Lose Right to Know, Lose All Hope of Liberty and Justice

“JERM/I Hate Whithe People!” Another addition to my extended essay on graffiti, I photographed this Tacoma scene in early 2008, then rediscovered it just two days ago while exploring “Old Data,” a hard-drive full of material a helpful Nurd acquaintance was kind enough to salvage from the ruins of a computer crash later that same year. Kodacolor 800, Pentax MX with 28mm f/2.8 SMCP-M, exposure not recorded; posterization by Gimp Image Editor. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2013. (Click on image to view it full size.)

*

 

LIBERTY DEMANDS THE free and unfettered exchange of information, a truth most of us recognize so instinctively we seldom consider it in detail. Though freedom of information is amongst the most simple of principles, it is also one of the most profound, for without it, there cannot be informed discussion and debate, and without such exchanges of ideas, there can be neither democratic process nor justice. Therefore to measure whether liberty in the United States is real or bogus, we need only ask ourselves how easy – or difficult – it is for us to stay informed about the people and events that determine whether we live in relative comfort or in the fear and wretchedness that increasingly defines USian reality for all save the privileged One Percent. Remember too this standard is applicable to every aspect of our lives – including those socioeconomic matters over which we as workers are now, by capitalism's final maturation into Ayn Rand fascism, prohibited from exerting any influence at all. But what we are focusing on today is not economics per se; it is the prerequisite of an informed public to the achievement and maintenance of what we label “democracy.” And since we already know there is no longer any freedom of information at the federal level – witness President Obama's imposition of the total-surveillance state and his unprecedented war on whistleblowers and the working press – we are looking instead at parallel examples from other USian realms. 

***

 

Until 2009, when I received my last newspaper paycheck, I nearly always had the advantage of a ringside seat in the local and state arenas of politics and government, and even when I was not officially a member of the working press, my reputation gave me comparable access. I had a good long run with the media world's gift of super-citizenship: I became a professional journalist in November 1956, the beginning of the last third of my 16th year, when The Grand Rapids Herald hired me as both a copy-boy and a sports stringer, and its American Newspaper Guild local issued me my first union card, two milestones in which I took enormous pride. For most of the decades thereafter, staying informed was generally no more difficult than observing events and interviewing the participants. The techniques are essentially the same whether you're covering sports or reporting on public affairs. I debuted at the latter in 1958, the initial fulfillment of one of the goals that had been mine since my decision at age 14 to become what in those days was called a newsman. My first political story was a detailed report on that year's local elections, the facts gathered during an all-nighter in the vote-counting room at the Knox County Courthouse, an assignment that produced a half-dozen double-spaced typewritten takes for The Fountain Citizen, a prosperous weekly that served a sprawling, relatively populous but unincorporated suburb immediately north of Knoxville. It took me another five years, three of which were consumed by a Regular Army enlistment, to achieve my paramount goal – that is, to break into investigative reporting. My debut was published by The Oak Ridger in 1963 – Managing Editor Dick Smyser had assigned me to ferret out the facts behind a flare-up of gun violence in the East Tennessee coal fields – and I quickly learned that, just as I had imagined, here was journalism at its most demanding, particularly when you had to work under-cover or organize clandestine meetings in out-of-the-way locales to protect your sources. But even amidst my scariest and most challenging investigation, for The Jersey Journal in 1970 – a double-barreled exposé of the heroin-addiction epidemic inflicted on the United States by the Vietnam War and the federal government's desperate efforts to keep it secret – I never thought much about my right to know or my readers' right to learn the truth as best as I could report it. Like most of my colleagues, I merely took those rights for granted.

In other words, shielded as I was by my press card, I was pampered, probably blinded and perhaps even spoiled rotten by what I now know was, just as I said above, super-citizenship: an ivory-tower view of USian governance. As I am finding out in the Average-Joe status to which I have at last been reduced by official (albeit only partial) retirement, I have no de facto right to know anything, despite de jure assurances to the contrary. Public disclosure and transparency laws are thus meaningless – unless of course you can afford lawyers to enforce compliance. But I lack the requisite wealth, which means the only real right I have is to badger politicians and bureaucrats and other sorts of officials with emails and telephone calls they in turn are free to ignore at will. Unlike a daily or even weekly newspaper, this blog, with its national and international readership that numbers only in the upper hundreds, is insufficiently influential to compel even the basic courtesy of “no comment” responses. And “compel” is the appropriate verb: under the new paradigm of USian governance – unlimited profit and absolute power for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for all the rest of us – the politicians and bureaucrats serve only the One Percent, which means they now respond to any of us in the 99 Percent only if and when they are forced to do so. Thus their responses are either brazen lies (Obama's “change we can believe in”), Ayn Rand sneering (Romney's “47 percent who...believe that government has a responsibility to care for them”) or unapologetic violence, relentless onslaughts with truncheons, pepper gas and rubber bullets by the legions of federally militarized police that, in obedience to orders  from the White House and the Department of Homeland Security, mercilessly crushed the Occupy Movement. I doubt I need point out the brutality of the assaults indicates the authorities' intent was to forever suppress any further USian capability of organized dissent – much as Tsar Nicholas II sought to do on the original Bloody Sunday,  8 January 1905.

Obviously – a bitter lesson learned too late – I should have paid more attention to all those angry 99 Percenters who, particularly after 22 November 1963, repeatedly warned me that if you're an Average Joe or an Average Lisa, the politicians just tell you to fuck off. Stupidly, I always dismissed such protestations as hyperbole born of willful ignorance – mostly refusal to learn how the system works. But now, in official retirement, I'm an Average Joe myself. I'm the one who's being told to fuck off – though never in such honest words of course – and now I see it was I who did not know the system. 

Which is all by way of preface to explaining why the controversial story I promised last week remains unreported. The politicians and their collaborators in a certain local non-governmental organization apparently know I sense incipient class-betrayal in their otherwise inexplicable refusal to discuss a proposal for mandatory paid sick leave that, were it to become law, would dramatically improve the quality of life for every woman, man and child within the Tacoma city limits. Now – never mind my long and award-winning history in local journalism – they won't answer my emails or telephone calls about the seemingly endless delays that, probably just as planned, are quietly drowning the proposal in a sea of forgetfulness. This non-response is a new development – a new experience for me, too – though it may also be retaliation for my revelations of the hatefulness behind the local war on transit.  Whatever, it portends the doom of the sick-leave proposal itself, which is a direct challenge to the anti-worker principles of Ayn Rand governance. Thus we can confidently assume it won't ever be formalized as a city ordinance, much less enacted. In turn this means the main question facing the NGO leaders is how to present their failure as success, while the politicians have to calculate how to disguise their obedient service to the One Percent as democracy in action. 

Such is life in this Pacific Northwest seaport city of 200,000 people, where – despite the notorious anti-transit-user bigotry of the voters and elected officials – the local bus system may yet survive another year.  Meanwhile, the non-response to my inquiries tells me I'm now just like every other USian citizen who is not part of the Ruling Class, which means I'm viewed by the capitalists and their politicians and bureaucrats as an enemy of the(ir) (e)state. 

*****

Apropos the intimate relationship between censorship and injustice, I do not understand why so many USian feminists steadfastly refuse to acknowledge the terrible and escalating danger of Christian theocracy in the United States. It is a definitively subversive threat that is lavishly funded by the One Percent. Its menace is credibly documented, including in several links below. Its rationale – that theocracy is most profitable means of achieving a slave-minded workforce – is well known. It's innate malevolence – particularly to women – is frighteningly portrayed in The Handmaid's Tale, a superb novel by Margaret Atwood that is arguably the feminist equivalent of George Orwell's 1984. In the real world, theocracy's Skinner-box prototype is the USian South, where the Ku Klux Klan functioned as the Christian equivalent of the Islamic “morality police” – precisely the reason the Klan is colloquially known as “the Saturday Night Men's Bible Study Class.” Theocracy's financial efficiency is proven there too: note the region's conditioned hostility to labor unions, its viciously substandard pay scales and its abysmal levels of educational achievement. Indeed, corporate executives rule the southern workplace by what amounts to divine right; throughout the South, to defy your boss is literally to defy god almighty. The attendant fear of eternal damnation – subconsciously the most terrifying prospect ever inflicted on the human mind – silences any who might demand living wages. It also dumbs down all but the most scholarship-oriented youths, who seem to require religious dispensation or other forms of protection by the aristocracy merely to advance beyond the level of high-school pregnancy. And now, with the theocratic South's Christian misogyny metastasizing throughout the United States, women in fully 87 percent of the nation's counties are already denied local access to abortion.  Then why – with the basic right of women to control their very selfhood at such grave risk – do so many USian feminists aid and abet the imposition of theocracy by refusing to speak out against it? 

My guess is these feminists' suppression of their own voices is mandated by a combination of factors. One is the extent to which the USian feminist movement has been captured by the Democratic Party, itself an eager albeit far less publicized participant in the theocratic blitzkrieg, for which again see below. A second factor is so-called political “correctness.” To acknowledge the murderous threat of Christian theocracy is to confront the blood-drenched, anti-woman, anti-Nature horror that is Abrahamic theocracy in general, which includes the Hebrew theocracies of the Old Testament era, the new Judaic theocracy that is now overtaking Israel, the 1700-year reign of Christian theocracy in Roman and post-Roman Europe, and the Islamic theocracy that has ruled the Middle East since the late 600s. But the USian Left is not only in ignorant denial of the relevant history; it cannot abide any admission the aircraft-hijackers of 9/11 – regardless of what else might have been done to intensify the Reichstag-Fire impact of their atrocities – clearly believed they were heroes in the resumption of Islam's 1400-year war against Western Civilization. Were USia's self-proclaimed Leftists to admit the reality of that war, which is unequivocally proven by the very history they reject as irrelevant, they would be forced to set aside their (patently false) conception of Islamic terrorists as “liberation fighters.” Instead the terrorists would be recognized as what they are – murderous religious fanatics, the equivalent of Ku Klux Klansmen whose fanaticism is so extreme, it has prompted them to adopt suicide tactics. Hence, if USian feminism is to maintain its alliance with other Left-minded groups, many feminists seem to feel they have no alternative but to say nothing about theocratic encroachment – no matter the very specific hazard all forms of Abrahamic theocracy present to women's intellectual, sexual and reproductive freedoms. A third factor in this ongoing campaign of self-censorship is probably the arrogant indifference of many USian feminists toward religion in general, which they dismiss as irrelevant superstition – never mind that by their dismissal, they blind themselves to what innumerable polls prove remains the primary ideological force in USian life. In this context, it is relevant to note that author Atwood is a Canadian and therefore (presumably) free of the pressures for lockstep ideological conformity that characterize the entire USian political spectrum. All that said, because my own access to feminist perspectives is clearly limited by my gender, I yearn for someone with the honesty and courage of a Joreen Freeman  to address just why it is so many USian feminists are so loathe to publicly denounce the near-limitless peril the encroachment of theocracy imposes on women – and on all the rest of us as well. Thus my response to “Why the Relentless Assault on Abortion Rights in the U.S.?,” a glib but profoundly misleading piece  by the journalist and historian Ruth Rosen:

Why the relentless assault on women's sexual freedom in the United States? Unfortunately Ms. Rosen neither states the question correctly nor answers it truthfully. The answer, of course, is the One Percent has decided zero-tolerance Christian theocracy is the most profitable (and therefore most expeditious) way of controlling the 99 Percent – all the rest of us. And the vital first step in imposing Abrahamic theocracy of any kind – Christian, Islamic, Jewish – is the re-enslavement of women. (As for why women are the specific prime target, note the psychological and semiotic messages implicit in the fact that – whenever Abrahamic orthodoxy is rejected or transcended – Liberty is always portrayed as female.)

 

Those who doubt the theocratic threat are urged to visit the website Theocracy Watch, which – due to its lockstep allegiance to the Democratic Party, unfortunately suppresses the under-publicized involvement of leading Democrats, among them Hillary Clinton and President Barack Obama, in the ever-escalating push toward theocracy. (Jeff Sharlet reveals how Clinton “fights side-by-side with [Sen. Sam] Brownback and others for legislation dedicated less to overturning the wall between church and state than to tunneling beneath it.” See The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, p. 275.) Meanwhile Obama is forever willing to surrender women's reproductive rights  even as he shows his true theocratic colors  by radically expanding President George Bush's program of “faith-based initiatives,” thereby providing federal funds to religious social-service agencies that routinely discriminate on the basis of belief. Obama's betrayals, like Clinton's, are facilitated by Democrat hypocrisy – the Democrats' reflexive, often fanatical support of policies they would fiercely oppose if advocated or imposed by Republicans.

 

Two other sources are also especially useful in tracking the theocratic threat. These are Americans United for Separation of Church and State  and Merger Watch. The activities of the former, chiefly lawsuits against the more blatant incursions of Christian theocracy, are well known. The latter group, which is documenting the Roman Catholic Church's newest assault against women's rights – the malevolently cunning tactic of buying up health care organizations and terminating women's sexual freedom by imposing the church's zero-tolerance prohibitions – has mostly been ignored by so-called "mainstream media." Obviously the One Percent does not want women recognizing and mustering against the church's new, market-based approach to re-imposing total misogyny. Nevertheless, women in the state of Washington, where the church already owns and/or controls at least half of all health-care providers, have begun to react. 
 

In any case, as long as Democratic apologists and other clandestine defenders of Abrahamic misogyny continue to deliberately suppress information about the real nature of the theocratic threat, we all remain at huge and terrible risk – though none more so than women.

 

*****

 

Oh how I miss the complimentary tickets that came with being a member of the working press. Nevertheless, thanks to the financial beneficence of a dear friend, earlier this week I was able to watch a documentary film entitled The War on Whistleblowers: Free Press and the National Security State. Thought-provoking and informative, I recommend it to anyone who can find a way to see it, which may be difficult, as too many major theaters seem loathe to screen it. But here in Tacoma, the film's showing was facilitated by the bravery of the people who own and manage The Grand Cinema, a feisty independent movie-house that dares feature art films in a notably nyekulturniy town and, best of all, is only a short walk from my dwelling-place. But the film is also a bit disappointing. An unsparing report of military personnel slain, maimed or endangered in the name of profit and lives ruined by government oppression, it nevertheless ends on a janglingly inappropriate upbeat note, as if Director Robert Greenwald believes we've all been so brainwashed by the cult of positive thinking – picture a Smiley Face atop a mound of corpses (“Have a Happy Day”) – even bad news needs be given a Walt Disney ending to make it palatable to the USian consciousness. Though in fairness to Greenwald, I should point out the Whistleblowers footage was already in the can when the worst possible news broke – that here in the United States of George-Bush-cum-Barack-Obama and the One Party of Two Names,  there is no longer either a free press nor even much of a pretense of liberty. Our last remaining illusions of freedom have been dispelled by Edward Snowden's courageous disclosures of the relentlessly totalitarian nature of the USian state security apparatus, which is obviously aimed more at us, the increasingly alienated 99 Percent, than it is intended to counter any threat from abroad: once again, welcome to the Fourth Reich. Though now we know just how awful things truly are, there's a (tiny) chance we might begin to formulate adequate strategy and tactics of resistance. 

But the reflexive denial of our ever-more-hopeless circumstances continues unabated. During the apres-flick discussion, somebody predictably quoted the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1964 statement that “the arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Alas, my admiration for the martyred King does not change the fact his observation, which has a long and illustrious genealogy dating at least back to 1810,  is nevertheless a blatant falsehood. The hideous truth of human history – at least human history since the fall of Knossos marked the ultimate triumph of patriarchy – is that justice, which cannot be achieved without liberty, is but a willow-the-wisp, a haunting, ephemeral, poignantly brief glimmer of conceptual light amidst a seemingly endless midnight of savagery. Yes, there have been moments of liberty, of justice as defined by democratic and quasi-democratic states, but the associated freedoms were mostly limited to a chosen few and in every case, including our own, were eventually swept away by the tides of tyranny that characterize the human norm. Thus our species' scant few attempts at building just societies are dwarfed by seeming endless millennia of despotism. Don't take my word for it; measure it yourselves: the centuries of oppression predominate by a ratio of at least 20 to one. And now – as proven by the ever-intensifying intrusion of Obama's zero-tolerance surveillance state – the darkness of injustice and enslavement is descending once again, quite possibly to imprison us until our species' self-imposed extinction marks the end of time itself. And there is scant hope for rescue or amelioration. Though the arc of the universe is indeed long – a span we can now measure by the same technologies that guarantee our enslavement – it bends not toward justice but toward ever-more-total subjugation. 

LB/26-28 July 2013 

-30-