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| East Village woman, 1967. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2011. Details in “Visual Thinking,” below. (Click on image to see it full size.) |
*****
ONCE AGAIN I find myself apologizing for prolonged but unavoidable absence from this space.
First a computer rebuild that was estimated to take two days required six days instead.
Next was an overnight trip to the hospital for diagnosis of back and chest pains that were (as I suspected) not cardiac in origin but were new symptoms of the steadily deteriorating spinal injuries inflicted on me in 1978 by one of Washington state's obscenely coddled habitual drunks, a man who had been arrested at least 19 times for drunken driving – each charge dismissed -- before he slammed his Godzilla 442 Oldsmobile into the driver's side of my Bambi-sized Honda Civic and condemned me to spend the rest of my life shackled by increasing physical disability. Hence my most recent odyssey from Consulting Nurse to Urgent Care to Emergency Room to hospital bed.
Finally, back home after this latest encounter with medical reality, there was the simple inertia of depression – that and renewed anger at either being on god's enemies list (if indeed there is a god) or at the very least exceptionally accursed by fate and circumstance.
As it says on the bumper sticker: “Old Age: It's Not for the Faint of Heart.”
While that's true of old age anywhere, it's an especially savage truth here in the Ayn Rand plutocracy of the United States of America, where transit riders are denounced as tax parasites, mass transit itself is condemned as welfare and dismantled accordingly, and the most selfishly malicious people on Planet Earth cheer wildly at the death of anyone – elders included – too impoverished to buy the nation's genocidally expensive health insurance.
*****
We Rise Up Angry, But the (Pseudo) Left Bares Anti-Union Fangs
Organized Labor's decision to join the definitively anti-capitalist demonstrations that began in New York City and are now breaking out throughout the United States kindled such joy in my heart it literally brought tears to my eyes.
But my delight quickly turned to anger at the Ruling Class response. Despite a mass-arrest total reportedly approaching 1000 persons in New York City alone, Ruling Class Media continued a near-total blackout on news of this rapidly developing story. As of Sunday morning, the one exception was MSNBC, which began reporting on the Occupy Wall Street protest last week, when the participation of the Transport Workers Union and a number of other labor organizations expanded the demonstration into nationwide resistance.
The best source for updates on this new movement – which is growing with unprecedented speed and which I believe could (and should) give birth to our first nationwide general strike – is the website Occupy Together, linked above.
As if to underscore the intrinsic weakness of organizing via Internet, censorship by certain Internet service providers has already killed this link at least twice – your monitor will show “error 404 nothing found” – which means your only alternative might be to Google “Occupy Together,” with or without quotes.
(The server Yahoo has already admitted suppressing demonstrators' cell-phone transmissions, and I have no doubt the censorship will intensify as the movement gains strength and momentum.)
Meanwhile the earliest details of organized labor's official involvement in the Wall Street protest were reported by In These Times in a piece further disseminated by Common Dreams. As I wrote on the associated thread, “Never have I been so proud to be a union member and a New Yorker – even, as I am, a New Yorker long ago forced into permanent exile by gentrification.”
Alas, the majority of posters on that same thread expressed anti-union hatefulness of the breathtaking intensity we normally encounter only from the Right. Seldom have I seen a more vivid portrait of how the self-proclaimed “progressives” on what I call the “Pseudo Left” serve the Ruling Class as diligently as the Teabagger thugs or the diverse klaverns of the Ku Klux Klan.
As I replied to one such poster:
“The nastily bourgeois anti-unionism evidenced in your post – like the white bourgeois anti-unionism that toxified the U.S. feminist movement after its socialists were purged in the early 1970s – is a large measure of what brought us to Moron Nation and its slave economy.”
“But if we are going to save ourselves from capitalism – and now with the resurrected militance of labor I believe it might actually be possible – you are going to have to make the decision mandated by that anthem first sung by the Harlan County mine workers: 'Which Side Are You On?'"
Later on the same thread I elaborated:
“Whether it was the deliberate product of Machiavellian scheming or an accident of hostile fate, the Vietnam Era schism between the Working Class and the draft-exempt elite was the greatest gift ever handed the always-predatory capitalist aristocracy.”
“Indeed – exactly as evidenced in this thread – the division is at least as strong today as it was when George McGovern ran for president in 1972. It is measured not just in the exchanges here, but in the hatred and contempt with which those privileged enough to have been exempt from the Vietnam Era draft yet view those of us who served, a sneering anti-Working-Class malevolence expressed also in the anti-gunowner fanaticism and the anti-worker bigotry – particularly against loggers, miners, commercial fishers – that are litmus tests for membership in so many 'progressive' organizations...”
“But the joke is on those who continue to revile the Working Class. For the truth is in today's world – save for the coddled few who are part of the One Percent Aristocracy that owns and/or controls everything – we are ALL Working Class now.”
*****
Who Is the Real President – Barack the Betrayer or Obama the Orator?
Regardless of the outcome of the Occupy Together movement – even if it births a new political party (as well it might) – Barack Obama remains President, at least through 2012, which means a shift in his mode of governance as substantial as the one we are now witnessing should probably not be dismissed as “just more political bullshit.”
Nevertheless after the past two years I am literally afraid to indulge myself in any more hopefulness about his presidency. Of course I voted for him, but subsequent events have so obliterated my capability for political optimism, it has plunged again to its pre-2008 depth – the emotional chasm in which it had lain since it was sunk by the assassins who murdered John and Robert Kennedy.
Hence I am profoundly skeptical about the President's apparent conversion from Wall Street facilitator to populist firebrand.
Indeed I am once more convinced of what I said to my newsroom colleagues on the dreadful evening of 5 April 1968 – that “Robert Kennedy was the last politician in America who could have saved us from ourselves.”
Of course I applaud Obama's transformation. Better late than never – though I cannot but wonder if the President's new combativeness is yet another example of his genuinely Machiavellian flair for deceptive eloquence: in this case the utterance of compelling words albeit with the sure knowledge Republican obstructionism guarantees their message – and thus any threat to the Wall Street aristocrats who gave Obama nearly $16 million in 2008 – will come to nothing.
If this analysis is correct – if Obama seems to have turned against his original Ruling Class backers merely because it is politically expedient theater, if he and his financiers know his apparent about-face threatens no one save those of us it might dupe into voting for him in 2012 – we're once again being set up to be victimized by the Big Lies of “hope” and “change we can believe in.”
Nevertheless I hope – in fact I hope desperately, even prayerfully – my skepticism is mistaken, not the least because Obama the Orator is the Obama for whom I voted.
But after Barack the Betrayer's Wall Street-serving treachery in the critical matters of health care reform, Employee Free Choice and constitutional restoration, only a dullard would fail to ask “which Obama is the real President?”
And if the Obama we see today is indeed the real President, where the hell was he from 2009 until now?
The aforementioned financial data not withstanding, an African-American with whom I happened to converse recently astutely suspects the president was not only obstructed by his obvious foes – the racist Republicans and their Teabagger storm troopers (whose slogan might as well be “Keep the White House White”) – but was also sandbagged by closet racists in his own party and even in his own cabinet.
When I consider my acquaintance's hypothesis in the context of my own experience in the Civil Rights Movement – when I reflect on the inexplicable (but often carefully closeted) intensity of anti-black hatred not just in the South but throughout the United States – I begin to think he might be onto something.
And then I remember what another black man said to me a few weeks ago: that the average white's reaction to Obama is “see we gave them a chance and look how they fucked it up” – the N-word implicit in the subtle but telling twist of emphasis given the third-person pronouns.
Admittedly I have no idea how representative of African-American opinion my acquaintances' comments might be. But I have heard (way too many) whites uttering the “see we gave them a chance” syllogism, and I have also noted – with considerable trepidation – the looming backlash it implicitly threatens.
As to which is the real President – the Betrayer or the Orator – I can only speculate: a twenty-dollar word for guess.
Meanwhile George Packer of The New Yorker sums up the resultant political situation as succinctly as anything I've seen, this in a 9 September commentary equally valuable for its internal links.
“...Obama’s best hope will lie with the public. Do Americans still have enough faith in him, and in government, to give the President a second shot at reviving the economy? I’m not at all sure.”
In other words it's anybody's guess what's happening.
Though all Obama need do to clear up the confusion is openly side with the Occupy Together movement – which would also make amends for his failure to back labor in the Midwestern collective-bargaining fight.
*****
Notes on the Undeniable Reality of American Theocracy
Having too many times experienced the characteristic malice of religious fanatics, I am admittedly terrified by our creeping (and sometimes galloping) theocracy – the meticulously engineered, carefully imposed, insidiously clever thrust toward the ultimate tyranny of “one nation under God.”
Just as the Republicans openly cheer the extermination of people who are unemployed or otherwise chronically impoverished (though in the United States we murder by abandonment and neglect rather than in death camps of the sort that characterized Nazi Germany), the GOP also passionately embraces violent religious fanatics.
Because I am often mistaken for Jewish – especially when my native New York City accent was more evident than it is at present and my hair and beard, now mostly gray, were their original coal-black – I have witnessed firsthand the death's-head visage of Moron Nation's hatred of Jews.
Born in 1940, when circumcision was standard medical procedure regardless of one's ethnicity, I and a substantial number of my age-group peers were left uncircumcised in response to widespread terror the Republicans would win that year's elections and turn the nation officially fascist.
In 1943, when I was three-and-a-half, the war effort moved my family from the City to Jacksonville, Florida, where a gang of Southern boys a couple of years older than I but too ignorant to pull down my pants mistook me for a Jew and demonstrated their prowess as little Nazis and future Ku Klux Klansmen by holding me upside-down and burying my head in a playground sandbox.
A five-year-old girl named Mary Alice Shotwell – to whom my eternal thanks – stormed boldly to my rescue. Shrieking in fury, she pounded my would-be executioners with her fists until they fled.
I'm not sure what prompted her action or gave her the requisite courage – she was outnumbered at least four to one – but there's no doubt she saved my life. Perhaps she was motivated by the fact her parents were my father's friends – it seems to me Mary Alice's dad was a naval officer who worked with my father on matters of supply and logistics – or perhaps she had merely chosen me as a favored companion. I simply don't recall. In any case she quickly became my first true friend, though we were too-soon parted by the era's characteristic sudden changes of address for our friendship to stand any real test of time.
Now as I write this I wonder what became of her. I remember Mary Alice as slightly taller than I, a slender green-eyed blonde with long sun-bleached hair and softly tanned skin, a girl who always seemed to smell of Floridian summer: honeysuckle and salt air. I suspect in adulthood she was heartbreakingly beautiful – not the plastic tit-heavy Barbie Doll look so beloved of Moron Nation but real-woman beauty: a tall and slender danseuse, a young Veruschka as she might have been painted by Botticelli, proud of her femaleness and utterly confident of her relevance.
But I digress: friendship and – yes – a child's first love is so much more comfortable (and comforting) to write about than the anti-Jewish bigotry I've encountered nearly everywhere in the United States, even amongst my own maternal relatives, their prejudice especially evident in my mother's predictably venomous reaction to my several Jewish girlfriends.
Surprisingly, the same intensity of hatefulness seemed most common – even by comparison to the South – in Washington state, where the managing editors of daily newspapers in widely separate coastal cities rejected my job applications with nearly identical words: “we don't like your kind here...go back to New York City where you belong.” It is especially toxic in Seattle, the first and only place I have ever heard my birthplace openly referred to as “Jew York.”
But I have encountered many other expressions of religious bigotry too. I was in several fist-fights with the Protestants who attacked me – typically on Knoxville Transit Lines buses – merely because I attended a parochial school during the first half of the not-so-nifty '50s and was thus assumed to be Catholic. I was repeatedly harassed as a “pagan” and/or “devil worshiper” in the Everson/Nooksack area of rural Washington state c. 1987-1992 because I planted pumpkins and squash in with my corn, lived with two very large black dogs and never attended church. And I truly cannot count the number of such incidents that came to my attention during my years in the working press.
Hence we are dangerously foolish when we fail to list religious hatreds amongst the defining characteristics of the United States. Though such hatreds are now kept in check, they obviously await the opportunity to explode here just as long-checked ethnic hatreds exploded to destroy the former Yugoslavia.
Which is precisely why our national thrust toward theocracy is so terrifying: it institutionalizes religious hatred in exactly the same way Nazi Germany institutionalized hatred of Jews and Islamic governance institutionalizes hatred of all non-Islamic religions.
The frightening evidence our society is already imprisoned by theocracy goes far beyond the renewed legislative warfare against women and sexuality. Indeed the most glaring example I've yet encountered is the god-is-on-our-side preachment by Rear Admiral Margaret G. Kibben, the U.S. Navy chaplain who intoned it as part of an awkwardly long prayer to open and close President Obama's recent Medal of Honor presentation to Marine Sergeant Dakota L. Meyer:
“Almighty God...in accordance with your divine guidance, our founders established a nation rooted in the ideals of courage and virtue...we now yield to your direction for this country...”
Note not just the singularly Christian label for the deity, but the thinly disguised assertion the United States and its leaders are god's representatives on Earth.
As if to eliminate any lingering doubts about theocratic intent, Kibben closed the ceremony 18 minutes later by proclaiming it too of divine origin:
“God made this ceremony serve as a reminder of the responsibility that comes with receiving the grace gift of freedom.”
If, as it seems, the so-called War on Terror has already reshaped the United States into a garrison of born-again Crusaders, the rebirth of the Inquisition cannot be far behind. And that is exactly what the Christian fanatics intend.
*****
Visual Thinking: Poignant Hope in a Perilous Time
Long ago and far away amidst a Revolution in Consciousness that now takes place only in memory, during a pre-terminal-climate-change April with the chilly remnants of winter still resisting the warming gestures of spring, some of the youth of Manhattan's Lower East Side decided to clean up their local environment.
It was 1967. The clean-up's organizational work done by the Jade Companions of the Flower Dance – the local equivalent of a neighborhood association – and it soon led to a scheduled event called a Sweep-In: hundreds of young men and women hauling away tons of trash in a gesture they hoped would lead to solidarity between the bohemian community (which was already calling itself “the East Village”) and the traditional residents of Alphabet City – Avenues A,B,C,D – the 19th Century tenements of which then housed people who were mostly either Puerto Rican or immigrants from Eastern Europe.
The woman in this portrait was taking a break after spending most of the day helping clear a vacant lot of litter. I no longer have her name – those notes (like so much else in my life) were destroyed in the 1983 fire – but I see her now as an icon of the blessed hope that was once ours, a hope that may again be aborning in the Occupy Together movement.
I don't remember the camera – probably a VT Canon, maybe a Pentax H1A, whether the rangefinder or the SLR obviously (by the slight distortion of her facial features) mounted with a wide-angle lens – but there's no question the film is Tri-X, and the approximate date tells me it was developed in Diafine at 1200.
May we again have cause for such optimism as shows in this young woman's gentle smile.
LB/2 October 2011
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