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| This photograph has no connection to the story below, which mentions President Obama's genocidal efforts against life-sustaining social services only in passing. The image is an accidental sandwich, an inadvertent double exposure with a camera so old it lacks automatic double-exposure prevention. As to whether it might have been a compensatory gift from the Muse, with poetic or subconscious relevance to the reason this posting is so tardy, I leave that for viewers to decide. Rolleicord III, Kodak Tmax 100 in D-76, each of the two exposures 1/100th at f/16; colorization – to intensify the ethereal mood – by Gimp software. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2013. |
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AN EMOTIONAL CRISIS precipitated by a
medical crisis – discovery I am going blind due to cataracts but
may be denied corrective surgery by another medical condition for
which there is no cure – delayed this week's posting. It is also
the reason I'm filling this space with a commentary I wrote six days ago:
anything more recent would be too bitter for public consumption.
Hence the following, my pre-threat-of-blindness response to a story
in Crosscut, the Seattle on-line daily, in which a local
journalist – apparently too afraid of the secret police to tell the
truth about what the United States has become – cravenly described
our subjugated nation as a “free society.”
The journalist, Floyd McKay, is a
former long-time member of the Pacific Northwest working press and a
professor emeritus at Western Washington University. I do not know
him personally, but we are nevertheless indirectly connected. WWU is
the descendant of Western Washington State College, the last of my
own several almae matres, which through
its Fairhaven College granted me an interdisciplinary bachelor of
arts degree in 1976 – and 34 years later made it unmistakably clear
I am one alumnus its officialdom would surely strike from their
roster of graduates if they could. Though McKay joined Western's
faculty long after I left its student body, I am familiar with his
work via Crosscut's
coverage of the ongoing Puget Sound coal-port struggle. His reporting
of that wrenching conflict seems not only fair but exceptionally well
researched – the sort of in-depth writing that was routine on the
New York, New Jersey, Michigan and East Tennessee papers for which I
worked during my first two decades in journalism but which has since
gone the way of Archaeopteryx. (Apropos the coal port, the
usual suspects intend to build it just outside
Bellingham, a blatant “fuck you” to what is probably the most
environmentally conscious city in all USia. Moreover, the obvious
vindictiveness of the coal-port scheme has a nasty parallel in the
equally assaultive Roman Catholic campaign to abolish female
reproductive freedom here in the nation's most officially pro-choice
state by buying up all the local hospitals and clinics. Might these
developments be part of a multi-pronged effort to turn the entire
realm into a West Coast version of Appalachia? Asking such an
allegedly “unthinkable” question is well within the purview of
the investigative reporter, at least as I learned the craft, but it
is the one element McKay has failed to explore. Perhaps he has
forgotten – or never knew about – the testimony of Watergate
Felon John Ehrlichman that Washington state is the One Percent's
favorite proving ground for its strategies and tactics of
oppression.) Be that as it may, I was appreciative enough of McKay's
reports on the coal-port fight, I turned directly to his analysis of
the recently exposed secret police investigations of journalists,
part of the (still-unfolding) story of the Obama Administration's
unprecedented efforts to nullify the entire First
Amendment.
But I was sorely disappointed; McKay's
lead set the (cringing) tone of his
entire text:
“Technology
changes, but the basic tenets of
journalism and the codes that govern reporting in a free society
remain remarkably the same.”
Finally, hours
after McKay's essay
appeared – I had been busy all day with regular
first-of-the-month errands – I wrote a response on the associated
comment thread:
(Note: Crosscut does
not allow embedded live-links in comment threads, hence the URLs below
appear as in the original, this to spare me the necessity of revision.
My apology for the resultant awkwardness.)
Seems to me there are three points
of contention in this story. These are: the nature and motives of the
Obama Administration; the nature and role of the nation's
informational media; and – pivotally – whether the United States
remains “a free society.”
It also seems to me – this from
behind my own 50-plus years doing journalism – McKay's
understanding of these questions is...well, less than adequate.
Indeed, based on the foregoing comments, the one poster with whom I
come closest to agreement is dbreneman. Given
our total disagreements on public transport – I like most New
Yorkers believe it is a civil right, dbreneman
seems to share the defining local conviction transit is a form of
welfare – our near-consensus over what should be termed the “USian
press crisis” is probably an irony of the first order.
“More than any figure in history,”
says Turley, “Obama has been a disaster for the U.S. civil
liberties movement. By coming out of the Democratic Party and
assuming an iconic position, Obama has ripped the movement in half.
Many Democrats and progressive activists find themselves unable to
oppose Obama for the authoritarian powers he has assumed. It is not
simply a case of personality trumping principle; it is a cult of
personality.”
At the same time, the nature of
USian informational media has also been transformed. In the era
McKay and I joined the working press, about 90 percent of the
nation's newspapers were locally owned. Now, today, something like 95
percent of the (shrinking number of) print news outlets are owned by
monopolies, with lockstep reportorial conformity enforced nearly as
rigidly on today's USian papers as it was on Hitler's Voelkischer
Beobachter or the Stalin-era Pravda.
(Coincidentally, my newest blog post
[http://lorenbliss.typepad.com/loren-bliss-outside-agitators-notebook/2013/05/notes-on-life-after-uselessness-the-old-man-with-an-old-rolleicord.html]
describes the personnel-office methods the monopolies – which also
own or control all the nation's broadcast media – use to ensure the
political reliability of their employees.) The result is news
coverage and opinion that is almost never more than the approved,
quasi-official voice of what the Occupy Movement labeled “the One
Percent” – the Big Business/Wall Street aristocracy that, by its
financing of both the Democratic and Republican parties, has become a
genuine Ruling Class in the ancient and most arrogantly despotic
sense.
Meanwhile the cult of personality
that now silences Democratic criticism of Obama has again, just as it
did under presidents Carter and Clinton, forced the Democratic Party
to abandon its own egalitarian New Deal principles. Therefore let
us not forget it was cults of personality that enabled the tyrannies
of Hitler and Stalin, the former in the name of a prototypical
Ayn-Rand-type master race, the latter in the name of the very
socialist humanitarianism he so wantonly betrayed. Perhaps the
far-Right's odious characterization of Obama as a new Führer
is eerily prescient.
In any case we see the United States
is clearly no longer the “free society” McKay claims it to be. A
growing number of citizens, myself among them, would argue the
nation we formerly thought of as “ours” is now but a modern,
globally imperial version of pre-Revolutionary France, with the
former middle class now permanently reduced to the status of the sans
culottes. The politicians no longer represent us – “we
the people” – at all. In fact – note the impending cutbacks to
Social Security, Medicare and food stamps – “our” elected
officials now make no secret their only loyalties are to the bankers
and chief executive officers who are their financial masters.
In this context any discussion of
“the role of informational media” is a form of denial. USian mass
media is, as an institution, no less compromised – that is, no
less a wholly owned subsidiary of the One Percent – than the
political system or the economy. Hence the only relevant question is
not how the (hopelessly corrupt) judicial system might rule on
reportorial and photographic rights, or whether the (irremediably
compromised) politicians will enact an effective shield law; it is
instead whether individual journalists will recognize today's United
States gives them only two choices: submission or revolution. Hence
too the new relevance of an old Appalachian song of resistance,
“Which Side Are You On”
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SB0fc9CobQ
).
The
problem, of course, is that today's journalists are hired precisely
for their conformity and obedience.
But
history
shows us
even the most hopelessly
submissive
serfs sometimes
rise
up angry. History
also suggests
the
brazen,
piss-on-our-constitutional-rights
intrusions the
USian secret police are
now tyrannically
inflicting
on all of us –
not
just journalists
but
everyone in the 99 Percent
– might
finally
awaken
any number of hitherto
suppressed revolutionary instincts.
Too
bad resistance is
now futile, exactly as under the (fictional?) Borg. Whether
nonviolent or otherwise, the result –
as we have already glimpsed in the Obama
Regime's suppression
of the Occupy Movement and
its expansion of Bush Regime surveillance into Orwellian monitoring
of all 99 Percenters all the time – would
be a bloodbath of Third
Reich
magnitude and Greasy
Grass
futility.
LB/7
June 2013
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