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| Occupy Tacoma visited the city's McKinley Hill neighborhood with an informational march on 4 November. All demonstrations of this sort help bypass the near-total news embargo imposed by Ruling Class Media, but this event was especially notable for its thought-provoking signs. Meanwhile the prevalence of anti-Wall-Mart placards underscored both a boiling local controversy (for details see below) and the great extent to which the Occupation is supported by organized labor. |
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Photographs by Loren Bliss copyright 2011. Click on each image to view it full-size. (One-time use rights available.)
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| "I Can't Afford to Bribe a Congressman" describes the worsening plight of 99 percent of the U.S. population. The invitation to the Tea Party reflects the Occupation Movement's big-tent nature, focusing on expression of grievances rather than preachments of ideology. "Turn Off The News" calls on people to wean themselves from the Ruling Class propaganda machine, which either ignores the Occupation or besmirches it with negative sensationalism. "Your Bank Is On Welfare" echoes the Occupation's signature chant: "Banks Got Bailed Out/We Got Sold Out." But the slogan in the picture next to the bottom, "Occupy Your Mind," is surely the most thought-provoking text of all. Because the demonstration remained peacefully uneventful even when it picketed a local branch of U.S.Bank, which is part of the national banking monopoly, the smiling faces in the last frame -- at a brief pause near the completion of the 1.7 mile march -- seemed to my out-of-retirement photo-editor's eye to be the perfect ending for this chapter of the Occupy Tacoma story. |
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Visual Thinking: of McKinley Hill, Wal-Mart, Tacoma Politics, the Occupy Movement and Tech Data
MCKINLEY HILL has a curious history. When I lived there during my first stay in Tacoma, 1978 through 1982, it was a notably safe Working-Class neighborhood, kept crime-free by the resident motorcycle club in much the same way Manhattan's Little Italy was so effectively policed by the Wise Guys from Cosa Nostra.
But sometime during the middle or late '80s – I don't know the details because I was back home in New York City – a new municipal regime in Tacoma ran the bikers out of town. In the aftermath, McKinley Hill fell prey to the street gangs that increasingly provide the sole familial structure available to capitalism's throw-away children. The gangs finance themselves by dealing drugs – all-too-often the only living-wage work available to youths who because of color or caste are from birth entrapped in the capitalists' slave-pens.
Meanwhile the McKinley Hill neighborhood itself – portrayed in Ruling Class Media as the bloody battleground of Asian, African-American, Hispanic and First Nations turf-warriors – justifiably acquired a singularly bad reputation. Some said it was the most dangerous neighborhood on the entire West Coast.
Others, people who have moved there more recently and participated in McKinley Hill's courageous neighborhood reclamation campaigns, assert quite forcefully the era of gang-warfare there has been ended, that the district is again quite safe – as surely it seemed to be during the 4 November event pictured above. Not only were there no adverse incidents; many residents applauded the demonstrators. Some even joined the march.
More than a few of the newcomers to the demonstration were Tacomans furious about the latest Wal-Mart outrage: a breathtakingly successful stealth campaign in which Elks Club officers were used as pawns – whether wittingly or not remains undetermined – to seemingly befuddle city officials into approving the mega-store's sneaky invasion of an old and mostly-residential neighborhood miles away from Mc Kinley Hill.
The people of the afflicted district, who had mistakenly believed Tacoma city government still represented them and not the tyrannical One Percent, feel utterly betrayed and are understandably furious. They legitimately fear that Wal-Mart, with its notoriously anti-social customer base and its street-clogging increase in vehicular traffic, will reduce the neighborhood to yet another example of the slummy, trash-littered environments one so often encounters near the perimeters of downscale shopping centers.
Such is capitalism – infinite greed as maximum virtue – its consequences the predictable product of capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, a hearty fuck-you to all the rest of us. Hence the red-and-white placards, “Tacomans United Against Wal-Mart” that -- proudly emblazoned with the “bug” proclaiming a union-made print job – debuted at the McKinley Hill demonstration. Hence too another of the (nearly countless) reasons there's an Occupy Tacoma...with a big sister named Occupy Wall Street.
As always in these post-Leica times, my working cameras are Pentaxes, a pair of reconditioned MXs, the model I used during the late 1970s and with which I am (again) falling in love. The medium is FujiFilm 800. The first and last images were made with the 135mm f/2.5 Takumar, the others with the 100mm f/2.8 SMCP.
LB/15 November 2011
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(Pictures and text published in Outside Agitator's Notebook prior to 1 August 2011 are available via TypePad at lorenbliss.typepad.com.)
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