Not Dead (Yet); Just Dismal December'd to Sullen Silence

AS I SAID in my last post, for lower-income people in the United States and its global empire, December is by far “the cruelest month.” 

As so often is the case, the political is also the personal. Two-thirds of every December is stolen from me by indignities imposed on the poor to rub our noses in the metaphorical dung-heap of our alleged “worthlessness,” the imaginary condition for which we are ever-more-forcefully condemned. 

First there is the paperwork required to annually re-certify my Medicare subsidies and food assistance: 30 pages of forms and documents including birth certificate, photographic identification and military records demanded by the Washington State Department  of Social and Health Services. The birth certificate,  driving license and discharge papers are to prove my identity has not somehow magically changed since last year; the remainder of the documentation is to verify I remain enough economically wretched to qualify for assistance – as if there were any possibility the U.S. economy might ever again improve to the point a person of my age and skills could find a job. 

Completing all this mandatory tedium invariably takes up most of an entire week. I have no clerical skills; I am a writer and editor – not somebody's secretary or clerk-typist. I am also dyslexic, and my penchant for typing errors – especially transpositions of vital numbers – is profoundly vexing. The chore is beyond drudgery, so oppressive it leaves me emotionally drained.

Then of course there is the grand climax. I arise at 5 the next morning so I can be at the welfare bureau no later than 7, ensuring I'll be at or near the head of the line when its doors open at 8 a.m. That way – assuming my papers are in order – I'm sure to be interviewed sometime the same day. (It's really an interrogation, though in deference to my age the caseworkers are always scrupulously polite.) 

 

While typically I walk with a cane, I always borrow a walker from a neighbor for my annual welfare odyssey. The walker is necessary to provide me with a place to sit while I wait for the office to be opened. I cannot sit on the floor because, once down, I am too crippled to get back to my feet without a painful struggle. 

Meanwhile gnawing at the edges of my consciousness is the huge anxiety – sheer terror, actually – the whole process invariably evokes. Will I be thrown off the Medicare subsidies? Will my food assistance be slashed – or eliminated entirely? 

Next after the annual welfare ordeal comes the physical labor of preparing my apartment for the quarterly premises inspection, the invasive procedure by which we lower-income elderly and disabled people who live in government housing are reminded – four times each year – of the extent to which we truly are regarded as worthless bums, irresponsible if not actually criminal. 

The necessary house-cleaning requires hours of bending and stooping, which for me is painful, often excruciatingly so. This in turn forces me to spread the chore out over six or seven days – the loss of another full week.The inspection itself is a proverbial snap, hardly more than a formality, but were I to leave my apartment in its usual messy condition, it would surely be otherwise. 

And even after I pass the inspection, the discomfort is far from over: recovering from the cleanup-induced back pain usually takes another three to five days, occasionally as long as a full week, once (after I badly wrenched my back cleaning the toilet), an entire month.

 

People, especially women, sometimes ask me why I don't clean as I go, so getting ready for the inspection is (presumably) less work. 

The answer is the clean-as-I-go approach merely multiplies the bending and stooping. Every surface in my kitchen is off-white – not just the stove-top and counter-tops (which I do clean daily), but all other vertical and horizontal surfaces as well: cabinets, stove, refrigerator and floors. All of these need regular cleaning. But the associated pain limits me to cleaning them only just before inspections. 

That's because I'm literally a cripple, hobbled by a bad knee and a complex back problem – multiple damaged vertebra – with both afflictions radically worsened by osteoarthritis. 

Each is the legacy of an injury. A hard fall in 1977 – I slid off a rainslick loading ramp while trying to heft an antique ice-box into a moving-van – required surgical removal of all the cartilage from my right knee. The back injury was inflicted in 1978 by one of the millions of defiantly habitual drunken drivers who characterize both the gasoline-powered moral imbecility of the United States and the desperate need of its peoples for constant intoxication to dull the anguish of their empty lives. 

My vehicular assailant had been arrested for drunken driving 19 times before he careened out of control on a busy throughfare and skidded across four lanes of traffic to broadside me in a shopping-center driveway. He was typical of the maliciously sociopathic alcoholics who routinely haunt – and hunt – U.S. streets and roads: it was only mid-afternoon, but already he was dead drunk. Witnesses said he lost control of his car because he was speeding on rainslick pavement, trying to drive and beat his wife at the same time. 

Verily, the collision itself was Godzilla versus Bambi: his 442 Oldsmobile, my (brand new) Honda Civic. The cops said it was a miracle I wasn't killed. Given the resultant disabilities, I find the miracle dubious at best.

Thinking about how painful it is to clean my apartment, it came to me this morning the kitchen color scheme in these apartments is truly cunning, obviously intended to do exactly what it does: show even the smallest speck of dirt. Thereby it forces us to keep it clean – or suffer the obvious lack of cleanliness that would facilitate eviction. It's another proof of the lower-income-seniors-are-irresponsible-bums paradigm that governs public housing. 

The same bigotry denies us gas cooking. For me – because I was never before reduced to cooking on an electric range, and because after eight years of living here it is obvious I will never learn how – denial of gas cooking means most of my food is burned on the outside and raw on the inside. 

Why don't I move? Income, pure and simple: these are the only sorts of accommodations I am allowed.

Then this year was added a new affliction: the huge anxiety evoked by a dying computer.

Thanks entirely to the generosity of my former wife and present-day dear friend Adrienne, that problem has been resolved, though I have yet to install the new machine. I remain wary because – at least in my life – all such processes are haunted by that prick Murphy and his relentless law: anything that can go wrong invariably will. 

But I'll (presumably) return, if not later this year, then very early in 2013 – especially now that Democrat Candidate Obama the Orator is shape-shifting back into Republican President Barack the Betrayer, his closeted GOPorker hostility toward lower-income people again becoming obvious in the ongoing “fiscal cliff” debate. 

Thus another of my Dismal Decembers: with Christmas only a week away, I can scarcely muster sufficient enthusiasm to snarl “bah, humbug.”

LB/18 December 2012

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Xmas Greetings: Why December Is 'the Cruelest Month'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

Their tactics are now obvious. 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Goddess save us, every one.

LB/1 December 2012

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How Hate-Mongering Wrecked an Urban Transit System

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LB/24 November 2012

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Warren, Norma Miedema and the Return of the Goddess

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

*****

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

*****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LB/10-12 November 2012

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