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| DANCING IN THE RAIN – A child whose parents were attending the $15 Now rally on 3 May at People's Park in Tacoma celebrates her own private May Day festivities. She was joined immediately afterwards by two other kids who also danced in the rain, but by then I was out of film. The rally was part of an ongoing national campaign to raise the local, state and federal minimum wage to $15 per hour. Click on image to view it full size. (Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2014.) |
*
TO
ACKNOWLEDGE DESPAIR is not the same as surrendering to it. The above
photograph is implicitly and explicitly hopeful. It refutes those
obnoxious disciples of compulsory positive thinking who self-righteously
nag me with their dogmatic diatribes – who falsely denounce
acknowledgment of despair as aid and comfort to the subjugators of our
nation and the rapists of our land. The mere fact I can make such a
photograph proves the PollyAnnas of both genders are idiots or
hypocrites or pathological deniers and are in every instance beneath
contempt because they, like the propagandists of the One Percent, would
blind us to our true circumstances. Yet until we understand just how
hopeless those circumstances are, we will never evolve the means to
transcend our hopelessness.
Despite
how children such as the rain dancer bear witness to the necessity of
hope, in this time and place I have every right and reason to despair. I
watch the relentless imposition of fascism and fascist governance that
characterizes modern U.S. history, definitively since 22 November 1963 and arguably since 12 April 1945. I threw away the New York Times potential
of my journalism career when I went to jail for the Civil Rights
Movement in 1963. Yet now 51 years later I witness the widespread
re-emergence of the same racial bigotry I had foolishly believed might
be permanently exorcised from U.S. society. My willing sacrifice – which
later denied me my life's most promising job with the Canadian
Broadcasting Corporation and therefore an opportunity for Canadian
citizenship as well – was utterly pointless. Bigots, I know now, are
truly ineducable; they cannot be reformed; yet their bigotry must somehow be culled
from our species' mentality lest it embroil us in ever-more-suicidal extremes.
But
the deepest most wrenching source of my despair is the U.S. emergence
of a new, carefully manufactured, neo-Nazi-intense hatred of lower
income people. It is literally as if we the elderly and disabled and
chronically unemployed and yes too all our children and grandchildren
are being pre-positioned to be, in this beastly Fourth Reich that now
slouches toward its official birth, the methodically scapegoated victims
the Jews were in the Third Reich. Ayn Rand, who gave capitalism its
modern equivalent of Mein Kampf, called openly for our
extermination, and because death camps are not yet again fashionable,
her genocidal policies are everywhere imposed as “austerity” and already
whole families go hungry as a result.
So of course I despair. No knowledgeable person, no sane person, could possibly do otherwise.
Yet, perhaps paradoxically, it is despair that denies me the ability to surrender.
And it is my inability to surrender that prompts me to make photographs like the one above.
I
have reached a point wherein I would rather write of almost anything
but politics. Sometimes I think I would even go back to the stultifying
boredom of covering sporting events as I did in my youth to earn my passage
into real journalism. I would especially prefer to write of the
startling and sometimes poignant humanity I so often witness while
riding mass transit, or to share the many inspiring dog stories I
learned in my years as a reporter and collect even now in the company of
other dog lovers.
Most
of all I would rather say fuck it and go fishing, spend the best hours
of my final years losing my self in the back-country satori of
clear and troutly water and the Zen of working the slow green
depths of some wild river with a seven-foot ultra-light-action rod and a
Number 1 Mepps spinner and that uniquely wordless anticipation that
wells up like invisible mist from the recognizable habitats of big
cutthroats and lunker-size native rainbows.
But
even in the wilderness, despair invariably intervenes like a sudden
invasion of a dozen cast-off beer cans borne into a supposedly pristine
canyon by a swift and allegedly unspoiled current. Damnit, I love this
nation for its former potential and I love this land for the
exquisiteness that is being ripped and gouged away in the name of profit
and – fool that I am – some small part of me believes both the nation
and the land can yet be restored. My despair is therefore the despair of
an exile or a refugee, and it compels me to fight on in the only ways I
can: by writing about the very politics I have come to deplore; by
occasionally making icons of hope such as the photograph above, by
serving such causes – for example the quest for a $15 minimum wage – as
my geriatric disabilities yet allow, and most of all by acknowledging
that in such times as these, survival itself is an act of revolutionary
defiance.
And
if neither nation nor land can be restored, at least the future – if
indeed our species has any future at all – may know a few of us in this
o-so-stealthily inflicted miasma of Moron Nation remained conscious of
what was being done and how we were being methodically disempowered and
enslaved.
******
In Case You Missed It,
the fact there is no breaking news this week from Ukraine is good news,
perhaps the best news of all. Recommended (the first report is from Reader Supported News, the others from Consortium News), are the following: “Secret Cable Reveals Russia Warned US in 2008 Meddling in Ukraine Could Split Country,” here; “How NATO Jabs Russia on Ukraine,” here; “Cold Water on the Neo-Cold War Hysteria,” here; “Ethnic Russians Are People Too,” here. and “Ukraine's Dueling Elections,” here.
Vital
backgrounders on how the U.S. finances global re-Nazification – as
relevant to the Ukraine Crisis as it is to present-day Latin American
politics – are “How Wall Street Bailed Out the Nazis,” here; “Hitler's Shadow Reaches toward Today,” here; and a der Spiegel exclusive, “Nazi Veterans Created Illegal Army,” here.
******
Again
this month President Obama has shown his true
(white/Republican/Christofascist) colors, this time by nominating
Michael Boggs, a self-described “conservative Christian” who is notably
anti-woman and anti-gay, for a lifetime federal judgeship.
The White House announcement immediately generated on-line opposition including a petition by the usually staunchly pro-Obama People for the American Way. Then Ian Millhiser's ThinkProgress exposé, “Obama Judicial Nominee Ran Anti-Gay Political Campaign Touting His 'Conservative Christian Values,'”
revealed additional details of Boggs' politics, provoking no reaction
at all from the ever-more-defiantly Republican Obama but doubtlessly
evoking cheers and klapping maybe even a celebratory kross-burning or
two from Ku Kluxers throughout Georgia and elsewhere in the former
Klanfederacy.
An outraged poster on the Millhiser comment-thread bitterly noted Senate Democrats now must either vote against a Democratic president's judicial choice or approve a nominee “who might as well have been chosen by the Tea Party.”
“How,” the poster asked, “did we get to this pathetic point?”
I answered with a burst of Outside Agitation:
(1)-The
U.S. experiment in representative democracy ended 22 November 1963.
Ever afterward, the nation is increasingly ruled by One Party of Two
Names.
(2)-The collapse
of the Soviet Union and the permanent co-optation of China remove all
global restraints to capitalist savagery. Capitalism accelerates its
inevitable transformation to fascism and thence to economic neo-Nazism
(genocide against all “non-profitable” elderly, disabled, chronically
impoverished people in accordance with Ayn Rand's fictionalizations of Mein Kampf).
(3)-The
two pseudo-parties within the One (Ruling Class) Party of Two Names
become distinguishable only by rhetoric. The Republicans are overtly
fascist; the Democrats are equally fascist but hide their fascism behind
Big Lies, e.g. “change we can believe in.”
(4)-Now,
with the 99 percent ever more afflicted by capitalist predation and
therefore ever more rebellious, the Ruling Class abandons bipartisanship
and the slow-boiled-frog imposition of fascism and adopts ever-harsher
measures, e.g., total surveillance, the National Defense Appropriations Act of 2012 and its nullification of the Bill of Rights.
(5)-Obama
reveals his true (white/Republican/Christofascist) political identity:
first the Rick Warren appointment, now Boggs, also killing net
neutrality, single-payer/public option, Employee Free Choice, etc. ad nauseam.
In
the context of all Barack the Betrayer's other about-faces and
back-stabbings, the Boggs nomination should eliminate any lingering
doubts the president was in fact a Manchurian candidate – the ultimate
false-flag operative thoroughly trained in the arts of deception by his
One Percent masters, then imposed on us via those Manchurias known as
Wall Street and mainstream media.
******
Photo data:
The film is Kodak Professional BW400CN (black-and-white for development
by C41 color processing machinery), its kill date 12/2010. This was the
remnant of a much larger lot of film I used on a commissioned job c.
2006-2008, and I had kept the last two rolls in my refrigerator ever
since. Kodak rated the film's SAE (ISO) at 400, which I found to be
correct for indoor work, though its daylight speed is closer to 600. The
camera was one of my ancient Pentax MXs, the lens an equally geriatric
70mm-210mm f/4 Tokina zoom at maximum (210mm) extension. Exposure was
1/250th of a second at f/5.6.
******
Back to the beginning: do I really believe there is still any hope?
Not so much. In fact what I believe is “the imbecility of hope,” which
parodies the phrase coined by our false-flag president, who has
intensified our hopelessness to infinity by proving himself to be the
most brazen liar in U.S. political history. Hope seems imbecilic because
I know the four historical prerequisites of change – none of which appear to be achievable in today's United States. Hope seems especially imbecilic when I think of someone like Cecily McMillan
spending seven years in prison and know – because it is the dirty
business of a journalist to know such things – it will destroy her no
matter how strong and brave her resistance. But occasionally – as when I
photographed that child dancing so joyfully in the rain – it seems to
me we have no choice but to be hopeful...even if it's only the hope of
learning to live well despite chronic hopelessness.
LB/18 May 2014
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