socioeconomic status that made “crime” and “welfare” racist buzzwords during the final decades of the 20th Century. No matter PT's proposed tax hike was so small even a pauper could have afforded it, the Josef Goebbels psycholinguistic manipulation at which the Republicans have excelled at least since the Nixon years quickly turned a “Yes” vote into another form of the affirmative action the White Right regards as abject surrender to minorities they most despise.

That's why the anti-transit propaganda characterized the tax increase as doomsday made real: “Up to 10.1% Sales Tax? It's Too Much! Reject Prop 1.” The 2011 anti-transit slogan was similarly euphemistic: “Stop Wasting Tax Funds...It's Time To Take A Stand In Pierce County.” Curiously, the page on the party's website featuring the grossly misleading “10.1 sales tax” claim has since vanished, but the propaganda from last year remains: “Pierce Transit and the unions they support are waging a war against your wallet in what may be the most audacious tax grab of 2011.”

As pro-transit poster Zaqar notes on a long TNT thread already linked above,  “A racist subtext certainly underlies Pierce County opposition to the tax and many of the comments on this article – unless you think everybody has somehow failed to notice that the majority of people earning less than 20K per year, that is, the majority of people riding the bus, are not white.”

Dg54321's retort is a classic:  “And who's fault is that?  With affirmative action, there is no reason people of color cannot make as much money if not more than white people.  Enough of the "whitey is keeping me down" BS, cause it just doesn't fly in the year 2012.  A black man is in the Oval Office for crying out loud....what more do you people want?”

Remarks on 2011 threads were even more blatantly racist. “It's dangerous (to ride the bus),” said taxedenoughintacoma. “I don't ride uless (sic) I have my carry weapon. Go ride the bus and night and look at some of the people. You won't ride again. Too scary if you ask me.” 

“You want me to vote for the Transit,” asked WarmNfuzziOne, “when this is the primary means juvenile petty thieves and thugs become enabled with transportation to spread their behaviors beyond the hood? Ever wonder how much safer the Lakewood Town Center and Tacoma Mall would be without the Transit?”

Another racist comment has since been deleted from the same thread: “If this thing (is defeated), it will probably be comfortable to go to South Hill Mall once again. The last time I was there the place was chock-a-block full of hood-rat gangsta' wanna' be punkasses with more being delivered every ten minutes by Pierce Transit. The Mall employees told me they are an unmitigated negative, never spending a dime and spending their afternoon harassing the few customers they had not succeeded in running off.”

But is Pierce County's anti-transit-user movement – and a movement it surely is – a harbinger of things to come elsewhere in the suburban United States? Or is it merely another dying spasm of the Republican/Teabagger racial bigotry and socioeconomic hatred that swept the nation ​in response to the 2008 election of President Barack Obama?

That too is a legitimate question, particularly given the long-ago testimony by Watergate Felon John Ehrlichman, one of Disgraced President Richard Nixon's top henchmen, that Washington state is a favorite proving ground for the One Percent's techniques of oppression. Its relevance is underscored by the mystery of how the “transit is welfare” meme that was PT's downfall appeared seemingly from nowhere, its Carl Rove/Grover Norquist malignancy suggesting manipulative cunning far beyond the usual “Nuke Tehran/Kill Fags/Get a Job” utterances of the local reactionaries.

The best guess of the more savvy transit advocates is it was introduced by national Republican operatives, the political equivalent of a marketing test. If this is true – if the ruin inflicted by the Pierce County anti-transit-user movement is the first battle in a nationwide Republican war on mass transit – it bodes ill for the users of every U.S. public transport system outside the Boston-New York City-Washington D.C. Corridor, the only region in the entire nation where public transport is considered a civil right.

Given these givens, is there any possibility of saving the Tacoma portion of the bus service?
 

Tacoma Mayor Marilyn Strickland, who also chairs the PT Board of Commissioners, is noncommittal. Briefly interviewed after a 20 November city council meeting, she reluctantly acknowledged Tacoma's newly created Public Transportation Benefit District could indeed provide the legal framework for creation of a Tacoma-only bus system. But the PTBD, she said, was established for emergency repairs of streets and sidewalks. It has only a $3.5 million budget, she added, with no plans to expand into the realm of mass transit.

ATU Local 758 President Don McKnight said he doesn't know whether or how Tacoma's bus service might be preserved. “At this point,” he said, “it's been made clear that everything is on the table.”

Another unknown is how the end of PT bus service will affect the commuter trains and express buses provided by Sound Transit, the Seattle-based regional transit authority that serves a three-county area from Tacoma north through Seattle to Everett, another Puget Sound seaport city. ST, which autocentric suburbanites bitterly criticize for its refusal to squander money building giant parking lots, depends heavily on local buses to ferry passengers to and from its railroad stations and bus terminals.

Transit advocates thus rationally fear the loss of local bus service will prompt ST to discontinue the trains and express buses that serve Tacoma and its immediate environs. Given the strength of anti-transit sentiment in the Pierce County suburbs, they say it's possible ST will even shut down the popular trolley it operates in downtown Tacoma, part of a light rail system that was to be expanded within Tacoma and eventually extended to link the city with SeaTac International Airport and Seattle itself.

But Pierce County suburbanites killed those projects too, voting against regional transit proposals in 2007 and 2008. Hence the probability is the proposed ST expansions will never be built. Indeed the trolley itself may be shut down. 

Meanwhile, the victims of the Pierce Transit cutbacks – students, low-wage workers, PT employees whose jobs will be lost, anyone who is elderly or disabled – now live in post-election dread.

“It is already difficult to get to use this system,” wrote MFM008 on another TNT  thread about the looming shutdown.  “I am disabled and without this some people could die. How do kidney dialysis patients get to appointments 3 times a week?  This isnt just to get to jobs or shopping. I cant drive because of my eyes, my moms are worse- she uses pierce transit. What do you do when this is all you have? suggestions? Die?”

Said Tomwa007 in a typically heartless response: “You better move to downtown Tacoma with service if you can not afford private transport. That is how it works, get used to it.”

LB/24 November 2012

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Warren, Norma Miedema and the Return of the Goddess

ENOUGH PARTISAN POLITICS for a while. Even after the energizing victory of Elizabeth Warren in Massachusetts, I still doubt there is anyone in this nation – or for that matter anywhere on this tragically afflicted planet – who has the power and will to get us off the slide to extinction on which capitalism has launched us by its insatiable greed.

But if there is such a person, and if she is to save us from ourselves, surely her attributes will include not only the socioeconomic and political bravery of Warren but the death-defying courage and Gaian passion that makes Norma Miedema both a modern heroine and the back-to-the-future embodiment of a female consciousness seemingly absent from our species since the age of Celtic myth. It is not far-fetched to suggest Warren and Miedema represent parallel and entirely congruent aspects of a single impulse toward human survival. 

Warren of course is already becoming known throughout the world as a symbol of an electorate's awakening from political torpor. Miedema, who organized and led a  presumably impossible, deadly dangerous and therefore epic horse rescue in Holland, is scarcely known beyond her native land. As to the specifics of what Miedema did and why it is so psychologically and metaphysically important, I suppose these details too could be labeled political, albeit only in the broadest and yet most deeply personal sense of our win-or-become-extinct struggle against capitalism and patriarchy in general. I say this despite the fact most of the information I have about Miedema reached me only late Friday, and much of that was by inference alone – the ability of video-taped imagery to transcend the barriers of language – the entire package handed me by one of those Muse-haunted coincidences Carl Jung labeled synchronicity. Saturday I was still in joyous shock at the absolute correctness of the journalistic intuition that prompted my research and so moved by my discoveries I could not find words to write what I had learned. 

Hence it seemed there was naught to do but strap the ever-more-essential brace on my right knee and go for a long walk. The Internet said the outside temperature was 41 degrees Fahrenheit but it felt colder, maybe in the late 30s. The sun was setting a sickly storm-warning yellow behind the ramparts of the hospitals on the hill above the seasonally emptied expanse of Wright Park. Those who pay attention would have seen a graybeard geezer wearing a black beret and a faded olive canvas coat open to the wind and beneath the coat a bright red-and-yellow plaid wool neck scarf and under that a shirt of dark red coarse heavy wool girthed at the waist by a black belt-purse, all this above baggy black flannel workout pants with elastic cuffs tight over hiking boots: today's variant on my normal winter apparel. To others less attentive – and during the entire 45 minutes afoot I encountered only six humans total (two runners and four dog-walkers) – I was just a bespectacled vaguely foreign-looking old man hobbling with his hickory cane along formal tree-lined paths that had vanished beneath great drifts of brown and yellow leaves, maple and chestnut and birch and poplar, oak and ash too but without the bitter thorn that completes the trio of calendar trees by which one might curse an enemy, as Jack Orion, the Celtic Star Lord, had fatally cursed the interloping plagiarist who dared try usurp the bed he shared with the Goddess.

Now the pale sun was hospitalized and gone; now it was dusk, the lingering blue-shifted twilight of the Pacific Northwest, and I could not but see in Nature's temporary imposition of autumnal anarchy another harbinger of the apocalypse we now fear to be inevitable: this is how the park will look in the first fall of its abandonment, a mile of bare-branched silence, its summer children banished and surely dead and all our music lost forever. It was a terrible realization, lump-in-the-throat painful. 

Instinctively then I sought the ancient reassurance denied us by the we're-damned-forever sadism of the religions that still vainly seek to rule us, the Abrahamic cults of Christianity and Judaism and Islam and all the imperialistic science so derived, and I committed precisely the sort of reflexive heresy that surely would have gotten me arrested were the Christian fanatics yet as theocratically empowered as they were in the 1600s when one of my female ancestors was persecuted as a witch in Connecticut. I ungloved my right hand, reached out and touched the giant sequoia that soars near the middle of the park, then a few hundred yards later caressed the first of the smooth-trunked beeches that border its southern end. As I did so I realized I was mentally reciting, seemingly by instinct, the opening stanza from Robert Graves' reconstruction of “Cad Goddeu” or “The Battle of the Trees,” a mysterious and perplexing work by the ancient British poet Taliesin: 

The tops of the beech-tree have sprouted of late
Are changed and renewed from their withered state...

 

Graves believed the verses to be a poetically charged description of a historical event, but to me, the first lines have always had an aura of prophecy as well. The beech in European mythology is a tree of life, of restoration and regeneration. It is therefore a symbol of the Great Goddess – which makes it arguable Taliesin was prophesying her resurrection. So were the Ghost Dancers, 1500 years later and a continent away: 

The white man's god has forsaken him
Let us go and look for our Mother
We shall live again!

 

And poignantly forlorn as the park was in its dwindling light with the dark exclamation points of its few tall conifers and the fading mid-November ghosts of  October's bright deciduous color, the power I sensed beneath my fingers in that living wood, even in its dormancy, was so compelling it left me whispering fervent thanks to a deity who at the very least (and even if she has no objective existence) is the consummate symbol of our environmental salvation and whom I'm sometimes certain is real as life itself but nevertheless, more often than not, agnostically deny. 

All of which, as we shall soon see, has everything to do with Norma Miedema. 

*****

On the rare occasions I manage to suppress my cynicism enough to believe in the Goddess as I did for those moments during my walk in the park, to imagine her as objective reality and not just an essential symbol, I am invariably smitten, sometimes to tears, by joyful gratitude for the good fortune granted me by the women who inspired and clarified my words and pictures and blest me with sweet love and patient friendship sufficient to ease the wounds inflicted by a murder-minded mother. The essay entitled “Dancer Resurrected” expresses this gratefulness in detail, though it is entirely too long and desperately needful of a competent editor. In this context the historical events it references – the 1965 Blackout and the 1967 Easter Be-In – are prerequisites to the personal confirmation described in its penultimate section. The episodes related separately in “Abutments”  and “Doorways,” each of which remains personally compelling in its own right, are themselves assertions of faith and thankfulness. 

But always there is the relentless thrust of the counter-reasoning I describe in “Outlanders,” a memoir-chapter I wrote two years ago but have yet to publish because I am torn between the (seemingly impossible) task of writing plausible fiction sufficiently adept to hide the identities of the three women who are responsible for the most metaphysically pivotal, profoundly revealing, undeniably magical and yes shamelessly sensual weekend of my life. The alternative is to include essential details that would make their names unmistakable even behind the cover of aliases. Though one of the three has read the work and says “Do it; use my name. I'd love to see it in print,” she is a professional musician who yet smiles on cutting-edge outrageousness while the other two are seemingly beyond contact range and, I suspect, have in their elder years become far more private persons. All of which is irrelevant here; the relevant part of “Outlanders” is not subject to writerly angst, probably because it flatly contradicts the very evidence the rest of the chapter dares reveal: 

A big part of me rejects as patently absurd not just the idea of reincarnation but any other conception of life-after-death: at best a terrified byproduct of belief in the divine (itself the adult variant of the Santa Claus myth), at worst clinical dementia. By the same logic I likewise dismiss religious visions, past-life memories, ghosts and all the rest of the allegedly supportive evidence of a deity or a “hereafter” as genuine insanity – even when the phenomena in question is my own personal experience. In this frame of mind I regard all such episodes as but preliminary symptoms of the terminal madness that accompanies the unbearable moment-of-death realization that for each of us our death is truly the end of everything forever, the recognition of which destroys the human mind in the same way rot more gradually obliterates the body, the mind mercifully disintegrating into a chaos of hallucination much as the body deteriorates into an entropy of maggots; that death is not just the demise of one's physical body but the termination of one's consciousness and therefore a microcosm of apocalypse – the end of the world, indeed not just the end of all being but the end of all potential; that death proves the unspeakable meaninglessness of selfhood; that the nonsensical nature of life in general is thus established beyond dispute by the final destination of the passage from the Big Bang of conception through its siren-song aftermath of expanding possibilities that all lead nowhere save to ultimate betrayal, the hitherto-denied but now inescapable darkness of the Black Hole; infinite silence, an ultimate deafness never again to be relieved by the exquisiteness of music; every vestige of our own personal reality consigned to a grave thus the graveyard of reality itself – all such assertions condensed in one question that like everything else at the instant of death-as-oblivion is reduced to irrelevance. If such is death – and this mode of thinking allows me no alternative – then life is but a non sequitur, the dread knowledge with which irony-minded U.S. soldiers in Vietnam so often comforted their dying comrades: “it ain't nothing, bro; let it go; it ain't nothin.” 

 

And now, as if some presumably imaginary being had become so vexed at agnosticism and disbelief she materialized in emphatic rebuttal, there is that videotape I first saw on the Internet in 2006, Norma Miedema and six equestrian sisters rescuing a terrified and fractious herd of at least 100 horses marooned by a fatal storm – a rescue men with machines had thrice attempted and thrice failed. 

As is promised (or perhaps threatened) by a very old ballad: 

Cunning and art he did not lack
But aye her whistle it will fetch him back.

*****

True to form, by the time I got home from my walk, my cynicism had resumed its snarling negativity, but the video was there waiting. The previous night while watching a poorly subtitled cable-TV movie about Asian horse-herders, I had suddenly remembered the rescue I had viewed in 2006 and the atavistic echoes it evoked, and I spent whatever time it took to find it on the Internet and several more hours researching the event itself. It is an episode so powerful it suggests not just the reality or at least the psychological validity of the concept of a goddess but provides us a vivid and not-at-all-mystical portrait of Epona or a woman who is surely her priestess whether consciously or not.

For those unfamiliar with mythology, Epona is one of the innumerable representations of the Cosmic Mother – the womb that gives birth to all that ever was and ever will be – in this instance portrayed as the Bountiful Mare or a woman and mare together, the Goddess as she was (quite rationally) pictured by the ancient People of the Steppe, the Scythians and their genetically confirmed descendants the Celts. 

Such metaphysical constructs are always more instinctively familiar and comforting to me than those of the Abrahamic cults, and they have been so for as long as I can remember, which is probably no coincidence since DNA analysis has proven the equestrian tribes of Eastern Europe and Western Asia to have been amongst my earliest and most genetically dominant ancestors. Though my family name is English, probably originally German, far enough back maybe Jewish, my genetic heritage is almost pure Celt. Perhaps that's why the video in question invariably evokes delicious chills and affirmative gooseflesh and tears of recognition: Epona again, scarcely changed from when she was immortalized on England's White Horse Hill, some molecular part of me wordlessly remembering the age and truth so gracefully symbolized and – yes – mourning its loss and yearning for its restoration. 

The resurrection of the Goddess, which remains our species' most important yet most unreported story, was begun by (mostly male) scholars more than a century ago. But it's present-day impetus comes from a uniquely potent, utterly spontaneous combination of increasingly female artistic vision and breakthrough science. The former – precisely as Graves himself recognized – is always the realm of the Muse. The latter, though patriarchal in hierarchy and method, nevertheless shattered the patriarchy's biological and conceptual cornerstones, first by inventing the birth-control pill, which restored to women the control of their bodies men stole from them thousands of years ago, secondly by restating via the Gaia Hypothes the core principle of our species' first and oldest religion: that the Earth (and by extension the entire universe) is our Mother – alive, conscious and self-regulating. In this context, the misogynistic hatred and terror that motivates today's theocrats and their wars against women and nature are entirely predictable reactions. 

If Edward Whitmont (The Return of the Goddess, Crossroads:1982) is right about the re-emergence of Goddess-archetypes as survival mechanisms – and I cannot doubt his findings – it is to be expected that in this era of backlash and terminal climate change and the death and despair so inflicted, we would meet again an archetype approximating Epona, who let us not forget is also a warrior-goddess. Which I believe explains why – six years after her dramatic leadership of that epic horse rescue – the coverage the Dutch press is giving Norma Miedema suggests she is finally becoming one of our modern heroines, a role-model of the sort we have not seen in many lifetimes, as if she rode in from the plains of Scythia or materialized from the pages of Herodotus' Histories or Tacitus' Agricola.

Now that you've seen Norma Miedema's portrait, here is the video of what she organized and led. It's unfortunate the accompanying music is so distractingly modern; Faun's “OynengYar,” which I first heard only yesterday but seem to remember from forever, would be an infinitely better anthem. Too bad I have neither the Nurdish knowledge or skill to make it so: its “Dance My Love” is an invocation  not only of the Steppe but in the Kazakh tongue and almost certainly of pre-patriarchal traditions as well. But at least this Dutch version of the video is infinitely better and more detailed than the variant that first appeared in the United States six years ago, monitored as it is today by a maliciously Christian censor who – as I can personally attest – blocks any attempted reference to the pagan echoes the imagery so undeniably evokes. Note too this USian version is accompanied by an intrusively masculine and therefore obnoxiously inappropriate Vangelis piece, “Conquest of Paradise,” which some nyekulturniy malcontent has dubbed onto the tape no doubt in an attempt to assuage his threatened masculinity, his own small contribution to the war against women and nature. 
 

In resistance we have the brave precedent set by Elizabeth Warren, who alas may yet be betrayed by the opportunistic cowards and moral imbeciles with whom she must of political necessity interact. But in our time of need we are also given that which is beyond betrayal, the courage and sensitivity and wisdom shown us by Norma Miedema and the blessed memories of bonfires and moonlight sung us by Faun and in their symbiosis the quickening splendor of our species' oldest wellspring of mindfulness.

Let the roses and rosebuds bloom
Dance my love, dance my love.

LB/10-12 November 2012

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Election 2012: Local Hatefulness Kills State, National Joy

THOUGH THERE WAS was much to celebrate in the results of the 6 November balloting – especially the senatorial triumph of a woman who genuinely terrifies the One Percent – it was nevertheless the worst election night of my life: dread and circuses, with dread winning by a landslide. 

That's because the voters of this Ayn Rand backwater to which I was long ago exiled by the gentrification of Manhattan are again using their ballots to sneer “Fuck You” at anyone who's dependent on public transport.

Not that I am surprised. Those of us who are transit riders, pedestrians and bicyclists have long been openly despised by a substantial majority of the wealthier suburbanites here, and now possibly we are being targeted by a majority even within the city limits of Tacoma.

It would not be incorrect to label this bigotry a movement – the Anti-Transit-User-Movement. Its well-financed hatefulness has coalesced into cultoid deification of automobiles and pickup trucks as ultimate symbols of “Americanism” and “the Pacific Northwest Lifestyle”: it is literally a car cult, as unique to the Puget Sound region as the cargo cults were to remote South Pacific islands.

Its disciples fume against bicycles, trains and buses as proofs of conspiracy against their imaginary “right to drive” – in ugly reality their self-obsessed, morally imbecilic compulsion to isolate themselves in mechanized armor and mercilessly bully anyone who is not similarly equipped. 

The car cultists are road rage personified. They demonstrate their autocentric hatred by refusing to slow their vehicles for bicyclists or yield the right-of-way to obviously disabled people in crosswalks; they spew invective – “get a job, you lazy bum” – at those of us waiting at bus stops; most of all they flock to the polls at every opportunity to vote against transit and thereby continue their relentless assault against transit-users. 

And yes it is that personal – as personal as a fist in the face. The insurmountable hardships these anti-bus-rider voters will gleefully inflict on me if they're successful – the lethal misery they will happily impose on anyone whose circumstances are similar to my own – robbed the election of all the joy it would otherwise have evoked. 

Make no mistake: I applaud the victory of President Barack Obama, which – or so I desperately hope – has slowed the Ruling Class effort to impose a new form of Nazism on the United States. I am delighted the voters of Washington have apparently elected Jay Inslee governor – and have thereby beaten back the One Percent's attempt to turn this state into another Wisconsin. 

I am pleased these same voters have endorsed marriage equality and legalized possession of marijuana, the latter a defiant protest against the federal government's sadistically punitive, implicitly racist War on Drug Users. 

Above all else I cheer the election of Elizabeth Warren, the new senator from Massachusetts whose victory pledge – “I won't just be your senator, I'll be your champion” – promises a potentially revolutionary revitalization of the entire Democratic Party. (Perhaps that explains why slightly more than half her speech, including the pledge itself, is now being suppressed by the corporate news monopolies.) 

Warren's apparent fragility paradoxically emphasizes her indomitable strength, a purely female manifestation of the emotionally compelling leadership traits that prompt soldiers to follow a commander through a harrowing of hell. Her proven courage and brilliance combine with her unapologetic womanliness to demonstrate a kind of magnetism and power that has remained relatively unknown in the adamantly patriarchal United States. But in truth it is ageless – witness the examples of Maeve in Celtic mythology and Boudicca in classical history. 

Not only do I cheer the senator-elect. Verily, I salute her as well. 

Indeed there is a quality of trustworthiness about Warren the like of which I have not sensed in a politician since the halcyon days of John Fitzgerald Kennedy and his brother Robert. That's why I believe she could become not just the new voice of a Democratic renaissance but the leader and conscience of an all-woman congressional insurgency that might actually free the party from its Wall Street captivity and restore the principles of the New Deal.

Admittedly that may be no more than the oft-disappointed yearning of a man who even in old age has never quite abandoned his conviction the Women's Movement would at last force this nation to be true to its stated principles of liberty and justice for all, much as my late father believed of the African-American Civil Rights Movement. 

Though it may be a lot more than that. Ultimately it feels like another reliable prompting of journalistic intuition – the first real, instinctive, from-the-bottom-of-my-heart political hopefulness I have felt in years. 

But on election night Warren's bright and blessed promise was ultimately meaningless – a phenomenon far away on the homeland coast from which I was long ago economically banished. 

Here in real-time Tacoma the Anti-Transit-User Movement was proving the town and its surrounding Pierce County to be perfect examples of Moron Nation – my name for the USian worst, the most pridefully ignorant, venomously conformist, vindictively anti-intellectual, maliciously bigoted citizenry in the industrial world.

It was a realization all the more painful because I used to love Tacoma. There was a time, 34 years ago, when Tacoma was genuinely more cosmopolitan than Seattle, particularly in the welcome its people extended to “outlanders” like myself. But now the probable outcome of the transit fight was legitimately resurrecting the question once asked by a brazenly snooty Seattle tee shirt: “If God is on our side, why is there a Tacoma?” 

Tacoma's vote is part of the Pierce County vote, and Pierce Countians were not only voting 51-49 to destroy the local transit system they had already ravaged at the polls in March 2011. Now in 2012 with Inslee headed for apparent victory, Pierce County was voting 52-48 for Rob McKenna, the homophobic, anti-health-reform, anti-Medicaid Republican attorney general who real Democrats feared was scheming to be another Scott Walker. And now, though marriage equality had won statewide, the locals were voting against it, 53-74 to withhold full citizenship from gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people. 

Because of Washington's absolutely reliable but painfully slow method of counting votes, the tabulations will continue for nearly another week.

If McKenna wins, Pierce County's closet-fascist voters can congratulate themselves. They will have made the difference between Washington remaining an officially progressive state or threatening – via gubernatorial powers of decree and paralysis-by-veto – to become another anti-labor, anti-woman, anti-gay Wisconsin. Likewise, had gay marriage lost, Pierce County could have lauded itself as the locale that swung the knockout punch of religious fanaticism against the LGBT community's yearnings for equality. 

As a Tacoma-born colleague of mine pointed out in the context of a gay-bashing incident several years ago, what else can you expect from the town that has more churches and church-going zealots than any other municipality in the state? 

But Tacoma and Pierce County also have the largest per-capita labor union membership in the state, which makes their citizens' calculated brutality toward transit-users all the more astonishing. It is a malevolence so intense the ballots have become like bullets – volleys to savage anyone who can't afford an automobile. 

Once again, brandishing as they did in 2011 the Moron Nation shibboleth that “transit is welfare” (the corollary of which is “let's kill the bums by shutting down their transportation”), the Anti-Transit-User Movement was vetoing a last-ditch, save-our-system measure proposed by the agency that operates the local bus service. 

Pierce Transit, as it's called, had asked voters to choose between two alternatives.

One is a tiny, three-tenths-of-one-percent sales-tax increase – that's three pennies on a $10 purchase – a sum even a pauper could afford. 

The other is a 53 percent cutback in bus service: no service on weekends; no service after seven p.m. on weekdays; service on the few surviving routes reduced mostly to one bus per hour – utter devastation dealt those of us who depend on public transport.

Because the vote counts continue, it's logical to wonder if there's any chance for a last-minute reversal in the results. I asked two well-positioned sources that very question. Neither answered. 

In other words, the Anti-Transit-User Movement of Tacoma and Pierce County has almost certainly won again – not really a surprise since its voters have rejected every other such proposal, whether from Pierce Transit or its Seattle-based regional counterpart Sound Transit, at least as far back as the middle '90s. 

Even if by some miracle we pro-transit people manage to eke out a winning margin, our enemies – and enemies is precisely what they are – already threaten a Florida-type recount fiasco that could delay the decision for weeks if not months. Clearly their hatred knows no limit; seemingly, neither do the bank accounts of their financiers. 

Nor is this unusual. The entire Puget Sound region has a uniquely anti-transit history that dates to 1968, when Seattle's first effort to build a regional light-rail system was easily defeated by a breathtakingly nasty campaign built around the assertion, never publicly proclaimed but often whispered, that “we don' wanna be like 'Jew' York.” Impossible to trace, it was apparently spawned by a faction of the One Percent that regarded adequate mass transit as a threat to its hegemony – an invitation to “undesirables” who might challenge local sweatshops and question the exclusionary privileges that make much of Western Washington a private country club for the super-rich. 

Three more decades of xenophobic no-transit votes reduced the population's smugly arrogant claims of environmental superiority to undeniable proof of a hypocrisy so huge its only counterpart in U.S. political history is the fossil-fuel industry's Big Lie efforts to persuade us it's not Mother Nature's deadliest adversary.

Only in recent years has a huge influx of high-tech “outlanders” nullified Seattle's indigenous hostility to public-transport users. Compared to transit systems in other Pacific Northwest coastal cities, Portland to the south and Vancouver in Canada, Seattle mass transit runs at least four decades behind – deliberately kept so backward it cannot possibly catch up – an urban-area outrage even in the notoriously autocentric United States. 

Now, as if in a race toward a new bottom, the Anti-Transit-User Movement of Tacoma and Pierce County is bidding to make its own bailiwick many times worse. What nobody in authority wants to admit is that downsizing of the magnitude being inflicted by ATUM voters will almost certainly mean the death of Pierce Transit. Nearly a fifth of its operating revenues come from the fare box. A service reduction of 53 percent will slash fare-box income to the proverbial bone, most likely enough to bankrupt the agency and shut it down permanently.

One knowledgeable transport-industry source says Tacoma/Pierce County thus will have brought upon itself the odium of being the largest urban area in the industrial world without public transportation. Thus too will it become a monument to greed, bigotry and miserliness, a nadir of anti-transit-user malice. Endorsed as the ATUM is by the Tacoma-Pierce County Chamber of Commerce and a deep-pocket coalition of local automobile dealers, it is already attracting the most negative sorts of international attention. 

Clearly, its alliance with the rabidly Teabaggerish ATUM severely limits the chamber's ability to fulfill one of its primary responsibilities – promoting Tacoma/Pierce County as a forward-looking place in which to headquarter, expand or build business and industry. 

Presumably the chamber represents all local business interests, but its emergence as a leader in the war against mass transit users suggests a much narrower (hidden) agenda. Has the chamber deliberately made itself an instrument in the One Percent's lethal subjugation of lower-income people? Is there some secret cabal of obscenely wealthy speculators eagerly awaiting the last run of the last Pierce Transit bus? Do they intend – once the transit agency is slain – to launch a for-profit bus company? 

No doubt such service would be priced to exclude all save the richest commuters – the aggressively Caucasian autocentrics who loudly decry the area's ever-more-gridlocked highways even as their votes against transit make the traffic that much worse. 

Why then do they vote as they do? 

Only a boundless aversion to the implicit democracy of public transport – a bottomless loathing and contempt for racial and ethnic minorities and the urban poor in general – could prompt such self-contradictory voting. With Pierce Transit slain and a for-profit bus company operating on the commuter routes, the wealthy suburbanites – and let us not forget Tacoma's growing number of penthouse urbanites – would finally have their own de facto limousine service. 

Plausible? You be the judge. But as we all know, privatization is almost always the ugly motive behind the deliberate downsizing and destruction of government services.

Perhaps some securely employed investigative reporter – if indeed any remain – will wrangle an assignment to explore these questions in depth. 

Meanwhile there's no doubt the attack on Tacoma/Pierce County bus riders is class war of the most vicious sort. Those of us who are elderly, disabled, chronically impoverished and therefore dependent on public transport for medical appointments, grocery shopping and other life-sustaining errands are being handed the Ayn Rand version of a termination notice: "we don't want you here; hurry up and die." 

LB/7-8 November 2012

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