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| “Tea Partiers: You Should Be Here Too,” another of my Occupy Tacoma pictures, this one originally published by Reader Supported News. Pentax MX, 100mm f/2.8 SMCP-M, Fujicolor 800, exposure not recorded. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2011. |
*
(NOTE: Changes in the circumstances of
my life – a welcome increase in activities unrelated to this blog –
mandate I now make Sundays or early Monday mornings the time of my weekly posting. Please
accept my apology for any resultant inconvenience.)
***
EDWARD SNOWDEN'S GREAT GIFT to us, We
the People of the United States, is the dawning realization our love
for what used to be “our” country transcends the divisiveness that denies us the solidarity we need if we are to prevail against the
One Percent. The Ruling Class is thus trembling, possibly as never
before in my 73-year lifetime. Little by slow, more
and more of us – even some of the most pampered
politicians – are awakening to the personal dangers implicit in the hideous
truth our government has been captured by a cabal of morally
imbecilic plutocrats whose greed is infinite, whose potential for
tyranny knows no limits and whose imperial ambitions have no earthly
boundaries.
But it remains to be seen whether this
fledgling coalition of patriots can thrive and mature. President
Obama is already demonstrating his slithery skill at backstabbing
those who oppose his worse-than-Nixon despotism,
and far too many Democrats
have abandoned
their pretense of progressive values in
nauseatingly hypocritical efforts to remain faithful to their leader
and the
total-surveillance
police-state he has
created. It is exactly
as if they
were fascists in some
lockstep cult of personality, and
Obama's title were führer
rather than chief
executive.
Yet
in this newly
emergent, post-Snowden context,
it
seems there are nearly
as many
of us, myself among them, who
would
willingly sidestep
our
instinctive distrust of Ron Paul
and even refrain
from expressing our
contempt
for the Teabag faction, if
only it would help form a
united front for the restoration of constitutional governance.
Such face-to-face,
human-to-human political
re-integration
would probably be
good medicine for
us all. Though it would
undoubtedly
be revolutionary, it probably would not result in revolution per
se, because it might
go revolution one better and make it unnecessary.
Nor is Snowden's protection by Russia
without its own (obscure) pro-democracy precedent. It was Mother
Russia, in the person of Tsar Alexander II with the might of the
Russian Imperial Navy's Baltic and Far Eastern fleets, that saved
the federal Union
by protecting our coasts from British, French and Confederate
attack during the Civil War. (My profound thanks to my late father,
Donald R. Bliss [1910-1971], more learned in history than anyone I
have ever known, who when I was age 10 or 11 and in fifth grade
studying the Civil War, revealed to me the long-suppressed facts of these nation-preserving events.)
Could it be that, by granting Snowden
temporary asylum, Vladimir Putin, Russian president and de facto
Tsar, has given the restoration of USian constitutional democracy the
international protection it needs to succeed? If this is indeed
what obtains, if Putin thus empowers Snowden and his disclosures, the
irony – and some would say the karmic or poetic justice – would
be profound, establishing a subtle parallel between the events of
1861-1865 and 2013. Meanwhile, the Josef Goebbels clones of the
corporate propaganda media not withstanding, Russia already helps the
United States in a surprising number of ways, as reported by Juan
Cole.
Yes, the Russians are clearly acting in
their own interests – but so was France in the events of
1775-1783.
***
Unfortunately the odds of forming a
united front of patriots for the restoration of constitutional
governance are considerably diminished by two large groups within the
body politic.
One of these is the growing cult of
Christian theocrats, about which I sound the alarm as often as I can and usually
in detail I hope is genuinely frightening. (If you're reading this via TypePad, click on
“Archives,” then click on “Religion.” If you're on Blogger,
it's more of a pain because you have to do it year by year: look
under “Blog Archives,” click on a year, wait for for the
search-engine blank to appear at the upper left corner of the page,
then type in “theocracy” without quotation marks.) In any case,
suffice it to say these “born again” followers of Jesus jeopardize us all. They are
defined by their fanatical opposition to sexual freedom, female
personhood, science, the primacy of Nature and anything remotely
resembling political or economic democracy. They are as
uncompromisingly hateful, particularly toward women, as any member
of the Taliban.
The other obstacle to patriotic
solidarity is the dominant majority within the USian Left, the
demonstrably self-defeating, hopelessly white-bourgeois,
Ayn-Rand-tainted arrogance of which continues to astound me, even
though by now – having watched it destroy the Occupy Movement
– I should expect no better. Never mind its characteristic loathing
of intellectuals, union members and blue-collar people, its ignorant
rejection of class-struggle or any other formalized ideology or
analysis, and its unthinking acceptance of Randite elitism long ago
reduced it to nothing more than a pseudo-Left. Loud and petulant
enough to shout down any attempt to re-form the genuine Left that was
fatally weakened by the post-World-War-II purges
and slain by the class conflicts exacerbated by the
Vietnam War,
its primary political contribution is sustainment of the angry
divisiveness that protects the Ruling Class by discouraging
solidarity amongst the 99 Percent. Thus, hiding its Randite instincts
behind its progressive rhetoric, this pseudo-Left routinely wages
vocal and sometimes violent warfare against loggers, commercial fishers, oilfield riggers, long-haul truck-drivers, mass
transport workers
and anyone else whose job or lack thereof is deemed politically
“incorrect,” which of course includes nearly all of us whose
annual income damns us as “the poor.” Note how the prefatory
article isolates us – the homeless, the elderly, the
disabled, the minorities – the better to facilitate the
genocide-by-abandonment
President “Slick Willie” Clinton peddled as welfare reform and
the cutbacks in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid Barack the
Betrayer continues to defiantly tout as a grand bargain.
Admittedly, my attitudes toward the pseudo-Left, which used to call itself the "New Left," are profoundly influenced by the late Jack Newfield. It's a tragedy his superb Village Voice reporting
on the death of the New Deal coalition has apparently never been
made available on-line.
But it was through those stories of the
late 1960s and early 1970s I acquired the tools to recognize the
escalation of class warfare that, as I entered old age, would bring
about the wholly dire half-fulfillment of my own father's
oft-repeated prophecy: “the
time will come when things in this country get so bad, the Red Army
will be welcomed as an army of liberation.” Throughout the years after 1973 and
everywhere in the nation, the costs of living had skyrocketed as wages stagnated or declined. But
my editors demanded I remain silent. The closest I ever came to
reporting what was really happening was a piece headlined “New York
Creativity: An Uncertain Future.” Published in the August 1986
issue of Art Direction magazine – the last edition for which
I myself was editor-in-chief – the report's boldface summary denounced
“greedy landlords” for “jeopardizing the city's position on the
cutting edge.” The text elaborated: “(T)he economics of New York
living are becoming increasingly inhospitable...The situation in the
photo district has become so critical that many established
photographers have added their voices to a growing demand for
commercial rent control...Village Voice writer Erika Munk
predicted (three months earlier) that 'without a drastic change of
direction, Manhattan will be finished as America's creative center'”
– as in fact it has been.
But it is not just capitalist economics
that killed the American Dream and overthrew the USian experiment in
constitutional democracy. It was also the breathtaking stupidity of
the pseudo-Left. As a press officer for an Office of Economic
Opportunity program in 1971 – apart from the Army, the only
government job I ever had – I remember all too well how the snooty
condescension of the (white bourgeois) feminists doomed their
efforts to organize welfare mothers, how the pampered collegians
then damned all women on welfare as “hopelessly reactionary,”
vowed to infiltrate the welfare bureaucracy and thereby make feminist
consciousness-raising a mandatory prerequisite for receiving stipends and
services. Of a kind with the draft-exempt academic elite who yet
despise those of us who served in the Vietnam Era military, these
sorority-house radicals soon joined with their male counterparts to
foment the still-raging campaign for forcible civilian disarmament –
the imposition of mandatory pacifism and compulsory victimhood that
is one of the many forms of USian class warfare.
A decade later, the impending
bankruptcy of a newspaper flung me jobless into the Reagan Recession
and a hunt for employment that by 1982 had turned me into a
commercial fisher – engineer/deckhand aboard a 96-foot purse
seiner. Thus at age 42 a mostly benevolent fate allowed me to
experience firsthand not only the quiet ecstasies and
high-pucker-factor hazards of working at sea but the darker truths of
USian blue-collar economics, realities about which I had hitherto
only written from afar. One such sociological encounter, with a
trust-funded student from Western Washington University's Huxley
College of Environmental Studies, was particularly enlightening. The
student, who could not see beyond the grease-stains on my engine-room
jeans and therefore had no idea who or what I might be,
presumptuously lectured me on the new paradigm of ecological
economics: “you people,” he said, “are going to have to learn
to live with less.” It was the same übermenschen
mentality that in its most extreme form calls for spiking trees and
threatening the lives and livelihoods of loggers – the sneering
pomposity that, beginning in the Vietnam Era, has driven most
blue-collar men and women into the manipulative arms of the Republican Party.
Nevertheless I had thought the collapse
of the Occupy Movement, which in large measure was the byproduct of
college-age Caucasians who proudly label themselves as “progressives”
but are as anti-intellectual as the late Sen. Joe McCarthy and as
anti-union as the late Ayn Rand, had perhaps taught these
pseudo-Leftists to at least partially muzzle their self-contradictory
haughtiness. Not so, as Laura Gottesdiener demonstrated by
implicitly dismissing all white victims of
foreclosure as somehow magically immune to its heartbreaking, gut-wrenching
horrors. “(T)he difficulties white America has faced during the
foreclosure crisis,” she wrote, “don't compare with what Wall
Street and the banks have inflicted, physically and psychologically,
on African American neighborhoods.” In other words, despite the
story's misleadingly inclusive headline (“Backyard Shock Doctrine:
Wall Street's Destruction Comes Home”), Gottesdiener, herself
Caucasian, says white folks just don't feel the pain.
As I (unpopularly) replied in the
associated comment thread, “by defining foreclosure and eviction as
a racial problem, she guarantees the indifference if not the overt
hostility of the white majority – the approximately 75 percent of
the USian Caucasians who are definitively racist.” Hence I feel
she owes her readers a triple apology: to foreclosed, evicted and
homeless whites for minimizing their misery; to foreclosed and
evicted Blacks for marginalizing their sufferings by setting them
apart from other class-war victims; and to the entire 99 Percent for
re-inflaming the racial obstacles to solidarity.
To get a clearer picture of what
Gottesdiener did wrong, it is useful to compare her above-linked
prose with a new essay written by Chris Hedges.
Gottesdiener's research was seemingly detailed and in considerable
depth, but she mis-assembled her facts into a lament for African
Americans that simultaneously (and not very subtly) demonizes whites
and thereby furthers the Ruling Class purpose of sustaining maximum
99 Percent divisiveness. Hedges meanwhile assembled similar and
equally credible facts that, because of his reportorial
thoughtfulness, does not minimize the significance of race but
nevertheless becomes a lamentation for us all. Precisely because of
its portrait of the universal suffering imposed by capitalism's
transformation into Ayn Rand fascism, it furthers the evolution of
99 Percent solidarity.
Perhaps the difference between
Gottesdiener on one hand and Hedges and myself on the other is a
difference in backgrounds. Though Hedges is as famous as I am
obscure, he is, as I am, a declared libertarian socialist, an
unapologetic intellectual and a journalist of several decades'
experience. Gottesdiener meanwhile labels herself a “freelance
journalist” and declares herself “an organizer with Occupy Wall
Street” – the latter a decidedly curious description, since I as
an early activist in Occupy Tacoma know the entire Occupy Movement has been effectively dead since the
spring of 2012. Moreover, since it was through Occupy I met some of
the indescribably bitter adolescent children of white families who
had been thrown out of work, foreclosed and evicted into homelessness
– the kids themselves coalesced into an unspeakably angry
subculture that will either form the core of a genuinely
revolutionary movement or destroy itself in criminality – I am
doubly perplexed by how she could be so dismissive of the associated
trauma.
LB/4 August 2013
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