Capitalism Requires an Endless Succession of Big Lies

CAPITALISM, OF NECESSITY, requires constant use of the Big Lie.  That's because, when capitalism is reduced to its lowest common denominator, it is ultimately moral imbecility – infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue – the conscious rejection of every humanitarian precept our species ever set forth. The same is true of capitalist governance – absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation for all the rest of us – and for the same reason. Neither capitalism nor capitalist governance can exploit its victims without a perpetual smokescreen of lies and evasions to conceal its quintessential savagery.

While the lies of our capitalist masters are typically blatant – for example President Obama's knowingly false assertions the Russians are to blame for the Ukraine Crisis  – sometimes their deceptions are more subtle. One example is the methodical destruction of the career and ultimately the life of the journalist Gary Webb,  detailed by Robert Parry in “The CIA/MSM Contra-Cocaine Cover-up.” Another is the lie-by-omission at the core of the Democratic Party's pre-election effort to make us forget how Democrats joined hands with Republicans to try to slash our already inadequate Social Security stipends. Thus a recent Truthout piece, “The GOP Social Security Deception Game Is On - Here's How to Fight Back,” dutifully disseminates the propaganda the Democrats desperately hope will enable them to retain control of the U.S. Senate. Its story-line is the Big Lie that Democrats are eternal fighters for the Working Class, and with Sen. Elizabeth Warren  arguing the case, it's an easy lie to believe – especially for those of us foolish enough to still have faith in the possibility of obtaining redress from our hopelessly corrupted political system.

But lest we forget the truth – which Truthout does reliably publish save when the its election-year fealty to the Democratic Party overrides its journalistic ethics – here is an AlterNet report, “Sell-Out Alert: 9 Democrats Already Caving to GOP On Social Security Cuts,” to remind us what really happened.  As it says, “...the biggest Democrat of all – and the one not drawing a line in the sand but possibly leading a historic sellout – is President Obama.” In other words, Barack the Betrayer strikes again, targeting Medicare as well as Social Security – and now he's got Sen. Warren, the alleged defender of the 99 Percent, to cover for him. Equally ironic is the role Washington state Sen. Patty Murray – a Democrat who likes to brag about her feminist credentials – played in proposing cuts which (see below) would have been especially devastating to women.

For those who still doubt the Democratic and Republican parties are nothing more than deceptively named factions of a single party of plutocrats, there's the fact 43 of the 55 members of the Senate Democratic Caucus voted just last February to help President Obama impose an $8.5 billion food-stamp cut.  Note the Democratic numbers: 43 of 55 is 78 percent. And when you eliminate the two independents and count only the actual Democrats, you have 43 of 53 or 81 percent – which gives us the real percentage of Democratic politicians who are indistinguishable from their Republican counterparts in hatred and contempt for us, We the People of the 99 Percent. As Washington state Senator Maria Cantwell put it (scroll down the linked text), “it's time that we move forward” – never mind the vast majority of the cutback's victims are women and children. 

Cantwell is considered one of the Democrats' leading liberals and feminists. But it is her Marie Antoinette indifference to the deliberately genocidal consequences of radically downsizing the food-stamp program that underscores another of the Democrats' Big Lies – their now obviously false claim they can at least be counted on to protect the wellbeing of women.  It was Democratic President Jimmy Carter's signature  on the Hyde Amendment that robbed lower-income women of their abortion rights. It was Democratic President Bill Clinton's expansion of free trade  that took away so many jobs – and so many health-insurance policies – that were the sole sources of reproductive choice for working women who were not independently wealthy. (Rich women, Ruling Class women, always have reproductive freedom; it's one of the innumerable privileges the plutocrats are ensured by their obscene wealth.) More recently it was Obama the Orator's initial shape-shift into Barack the Betrayer – the irremediable betrayal that forever defined Usian health care as a privilege of wealth rather than a human right – that opened the door to Hobby Lobby  and all the other looming theocratic restrictions on abortion and contraception. And don't forget the deadly damage  the Democrats' proposed Social Security and Medicare cuts would have done to women.

What, therefore, will change if the Republicans – as expected – win a majority of seats in the Senate? Not much; arcane, pro-plutocracy Senate rules already give the Republicans de facto control,  so all that will happen is the nation's march toward overt fascism and Christian theocracy and its simultaneous descent to the total wretchedness of de facto slavery for the 99 Percent will merely accelerate a bit. Besides – just as the Social Security and food-stamp issues demonstrate – the only real difference between the two parties is rhetoric. The Republicans are already unapologetic Christofascists. The Democrats meanwhile have become breathtakingly skilled at hiding their fascism behind legislative sleight-of-hand and election-time declarations of humanitarian principles in which they no longer believe. The latter have therefore become Big Lies in their own right: the classic example is Obama's 2008 campaign slogan: “change we can believe in.”

The bitter truth is we are governed by one Ruling Class party of two names. Thus government at every level in the United States, federal, state and local, is by, for and of the capitalists, with the rest of us – despite the Big Lie of “democracy” – methodically excluded.  But when oh when will we awaken to the awful truth?

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As I said above, Truthout can be counted on to tell the truth about anything save the Democratic Party. Hence the relevance of two unusually insightful reports that explain exactly how capitalism works. One, which describes how New York City perfected a mode of zero-tolerance policing that helps force lower-income people out of neighborhoods targeted for gentrification,  is entitled “Policing for Wealth.” The other – a timely essay on how private charity preserves capitalism  and thereby facilitates its oppression of lower-income people – is headlined “The Charitable Society or 'How to Avoid the Poor and Perpetuate the Wealth Gap.” It's money quote – no pun intended – lays bare a perfect example of the systemic dishonesty essential to capitalism's survival: “...corporate charity becomes a kind of self-rewarding capitalist enterprise because it is able both to maximize profit through tax breaks, and subtly cement capitalist economic, social and political policies that reflect the interests of the super-rich – from monopolization to privatization of public goods and institutions. So, it turns out that much of the giving involved here is not giving for the sake of promoting the common welfare, but philanthropy for private profit and corporate self-interest at the expense of long-term public good” (italics as in original).

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At various times I have pissed off many of my more politically naive comrades in the USian Left by proclaiming that the so-called “revolution of the 1960s” never happened. Yes, it was a potentially revolutionary time – so much so Soviet intelligence scrutinized the era's people and events in a meticulous search for revolutionary potential. But the Soviet analysts, who (let us not forget) were themselves professional revolutionaries, concluded that only the USian minority communities had the requisite combination of grievances, leadership, anger and determination. And even these qualities, the analysts found, were nullified by the communities' relative smallness and the exclusionary bigotry of the Caucasian majority. The rebellious whites were meanwhile dismissed as mostly bourgeois faddists who had merely seized upon revolutionary rhetoric as a means of rationalizing ultimately selfish demands. Hence no Soviet advisers were ever dispatched. The analysis, by the Committee for State Security, Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti or KGB, came to light after the collapse of the U.S.S.R. By then, the accuracy and indeed the prescience of the analysts' work had been confirmed by how quickly anti-war dissent and a plethora of other seemingly “revolutionary” activities were terminated by the end of the military draft in 1972. Hence my “no revolution” argument is – at least in a limited sense – validated by world-class experts.

Not all whites, of course, were faddists. Many were in fact genuine revolutionaries. But their revolution – manifest in feminism, environmentalism, the back-to-the-land movement, the alternative press, the resurrection of paganism and most of all in music and art – was no more or less than what the late Walter Bowart called it in a conversation with me in 1967, “a revolution in consciousness” rather than in political or socioeconomic terms. This was the revolution I described in the forever lost work “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer,” which argued on the basis of a 24-year collection of evidence that the epicenteral rebellion of the 1960s was the first wave of a spontaneous global uprising against patriarchy.  (As many of you know already, “Dancer” was destroyed by fire just as it seemed destined for mainstream publication.) But other relics of that era fortunately live on, albeit sometimes only in the contents of academic papers. One of these is a carefully researched, tautly reasoned, competently written masters-degree thesis, a brief history of the feminist back-to-the-land movement,  “Country Women: Back-to-the-Land Feminism and Radical Feminist Praxis in the Women's Liberation Movement,” that despite its somewhat awkward title is useful far beyond the realm of women's studies. It contains the most complete back-to-the-land-movement bibliography I have yet encountered. Not withstanding its singular focus, it provides what is probably our best-ever portrait of the attitudes and yearnings that brought the entire back-to-the-land movement, feminist or otherwise, into being.

In this latter context, perhaps my own back-to-the-land piece, a prose elegy to an ill-fated commune,  is again relevant.

Unfortunately our understanding of the era in question remains limited by the label – “the '60s” – which the Ruling Class insists we use to describe it. But it was not merely the phenomenon of a single decade. A more accurate chronology would mark its beginning with two events in 1955. One was Rosa Parks'  infinitely courageous protest against Southern segregation; the other was Allen Ginsberg's completion of the epic poem Howl.  What followed those two seemingly disparate events was an astounding symbiosis of political and aesthetic rebelliousness that not only gave birth to a half-dozen identifiable movements – civil rights, anti-war, feminist, environmentalist, back-to-the-land, alternative press – but evolved its own signature musical and artistic forms. It also legitimized quests in realms of hitherto-forbidden spirituality including Buddhism, First Nations wisdom and goddess-centered paganism. The associated metaphysical rebellion – particularly the evolution of modern Wicca  – was especially important in adding spiritual dimensions to feminism and environmentalism.

However, from the bourgeois (and therefore culturally dominant) perspective of Caucasian university students, the era's significant rebelliousness was mostly political and is assumed to have begun with the Berkeley Free Speech Movement,  which seemed to end triumphantly and thereby raised false hopes that would eventually be forever shattered as the capitalists fought back with a slow but inexorable vengeance, turning the United States into an electronic concentration camp  and relentlessly shackling the population in the same sort of economic and political slavery that has always characterized the lives of USian minorities. Now, 50 years later, Barbara Garson, who was one of the original FSM activists, poignantly wonders what the hell happened: “Who Really Won the Battle of Berkeley.” As if in reply, an analysis by Marlene Dixon, another activist of the era, provides the best explanation  I have yet read, never mind “The Rise and Demise of Women's Liberation: A Class Analysis”was written in 1977. Dixon argues – correctly I believe – the era's political and economic revolutionary potential was nullified by widespread refusal to acknowledge the reality of class warfare and by wholesale rejection of ideology and ideological discipline – all of which failings were legacies of the reflexive anti-intellectuality drilled into the nation by the sweeping anti-Leftist purges that followed World War II. While Dixon's work focuses on Women's Liberation, it is, like much feminist writing, a microcosmic portrait of the internal conflicts that characterized the entire spectrum of the era's political movements.

As to when the era ended, that too remains in dispute. But if I were to select an arbitrary date, I'd pick 4 November 1980, national election day, when fully 55 percent of the post-World-War-II baby-boom generation  voted their bourgeois, white-racist values and elected Ronald Reagan to the presidency. Thus the same generation that opposed the Vietnam War and claimed to be “revolutionary” later set the United States on the counter-revolutionary path to overt fascism along which it has relentlessly marched ever since. Hence, as it turns out, the aforementioned Soviet analysis was not nearly negative enough. Too many of the bourgeois whites who claimed to be revolutionaries were not just faddists; they were also fascists at heart – a perplexing condition indeed until you factor in the soaring popularity of Ayn Rand's work, particularly Atlas Shrugged,  which, when it was published in 1957, even conservative reviewers damned as a fictionalization of Hitler's Mein Kampf. But  Atlas Shrugged's  promoters claim it sold an average of 73,400 copies per year during the 1980s and now, they say, it sells at an annual rate nearly 4.1 times that. If these figures are accurate, what they tell us is there is no likelihood at all of diverting the already global USian Empire from its ever-more-obvious goal of becoming the de facto Fourth Reich. Exactly as history demonstrates, what is fascism but the mature form of capitalism?

Nor is there any rational likelihood of a movement arising to somehow ameliorate capitalism's ever-escalating brutality. Quoth one of its victims, the activist Cicely McMillan, speaking via a recent interview by Anna Lekas Miller entitled “On Being a Woman Inside and Outside of the Criminal Justice System”: “I don’t see a movement coming unless it is led by women, cross-class, cross-culture, cross-race. I think this has got to be a highly collaborative movement. I think women are the only ones who have been socialized with a certain experience to be able to do that. If we can work on behalf of women, on behalf of families, on behalf of communities collaboratively then we will see a movement of the 99 Percent, and the only way we will get at that is through the inter-workings of the people who are the community leaders and those are still women.” McMillan is obviously correct. As Vladimir Lenin noted in 1918,  “the experience of all liberation movements has shown that the success of a revolution depends on how much women take part in it.”

As to what really happened to the USian revolutionary potential, whether from 1955 through 1980 or now, it seems neither Garson nor Dixon – nor for that matter McMillan – are familiar with the works of Sun Tzu.  Hence they each overlook the simple fact even the most competent of the nation's would-be revolutionaries committed the always-fatal sin of underestimating the enemy. They failed to recognize the USian Imperial Ruling Class is the most all-powerful, most malevolently cunning ruling class in human history. The Occupy Movement, in which McMillan played a key role, was undone by the same failure. Thus were squandered what were undoubtedly our species' last opportunities to escape the slave-world horrors of capitalism matured to fascism – the aforementioned electronic concentration-camp. More to the point, the rebelliousness associated with the '60s was also probably our last chance to avoid self-inflicted extinction. Already the Ruling Class is moving to ensure a fully indoctrinated, relentlessly ecocidal fascist future: Atlas Shrugged is now required reading in many of the nation's colleges universities. Other Ayn Rand diatribes have been required reading in USian high schools and middle schools since the mid-1960s. Josef Goebbels – who sought to achieve universal German readership for Mein Kampf – is no doubt smirking in his grave. 

 

Meanwhile the terrifying totality of the secret-police operations by which we are already oppressed becomes ever more evident thanks to a few die-hard journalists and civil libertarians – daring men and women who will undoubtedly be among the first persons disappeared when the Ruling Class decides it's had enough dissent and protest and orders the Last Roundup. The following is from “Police Sign Gag Order Before Getting FBI Spy Equipment,” a MuckRock report:“Advanced cell phone tracking devices known as StingRays allow police nationwide to home in on suspects or to log individuals present at a given location. But before acquiring a StingRay, state and local police must sign a nondisclosure agreement with the FBI, documents released last week reveal. The document released by the Tacoma Police Department is heavily redacted — four of its six pages are completely blacked out — but two unredacted paragraphs confirm the FBI’s intimate involvement with StingRay deployment.”

Yes, dear readers, that's the same Tacoma in which I now reside.

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For those of us who recognize the course toward overt fascism the U.S. has been steering since 22 November 1963 – and for those who do not, a superb primer is JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters (James W. Douglass; Orbis Books: 2008) – it is no accident an unprecedented campaign for forcible civilian disarmament has emerged just as the 99 percent has begun awakening to the fact the American Dream is dead beyond resurrection. With the nation's socioeconomic conditions in a permanent nosedive  and even members of the Ruling Class now openly predicting revolution,  the forcible disarmament of the civilian population is merely another (logical) element on the Ruling Class list of measures to ensure we will never escape the electronic concentration camp in which we are already imprisoned. (Yes, it's true a hunting rifle is no defense against a tank or a drone. But a hunting rifle can surely be used to acquire weapons that are – which is why, for example, Hitler began disarming his opponents as soon as he took power.)

However, the USian Ruling Class – bolstered by its mastery of psychology and its manipulative subsets in marketing and behavior modification – is infinitely more sophisticated in its application of the techniques of oppression than ever the Nazis were. That's why, here in the land of the Second Amendment, forcible disarmament is invariably cloaked with a Big Lie, always in the form of deceptions, often by censorship as well. Thus the enormous relevance of a censorship-defying report  by Charles E. Cobb, “Guns and the Southern Freedom Struggle: What’s Missing When We Teach About Nonviolence.” Cobb, a former field secretary in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), is the author of This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible (Basic Books: 2014). As I said on the comment thread when CommonDreams, which is often painfully politically correct, dared circulate the aforementioned text:

Thank you for publishing Mr. Cobb's oh-so-relevant report. Especially thank you for  having the incredible (and incredibly rare) courage  to defy the venomous, maliciously dishonest and sometimes violent hatefulness of the forcible disarmament cult -- the hysterically anti-gun fanatics who, in clandestine alliance with the One Percent, are reducing us all to compulsory pacifism and mandatory victimhood. (Yes, there really are some of us on the Left – far more than the forcible-disarmament cultists dare admit – who support the Second Amendment in its broadest interpretations. And Mr. Cobb's report illustrates one of the reasons why.) 

     

Soon afterward, perhaps fearful of being outdone by one of its rivals, Truthout published a report that refutes one of the forcible-disarmament movement's most oft-repeated Big Lies.  Entitled “Fact-Checking Feinstein on the Assault Weapons Ban,” it notes how throughout the 10 years since the federal assault-weapons ban expired, its originator, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), continues to claim the ban reduced crime and saved lives. “But gun violence experts,” the report states, “say the exact opposite.” In other words, Feinstein – like most of her colleagues in the forcible disarmament movement – knowingly lies.

The proponents of anti-gunowner Initiative 594 in Washington state are using the same tactics. They bill their initiative as a “simple” measure to tighten the restrictions that presumably keep felons and dangerously mentally ill persons from acquiring firearms. But its oppressively complex, turgidly written text is laden with prohibitions intended to criminalize many legal and commonplace uses  of shotguns, rifles and handguns – including shared usage amongst family members. And it is being promoted by some of the slickest anti-gun propaganda  I have yet witnessed. Once again, just as the late Watergate felon John Ehrlichman acknowledged in his 1974 testimony, it seems Washington state is being used as a national proving ground  for techniques of oppression.

 

Nationally the ultimate firearms-related question would now seem to be whether the Left is at long last awakening to the need for an armed Working Class to discourage capitalist savagery. Locally the question is whether the I-594 proponents' Big Lie tactics will prevail in a state the electorate of which – albeit nominally progressive – is nevertheless noted for its skepticism toward any measures that expand the authority of government. The answers will undoubtedly be vital in shaping our national future.

LB/27 September-5 October 2014

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Health Update: Recovering But Still Zombified by Cipro

THE ANTIBIOTIC CIPROFLOXACIN, every bit as unpleasant as they say it is -- nearly as debilitating as chemotherapy -- has gooned me out to the extent that only now, three days after finishing the course of medication, am I even beginning to be able to again purposefully focus my (alleged) mind. I began work on a a blog post Sunday afternoon, then discovered it required much more research than I had anticipated and am thus aground until I can find the data I need. Combine that with the fact that though I was a card-catalogue whiz, I'll never be any good at Internet research -- I despise it for the same reason I despised the childhood game Simon Says (if you don't word your query exactly correctly, you get bupkes) -- and it will be late today or maybe even tomorrow  before I get this new essay written.  Meanwhile, my repeated apologies; I'll be back in print as soon as I am...well, back in print.

LB/29 September 2014

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No Blog: Sick with Infected Kidney but Recovering

Laid low by an infected kidney and its accompanying fever, which peaked at 103.2 degrees (Fahrenheit), I am now recovering thanks to the antibiotic Ciprofloxacin. (Yes, cipro  is as unpleasant as they say, nearly as debilitating as chemotherapy, and if you're unlucky, it can cripple you with ruptured tendons.) Hence I'm not blogging this week; not doing much of anything, in fact, save sleeping. My apologies; I'll be back as soon as I am able.

LB/21 September 2014

Ferguson Is Everywhere, and We Are All Michael Brown

THE WHITE RULING CLASS in Ferguson, Missouri is obviously terrified by the anger of the town's African-American majority population – hence the rush toward reforms  reported in useful detail by The New York Times two days ago.

The PollyAnna liberals, of course, will soon be hailing the reforms as a great triumph, the silver lining in the storm-dark clouds of Michael Brown's death and the still darker portends of the local police fulfilling the purpose for which they have been federalized and militarized – to serve as capitalism's army of occupation in the USian Empire's domestic colonies. But nothing will change save the gradual banishment of that conquered-territory image,  which must be suppressed because it (correctly) tells us our overlords think Iraq, Afghanistan and the imperial homeland are tactically and strategically interchangeable.  That's why, within weeks if not days, a team of obscenely salaried Josef Goebbels wanna-bees will be revising our recollections of what really happened so that eventually Ferguson fits the official Horatio Alger version  of U.S. history. And do not doubt they will succeed. The USian Ruling Class manages the most diabolically sophisticated tyranny in all human time, and its propagandists are the most effective truth-benders ever: note how they have already revised the story of Martin Luther King Jr. to remove the “r” from his call to revolution.

No doubt the propagandists will do with Ferguson as they have done with the life and death of Rev. King – they'll afix a smiley face to it. Picture a smiley face replacing the Roman execution order atop a medically accurate representation of Jesus' crucifixion agonies, or (like the Arbeit Macht Frei above the main gate at Auschwitz), hung at the entrance to Guantanamo: in either instance, complete with its slogan – “have a happy day” – and you'll understand the ultimate grotesquerie of this approach. Its historical context is especially telling: the smiley face emerged at the height of the Vietnam War, as if it were an admonition to capitalism's victims: “have a happy day” (or else).

Yes that is the precisely sort of predator nation in which we now live, as the dismantling of the New Deal,  the nullification of the Civil Rights Movement,  the defeat of feminism  and the terrifying triumphs of the lavishly funded theocratic counter-revolution  prove beyond all argument. “Reform” in this context is fraud – its sole purpose is deception, an illusion of “change” that does nothing more than temporarily cloak the savagery of capitalism, which is so malevolent it can no more be “reformed” than cancer.

But this time the marks know the score. The Ferguson residents who dismiss the reform effort as a scam  are undoubtedly correct. The black community, like all other USian minority communities, has learned from bitter experience that anything the Ruling Class gives, the Ruling Class can just as quickly take back – and no doubt will. Blacks know what too many of the rest of us still refuse to learn: the federalized, militarized police and their conversion into capitalism's army of occupation in the homeland colonies means Ferguson is Everywhere U.S.A. just as Michael Brown is all of us – every 99 Percenter regardless of race or gender or age.

Sometimes, rather than offer bogus reforms, the Ruling Class merely lies, a response at which the president is an obvious master. Hence Obama the Orator's 2008 campaign slogan, “change we can believe in” – possibly the most glaring Big Lie in U.S. political history – and his post-electoral transformation to Barack the Betrayer. Now in the latter persona he is again showing his true Republican selfhood by helping Pennsylvania privatize Medicaid, which – exactly as intended – will significantly worsen the plight of the state's poor, no doubt in some cases fatally, all the while enabling the One Percent to turn a handsome profit on the resultant misery.

Since Obama's absolute fealty to the Ayn Rand principles of capitalism is so obvious, I would also question the promises by the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate Ferguson and an even more obvious atrocity in Louisiana, where a black man who'd been arrested, searched and shackled with his hands behind his back and locked into a police car then supposedly produced a concealed handgun and fatally shot himself.

The president has also called for a “review” of his own police federalization-and-militarization policies. (Yes, the process of turning the police into storm troopers was begun under Bush II, but like the nullification of the Bill of Rights, Obama has continued it with a vengeance.) Probably all the “review” means is the imposition of new measures to cover up the ongoing conversion of the police into a new Schutzstaffel.  We the People are becoming more rebellious, and the One Percenters, who worry the imperial war machine might not reliably kill U.S. citizens, are becoming terrified. Hence here in the United States the aristocracy turns to the police, exactly as the aristocrats did in Tsarist Russia, which gives “serve and protect” a new and decidedly more Ayn Randish meaning.

Hence too what I would anticipate from these investigations is nothing more than dramatic pronouncements in the characteristic Obama style: compelling rhetorical flourishes that when carefully analyzed say exactly nothing and change even less. Bear in mind too it's an election year: that means Obama's required to (seemingly) pander to the Democratic base. Never mind all the sensible Democrats (of which, long ago, I was one) have already figured out the party labels are meaningless – that we're governed by one Ruling Class party of two names, and that the only meaningful difference between the Republicans and the Democrats is the former are fascists and brag about it while the latter are every bit as fascist but try to hide it behind a smokescreen of lies.

As many of you know I was an active supporter of the Civil Rights Movement and in 1963 was jailed on related charges in Knoxville, Tennessee. Reasoning from the eye-opening lessons I learned then and during the subsequent 18 months I remained in the South, I have selected a three more follow-up stories that seem to me to capture the essence of Ferguson's importance – and more importantly stress the fact Ferguson is (as I said above, and as cannot be said too many times) Everywhere U.S.A. One of these texts is a Popular Resistance.org piece that makes the point the killing of Michael Brown and other young black men is part of the nationwide class war,  “massive disinvestment in urban neighborhoods and unconscionable levels of joblessness and economic underdevelopment.” Another is an Associated Press dispatch Reader Supported News rescued from the Orwell hole: it says the Ferguson resistance is inspiring a nationwide resistance movement –  which is precisely what the Ruling Class doesn't want us to know. Lastly, also from the previous week – I now feel I should apologize for having been so caught up in the personal angst of viewing newsprint copies of my fire-destroyed photography – a Truthout exclusive examines the clash between “peacekeepers” and activists that is a vital part of the Ferguson backstory.  It is actually a new twist to an old conflict: in my day, the “peacekeepers” were called Uncle Toms.

Finally here are three more stories that fall into the “as-if-there-were-any-remaining-doubts” category.

The first reveals the extent to which the so-called Main Stream Media (MSM) has become the government's propaganda apparatus,  a perfectly logical evolution given the fact government at all USian levels is now a de facto subsidiary of Wall Street. In other words, government and business have merged, producing the ever-more-obvious reality of “capitalist governance” – absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation for all the rest of us – what earlier generations knew as fascism.

Next, in the second report, we have another revelation of the forceable imposition of Christian theocracy on the military.  Undoubtedly (though the text doesn't say it), this is a desperate effort by the Ruling Class to use the Prosperity Gospel  in an attempt to bolster the political reliability of the troops. Will the theocrats succeed? Will biblical law replace remnants of our constitution? Margaret Atwood  surely thinks so – and having lived in the South, which is already a functional theocracy, I tend to agree.

Lastly, an anti-Michael Brown website provides a new yardstick by which to measure the magnitude of USian racism  – one of the many reasons I believe we are not far from the emergence of an USian Nazism that will target racial, sexual, political and spiritual minorities here in the bourgeoning Fourth Reich much as they were targeted in the Third Reich. But here it will no doubt be under the aegis of a smiley face, perhaps even with clowns to comfort the children before they are gassed: “have a happy day.”

LB/14 September 2014

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Perhaps This Will Help You Understand the Plight of Patrick McLaw

(For A.H., whose belief in my courageousness gave me the courage to write what follows, with my apologies to all for how long it took me to write it.)

THE STRANGE STORY of Patrick McLaw, the novelist and language-arts teacher who was seized by the police  and at this writing is involuntarily confined in a Maryland mental institution, warrants our continued attention – and not only because of its frightening suggestion the authorities may now be using mental-health facilities as extra-constitutional prisons. While the Gestapo-reeking circumstances of McLaw's detention remain unclear,  the one absolute certainty is the state's claim he is mentally ill has ruined his life beyond any rational hope of repair. The fact he is African-American in a nation that is again becoming infamous for its bigotry  merely underscores the finality of his doom.

McLaw's case is significant because brings together the issues of class warfare, racism, the expansion of police authority, the theft of our constitutional rights – and adds to them a topic I know by heart but seldom have the opportunity to explore: the hatefulness and brutality that characterize U.S. attitudes toward people who are mentally ill or mentally disabled. As the authorities' treatment of McLaw demonstrates, and as innumerable studies confirm, mental illness in the United States of America is the penultimate nadir of pariahdom. Only child-molesters are more publicly hated and feared. It makes no difference at least 26.2 percent  of the U.S. adult population is mentally ill in any given year. Only the Ruling Class rich – those who are wealthy and powerful enough to stay out of the social-service system entirely or to bribe its bureaucrats to secrecy – escape the stigma.

Meanwhile, locked away as he is, McLaw's captors have successfully reduced him to a non-entity. His personhood is hidden from us, which means we can only guess what he might be thinking and feeling. But given how my own talents were forever nullified by the odium of mental illness – the clinical depression inflicted by the fire that destroyed my life's work – perhaps by retelling my own story I can at least portray the magnitude of troubles with which McLaw is likely to be afflicted if and when he is ever released.

McLaw's education and chosen occupation suggests he invested a great deal of time and effort in becoming who and what he was. So did I. Though my own journey differed from his – for example, poverty kept me from a bachelor of arts degree until I was 36 years old – I suspect the passions we brought to our arts were very similar. Our greatest differences – the fact I am a Caucasian male, with all of the presumptive socioeconomic advantages, and the fact I have never been institutionalized – are eliminated by our common plight. Neither race nor gender provides any defense against how an official diagnoses of mental illness or disability destroys everything you were and might have been. Nor does it matter, in the eyes of the public, whether you were institutionalized or not. In-patient or out-patient, you're now damned as a “crazy”– and so you will be for rest of your life.

Some of you already know my story. In the spring of 1983 I returned to New York City, assuming my birthplace and the home of my early childhood would again be the permanent home of my adulthood. I was traveling light. At the invitation of the late Helen Farias, a dear friend who had inherited a two-storey pioneer farmhouse near Alger, Washington, I had boxed up my files and other possessions and stored them in one of her unused second-floor bedrooms. When I found a suitable apartment in Manhattan, I would send her the money to ship these pre-packed items to my new address. But instead there was the fire, and now there was nothing left. The house and even its adjacent outbuildings were reduced to heaps of smoldering ash. My friend's work – Helen too was a writer and editor – escaped the flames only because her office was elsewhere. Her cats were not so fortunate; they died in the fire.

The loss of my work was the most wrenching shock I have ever known. My grief was overwhelming. It was profoundly intensified by the fact the fire's casualties included abook of photographs and text that had begun as an entry in my 1959 journal and was at long last seemingly on the brink of major publication. Titled “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer,” it argued that the Counterculture which had grown out of the 1950s Beat Movement and crested during the 1960s was exactly what it claimed to be, a “revolution in consciousness” – and that its rebelliousness, the true nature of which was obvious in its music and art,  was amongst the first waves of a global revolution against patriarchy.

I knew my hypothesis was radical and perhaps even inflammatory, no pun intended. It had generated substantial controversy when I presented it for academic scrutiny during the final year of my bachelor of arts program at Fairhaven College. Despite the decades of research I put into its text – the quest to name what I was photographing was as important as the photography itself – I never imagined “Dancer” would be more than a volume of pictures accompanied by the photographer's reflections on his odyssey toward understanding. But the late Cicely Nichols, longtime friend and former editor-in-chief at Grove Press, convinced me “Dancer” could be shaped into one of the most important books of the 20th Century.

The fire's devastation was thus all the more intense because of my newly heightened expectations. I am not an optimist; raised as the unwanted child in a painfully dysfunctional family, I have never been given to unrealistic expectations, but after Nichols' enthusiastic response to my photographic portfolio and a few samples of my writing, for once in my life I actually dared be hopeful about my future. But now, as if in cosmic retribution for my folly, I had no future at all. The flames took not just the rough draft of “Dancer” but all its 24 years of research notes and pictures; all my other photography including hundreds of prints and thousands of negatives and color transparencies; two other books in progress that existed only as photos, notes and outlines; nearly all my other unpublished writing; clippings and tear-sheets of all my published work; all my journalistic award certificates and letters of commendation; paintings and drawings – literally all the creative efforts of my life dating back to my 12th birthday and my first camera, a used Kodak Brownie Reflex given me by my father.

Worse still was the eerie timing of the fire, which occurred on 1 September 1983. It started at the exact moment Nichols and I were meeting to finalize the agreement that would presumably bring “Dancer” to print. The time of ignition was revealed by the heat-welded hands of a clock at the fire's point of origin. First attributed to arson, then mysteriously changed to fire “of undetermined origin,” the blaze began at 4:30 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time, which three time-zones to the east is 7:30 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time – exactly when Nichols and I began our work-and-dinner session. Regardless of the fire's cause, its timing – which turned what might have been the best day of my life into what was indisputably the worst – was too exact to be coincidence.

Though I had been targeted as a suspected subversive by the U.S. government on three occasions that I know of – once in the Army, twice in civilian life (USian fascism is nothing new) – I never imagined my personal politics might result in the destruction of my life's work. But the fire's timing is typical of the “plausibly deniable” acts with which undercover operatives – especially those skilled in psychological warfare – torment their victims. Because of this – note again the waffling of some (perhaps easily bullied) rural fire-marshal – I cannot doubt the fire was arson, most likely government arson at that. Who but some telephone-tapping agent of the national secret-police apparatus could have known when to light the flames with such hurtful precision?   And the message itself was unmistakable: I was opposed by forces so relentlessly powerful, it was futile to resist. Thus I learned what is obviously the central lesson of my life: that hope, at least for me, is not audacity but imbecility.

It took the resultant depression almost exactly three years to drive me out of my beloved Manhattan. For most of my adult life I had recognized the City as the place for those who have something to offer the world. But now after the fire I had nothing to offer anyone, not even myself – and given the malevolence of my enemies, it was obvious I would never be allowed to develop such offerings again. Thus in late 1986 I returned to Washington state, a place I disliked for the notoriously xenophobic small-mindedness of so many of its people but where I had paradoxically fallen in love with its light and its water and how its mountains plunge directly into the sea. Believing periodic contact with nature would be healing, I had been putting some of my New York City earnings into a tiny piece of rural Washington real estate – probably, in retrospect, an act that was itself symptomatic of how befuddled I had become – though for nearly a year after my return that place would be my only sanctuary.

I already knew there were few journalistic opportunities in Washington state. A decade earlier the local mainstream-media editors had shown themselves to be as xenophobic their as readers. The late Henry MacLeod, then managing editor of The Seattle Times, told meEast Coast experience “doesn't count out here,” and suggested I hasten back from whence I came. A managing editor named Fowler at The Bellingham Herald was more blunt: “we don't like your kind here,” he said. “Do yourself a favor: catch the next flight back to New York City.”

No matter. I could no longer dependably write or photograph; the associations with the lost work were too painful. Hence I would fall back on my secondary skills, work as a commercial fisherman or a laborer or maybe a commercial printer and perhaps eventually freelance a bit on the side. But unemployment remained high due to the Reagan recession. I was unable to find any job at all, and my mood worsened until some days I could hardly muster the energy to get out of bed. At last recognizing the nature of my affliction, I went into therapy, but it was too little too late; my economic circumstances were already becoming desperate. My therapist, Dr. Arthur Budke PhD, formally diagnosed my condition as post-traumatic depression. He said it was severe enough to qualify me for welfare and began insisting I apply for it. Finally, in the late spring of 1987, so impoverished the only alternative was homelessness, I did as he demanded. Like McLaw, I was now trapped in the system – and so began the process that destroyed my life.

Citing my therapist's findings, the welfare bureaucrats categorized me as “mentally disabled” and enrolled me to receive a state check for $314 per month plus about $75 in food stamps. The stipend was labeled “GA/U,” which stands for “general assistance/unemployable.” It is colloquially known as “nut money”; its recipients are officially called “clients” but are colloquially known as “welfare crazies” and “nut cases.”

GA/U was supposed to be paid on the first of each month but was often late, sometimes as much as a week and frequently with catastrophic results, invariably because welfare funds were arbitrarily withheld to maximize the interest earned by state deposits – a prime example of the official attitude toward welfare recipients in general. As for GA/U, its bureaucratic overseers were the most condescending and vindictive officials I have ever encountered. They made no secret of the fact they regarded us as subhuman. And they behaved as if their sole purpose was to punish us for our poverty, which they did at every opportunity.

I was on welfare through the winter of 1989, a reality in which the mundane disguises horrors that are incomprehensible if you have not experienced them firsthand. I was too distraught in those awful years to trifle with metaphor and simile, but now in retrospect it comes to me I was like some shell-shocked refugee captured by a flood and swept away by its irresistible current. Its water was brown and treacherous and toxic and alligator-infested and it raged through kudzu jungles and cottonmouth-moccasin swamps and it allowed me only two choices: I could yield to to its undertow and drown or I could grab onto some piece of flotsam and fight to keep my head above the torrent. Obviously I chose the latter. I had not even the faintest hope I might be washed up onto some shoal or sandbar, but eventually I discovered – perhaps a gift of my Celtic ancestry – I possessed a seemingly congenital inability to surrender. Since this is probably the sort of choice that's now confronting Patrick McLaw, I can only hope he chooses wisely.

***

 

Innumerable studies document the U.S. attitude toward mental illness as the harshest and most unforgiving in the developed world. Indeed mental illness in the United States is feared as if it were a fatal contagion, something you might catch from mere proximity to a mentally ill person on a bus or – horrors – use of a toilet-seat upon which a mentally ill individual has recently sat. Yes, the prejudice is that extreme. But why? The sociologists with whom I have discussed it say they suspect that in the de facto theocracy that underlies the cult of U.S. “exceptionalism,” mental illness is subconsciously viewed as divine retribution. I agree; the Abrahamic god, the death-dealing deity of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, is undoubtedly the most sadistic god in human experience, and the hostility directed at people with mental troubles is “exceptional” indeed. Mentally ill persons are shunned as if they are accursed – fingered by god as hate-objects – and in extreme cases they become the human equivalents of sacrificial scapegoats. But the influence of religion on U.S. society is woefully underestimated. Hence even in the secular realm of journalism, no career-minded editor will dare hire you if you have ever been officially labeled “mentally ill” or “mentally disabled” – never mind your diagnosis or the brevity of your affliction. Even beneath the gloss of enlightenment, the conditioned fear of the divine lightning bolt often remains tyrannically compelling. 

The oppressive commonality of such prejudice is why I feared life as I had known it would end forever the moment I was labeled “mentally disabled” – an apprehension soon confirmed in every dreadful detail. Hence at the same time I applied for nut money, I applied to the state's Division of Vocational Rehabilitation for help finding some new career – work that would be insulated against the climate of loathing but would utilize at least some of my visual, verbal and analytical skills. Here though I encountered a succession of mysterious obstacles: DVR psychologists declared me a top-notch candidate for vocational retraining, yet I was repeatedly denied access to all DVR programs.

Initially, the DVR bureaucrats contented themselves with “losing” my paperwork. After the third such loss, Dr. Budke, who was still my therapist, intervened to get my application processed. But the bureaucrats rejected it again, claiming my entire work history was a lie or a delusion or both. They demanded I provide them names to attest its reality. I did; the bureaucrats obtained confirmation of my achievements, but the questions they asked my former supervisors and colleagues made it obvious I was on nut money. Now there was no question my journalism career was dead. Yet once again the bureaucrats found a litany of reasons – so many I cannot remember them all – to deny me rehabilitative services.

I will never know the true source of these obstructions. One possibility is they were inflicted by the same nameless, faceless but obviously malign sorts of individuals who destroyed my life's work and so annulled all my lifetime efforts. Another possibility, perhaps underscored by the bureaucrats' efforts to confirm my resumé, is the obstructions were vengeance for the anti-DSHS investigative reports I had written during the late 1970s and early 1980s. A third possibility – the one I still think is the most likely – is that I had run afoul of the legislatively prohibited (and therefore secret) gender-quotas for which the Department of Social and Health Services was then becoming infamous.

Angered by the endless delays, bolstered by yet another evaluation that found me “exceptionally well qualified” for vocational rehabilitation, I contacted a pro-bono lawyer and threatened legal action against DSHS. I had hoped this would force DVR to admit me to a job-training program; I knew DVR endorsement was now the only way I could neutralize the mental-patient odium enough to get myself back into the workplace. And for once the bureaucrats responded quickly: they changed my diagnosis, branded me “permanently unemployable” and forced me onto Social Security/Disability, thereby destroying forever my ability to earn any sort of living at all.

Note here the disturbingly Orwellian parallel to the McLaw case: first the Maryland authorities publicly announced he was detained because of alleged threats they claim are implicit in his fiction. Then, when McLaw's extra-constitutional detention raised a national storm of protest,  the authorities quickly changed their story. His novel and his use of pen names were no longer the cause of his incarceration. Now they are claiming he was involuntarily committed because of “mental health issues.” Obviously, whether on the East Coast or the West Coast, the government officials will say whatever is necessary – truth be damned – to justify their egregiousness and protect themselves from lawsuits.

As I noted before, I have never been institutionalized. Though I did not realize it until years later, during my struggle with the welfare bureaucrats I was obviously protected by Washington state's admirably strict laws against retaliatory commitment – a fact for which I remain ever thankful. Had the bureaucrats been able, they would probably have tried to bury me forever in some piss-reeking DSHS Bedlam. But being forced onto Social Security Disability Insurance was bad enough, and from the bureaucrats' perspective it was no doubt a triumph: the “M” they had metaphorically branded on my forehead ensured no employer would ever again take me or talents seriously.

Theoretically, you can return to work while receiving SSDI stipends, but the ubiquitous animosity toward mental patients makes continued employment highly unlikely once your disability is revealed as mental.  And such disclosure is unavoidable because your employer is an essential participant in the review process by which the Social Security Administration evaluates your employability. Nor does the Americans with Disabilities Act offer any real protection – note again the above-linked report. From the perspective of the truly needy, ADA is like all other U.S. social-welfare legislation, intended mostly as propaganda and therefore more about deliberate deception than actual amelioration – yet another example of how the so-called American Dream was never more than a Big Lie.

Yes, the fire and its ruinous aftermath was a long time ago. I was 43 years old when it occurred, 49 in 1989 when the bureaucrats forced me onto SSDI and slew whatever might have remained of my socioeconomic prospects. I am now 74. Though my depression ended long ago, my existence has seldom risen above a desperate and often humiliating struggle against poverty, isolation and loneliness. Again we see the relentlessly unforgiving nature of capitalism, which teaches that those felled by misfortune are victims of their own folly and are therefore to be brutalized accordingly, whether by deliberately murderous cutbacks in the social safety-net, wildly increasing attacks on homeless people  or egregious denial of our constitutional rights. That's why, if I believed in a just and loving god – perhaps the most absurd notion of all time – Patrick McLaw would be at the top of my prayer list.

***

Strangely enough – or perhaps, in terms of Jungian synchronicity, not strangely at all – on Saturday night, 6 September 2014, I was confronted by a new and painful realization of all that was taken from me. And much as it had been 31 years and five days before – though without any of the original crippling intensity – it was an occasion of happiness turned to sadness. But this time the resultant anguish had a positive effect: it solidified my sense of situational kinship with Patrick McLaw. And a moving compliment from a stranger gave me the courage and determination to write of the circumstances that once bedeviled me and now bedevil McLaw – and anyone else caught in the treacherous clutches of the U.S. mental “health” and “welfare” bureaucracies.

The source of this interplay of Yin and Yang was a reunion of people who had been associated with The Seattle Sun, an alternative weekly founded by professional journalists and therefore equal in quality to the original Village Voice and in some aspects – especially visually – no doubt its superior. The Sun, of which I was the founding photographer, was published from July 1974 through January 1982; it was driven out of business by a longstanding advertising boycott organized by the local Ruling Class, which was implacably hostile to the truth-telling reportage that was the paper's award-winning forté. Its former writers, photographers, artists, advertising and circulation staffers and its many friends and financial supporters gathered in Seattle at an attractive facility on the Lake Union waterfront to celebrate the 40th anniversary of The Sun's first year of publication. (It is an aside, but part of Seattle's unique physical beauty is its combination of salt-water and fresh-water port facilities; Lake Union is part of the latter.)

For me the reunion was a pleasant opportunity to briefly reconnect with former colleagues and to view my own work as it is preserved in bound volumes of The Sun's entire production, an invaluable collection assembled by Carl Thorgerson, who was the paper's indomitable advertising manager. Here were not just the best of my Sun pictures – the covers and section fronts – but all the other images I had made for it, and suddenly I remembered just how many there were and how joyfully proud I had been to make these pictures of histories whether personal or political and large or small. And now for an instant it seemed I knew again the solid feel of an M Leica and the quiet but decisive snick of its shutter and the sharply alchemical scent of my darkroom and the wizardly submarine quality of its amber light and the oddly comforting odor of the Pekasol as I hung the film and how the tonal brilliance of prints made on DuPont Varilure emerge in the Dektol with an ever-so-subtle hiss and I thought of the countless times I said to rightfully impatient editors as I was washing and drying the day's take, “you can't rush the chemicals; you'll have the pictures as soon as they're done,” and I smiled at the recollection.

It was as if I were seeing ghosts or was perhaps myself a ghost reliving scenes from a former life, and as I paged through Thorgerson's wonderful archive, my body in real-time 2014 yet somehow for a long moment also present amidst the equally real physical and olfactory sensations of 1974 or 1975 or 1976, it came to me these fading images on fragile sheets of yellowed newsprint plus the few archivally processed exhibition prints that had escaped the fire because they were in my portfolio were all that remained of one of the most purposefully productive and aesthetically fulfilling periods in a stolen life I had never missed quite so forcefully as now. I had never seen so much of my forever lost work gathered in one place, and for that reason I had never felt quite so poignantly the actual dimensions of my loss. Suddenly I was crushed by its awful breath-stealing weight, and I could not bear to look anymore. There was nothing left for me to do but walk away, first from the pictures, finally – as quickly as I could politely arrange it – from the party itself.

In deference to my former colleagues, and later in deference to the woman with whom I attended the reunion, I maintained a pleasant countenance. Obviously I have made peace with my circumstances, have somehow even regained a bit of my former joie de vivre, and I channel my emotions into productive outlets such as this blog and the local campaign for a $15 minimum wage and the monthly newsletter I produce for my fellow residents in the senior-housing complex where I live. But there are limits to my endurance. Alone in my tiny apartment, I could no longer avoid the reanimated woe of the fire and its aftermath – the loss of the occupation that was my selfhood and the pictures that were my identity and then my credibility and finally all my societal worth as a human being and thus my ability to ever again build any other identity or hope for any reality beyond used cameras and worn-out coats and ragged blankets and the inescapable wretchedness of food-stamp poverty. 

For a moment I floundered in self-pity, again overwhelmed by old and bitter truths: that I will have no more second chances, no more lovers, will undertake no more quests, will have no more expectations of yearnings fulfilled or hopes realized, and because I know the viciousness of capitalism, I know the only changes in my material circumstances will be changes for the worse. But then – if I may fall back on my earlier metaphor of a wayfarer trapped in a flood – I began once more to swim. There is a terrible freedom in hopelessness such as mine, a freedom to tell the truth without fear of the consequences, and I realized that perhaps in an odd way – never mind the arthritis in my spine and shoulders that now sorely limits my ability to photograph – I might nevertheless once more carry on the truth-telling tradition that drew me to The Sun and kept me there for as long as I could stay and brought me back to Seattle 40 years later for an evening with my fellow truth-tellers. I would write this story not just to assuage my own hurt but to provide a living, breathing illustration of the plight of Patrick McLaw, who is only 23 but is already suffering the loss of all his hopes and dreams and facing the probability of an entire lifetime of destitution. Perhaps, whether he reads these words or not, he will come to understand, as I did long ago, that in such cruel times as these, survival itself is an act 

of revolutionary defiance.

LB/7-11 September 2014

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