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 Lay, Abu 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
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