Again the Stench of Political Bullshit Proves Inescapable

USian object d'art, 2013. Originally this was to have been one of three illustrations to an essay on the role of old equipment in the evolution of new photographic methodology and aesthetics, but an unwelcome political interruption delayed that project for another week. Rolleicord III, Kodak TMax100 in D-76. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2013. (Click on image to view it full size.)

 

A CHAIN LETTER touting a constitutional convention was emailed me by a well-meaning Leftist relative and compelled an immediate answer, forcing me to spend the entire afternoon sifting through the reeking contents of the political Dumpster I am trying desperately to abandon. 

The above image – new work with the old Rolleicord – is thus eerily appropriate to what follows. But it nevertheless infuriates me how the useless-yet-still-reflexive ethics of my murdered journalism career again triumphed over aesthetics that are very much alive, forcing me to set aside a half-finished essay about photography, a piece that was far more emotionally true than anything political could ever be now that any “change we can believe in” has been proven the biggest Big Lie in USian history. 

Hence instead of the anticipated pleasure of an afternoon of psychological healing, there was its exact opposite: a seven-hour submersion in the depressing methodology of investigative reporting culminating in yet another encounter with the utter hopelessness that should by now be the political default position of any genuinely thoughtful USian citizen.

The chain letter that ruined my afternoon is entitled “35 States So Far” and is reproduced here: 

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10022170750

 

What follows is the note by which I replied to my relative and everyone else on the chain letter's mailing list. (Links are not embedded because my email system does not allow it, and because I was unwilling to spend the time revising the text to accommodate embedding.) 

Though in my entire journalism career I wrote or edited no more than a half-dozen reports about the various calls for a constitutional convention, the common theme all these stories shared was how – given the savagely reactionary majority that rules the old Confederacy and nearly all the inland states –such an event would undoubtedly mean total nullification of the Bill of Rights. Unions, abortion, contraception, marriage equality, academic freedom and religious liberty would all be swept away in the name of a new nation under god, the United Christian States of America. Those of us who refused to bow to the theocratic sword would be punished – tortured and slain – as demanded by Biblical law. 

Meanwhile the so-called progressives of the coastal cities would have fought for their own agenda – chiefly the forcible, zero-tolerance disarmament of the entire civilian population and the end of any civilian right to self defense. And – yes – the theocrats would certainly allow the progressives this one triumph as part of what would no doubt be labeled “the Grand Christian Bargain.” Indeed the imposition of mandatory pacifism – that is, compulsory victimhood – is already a plank in many theocratic Christian platforms. 

Thus the nation that emerged from the convention would look religiously more like Iran or some territory controlled by the Taliban than the (former) United States. Politically – with the federal government shut down by the “goddamn-the-gummint” reactionaries – the new nation would soon resemble Somalia...or what miasma of states-rights anarchy and Ku Klux chaos the South would have become had the Confederates won. 

For those who doubt this prognosis, here are some selected links, the result of six hours of reasearch. The first three links urge the convening of a constitutional convention. Two of them are from the far Right; their significance is in their viciously oppressive demands. The third of these links is from a Leftist source that focuses on a constitutional convention as the sole means of repealing the Citizens United decision. But – given that a major progressive goal is forcible civilian disarmament – its absence from the rationale is itself indicative. 

http://catholicknight.blogspot.com/2011/04/new-constitutional-convention.html

 

http://www.beaufortobserver.net/Articles-NEWS-and-COMMENTARY-c-2013-03-03-265621.112112-The-benefits-of-a-constitutional-convention-outweigh-the-risks.html

 

http://www.wolf-pac.com/the_plan

 

The next link opposes a constitutional convention, but is included here because its pro-convention readers state an unapologetic assertion of theocratic intent: “Glory be! A second call for a Constituional (sic) Congress is due and needed. Changes would clarify there is no seperation (sic) of Church and State as our U.S. Constitution clearly sets forth.” 

http://www.thepropheticyears.com/wordpress/will-a-us-constitutional-convention-be-called-soon.html

 

These three links below summarize the arguments against a constitutional convention. The first two are from hard-Right sources but are nevertheless well reasoned and eloquently presented. The third is from a nominally hard-Left website, but its arguments are very weak, no doubt because demanding a convention has shifted from the Rightist cause it was c. 1960-2008 to the Leftist cause it has since become.) 

http://www.jbs.org/legislation/the-ultimate-argument-against-an-article-v-constitutional-convention

 

http://stoptheconcon.wordpress.com/

 

http://my.firedoglake.com/eveningstarnm/tag/constitutional-conventions/

 

The last two links are for those who scoff at the magnitude of the theocratic threat. Though Theocracy Watch errs in attributing the threat exclusively to the Republicans – as Jeff Sharlet reveals in The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, Hillary Clinton is as much a theocrat as Sam Brownback – the Theocracy Watch collection of data is nevertheless without peer. As for Catholic Watch, that documents how the Roman Catholic Church, by acquisition of hospitals and clinics, is methodically nullifying reproductive rights throughout the United States.

http://theocracywatch.org/

 

http://catholicwatch.org/

  

LB/23 May 2013

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Neighborhood Notes: Graffiti as a Revolutionary Act

Graffiti on Dumpster Blue, Tacoma 2012. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2013.

(Note: Google maliciously reanimated a long-dead email address and password to lock me out of Blogger – another example of our “nonexistent” Internet censorship. Though I eventually figured a way around this deliberately imposed obstacle -- that's why this post, which went up on TypePad last week, is appearing here only now --   the obstruction persists with infuriating regularity. Hence, unless I can figure out how to resolve the problem, I may no longer be able to post here. Hence too my most profound apologies to my overseas readers who for whatever reason have difficulty accessing TypePad.) 

*

EVER SINCE CHILDHOOD a few of my detractors have claimed I don't look sufficiently “American,” though what this has to do with photography will be clear in a moment. After my parents moved from New York City to Jacksonville, Florida midway through my third year, I was repeatedly jeered (and once almost killed) by so-called “playmates” merely because I “talked funny” –  whatever wartime cover I might have had immediately blown by my native accent, an obviously Northeastern combination of my father's Back Bay Bostonian and my mother's Michigander college-speak, the resultant linguistic hybrid slightly modified by my own happy hours in my father's Manhattan office and on Queens playgrounds and the beaches of Far Rockaway. With most white southerners still infinitely bitter after their defeat in 1865, I was therefore the enemy from my first day in the former Confederacy. But until a couple of my fellow students in a private Roanoke, Virginia kindergarten c. 1945 convinced themselves I was a “half-breed,” part Indian, “or maybe a secret Jap,” I had remained blissfully unaware my physical appearance also made me a target. Though I was not so harassed either at East Grand Rapids Elementary School nor at parochial Holy Ghost School in Knoxville, the unpleasantness resumed with a vengeance at both Knox County, Tennessee public high schools I attended, where some students (and maybe even a few teachers) claimed I “looked like a Commie,” sometimes “a four-eyed Commie queer,” and one student in particular was sure my father with his bald head and military bearing “looked just like a Russian officer...or maybe a Commie spy.” When during my senior year at Holston I was required to wear a fake Red Army uniform in some long-forgotten sociology class presentation, I leapt at the opportunity, imagining it a lifetime chance to give my detractors a defiant finger, but it predictably backfired; the nickname I had already acquired via my efforts in journalism – “Scoop” (what else?) – was afterward sometimes replaced by “Comrade” – though depending on the speaker, occasionally with more respect than derision. The 1956-57 schoolyear previous, this at South High School in Grand Rapids, Michigan, I had discovered I was far more attractive to women of diverse ethnicities – particularly Eastern European – than to the determinedly WASPish Barbie-doll/prom-queen types, a condition that seems to prevail even unto old age, in large measure no doubt because so many Eastern Europeans are so much more instinctively comfortable with intellectuals and intellectuality. Hence after I survived the uniquely devastating psychological and sometimes physical horrors of being an unpopular teen subject to the vicious zero-tolerance conformity of the South, I generally found the entire matter vaguely amusing. And as I discovered during the 1960s back home in the ethnic melting pot of the Northeast, that sort of mistaken identity distinctly broadened my sex appeal. When a dear friend remarked that a 1973 license photo “looks like it belongs on a KGB identity card,” I snickered. When the young white woman who cut my hair in Manhattan c. 1983-1984 guessed I was “part something Asian: maybe half Korean or Japanese,” I laughed aloud. And when an African-American friend recently said that to her I look “distinctly Mongolian,” I merely smiled and nodded: by then, familial genetic research had already traced Blissian ancestry beyond Britain to the People of the Steppe. 

Such ethnic non-specificity undoubtedly enhanced my ability to do the street photography I did nearly anywhere in the City, just as I cannot doubt it has now – given the increasing post 9/11 neo-Nazification of the U.S. population – made it difficult if not impossible (and unquestionably dangerous) for me (or anyone else who does not look perfectly Ken-and-Barbie “American”) to safely photograph in any public place anywhere in the United States. Witness again the hysterical woman's behavior  last week in Wright Park. Meanwhile authorities nationwide are waging such a relentless war against photographers  – even against those of us with credentials the police themselves have issued – it is increasingly obvious a clandestine directive to commit these atrocities has come from on high. Cops follow orders; isolated incidents of police brutality are therefore typically nothing more than individual acts of bad-cop disobedience and are most often punished accordingly. But the nationwide epidemic of assaults on the working press  as reported by the National Press Photographers Association (NPPA),  and the website Photography Is Not a Crime (linked above), suggests a carefully orchestrated, relentlessly aggressive campaign against the public right to monitor (ever more oppressive) local, state and federal government. Indeed a preponderance of closely related parallel actions by the Obama Regime – its malicious surveillance of journalists, its persecution of peace activists as terrorists and whistle-blowers as spies, its failed attempt to use the Internal Revenue Service to persecute Right Wing dissidents – indicate an intense, carefully coordinated effort to nullify the First Amendment that has no precedent in U.S. history. Meanwhile the public either remains sullenly indifferent or – like the provocateur in Wright Park and those compulsively faithful Democrats who regard the president as a secular saint above any wrongdoing no matter how much wrong he actually does – is openly supportive of the ongoing curtailment of our liberty. As I have said many times on various Internet comment threads, the great irony is how the rabid Right's formerly odious characterization of Obama as a new Hitler is coming true. What I have not before pointed out is the even greater irony it is the self-proclaimed “change-we-can-believe-in” pseudo-Left that is facilitating the transformation. Thus the anti-photographer malice I encountered last week in Wright Park metastasizes directly from the malevolence of the One Party of Two Names that has ruled us not just since the Reichstag Fire of 9/11 but the murder of the American Experiment in Constitutional Governance that occurred on 22/11/1963. I see now I was rather lucky; just as James Baldwin said, Manhattan truly was Another Country. 

*** 

The half-century I've spent photographing graffiti that ranges from artfully positioned bullet holes in road signs (East Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina) to political slogans and street art (New York City, New Jersey, Washington state) provides a teachable sequence in our national rejection of political consciousness, a trend that – not coincidentally I suspect – accompanies our national embrace of anti-intellectuality. Though the examples of graffiti featured in the attached portfolio (see the left-hand column) are the few survivors of the 1983 fire, these remnants are nevertheless sufficient to give a sense of long-term conceptual drift: whether within the rural framework of defiant bullet holes or its urban equivalent of rebellious splashes of color, a steady transformation from the metaphorical shouting of slogans to the absolutely non-metaphorical silence of ambiguity. The slogans – even the ones I despised (like the “kill niggers” scrawled in black crayon on a Knoxville restroom wall in 1963) – were linear progressions. The best of these – cynical protest (“George Metesky is alive and well in the White House”); epiphany (“King Kong Died for Our Sins”); anti-homophobic slap (“My mother made me a faggot, if you get her the sticks she'll make you one too”) – were proverbs or even koan. But by the 1980s, such graffiti was a vanishing genre; its last examples – “Kill a Developer save a Tree” (Bellingham, 1990) and “Kill Capitalists” (Tacoma, 2011)  – were merely Leftist variants of the Rightist rage I had seen expressed in Jim Crow Tennessee. Meanwhile, as the methodical downsizing of public literacy shrank the United States to Moron Nation, thereby sending anti-intellectuality and its associated ills of ignorance, xenophobia and bigotry soaring to Third Reich highs, non-verbal (or at least verbally ambiguous) symbolism has become by far the dominant graffiti form. It is a transformation that further substantiates Henry Giroux's disclosures of capitalism's self-protective effort to reduce the USian 99 Percent to the lowest possible mental denominator. As I said in the left-hand column piece, graffiti is “a semiotic indicator without peer.” 

Remembering from Occupy Tacoma the breathtaking fury of newly homeless youth – formerly middle-class teens hurled onto the streets when the sneering Ayn Rand aristocrats abolished parental jobs, then imposed foreclosure and eviction – I first took such graffiti merely as inarticulate exclamations of rage and defiance. Thus when I began this piece it was prompted by the post-American-Dream, post-American-Experiment sense of despair that has become my default emotional state, and I intended to cite the above image as nothing more than a poignant example of the illiteracy that – despite both taggers' obvious (and obviously doomed) artistic acumen – now guarantees our subjugation precisely because of its implicit inability to express explicit grievances. But on second thought (or rather second viewing), my growing awareness of the visual geometry it shares with so much of the newer graffiti – the dynamic that makes the above “fuck-you-I'm-still-here” signature (or whatever else it may be) and the comment beneath it work as a design that declares its independence from the constraints of rhetoric and the linearity of language itself – this suggests a dawning new aesthetic consciousness the light of which shines deeply even into (or perhaps, paradoxically, originates directly from) the darkness of impoverishment, subjugation and hopelessness that is now the definitive characteristic of the USian 99 Percent. Does it portend a new awakening? Can a functional politics of resistance arise from the aesthetics of defeat and disempowerment? Am I merely a crazy old man indulging in wishful thinking by imagining a metaphysical similarity between certain happenstantial works of street art and the disciplined output of, say, a Mark Rothko or a Clyfford Still? Quoth the former: “without monsters and gods, art cannot enact a drama.” Or as Robert Graves put it, “there is one story and one story only.” 

LB/16 May 2013.

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