OAN, Windows 10, an On-Paper Newsletter for Seniors, Susan's Questions/My Answers, Presidential Mania 2016

 

A lighthearted moment among Tacoma Clinic Defense volunteers on guard against Fundamentalist Christian fanatics who want to abolish women's sexual freedom. I recently joined TCD and will give it as much time on its defense lines and with my media skills as I am able.  Click to view image full size. (Photo by Loren Bliss © 2016)

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ONCE AGAIN, OAN is in a state of transition. I have lost nearly all my readers due to the posting-hiatus inflicted by the worst creativity-killer I have ever encountered – an ongoing, emotionally exhausting fight with Microsoft's (notoriously buggy)  Windows 10 software. Nor can I abandon the struggle. It is necessitated by my ongoing commitment to produce a professional-quality monthly newsletter for the senior-housing community in which I live. But the hours, days and weeks the battle with Windows 10 steals from my life leave me neither the time nor the energy to publish new material here on OAN – though perhaps I am at last finding a detour around the Windows 10 barrier.

As nearly as I could figure, at its height my OAN readership was approaching 1,000 page-views per week, with more than half those readers in Europe. But as of last week the number had declined to less than 40 per week here on Typepad and to about 16 a week on Blogger, where I also post because – for whatever reason – it is much more accessible to European readers. Hence my deepest gratitude to those few who have remained aboard.

The newsletter that now because of Windows 10 claims such a huge part of my life is a publication I founded in 2013 and of which I am deservedly proud. It is is called Community Chronicle. It began its fourth year last November. Three months before that, when the struggle with Windows 10 ended my ability to update OAN at weekly intervals, I decided Chronicle must take precedence because its entirely-local, only-on-paper contents include information essential to lower-income seniors and disabled people in our ever-worsening struggles for survival in the face of capitalism's implicitly genocidal “austerity” policies.

Nearly all this vital information used to be available in local newspapers and often in broadcast media as well. But it is now maliciously suppressed by the for-profit propaganda ministry colloquially known as “mainstream media,” which is owned by the same One Percenters who own all USian governments and politicians at every level, and who therefore limit “news” to that which is of interest only to the economically upscale readers sought by advertisers. For example, “mainstream media” now covers welfare only when it can be misrepresented as “wasteful” spending squandered on those of us the Ruling Class ever-more-openly denounces as “lazy parasites.” But stories describing the horrors wrought by welfare cutbacks and what cutback victims might do to cope with the resultant hardships – the sorts of news we routinely covered during my years as a reporter and editor – are emphatically forbidden.

Thus the Community Chronicle attempts to fill the information gap. It focuses on material relevant to those of us who are elderly and/or disabled, and above all else impoverished enough to live in a 50-apartment/50-resident complex that is one of fewer than a half-dozen independent-living housing projects for low-income seniors and disabled people in Tacoma, Washington, a seaport city of 200,000 persons. The Chronicle has a a core readership of 50 persons every month, and all of us understand our circumstances – that we are targets of the government's relentless reductions of everything upon which our survival depends, mass transit included. Most of us are acutely aware of the government's genocidal intent: “obviously,” as many of us say aloud, “the politicians want us dead, but they don't want the embarrassment of death camps.”

Obviously too the Chronicle's contents are relevant to an audience much larger than the 50 residents of the facility it serves. But it is an audience rendered unreachable by the exclusionary savageries of capitalist politics and economics. Most of the Chronicle's potential readers are denied Internet access by the obscenely prohibitive rates charged by U.S. Internet service providers – rates typically ten times higher than those charged anywhere else on this planet. The costs of the requisite hardware – at least $400 for an even mediocre-quality new computer and printer – are equally prohibitive. Thus only eight of my 50 fellow residents own computers, and only five are actually on-line.

That 90-percent-off-line figure for low-income seniors in the 65-and-above age group – by far the worst digital divide in the industrial world – seems constant throughout the U.S. (I say “seems” because the relevant statistics, readily available when I wrote about this for a senior periodical in 2007, have since become much more difficult to find and interpret. A credible 2014 report that the digital divide is slowly but steadily worsening as capitalism continues to contract economic opportunities for the 99 Percent has apparently vanished down the Orwell hole.)

Meanwhile, access to life-sustaining government social services is ever more (maliciously) limited to those who can afford the horrendous costs of buying and maintaining computers and subscribing to an ISP – in other words, to those who don't need government stipends and services at all. As a result, those who are most needy are the very people who are most often denied access. Nor is this coincidental; it is yet another (lethally effective) tactic of the slow-motion genocide concealed within the euphemism “austerity.” The resultant struggle – no-computer elders versus computer-access-only agencies – is precisely what makes the Chronicle so necessary to its readers. But the fact these readers are (now and forever) denied computers and Internet access also makes giving Chronicle a domain name and putting it on the Internet a waste of money.

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It is something of an aside, but I should note here that low-income senior housing is one of the more clever tactics by which the One Percent and its Ruling Class brain-trust perpetuate the societal divisions that ensure the 99 Percent remains forever disunited. Thus we elderly folk are warehoused separately from those USian Empire subjects the One Percent deems still exploitable for profit. Obviously, our overlords fear our (definitively subversive) memories of the New Deal's far better times – especially how those better times were won and sustained by the solidarity of organized workers. Such recollections, the Ruling Class fears, might give today's hopelessly disempowered debt-slaves dangerously disruptive notions of resistance.

Though most of these housing-facilities are reasonably comfortable, as is the apartment complex in which I live, their apartness nevertheless defines them as ghettos. And like all ghettos, they serve a specific capitalist purpose. Methodically isolated as we are, ever-more-encapsulated by the same damning aura of alienness the empire imposes on women, blacks, Hispanics, First Nations folk and any others it fears as potential enemies, we will be that much easier to subjugate and exterminate once capitalism completes its inevitable transition into fascism and/or the uniquely USian form of Nazism Donald Trump is now fomenting.

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Given the time-and-energy conflict between OAN and the Chronicle, I naturally felt my obligation to my neighbors – that is, to people I know and see almost daily – took precedence over my obligation to a group of readers who were for the most part anonymous. For a long while, indeed for most of the Chronicle's three-plus years of publication, I had managed with only minor difficulties to serve both groups. But then my desk-top computer died, which forced me to switch to a laptop computer irremediably dedicated to Microshaft operating systems – this after seven years of running an Ubuntu-equipped machine that had been built specifically for me.

Learning to use the laptop's Windows 8 and 8.1 operating systems was difficult enough. But Windows 10 is the most nightmarishly difficult operating system I have yet encountered. (Nor is there any hyperbole here; the experience is indeed giving me nightmares.) From August onward, fighting Windows 10 typically left me so emotionally drained, the best I could do was get out one or two editions of OAN each month. This is because Windows 10 has turned the seven-day job of writing, photographing, editing, typesetting and laying out the Chronicle into a 14-to-20-day ordeal of infinite frustration, wrenching fury and – not infrequently – total defeat.

One set of Windows 10 problems was caused by Microshaft's Rube Goldberg programming,  which made computer operation suddenly far more bewilderingly difficult than anything I have encountered in my 16 years of overcoming the computer's many intrusions on my ability to process photographs and/or write acceptably coherent text. In fact, with Windows 10 it was as if I had never run a computer before, the as-if substantially complicated by Windows 10's built-in incompatibility with the open-source software that is my (impoverished person's) mainstay.

Trying to describe this problem to a friend who has minimal familiarity with computers, I used the analogy of a familiar journey. Normally we go from Tacoma to Portland, Oregon by driving south on Interstate 5. Imagine, I said, if the only way to get to Portland was by driving 2800 miles east to New York City and then driving another 2900 miles west and south to make a journey that used to be only only 142 miles. That's what using Windows 10 is like – driving 5700 miles to get to a destination that's 142 miles away.

An additional class of problems – far less frequent but far more disabling – was inflicted by Microshaft's nasty penchant for occasionally ramming in emergency Windows 10 updates without first asking permission. In one instance, Microshaft jammed an update into my machine while it was maxed out doing graphics, and the result was an epic crash that not only obliterated about 6,000 words of Chronicle text (nine stories, all of which had to be rewritten from scratch), but rendered the computer non-operational for nearly three days, making the Chronicle a week late.

No computer or software manufacturer has ever done anything even remotely like this to me before, and the resultant stress was of such devastating intensity, it took yet another week of mostly sleeping 10 or 12 hours at a stretch for me to recover. When one is my age – I'll be 76 at the end of this month – the theft of two entire weeks of one's increasingly precious time is not something one easily forgives or forgets.

Though I have always despised computers – firstly, because they are electronic scabs that eliminated six of every seven jobs in newspaper journalism; secondly, because they are inhuman tyrants that force me to labor as a typesetter while simultaneously playing a much-despised game of electronic Simon Says; thirdly, because their frightfully prohibitive cost now repeatedly threatens to terminate forever my ability to write and photograph – I had nevertheless surrendered to them and achieved a sort of working peace. But all that has been swept away by Windows 10, and I can now say with absolute truthfulness there is nothing in this world I hate so much as computers, and nothing I fear so much as the uncontrollable extent to which they can destroy my work. After last month's ruinous crash, every minute I am at my keyboard, it is as if I am hunched beneath a Damocles sword that threatens the total destruction of whatever I happen to be doing.

And no, I cannot afford – will never again be able to afford – the approximately $250 it costs for a back-up hard-drive. Nor – since it is nearly as big as a second computer – is there any place in my tiny apartment I could put it.

Obviously the stress of being Microshaft-dependent will continue to spike my blood pressure and thereby shorten my life. A Nurd friend has promised – if indeed he can ever find the time – to take the day or so it will require to determine if this machine can actually be stripped clean of Microshaft contamination, and if so, he will reload it with a Linux operating system – a project that will take at least another day and maybe two or three. Hence what I am really asking for is a week out of his work-life. While some people I know, the friend included, maintains this can be done, others warn that Microshaft and Samsung collaborated so effectively, any attempt to purge the computer will destroy it. Hence my friend's effort may prove to be fool's errand. Whatever, producing the Chronicle with Microshaft Windows 10 software will meanwhile continue to steal a disproportionate amount of my time and inflict a truly horrendous toll in stress. But I will continue to do it simply because my neighbors depend on it for information they can get nowhere else. Such are the (not always pleasant) obligations of being a (real) journalist, even in (alleged) retirement.

What then of OAN? Because of the far more universal scope of its ideas, I regard it as the far more important work – indeed the only work of any real significance to whatever postmortem legacy might be mine. But how can I restore OAN to its once-per-week frequency when one week (and effectively at least two weeks) are consumed each month by the huge struggle to produce the Chronicle with Windows 10? And what then when I am done with the Chronicle I am so exhausted, all I can do for the next week is recover via generous does of sleep and trash novels?

Part of the answer seems to be to return to my former practice of including in OAN the comments and information I post on other websites. Most of these contributions to Internet dialogues are short and to the point, and during the second and third weeks of each month, they are further abbreviated because the only time I have to write them is when I am taking a break from the constant war with Windows 10 that turns production of the Chronicle into an ordeal I now anticipate with naught but dread. My comment-thread work on Reader Supported News – by far my favorite Internet news and discussion site (and therefore my primary posting-place) – is pared down still more by RSN's 1500-character limit on individual posts, which imposes on me the same (welcome) discipline that writing for daily newspapers did.

Though I always felt it was somehow cheating to include comment-thread material in OAN, I often did, albeit usually for the purpose of providing additional relevant details, and as of last week I have returned to that practice. That should guarantee weekly appearances of new OAN material – or as close to weekly as the ongoing fight with Windows 10 will allow. And should the commentary evoked by breaking news deserve it, I will also publish the OAN equivalent of the old-time daily-newspaper Extra: a special edition rushed out to report pivotal events, for example an assassination, a coup or a declaration of war.

I also continue to ponder what else might be properly published under the OAN flag. I think there's a goodly chance it will become the final destination of the memoir I have been writing during the past two decades, albeit never more than in seemingly disconnected bits and pieces. I have already published a few such pieces in OAN, notably here,  here,  here and here.  And of course there will always be photographs on these pages, because in truth (and despite the painful limitations imposed by arthritis and deteriorating spinal injuries), I still think of myself far more as a photographer than writer or editor. As I have confessed before, I am dyslexic, quite severely so in fact, and this eternally bitter truth – never mind I have won more awards and certainly made more money from writing and editing than from photography – relentlessly tells me that to label myself a “writer” is at best a self-deception and at worst a fraudulent act.

Yes, my intellect knows this notion of being a fraud is nonsense – not just nonsense but nonsensical self-hatred – but even after at least 55 years of proof, my emotions (as if in some longstanding parallel to Windows 10 perversity) always default back to to the fraud setting. The source of the problem is obvious: despite decades of government proclamations to the contrary, we the disabled are still taught, often from birth, to despise ourselves. Such is disability in a realm so instinctively Christian Fundamentalist, the disabled person is invariably treated as someone accursed by the divine sadist the Christians worship as their god.

The absurdity here lurks in the fact these same Christians claim our species is “made in the image” of their god. What then of a disabled person? I can think of no better example of a contradiction in terms than the notion of a “dyslexic writer” – a concept that as an image of a god becomes genuinely laughable. Perhaps “god” is a dyslexic reversal of “dog” (as in the truism “dog is love”), and that all of the atrocities committed in god's name are the result of mistakenly looking beyond the canine example for the wisdom essential to human survival. Having been blessed by the company of dogs for most of my life, I long ago recognized their value as teachers. 

Meanwhile the fraud meme resists even efforts to laugh it away. One of the great ironies of my life is that while my photographs have generated enough acclaim to appear in significant journals – Paris Match for one, Newsweek for another – most of my writing never made it beyond journalism's minor leagues, and it was in those notably limited environments it won the lion's share of my awards. The limits imposed by dyslexia? Not entirely; some of my earliest editors thought me destined for The New York Times, and the late Cicely Nichols thought my “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer,” which revealed the old Counterculture as the first wave of a rebellion against patriarchy, would become one of the more important works of the 20th Century. But my civil-rights arrest in 1963 seems to have ended forever my major-media potential, and that 1983 fire killed “Dancer.” Now, less than four weeks away from my 76th birthday and with the best of my work reduced to ash, the whole question of competitive quality is moot. That which has been destroyed can never be re-created. As I have learned from (invariably bitter) experience, whenever one attempts to do so, the result is always failure.

Perhaps that's why, even after the indescribable (and never-to-be-relieved) pain of the loss of all the work destroyed by fire, photography remains my passion. Seen through a camera, life is always new, often a Zen experience, and at its very best an encounter with Pagan ecstasy – that exquisite suspension of distinctions between self and other that no doubt prompted the original Taliesin to exclaim, “there is nothing in which I have not been.”

But writing, though a part of me loves it as much as I love photographing, is always befouled by the terrible down-pressing burden of the fearful o-please-don't-let-me-choose-the-wrong-word self-consciousness that is such an inescapably oppressive part of dyslexia. Yes I sometimes write reasonably well, but that does not alter the fact writing is for me (and always will be) as much an unnatural act as singing is for someone born without the power of speech. Thus it seldom rises above the level of dutiful intellectual exercise, as if I were required to move colored blocks about on a chessboard-like grid to prove how many different combinations I am capable of achieving. Which, no doubt, is why (especially when I am tired), my writing sometimes chokes on its own verbosity. And no, half-brother Donald, I never imagined myself a better writer than you, no matter the contrary opinion voiced by our father.

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I AWOKE FROM a nap yesterday with the inexplicable urge to answer questions asked of me several years ago by a woman who has a truly unique place in my memory. I know little of her present life and have no idea if she reads OAN. But I long ago learned to heed the promptings of journalistic intuition, which tells me to admit here and now I knew long before I turned 25 my financial prospects were so limited I would never have the material wealth capitalism demands of a “good husband,” and therefore I could never be a “good father.” Which is why, my dearest Susan H. N., I never tried to conceive another child with my second wife after her oh-so-devastating miscarriage, why I never dared seek to marry again after she and I divorced, and why our relationship dwindled as it did in 1963. But I think about you often even now, and as always I hope you are well and thriving.

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THANKS BE TO POLITICS for blessed relief from geezerly introspection:
An abysmally ignorant poster on the comment-thread of “Black Lives Matter, Just Not to Hillary Clinton” – an excellent William Boardman piece that is well worth reading – implicitly hailed Democrat Presidential Candidate Hillary Clinton as a revolutionary,  an utterly baseless sentiment so widespread throughout USian identity-politics it is ever-more-disturbingly obvious large segments of the electorate have been blinded to who and what she really is. Here is my response:

Given Hillary's ties to Wall Street, she is scarcely more revolutionary than Marie Antoinette. Which means that, like Antoinette, she will do everything in her power to crush the revolution.

Moreover, the revolution-crushing implications of her hitherto-secret collaboration with the forces of ChristoFascism are every bit as dire – especially for women and minorities – as the implications of Trump's refusal to repudiate his Nazi and Ku Klux Klan supporters.

Hillary's incipient betrayals are revealed by Jeff Sharlet on pages 272-277 of The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (Harper: 2008). Page 275 is especially damning: “Hillary fights side-by-side with (Sam) Brownback and others for legislation dedicated less to overturning the wall between church and state than to tunneling beneath it.”

As both a civil rights activist (Knox County Jail, 1963) and a journalist, I know too well the fundamentalist theocracy of the South and its stranglehold on both races – especially how Bible-thumping preachers control the vote. Hence I cannot but wonder if that explains the paradox of Hillary's popularity among blacks.

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TWO NEWS ANALYSES analyses in the same Sunday night Reader Supported News download present such antithetical views of the presidential election campaign I am posting links to each of them despite the fact I have (at least as of now) commented on neither of their threads. Their heads are self-explanatory. “Majority U.S. Public Opinion Is Mocked by the Ongoing Presidential Election” is here,  and “Why Bernie Sanders Won Super Tuesday” is here.  My present opinion on the campaign – the adjective indicating the content of the noun is by no means final – is included in the second passage below.

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ANOTHER DISCUSSION ABOUT Hillary – this on “Revenge of the Simple: How George W. Bush Gave Rise to Trump,” a Matt Taibbl/Rolling Stone essay that examines the terrifying reality of Moron Nation  – prompted me to focus on additional details of how Hillary's Inner Goldwater Girl has always served the One Percent at the expense of all the rest of us. Again I cited Sharlet:

Hillary's ongoing support for Free Trade is as implicitly anti-abortion as her clandestine collaboration with the forces of Christian fundamentalism is explicitly anti-abortion.

Free Trade – as U.S. feminists are at long last beginning to realize – throws millions of U.S. workers either into permanent joblessness or into sweatshop labor with radically diminished fringe benefits, or more likely no benefits at all.

In either case, the victims – male and female alike -- lose their health insurance. And for women -- especially with the devastating success of the JesuNazis' war against Planned Parenthood and all other birth-control providers – this means loss of the gynecological care essential to female sexual freedom.

To imagine the Machiavellian-minded Hillary is unaware of this deadly Free Trade side-effect is like imagining Hitler was unaware of the Holocaust.

And there is also, on pages 272-277 of The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (Jeff Sharlet, Harper: 2008), a strong suggestion Free Trade's role in the war on women is part her collaboration with the JesuNazi Sam Brownback. Quoth Sharlet (page 275): “Hillary fights side-by-side with Brownback and others for legislation dedicated less to overturning the wall between church and state than to tunneling beneath it.”

In other words, exactly as Free Trade does.

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I ALSO EXPRESSED my agreement with Taibbi, albeit by pointing out he was a bit late to the fair:

H.L. Mencken wrote the epitaph for the United States in 1920:

“On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

Now, with the Dunce-ocrats having ended the Sanders fantasy and ensured the candidacy of a woman who snickered at and applauded the agonizing death of a man anally impaled on bayonets, and the Republ-idiots sure to Trump the election with a man who channels Il Duce if not der Führer himself, there will soon be no place here for those of us who are old and/or poor and/or disabled or simply, by some accident of birth – geography, race, whatever – deemed no longer exploitable for profit.

This means we have but two choices: we can try to find another country – probably impossible for most of us older than about 55 (though I have some faint hope my analytical skills might prove useful elsewhere) – or we can remain here and wait to be exterminated, either by the slow-motion genocide of the social-safety-net cuts that will be inflicted no matter whether the president is Trump or Hillary, or by the death camps Trump is bound to establish to rid the nation not only of the minorities he openly despises but all of his critics as well.

Globally speaking, the American Dream has just become the Humanity Nightmare. The “sweet land of liberty” is dead. The only question is whether its successor nation will render our entire species extinct.

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I also added a couple of comments about capitalism – the sort of remarks to which discussion-group participants seem increasingly reluctant to respond, no doubt because we all know the secret police, obviously in anticipation of the mass arrests to follow November's election, never relax their vigilance:

The problem with a “mixed economy” is that capitalism is like cancer: it will always metastasize into fascism or Nazism.

It has already done so in the U.S., killing forever the Keynesian ideology of the New Deal, and (both as “austerity” and as the resultant rebirth of the Hard Right), it is rapidly doing so in Europe.

This is because the core mandate of capitalism is the rejection of every humanitarian principle our species has ever articulated and – as the replacement for those moral precepts – the elevation of infinite greed into ultimate virtue.

In other words, capitalism is institutionalized moral imbecility – the utter amorality of the serial killer focused on the accumulation of victims not by outright murder but by profit – which of course includes murder, as at Bangladesh or Bhopal or Triangle Shirtwaist or the Mingo County War or, for that matter, both World Wars, Vietnam, the re-colonization of the Middle East and Africa, etc. ad nauseam.

Footnote: Probably the only good thing that can be said about the Roman Catholic Church – apart from the work done in secret by a handful of subversive Irish and German monks to preserve what few remnants we have of the 35,000 years of pagan culture that preceded the forcible Christianization of Europe – is that its medieval clergy typically (albeit too-often ineffectually) insisted profiteering was a mortal sin. (See for example “Morality in Medieval Economics,” here.)

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Yes, the Soviets failed to evolve the economic democracy they sought – the oppressive undertow of Russian history is relentless – but the fact the effort was made at all is far beyond glorious. Too bad it is probably also the only such chance our species will ever be allowed – that capitalism, now triumphant, will go on to eradicate all sentient life from this planet.

But let us not forget that all the socioeconomic gains we wrested from capitalism were in fact gifts the U.S.S.R. gave to the rest of the world, gifts extracted from capitalism by the sheer terror the reality of the Red Army inflicted on the One Percent: “better give those workers something or there'll be a revolution here.” That was the fear that prompted the New Deal and every other concession to economic democracy whether in the U.S. or anywhere else in the capitalist world.

Which is precisely why – now that the Soviet Union is history – the capitalists are methodically abolishing all those concessions and returning to the serial-killer moral imbecility of “business as usual.”

Hence capitalism will continue reverting to its original Elizabeth Bathory mode no matter whether Moron Nation is zieg heiling der Trumper or chanting “USA USA USA” for Hitlery Clin...er, excuse me, Hillary Clinton.

LB/6 March 2016

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