Concern and Community in a Time of Growing Despair

IF YOU'RE OLD or disabled and no longer exploitable for profit and you are trying to survive in the industrial world's most deliberately cruel nation,  you are daily forced to endure the kind of constant anxiety that may eventually kill you or drive you to suicide. The government is now every bit as much your enemy as the fat-cat bosses were before you were tossed off the job, and that's because those same greedy bastards who were always trying to make you work more hours for less pay have bought off all the politicians and most of the upper-level bureaucrats as well. As a result the constitution you once trusted (and if you are male probably swore to defend with your life) has been nullified and subverted to the point it has become nothing more than the proverbial toilet paper upon which the One Percent routinely wipes its metaphorical ass. And it no longer matters whether their wholly-owned politicians are openly sadistic Republicans like Alan Simpson, who sneeringly described Social Security-dependent elders as “greedy geezers,” or serpent-tongued Democrats like this president who so often shape-shifts from Obama the Orator to Barack the Betrayer and then back again whenever his (always) Machiavellian agenda demands some new deception.
 

As I have said before and will continue saying until I die, it is obvious the Betrayer's intent and for that matter the intent of all today's elected (i.e. bought-and-paid-for) politicians is to reduce younger people to slavery and exterminate those of us who are now dangerous subversives merely because we have lived long enough to remember the better times Ayn Rand capitalism has now stolen from us forever.

 

Meanwhile the Betrayer's purpose has become obvious enough we can now name it with certainty: he intends to go into history as Wall Street's most faithful and reliably obedient servant ever and thereby ensure he and his descendants live the same pampered lives as the wealthiest aristocrats – never mind the color line will never allow the president and his family entry into the vindictively racist, adamantly all-white aristocracy itself. He knows – and you have to give him a kind of sleazoid credit for the morally imbecilic cunning with which he acts upon this knowledge – exactly who rules the global plantation into which our ever-more-enslaved and desperate planet is being transformed, and he will do anything in his imperial power to serve the Ruling Class. He is the perfect butler, the perfect overseer, the perfect factotum. He does not give so much as a Marie Antoinette damn if We the People are at last awakening to the fact he's the most dishonest U.S. president ever. If we dare resist, he will crush us at home as surely as he now crushes his enemies abroad.

 

That context – the ugly truth the genocidal war against Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid is now being led by the man so many of us hoped would protect us – was deliberately submerged by the Josef Goebbels clones who manage Ruling Class Media, and with the One Percent cleverly pointing its Romney-Ryan assault weapon at our heads, our fears thus enabled the Betrayer to lie his way into a second term. (I admit I voted for him twice, first time by choice, because I believed his “change we can believe in” Big Lies – that he supported single-payer/public-option health care, would enact Employee Free Choice and restore our constitutional rights – second time because Romney/Ryan terrified me into not voting my default preference, the Socialist Workers Party.) But whether it was acknowledged or not, the threat was always there Obama would do again what he had done in his first term and prove himself to be, behind his his Afro-Democrat disguise and his mastery of rhetoric, another Richard Milhous Nixon, at last fulfilling the Nixonian dream of being the man who struck the final blow against the constitutional democracy the One Percent has despised since the days of the Banker's Plot, when the Wall Street aristocrats collaborated with Nazi Germany in a (failed) attempt to topple President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. But Barack the Betrayer has in fact done much worse: were there a medal entitled “Most Obedient Servant of Wall Street,” Obama would have already won it.

 

Yet amidst all this misery and anxiety and wretchedness and sense of impending doom in a realm so transformed by capitalism into fascism it now bears only the most superficial resemblance to the nation in which I was born, the human spirit yet prevails in myriad ways. It reminds me of Lao Tzu's description of Tao as translated by Richard Wilhelm – “you look for it and you see nothing special; you act according to it and you find no end” – and that is what the above photographs are really about. I am blessed to live in a senior housing project that has evolved into a genuine community, thereby of course disproving all the Ruling Class lies claiming subsidized housing breeds alienation and irresponsibility, and when I limped outside today to hobble to a bus stop on a first-of-the-month errand, about 15 of my neighbors were gathered in the paved courtyard. They were seated on outdoor chairs and at outdoor tables, a jolly circle in the afternoon sun, and I was greeted by their smiles and friendly salutations and reminded again of how last summer maybe a dozen of us – even some who are severely disabled – had volunteered to paint the rusting steel bars of the courtyard fence. I spent hours grinding off the rust spots with an electric sander, then near the end of the workday grabbed a Pentax MX and a pair of SMCP-M lenses (a 28mm and a 100mm, each an f/2.8) and photographed a few of the painters as they finished the job. If our species is to survive what is to come – what indeed is already upon us – it will only be by such small local but definitively human efforts. The film is Fujicolor 400. All photographs by Loren Bliss copyright 2013. (Click on image to view it full size.)

 

LB/2 May 2013

 

-30-