Another Apology, Another Change; Trump Could Be the One Percent's Long-Sought Hitler; BLM Right to Disrupt (Fake) Democracy, Wrong to Silence Genocide Foes; Rejecting the No-Crop Credo of Full-Frame Photo Fanatics; Science Fiction Solves a Cosmic Riddle

Relishing the morning sunlight (second published variant).  Photo by Loren Bliss copyright 2015:  from the work-in-progress, "Lives Apart."  For  data and commentary see “Forsaking Fallacies,” below. 

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BLOGGING HAS BECOME burdensome, partly because of conflicting obligations arising from other unpaid volunteer editorial work. That is one reason this post is so belated, and why I am again compelled to apologize to readers who had expected more and better. But that is only one part of the story.

Another aspect is a condition characteristic not of this blog alone but of any writing I dare attempt without the protection of a competent editor or at least a reliable proofreader. It is an old problem, often set aside or thrust into the background but impossible to solve, in July hauled once more into painful and discouraging focus by yet another outbreak of familial hostilities  that among other things forced me to again acknowledge – this time as never before – my huge weariness with the always desperate, always fearful struggle against dyslexia, a condition now relentlessly spotlighted by the often-brutal self-honesty that seems to be among the genetic mandates of old age.

For me, that struggle is the defining, inescapably discouraging element in any act of complex verbal expression. I long ago acquired sufficient loquaciousness to hide it – a knowingly dishonest but necessary tactic I had perfected probably no later than my sixth year, unquestionably as a defense against my father's hatefulness. But I have never been able to shield myself from the infinitely embittering fact dyslexia always wins. Worse, it seems my defeat is invariably fated to be revealed publicly, these days by some grotesquely stupid misspelling or glaringly obvious typographical or mathematical error that – like the reading troubles which nearly caused me to fail first and second grade – confirms yet again my father's infinitely repeated denunciation of me as “goon boy.”

What rescued me from the Sargasso Sea of emotional and intellectual problems that are invariably inflicted by reading difficulties was the intervention of a maternal aunt, the one member of my mother's family who did not regard me as a pariah and to whom I therefore remain forever thankful. This blessed woman whose name was Alecia hired a summertime tutor who taught me reading as phonics rather than word-recognition. (The latter, impossible for a dyslexic, reduces written English to Chinese-style ideographs but is nevertheless favored by lazy teachers, including those at Jacksonville, Florida's Norwood Elementary School c. 1946-1948.) As it turned out, Alecia's beneficence was the finest most pivotal gift I would receive in this entire lifetime: by the middle of third grade I was reading at a 12th-grade level.

But the (arguably unfit) parent who was my (officially unfit) birthmother's sperm-source would not stop calling me “goon boy” until 1952 or 1953, when I was 12 or 13. Though he has been dead since 1971, I realize now his hateful curse – which like all such parental damnation is a curse in every possible sense of the word – will follow me into the grave. Meanwhile, exactly as it has always done, it continues to rob the writing-process of even the most minimal emotional reward, reducing it to an endlessly wary slog through a mine-field of potential mortification.

To the long-ago editor of a long-ago periodical who demanded to know why I invariably waited until the last minute to write my stories, I can now change my original answer – “I dunno; I just do” – to a statement of painful truth: that only by approximating the deadline pressures of covering breaking news for a daily newspaper am I able to nullify the paralytic fear of revealing the “goon boy” I will always in my heart-of-hearts believe I am.

Yet, as I said at the beginning, the never-ending battle against dyslexia and the self-hatred it invariably engenders is only part of a larger discouragement.

July's bout with familial hostility underscored by its real-world events the message of a dream I dreamt nearly two years ago: “you can eat with the Blisses this one time,” my eerily resurrected father said in the dream, “but then I want you out of here.” Thus the dream-factory of my subconscious was finally in my 73rd year acknowledging as absolute truth what I had feared since my fifth summer, 1945, when my father tried unsuccessfully to convince the state of Virginia to allow him to abandon me in one of its orphanages. In other words, my presence in the Bliss family after my father discovered the extent of my birthmother's madness at best an intrusion – and more often than not a mightily resented burden.

That 2013 dream's revelations had been profoundly disturbing, more so than I can possibly describe, and now in July 2015 its hurtfulness was renewed by my realization that no matter what I might say or do, in the eyes of all the Blisses except perhaps three – influenced as they remain by my father's oft-expressed contempt and resentment of me – I will always be damned. Thus there was really no point in doing anything other than metaphorically burning the proverbial bridges. Better the jagged-edged truth of out-in-the-open animosity than the soothing charade of bogus closeness that predictably turned to hostility if I ever dared call upon it even to the slightest degree.

What surprised me – and here we return to specific reasons for my absence from the blogosphere – was how emotionally draining this conclusive conflict was. Obviously I am not as resilient as I used to be. In my childhood and youth and through most of my adulthood, I could sidestep such episodes – and there were many – with sufficient alacrity to remain at least professionally functional. Even the most emotionally devastating of familial betrayals, my father's elaborate denunciation of me to my second wife, did not impair my ability to function as a journalist, whether with a typewriter or a camera, especially the latter. At the time (1968) I was 28 years old, and my experience since then has been that as one ages, one (thankfully) becomes ever more hardened to familial trauma. Perhaps though one's increasing proximity to the grave not only imposes that harsh mandate of honesty I mentioned earlier, but also an equally irresistible insistence on emotional openness.

It is a bit of an aside, but no doubt the reason I have always favored photography over writing is the former's blessed freedom from dyslexic taint – and therefore from the invisible but nevertheless reflexive intellectual cringing that is such a huge part of my father's legacy to me. Photography, itself the act of liberation writing could never be, is thus also liberated to become a passionate expression of passion – or so it was before the fire, and now blessed as I am by digital manumission from prohibitive film costs, so it seems to be becoming once again. By contrast, writing – even at its very best – has never gotten beyond mere intellectual exercise and obviously never will.

But it was not just the realm of blood-kin family – not “my family” because after 1945 I had no real family – that my father so diligently worked to poison. Whenever he had the opportunity, he belittled me to my lovers, friends and colleagues, many of whom, often with astonishment, reported his enmity. Characteristically, he seized upon the chance to denounce me to my second wife when she sought to enlist his assistance in saving our marriage from the mutual acting-out that beset us both in the wake of the miscarriage that took our much-wanted son. My father's response was to tell my wife she had been a fool for marrying me. He said I was “just like (my) mother,” adding that I was the genetically defective, certainly neurotic, probably crazy, possibly retarded spawn of a certified madwoman – the same “honesty” (his term) he shared with any of my friends and colleagues whenever he had the opportunity.

He had badmouthed me to my first wife too, but for her I was nothing more than a stepladder out of the Baltimore slums – she had never loved me, a painful truth she would reveal to me in 1961, while I was serving in Korea as part of my U.S. Regular Army enlistment (active duty November 1959-September 1962; reserves until October 1965). Hence she was indifferent to his slanders and untroubled by what they represented. Hence too, I didn't much give a damn what my father told her; I knew whatever he said to her, it would not alter the course of our relationship, which in any case was destined to end in divorce as soon as my wife determined it had fulfilled her stepladder needs.

But the circumstances of the 1968 incident – the episode involving my second wife – made it indescribably painful, not the least because each of us was trying desperately (and in our own often-ham-handed ways) to save our marriage. Despite all these stresses, in the professional sense I remained fully functional, so much so 1968 was a year in which my skill as a picture editor and layout artist helped my employer win significant editorial awards.

Now though in 2015 a far briefer encounter with the lingering residue of my father's beyond-the-grave malevolence shut me down completely. Until now, every attempt I made to write for OAN was stillborn, and it took a harsh regimen of self-imposed discipline for me to even get out the August edition of the monthly newsletter I produce for the senior housing project in which I dwell. Afterward – that is, after the newsletter is printed – I had always been elated, but this time I was as exhausted as if I had done two weeks of hard physical labor. Thus I spent most of the rest of the month either distracting myself by obsessing on old memories or new trivia or lying abed sleeping 10, 12 or 14 hours a day.

Atop all that – and here is the final hindrance to my resumption of OAN – there is my increasingly unshakable conviction we are indeed a doomed species on a dying planet,  which – if true – reduces all our lives to the absolute-zero of meaninglessness.

It means any life no matter its accomplishments or lack thereof is literally of no consequence. It means anything Rebecca Solnit (or anyone else) writes from a lets-organize-and-save-the-world perspective (or any other perspective beyond selfish entertainment) is at best grandiosity and at worst a collective spasm of denial. It means anything Gene Smith (or anyone else) has photographed is nothing more than a visual exclamation point. It means whatever choice one makes – whatever one does or does not do – is meaningless. It also means Ayn Rand is H. sapiens sapiens' ultimate philosopher – that her implicitly Nazifying credo of morally imbecilic self-indulgence is the only doctrine philosophically correct for our species and our planet – and that the One Percenters' limitless, fuck-the-world-we'll-all-be-dead-soon orgy of parasitic consumption is therefore the highest possible expression of human reality and therefore of our species' potential for achievement. It means we humans are no different from the conveyor-belt chickens we sadistically convert to food by dragging them upside-down and squawking to their mechanically tortured deaths – that we and our victims and the random motes of insentient stardust on the solar wind are are literally equal in cosmic insignificance.

Mostly though it means the abyssal nihilism of the post-modernists is utterly justified. If there is no meaning in anything save that which the individual (whether human or fowl) arbitrarily assigns it, the perfect corollary, the sacrament of Confirmation for serial killers and slaughter-house victims alike, is the apocalyptic gospel of Capitalist Saint John Galt. Which in turn means consciousness itself is meaningless, making it at best a cosmic joke, at worst an irrefutable argument Nature's ultimate achievement is not sentient life but its opposite: any object with no emotional or intellectual capacity whatsoever and therefore, beyond its molecular valences, literally both heedless and needless.

If, as Marshal McLuhan  dared posit, all real art contains elements of genuine prophecy, here too is perhaps the message in the zombie metaphor that has become so wildly popular in Moron Nation cinema and all its related marketing campaigns and profiteering. By reductio ad absurdum, that is, by reducing zombification to a comfortably unreal spectacle of comedic violence, the One Percenters – who remember own not just the government but the media by which we the governed are conditioned, commanded and controlled – cunningly ensure we are increasingly insulated from the unspeakable truth we ourselves are already the living dead.

Life then truly is naught but terminal illness – one in which environmental ruin is already evident  as the primary symptomatology. When there is to be no future, why bother to write anything? Why – beyond the personal satisfaction I get from the competent seizure of a telling image – even bother to photograph?

And is it not true that in the personal microcosm of futility imposed by the fire that destroyed my life's work, I have experienced the collective macrocosm of futility that now defines our entire species?

The older I get – the closer to the grave I am dragged by the inescapably terminal tow-chain of time – the more I am inclined to devote my remaining hours to small and meaningless pleasures, just as I did for nearly three hours a couple of days ago, watching a big brown-and-white autumnal spider build a glistening web between the northward-looking picture-window that spans the wall above my desk and the property-line windbreak of junipers that's maybe five yards beyond the glass. The spider is an arachnid prima ballerina on a choreography of web, her accompaniment a concerto of light and shadow. I watch her until she retreats into the vibrantly green foliage. Then for another 30 minutes or so I study the play of light upon her ephemeral geometry, for a time drifting into that blessed Zen state in which I become one with what I am observing and therefore, if I am so inclined, invariably make my best photographs.

There is no price tag on the rewards of such solitary silent mindfulness. Their value is indescribable. But I find such passages indescribably exquisite, and their exquisiteness has become as vital to me as breath itself.

Couple that change-of-attitude dynamic with the real-time obligations imposed by photographing, writing, editing and producing the monthly newsletter – said newsletter has grown to the point the associated work takes nearly two full-time weeks each month – and you've got the reasons OAN has now become (and will probably remain) essentially a monthly publication.

Oh, I'll no doubt post an Extra if events so demand. And – yes – I'm (of course) continuing the photo essay, working title “Lives Apart,” that I began here in the geezer ghetto in 2011, and – again yes – I will continue posting some of its images on OAN, never mind that beyond this blog there is no longer any publisher for such work, nor (as long as capitalism rules) will there ever be again.

Meantime, to all those who had expected I would do better, I once more apologize. Quoth Lao Tzu:

If a sage of the lowest order hears about TAO
He laughs loudly about it.
If he does not laugh loudly
Then it was not yet the true TAO.

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Trump Could Be the One Percent's Long-Sought USian Hitler

READER SUPPORTED NEWS has been republishing Matt Taibbi's Rolling Stone reports on Donald Trump's quest for the Republican presidential nomination, but for some reason – probably the mandates of writing for a publication that despite its pseudo-radicalism is (and always has been) unequivocally capitalist – Taibbi never dares acknowledge the historical parallels that define Trump's candidacy.

The first of Taibbi's stories, entitled “The Republican Assault on Trump May Only Make Him Stronger,” appeared on 8 August and prompted me to add, via its comment thread, the very analysis Taibbi carefully omitted:

What Trump has done – the sin the Republican inner circle cannot forgive him – is reveal the naked hatefulness that fuels the party's popularity with U.S. voters.

The party is the true voice of the U.S. One Percent. That's why it has been the primary vessel of USian fascism since the party's owners began their pivotal funding of Mussolini and Hitler. What Trump has done – the sin the Republican inner circle cannot forgive him – is reveal the naked, Nazi-intensity hatefulness that fuels the party's (growing) popularity with U.S. voters.

Nevertheless, its rhetorical strategy has been to render lip service to the USian Big Lie of "liberty and justice for all." But Trump, having flung away all such restraints, now expresses the true malevolence of white USian consciousness. Acknowledging the reality of Moron Nation, he offers himself as its leader.

Now at last the civilized peoples of the world – and all the targeted peoples here in the imperial homeland – can no longer deny the moral imbecilic, might-makes-right savagery that has become the core credo of USian governance whether at home or abroad.

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Will Trump win the nomination? I'd say almost certainly; no other candidate in my lifetime has dared personify so openly the empire's predatory nature. Will he become president? Probably – unless he is opposed by Sanders, in which we will have, at last, an an obvious choice between the capitalist reality of absolute Evil – greed elevated to ultimate virtue (the methodical rejection of every humanitarian precept our species has ever set forth) – versus the socialist hypothetical of collective Good: "from each according to their ability; to each according to their need."

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Three points in explanation:

(1)-Trump is the true voice of white USia, the Ku Klux, neo-Nazi voice the One Percent likes to keep silenced because – when it is allowed to speak freely – the reality of the USian Empire as the Fourth Reich becomes undeniable;

(2)-Hillary has exactly the same Ayn Rand values, but (A) hides them very deftly and (B) is perfectly positioned as an identity-politics candidate to silence any genuine discussion of class war – the one historical truth that, once brought into proper focus, proves beyond argument the necessity of socialism to human survival.

(3)-Sanders, though running as a Democrat, is by his personally declared socialism providing an antidote to seven and one-half decades of anti-socialist toxins. Thereby he is rehabilitating the entire spectrum of socialist thought.

Hence the unprecedented consequences of Sanders' candidacy, and even more so of a Sanders presidency: first the resurrection of the New Deal as President Roosevelt intended it (and most assuredly not as the Missouri political-machine operative Truman debased it). Then – in the socialist renaissance that inevitably follows – the continuation of the revolution We the People intended when we made FDR our longest-serving president.

The question, of course, is whether the Ruling Class with all its disruptive genius will be able to shatter the united-front majority of oppressed minorities (including Left-leaning whites) that would ensure Sanders' victory.

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Taibbi's second report, “Donald Trump Just Stopped Being Funny,” republished by RSN on 22 August, got a bit closer to the ugly truth, but still carefully avoided any reference to the historical precedents vital to understanding the significance of Trump's run for office. Again I attempted to fill in the blanks:

Do not be deluded by the apparent opposition to Trump. Capitalism can survive only by morphing into Nazism. That's why the One Percent has (clandestinely) sought a second Hitler since the Red Army saved us from the first. And now, in the person of Trump, our capitalist overlords have precisely what they want.

Remember too the One Percenters own government at every level, the mass media, all Republican candidates and probably all Democratic candidates. They control the national mentality to a degree not even Josef Goebbels could have imagined, and they are using that control to ensure Trump's success.

As to Mr. Taibbi's bewilderment by Trump's skyrocketing popularity, Mr. Taibbi was apparently never a target of schoolyard bullies. Apparently too he never witnessed the relentless sadism with which USian students mercilessly torment a child who is visibly crippled, as by polio.

Otherwise he would understand such atrocities define this nation. They reveal – as do racism, austerity and wars of extermination – the signature hatefulness of the USian people, who with their prosperity-gospel Christianity and their Ayn Rand codas of moral imbecility were primed long ago for Nazification. They have been awaiting the second coming of der Fuehrer ever since.

Trump does indeed bring to mind Mussolini. But the Il Duce posturing...is merely part of the comic-opera facade that hides the unspeakable malevolence of the first true USian Hitler.

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Yes it is (frightening). What most of us have forgotten is the how the USian One Percenters – who financed the rise of Mussolini in Italy and Hitler in Germany – also (with German and Italian backing) attempted a fascist coup here in 1934.

Their Bankers Plot (for which Google) was stymied by a genuine patriot, Gen. Smedley Butler USMC, (for whom Google), but it was only because of the Communist Party press – and probably Soviet intelligence operatives – the story became enough widely known to embarrass the mainstream press into covering it.

Then of course after World War II the One Percenters got their revenge – the anti-Communist, anti-socialist, anti-intellectual purges to ensure there would never again be a true and truly functional Left in the United States, and the Cold War to avenge the Soviet victory in what the Russians aptly call "the Great Patriotic War against Fascism."

Meanwhile the original Bankers Plot perpetrators and their sons and grandsons have been looking for another Hitler ever since.

They've found local Hitlers – Diem, Pinochet, the colonels of the Greek junta – but until now they've never had anybody positioned to take over the Empire and complete capitalism's conquest of the globe.

And don't for a minute imagine Trump is not the One Percent's candidate. Look at the savagery of the policies their wholly owned politicians are inflicting on us. "Austerity" is a euphemism for genocide.

If they could resurrect Hitler, they surely would.

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Most of what was written about the Bankers Plot  has been suppressed. Congress investigated, but there were no indictments, and the record was permanently sealed.

I first heard of the plot from my late father, a Communist during the 1930s. I learned more from two Communists I knew as a young man, both of whom had fought Franco's fascists in Spain.

The plotters intended to oust President Roosevelt – presumably by military coup, though this was never clear – then consolidate their victory by turning the American Legion into a domestic SS, which would make up for the U.S. military's post-World-War-I shrunkenness until it was re-expanded to global-conquest size.

The U.S. would have become the (ultimately dominant) partner in a Rome-Berlin-Tokyo-Washington D.C. Axis.

Gen. Butler's role was to have been the Legion/SS leader and perhaps – this too is unclear – the new president. But the plotters did not reckon on his "war-is-a-racket" patriotism, and he refused them.

Here the story becomes even more muddled. The two Spanish Civil War vets said Soviet agents – probably GRU (Red Army intelligence) rather than OGPU (KGB) – already had the plot infiltrated and ensured Butler's ability to expose it via the Communist press.

If true, this would explain one of the mysteries of World War II: why Roosevelt trusted Stalin – not because FDR was naive, but because Soviet agents had saved the New Deal and his presidency.

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My final contribution to the Taibbi/Trump discussion was in rebuttal to an articulate but sometimes ill-informed poster screen-named bmiluski, who repeatedly expresses an impassioned hatred of Russia and Russians and is a perpetual defender of the U.S. coup in the Ukraine, which on other threads often pits us against one another. On this thread too, bmiluski emerged as an opponent, bristling at my unsparing view of U.S. history: “Loren, I really take umbrage with your describing these actions as USian. WRONG...this is typical human behavior and exists in some degree or another in every single country on this planet. To subscribe it to one country is not only naive but disingenuous.”

Au contraire. bmiluski.

Start with the extermination of First Nations peoples. Add the millions murdered as "collateral damage" in myriad colonial wars and proxy-wars of economic conquest (think Latin America, Indochina, Korea, the Middle East, Greece, the Balkans, Africa, the Ukraine).

Then add the (uncounted) millions slain by USian capitalism's deadly profiteering (slavery, German Nazism, Italian and Spanish fascism, knowingly defective products [e.g., Ford Pinto], knowingly harmful drugs [e.g., thalidomide], workplace deaths [e.g., Bangladesh]). Remember the One Percenters own most of the world's major corporations.

Add also the slow-motion genocide implicit in the industrial world's most savage policies toward lower-income people. (Think death-dealing welfare “reform,” still more fatalities by denial of health care [including by the calculatedly prohibitive co-pays that define the Obamacare scam], the less-obvious deaths from cuts in food stamps, Medicare, Medicaid, cold-weather heating assistance, etc. ad nauseam).

And don't forget the war of extermination against people of color by the federally militarized police.

All those corpses damn us as our species' most murderous empire ever. Not even Nazi Germany came close.

Maybe that's why the U.S. spawns 75 percent of the world's serial killers. Perhaps they are the ultimate personification of the nation that believes itself to be the one true instrument of the (infinitely vengeful) Abrahamic god.

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RSN's reprint of Taibbi's latest Rolling Stone piece on Trump is here.  Significantly, Taibbi continues to avoid the increasingly terrifying likelihood Trump will become the USian Hitler. Instead, Taibbi remains lost in the 2015 version of the same fog of arrogant optimism that, after der Führer's “impossible” victory, eventually morphed into terminal clouds of Zyklon B.

Meanwhile – as if in direct opposition to Trump's ever-more-undeniable Nazism – Democratic Candidate Bernie Sanders is evoking a socialist renaissance that is already alarming our capitalist overlords. The extent to which this is true is evidenced by Robert Reich's sudden emergence as a defender of capitalism.  The following is a small excerpt from my response:

Wake up, people. What we are witnessing here in Mr. Reich's pro-capitalist testimonial – and this is a very important point – is the sly, subtle and decidedly Machiavellian emergence of a new anti-socialist offensive by the One Percent and its functionaries. The offensive is intended to combat Bernie Sanders' popularization not just of socialism but also of the necessity of revolution. It shows us the extent to which the One Percent and in fact the entire Ruling Class is increasingly terrified by the Sanders campaign – not just the campaign itself, but the impetus it provides for the exploration of all forms of socialism, including Marxism, its most revolutionary form.

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BLM Right to Disrupt (Fake) Democracy, Wrong to Silence Genocide Foes

MUCH AS CHARGES of racism have been used to silence the critics of the promise-breaking president who conned us all with the most brazen Big Lie in USian political history and thus should be immortalized as Barack the Betrayer, so has Black Lives Matter used charges of racism to silence those who would tell the ugly truth about its suppression, at Westlake Park in Seattle on 8 August, of a rally against genocide.

That's what the four BLM activists – Marissa Johnson, Mara Jacqueline Willaford, a third woman and a man whose names were not reported by any source I read – shut down. And – yes – the rally they broke up was in fact a rally against genocide.

That's because “austerity” is nothing more than a cunning modern euphemism for the slow-motion, blame-the-victim version of what used to be done in death camps or by soldiers in the field but now is accomplished by the methodical termination of life-preserving stipends and services -– Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, food stamps, winter heating assistance, welfare, unemployment insurance, even the dependable telephone service so desperately needed by those who are critically ill.

With the entire safety net under ever-escalating attack by the austerity-minded Republican/Democrat coalition that rules the empire on behalf its One Percent owners, any rally in defense of Social Security and Medicare is therefore by definition a rally against genocide.

And that is precisely what the Westlake Park event was – a rally in defense of Social Security and Medicaid and therefore in opposition to genocide.

Moreover, anyone who claims the mantle of political activism should at the very least be sophisticated enough to distinguish between that sort of event (at which Presidential Candidate Bernie Sanders was merely one of a day-long slate of speakers) and an actual Sanders-for-President campaign rally as occurred at a somewhat less public University of Washington venue that same evening.

But the main point obscured by the BLM-orchestrated chorus and its charges of “racism” is that the idiocy of BLM's Seattle action, whether its enormous service to the Ruling Class was misguided or deliberate, has nothing whatsoever to do with race. It is instead another very specific manifestation of the anti-intellectualism that defines Moron Nation, the land of un-think in which nearly all the USian 99 Percent has been methodically imprisoned.

For those of us who witnessed firsthand how the (mostly white) Occupy Movement destroyed itself from within even as it was being crushed by government forces from without, the Westlake Park incident was a horrible moment of deja vu.

Its true racism was our (honky) hope and expectation blacks would somehow save us from ourselves, that BLM would be smarter and more savvy and therefore more effective than Occupy.

But the egotism and fuck-you selfishness that are among the most malignant manifestations of USian anti-intellectualism once again triumphed over rationality and purposefulness, and once again, as is always the case when there is neither ideological discipline nor even thoughtfulness (characteristics the increasingly self-obsessed USian youth are carefully conditioned to despise), we the people, all of us regardless of race, got slapped in the face by the invasive termination of a rally in which we were all of us to have been the beneficiaries.

That said, I heartily applaud the BLM practice of disrupting presidential-campaign events. Given the realities of capitalist governance, all such events are Big Lies. I say that not as a condemnation of Sanders, but in acceptance of the probability the Ruling Class will never allow him to be president even if he wins. In this context, the fate of President-in-Absentia Albert Gore Jr. is instructive. Gore won both the popular vote and the electoral vote, but the Ruling Class was already in the year 2000 so committed to fascism, they would not allow even a traditional albeit mildly conservative liberal to occupy the White House. For Gore, the fix was clearly in. But the real fix occurred on 22 November 1963, and it has been reinforced by every election since then, most recently by Barack the Betrayer's breathtaking Big Lie of “change we can believe in,” and probably next yearby Trump's unabashed Nazism – even if Sanders actually wins. Hence I hope BLM continues its disruptions throughout this year and next.

What follows, from the Popular Resistance website, is the partial text of my part in a long and very thoughtful discussion about the Westlake Park incident:

Speaking as the professional editor I sometimes am even in my 75th year, the fatal omission in (Jamie Utt's reporting for the website changefromwithin.org) is that the Seattle event disrupted by Black Lives Matter was most assuredly not a "Bernie rally."

Given the unusual depth to which the incident has been covered, Mr. Utt cannot possibly be unaware the event was instead a commemoration of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. It was organized by the AFL/CIO and the Washington State Labor Council to mark Social Security's 80th anniversary.

For Mr. Utt to tag the event a "Bernie rally" is therefore deliberate deception. Not only does it purposefully obscure the inappropriateness of BLM's targeting. It also conceals the fact much of the booing was an expression of legitimate anger at BLM's implicit alignment with two of the most reactionary forces in the United States: those who despise organized labor, and those who are (genocidally) destroying the programs upon which we seniors and disabled people – many of us black – depend for survival.

In this context, BLM's silencing of Sanders becomes yet another intensification of the ultimate (and ultimately unbridgeable) schism in U.S. politics – not race, but the boiling hatred envious youth are being conditioned to feel for those of us who are still (somewhat) protected by unions and by Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. The incident thus exemplifies divide et impera, and its sole beneficiary is of course the Ruling Class.

***

I later added the following in response to Kevin Zeese, one of the founders and editors of Popular Resistance:

Obviously and just as you say, the distinction between a rally for Social Security and Medicare versus a rally for Sanders is unimportant to the people who terminated the event. Where we differ is in our understanding of the significance of their action.

You say shutting down the event had "a good impact." I don't know your age, but an obsessively self-centered indifference to geriatric, disability and economic issues so expressed is surely typical of younger USians regardless of their race or socioeconomic status. I on the other hand am both physically disabled and old – and therefore, because I am no longer exploitable for profit, I am a prime target of the slow-motion genocide implicit in all the Obamanoid/Republican/Democrat austerity programs. Hence I regard the forcible termination of the Seattle event as yet another wound maliciously inflicted by the vast majority of USians who – again regardless of race – are (increasingly) hostile to the (increasingly) desperate needs of elderly and disabled people and lower-income people in general.

From this perspective, the forcible suppression of Sanders' protests against the empire's forthcoming Social Security cuts and its already imposed (and already deliberately deadly) cuts in Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, low-income energy assistance and other such programs is no less oppressive than the forcible suppression of BLM's protests against the empire's ongoing war of extermination against people of color. Both forms of protest are protests against the empire's diabolically clever methodologies of genocide. Murder is murder, whether by the active measures of the One Percenters' militarized police or by the passive measures imposed by the One Percenters' wholly-owned politicians. But apparently BLM is too self-centered (or perhaps too ignorant of realpolitik) to grasp the all-important point.its termination of the Social Security event was thus a huge (and hugely deplorable) service to the Ruling Class.

On the other hand, if, as you say, it was appropriate to shut down the save-Social-Security/save-Medicare event, then why is it not appropriate to shut down or at least disrupt every political event in the USian homeland? The political truth is the Bernie Sanders candidacy and the protest politics of Sen. Elizabeth Warren or U.S. representatives Alan Grayson or Jim McDermott are not only rendered meaningless by their minority status, but are in fact part of the Machiavellian methodology by which the One Percent maintains the Big Lie of USian representative "democracy." Thus the real function – indeed the only real function of Sanders, Warren, Grayson, McDermott and their very few like-minded colleagues – is to perpetuate not one Big Lie but two: firstly that the Democratic Party is (by some particularly deluded mode of magical thinking), somehow separate from the de facto one-party apparatus that tyrannizes the USian Empire on behalf its One Percent overlords; secondly that there are still functional vestiges of the empire's former (albeit racially limited) pseudo-democratic process.

But acquisition of this sort of political wisdom would require the Left's wholesale rejection of Moron Nation anti-intellectualism (the very affliction that destroyed Occupy from within even as the empire was destroying it from without), and then the thoughtful evolution of a disciplined ideology of class-struggle that fully accommodates the realities of racism and sexism. Alas, this will obviously never happen. The nation's anti-intellectualism is the by-product of a cradle-to-grave conditioning so relentless it is now effectively part of USian DNA – and that (the resultant impossibility of achieving ideological solidarity) – is why all USian efforts at forcing genuine humanitarian progress are either now and forever doomed or at the very least delayed until successive environmental cataclysms (perhaps) shatter the power of the capitalist Ruling Class.

Nevertheless, the statement by one of the BLM event-terminators that the USian political system has "never" represented black interests "and never will" is absolutely true not just for her immediate racial-identity constituency but, regardless of race, for every member of the USian empire's 99 Percent. From this perspective – here I repeat myself – all USian political events should be disrupted as the Big Lies they are.

But that too will never happen. The pivotal, Ayn-Rand-minded, morally imbecilic (un)consciousness that as a by-product of anti-intellectualism now shackles the vast USian majority – again regardless of race – is a carefully inflamed, bitterly envious, increasingly murderous hatred for anyone – especially union members and/or elderly and/or disabled people – who has thus far managed to cling to some tiny vestige of economic security. Moreover, anyone who doubts this grotesque aspect of USian realpolitik is in clinical denial of the extent to which the associated hatefulness is fueling the ever-more-victorious Republican blitzkrieg that is methodically sweeping the nation toward unabashed fascism and even a uniquely USian form of Nazism.

Like it or not, it is this (reflexively selective) denial – specifically denial that genocide by austerity is ultimately no different from genocide by bullet or truncheon – that is the ultimate message conveyed by BLM's termination of the Seattle rally. And so it will remain – at least until the Left acknowledges all such celebrations of USian history and/or present-day politics as tacit expressions either in brazen support of capitalist savagery or of the Big Lies that enable it – and therefore musters in sufficient numbers and with sufficient discipline to disrupt every such event.

(Disclosure, I am one of the millions of victims of the genocide-by-austerity budget cuts in question. The Great Wall Street Ripoff of 2007-2010 took nearly 70 percent of my annual income, permanently obliterated the market for my [award-winning] photographic and editorial skills and bankrupted me as well. Since then my only income is a Social Security pension, and so it will be for however much longer I survive. My pension is so small that since 2009 it has qualified me for welfare. Last year this included $137 per month in food-stamps, an $18 per month stipend paid to the local land-line telephone-service provider plus various Medicaid supplements to the health care I purchase via Medicare. But this year, thanks to the aforementioned, slow-motion genocide imposed by Republican/Democrat austerity policies, my food stamps have been slashed $37 per month, and the $18-per-month telephone assistance has been permanently eliminated. Meanwhile my Medicare co-pays for the life-sustaining specialist services of cardiology and physical therapy have skyrocketed 400 percent, and I am now forced to pay 20 percent for life-sustaining laboratory tests that until this year cost me nothing.)

The Medicare cost-increases and the Medicaid and food-stamp cuts are all the work of the federal government – specifically Obama's back-room coalition of Democrats and Republicans – the de facto one-party apparatus that rules the nation despite the refusal by the mass-media propaganda machine to acknowledge or expose it.

Termination of the telephone stipend was inflicted by Washington state's Democrats, who (again) hurled lower-income people under the proverbial bus to save the state's breathtakingly huge tax exemptions for Big Business – billions of dollars that add up to the largest sum of state tax exemptions in the U.S. This means that as Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and the state's other parasitically wealthy resident executives siphon off ever-more-malignant profits, the state's lowest-income elderly and disabled people are suddenly and permanently denied the reliable telephone service essential to staying alive. (Yes, there is still the federal free-cell-phone service, but cell phones are notoriously unreliable, particularly given the destructive weather inflicted by terminal climate change.) Which in turn means – just as the One Percenters and their political vassals intend – these seniors and disabled people are forever cut off from 911 emergency services and are therefore soon to be dead – precisely the circumstances and outcome implicitly endorsed by BLM's selective disruption of the anti-austerity, save-Social-Security, save-Medicare event in Seattle – no matter whether BLM's endorsement was calculatedly malicious or merely thoughtless.

Update: BLM now says it will stop its exclusive targeting of Sanders and disrupt Republican presidential campaign events also.

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Forsaking Fallacies Fostered by Full-Frame Photo Fanatics

ART IS OFTEN turned sour by its reduction to meaningless ornamentation or its exploitation for mercantile messaging.

Hypothetical examples of the latter – at least I dearly hope they are hypothetical – would include the grotesquely offensive use of fine art to sell big-ticket ego-supplements. Picture, for example, a Modigliani nude appropriated for a Hummer commercial, or consider the perversion of the best, most revolutionary music of the 1960s into themes of trinket materialism and impulse-buying. Imagine Jimmy Hendrix  amidst the health-and-beauty-aids or Janis Joplin  as we browse the meat counter, “Are You Experienced” as we choose deodorants or “Piece of My Heart” as we decide whether dinner will be chicken, beef or pork, the background music co-opted (and probably stolen) to not-so-subtly underscore USian capitalism's new, increasingly exclusive definition of “democracy”: the alleged “freedom” to choose one product over another.

These are, as I said (and to the best of my knowledge), merely horrid hypotheticals; I have not (yet) heard Grace Slick's unforgettable “Crown of Creation” used to sooth impatient customers in a long checkout line nor – bite your tongue – seen a Modigliani conscripted to peddle cars.

But a real though far less obvious example of art soured by ornamentation is the curious cult of the full-frame photograph: the crippling principle that cropping is forbidden, the accompanying notion a photograph – any photograph no matter its content – has no artistic significance unless it is printed full-frame and proven so by (ornamental) inclusion of the black borders of its negative. By this deliberately, perhaps even maliciously restrictive taboo, much of the world's greatest photojournalism, including some of W. Eugene Smith's  seminal work, is theoretically marginalized to meaninglessness.

While I do not know the origin of this calculatedly censoring shibboleth, I do know where and when I first encountered it: in Seattle c. 1974, then (and probably even now amongst those dilettantes wealthy enough to afford the prohibitive expense of working in film), the home of an Ansel Adams  cult the zero-tolerance credo of which rejects photography of the human condition as sacrilegious, even heretical abuse of equipment and squandering of pixels and/or emulsion. The cult's corollary principle is that any image not “previsualized” – that is, its negative not exposed in strict submission to Zone System  standards – is to be discarded as garbage.

For a journalist, these are genuinely odious restraints, perhaps to be studied both for useful technical information and meaningful sociological data, but to be forcefully set aside whenever the content of a picture so demands, such as the difficulty of analytically previsualizing the skin-tones of a writhing, screaming protester as she is beaten by the police or getting an accurate Zone-System reading off a rapidly dissipating cloud of pepper gas.

Hence a basic technique of old-time, pre-digital photojournalism: meter the palm of your hand in the light wherein you're working and open up one stop if the subjects are Caucasian, two if the images include people of color. Point being that in reportage you try to go in prepared because you usually don't have time to be more selective about exposure or exact composition. The contemplative, either-or stuff you do in the darkroom, or as it's done today, on the computer.

The Zoned-out Adams disciples will of course respond that reportage and art are antitheticals, to which I would reply (and have) that what passes for art in the post-modern world – for example the photographic studies of de-electrified light-bulb filaments undertaken as “fine art photography” by one of the Seattle Zoners – is so removed from real-world aesthetics to be not just hopelessly sterile but utterly meaningless. But that of course is the core doctrine of post-modernism: that everything is so meaningless even the concept of meaninglessness has no meaning. Which, ironically, would seem to reduce “fine art” to a contradiction in terms.

All of which is prefatory to a much more brief commentary on the above photograph, one of the very last I made with my beloved M Leicas. The sun was behind the April clouds that morning in 2011, and I was shooting in a large room lit through a bank of industrially sized eastern-facing windows. Just as I raised my M4 to photograph the woman, the sun burst out, she grinned, and my cloudy-day, available indoor-light exposure with my 135mm f/4 Elmar, probably wide open at with the shutter at 1/125, over-exposed the Fujicolor 800 film by at least three stops. Whatever artfulness it achieves is therefore entirely coincidental. The image here today – a carefully cropped, more heavily dodged (the eyes) and burned in (the background and surroundings) variant of the full-frame picture I published here on 30 July – is part of an ongoing process to take maximum advantage of the accident and turn it into something better.

Yes, while I am entirely satisfied with the image desensitized to black-and-white, I am still indecisive about its most effective cropping and tonal manipulation.

The point, though, is rejection of the bullshit no-cropping shibboleths and the simultaneous refusal to be intimidated by one's material, a necessity I often stressed to my students while I was teaching photography part-time at a couple of colleges during the late 1970s and early 1980s. It is a lesson re-validated now – as a Canon T5 digital single-lens reflex overcomes the hitherto prohibitive limitations imposed by poverty – by the fact I am finally, at age 75, transcending the irremediable and infinitely painful losses inflicted on me at age 43 by the 1983 fire. Had I been hamstrung by the full-frame shibboleth and all the other taboos against manipulating an image ever closer to its apparent truth, I probably would never have again considered these matters.

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How Science Fiction Might Solve the Mystery of Cosmic Radio Silence

(Literary etiquette requires I preface the following with three disclosures. The first expresses my gratitude to the late Henry Miller for the term  “cosmodemonic,” which I borrowed from his [formerly illegal] trilogy, Sexus, Nexus and Plexus. The next conveys my thanks to the woman who first perceived the connection between the Koch Brothers and cockroaches and so coined the perfect term “Kochroach.” The last disclosure is my apology to the creator of “Kochroaches” for the fact her name was forever erased from my files in the January-March debacle of my Happy-New-Year-from-Jesus computer-crash.)

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IF I WERE a real writer instead of a posturing dyslexic, and if I wrote science-fiction, I'd cite the diverse elements of our impending extinction  as indisputable proof the fiery wheels, burning bushes and “divinely” inscribed tablets that infected our species with patriarchy were t the intergalactic equivalent of the smallpox-inflicted blankets by which Christian Europeans destroyed the First Nations of the Americas.

Indeed, such a hypothesis is merely a proper application of Occam's Razor: it explains our impending apocalypse without excluding any of its contextual evidence – including, by the way, the repeated sighting of Unidentified Flying Objects in a universe rendered ominously silent by its absence of any intelligently originated radio signals save our own.

Now, some 5,000 years after patriarchy's introduction to this planet, it and its predatory offspring Judaism, Christianity, Islam and capitalism have totally and eternally exterminated the ancient and formerly universal community of the Great Mother of All Being, which correctly envisioned humans and all the rest of Nature's children – animate or inanimate – as members of a single matrifocal, matrilineal and probably matriarchal family. That human society – proto-communistic, definitively egalitarian, necessarily democratic – guided our species' through the tragedies and triumphs of its first 195,000 years. But patriarchy and its philosophical descendants, like some immeasurably slow but relentlessly deadly virus, have methodically downgraded women from leadership to chattel, thereby extinguishing all but the faintest most etherial memories of our former self-sustaining ways. Meanwhile patriarchy's master-slave hierarchy has evolved into capitalism – infinite greed elevated to ultimate virtue – which in turn has spawned the final, terminal and terminally destructive capitalist forms of fascism and Nazism. Now the One Percent openly regards the concentration camp as its ultimate model of governance and views “community” as a synonym for “rebellion.” We the people – the 99 Percent – are doomed accordingly.

In our science-fiction novel, perhaps titled “The Swarming of Planet Earth,” the alien invaders wait until the 20th Century to make themselves known to the Ruling Class, first to the Nazis, next – when it becomes obvious the Third Reich lacks the resource-base to achieve global conquest – to the USian One Percenters. The aliens appeal to the moral imbecility and serial-killer compulsions that are the enabling components of capitalism. Disguising themselves in precisely those humanoid forms the One Percenters find most irresistible – think GQ, Elle and Hustler – the aliens assure the One Percenters of eternal survival in special “prosperity enclaves” in return for intensifying the destruction of the planet and hastening the extermination of the rest of humankind and of every other species, mammalian or otherwise, that might present a threat to the invaders. The resultant genocide, obscured by furious but meaningless political debates, is intended to eliminate the last remaining indigenous populations to ensure there is no remnant of the skills and cooperative instincts that formerly enabled our ancient ancestors to prevail even amidst the famines inflicted by a succession of ice ages.

Then in the final chapter, with Earth reduced by capitalism to the planetary equivalent of a reeking Dumpster, comes the invasion itself. The invaders, swarming like maggots in a corpse, drop all humanoid disguise and reveal themselves to be an unfathomably intelligent, inconceivably predatory subspecies of cosmodemonic cockroach that eons ago mastered both the technology of intergalactic flight and the psychological-warfare skill of seducing a dominant species into committing the specific acts of collective suicide that reduce a target planet into the most favorably roach-sustaining environment. As for the Kochroaches, the cosmodemonic roaches' One Percent collaborators, theirs is akin to the fate of Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, their living flesh slowly eaten from within by roach larvae, themselves fully conscious until the end.

And here, in our species' final pages, is the answer to the riddle of the ominous lack of intelligently originated radio signals that defines the universe. Here as everywhere in the cosmos, the Cosmoroaches (who are and always have been nature's closest approximations to god), keep everlasting watch, lest some mammalian species evolve enough to potentially threaten their eternal insectoid dominance. Then the Cosmoroaches inject patriarchy or some other equally potent psycho-toxin that not only ensures the mammalian species will self-destruct, but in the course of self-destruction will render their planet a perfect breeding-dump for Roachperpetuation. There is never more than one source of intelligent radio signals in the universe at any given moment because that's all the Cosmoroaches, whose exoskeletal bodies allow them to survive the rigors of warp-speed travel, will ever allow in their de facto hive.

And now, in recognition of the fact the Abrahamic god is probably nothing more than a giant, super-intelligent, super-predatory intergalactic cockroach, let us close with a new, more appropriate variant of the Protestant Christian Doxology:

Curse god from whom all misery flows
Curse him ye victims here below
Curse him above ye suffering host
Curse Father, Son and Holy Ghost.

(Not to worry: I promise my subsequent posts will be shorter.)

LB/30 July-7 September 2015

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