An Anxiety-Ridden Anthology of Outside Agitation

Three Utterly Terrifying News Reports

Biden Shows His True (Christonazi) Colors on Abortion: This past winter, the Biden Regime appeased the far right by leveling severe charges against abortion rights defenders. Now, the activists targeted in the federal crackdown are also facing legal attacks from an anti-abortion group and Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis. In addition to the federal criminal charges — which carry a sentence of 12 years in prison — Florida’s attorney general sued two of the activists for damages. Heartbeat of Miami, a “crisis pregnancy center,” is also absurdly alleging that all four activists were engaged in a conspiracy. The purported crime, the conspiracy, the federal charges? Spray painting.

COMMENT: once again – this time by disclosing the hatred of women it shares with its pretend opponents– the “Democratic” (sic) Party reveals its post-JFK function as the Fifth Column of the “Republican” (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party. Note too how this story was completely suppressed by the mainstream media propaganda apparatus. Now we know why the Democrats refused to protect abortion rights when they had the congressional power to do so.

*****

Drone Attack on Moscow Aims to Escalate US-NATO War with Russia. On Tuesday, Ukraine launched its second drone strike on Moscow to date and the first targeting civilian homes. Eight fixed-wing drones were launched, of which at least one crashed into an apartment building. Tuesday’s attack on the capital city of Russia is a signal that, following last week’s G7 meeting—at which the US announced it would send F-16 fighters—the imperialist powers have decided to bring the war ever more directly into Russian territory. These attacks are aimed at provoking a retaliatory response by Russia, which could then be used to justify a further escalation by NATO, including the potential entry of NATO troops directly into the conflict.

COMMENT: I fear this thrusts the threat of thermonuclear apocalypse well beyond that posed by the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.

*****

U.S. Wars Since 2001 Have Killed 4.5 Million People. The Cost of War Project at Brown University estimates that at least 4.5 million people have died as a result of the wars launched by the United States since the 9/11 attacks in 2001.

COMMENT: tyrannical empires are ultimately defined by their body counts, and with its genocidal campaigns against First Nations tribes and peoples of color, the USian Empire has already murdered multitudes more than Hitler;s Third Reich.

*****

In Tacoma as Everywhere Else in the Empire: No Escape 

Tacoma Art Museum board opts for more union-busting. WSLC vows continued solidarity with TAM Workers United: ‘We have defeated these tactics before, and we will defeat them again.’ It’s been seven months since the workers at Tacoma Art Museum (TAM) announced that they have formed a wall-to-wall union (TAM Workers United), as part of AFSCME Council 28. They are seeking livable wages, safe working conditions, transparency and accountability from management, and respect on the job. But despite support from all departments and 90 percent of union-eligible staff, the museum’s administrators have refused to recognize the union.

COMMENT: the aristocratic, anti-working-class vindictiveness of USian art patrons – something I know all too well from my years in New York City – should surprise no one. Hence my most heartfelt support for the TAM workers’ efforts to unionize.

*****

An Exceptionally Vital Report on the True Origin of Capitalism 

Origins of debt: Michael Hudson reveals how financial oligarchies in Greece & Rome shaped our world. Economist Hudson discusses the origin of Western debt-based societies and the research in his book, The Collapse of Antiquity: Greece and Rome as Civilization’s Oligarchic Turning Point (Islet: 2023).

COMMENT: based on this interview, the best explanation I’ve yet found of the origins of capitalism, and therefore a book I intend to buy.

*****

Nine Comment-Thread Posts from Other Websites:
(Some unavoidably repetitive due to the stubborn permanence of the crises that afflict us.)

We Are In for 19 Months of Relentless, Insultingly Transparent Spin

NOTE: Popular Resistance and Patrick Lawrence of Consortium News err gravely (and in Lawrence’s case perhaps deliberately try to deceive us) by equating Biden to the Soviet Union’s Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko; a far more politically accurate comparison of Biden is to the Weimar Republic’s senile president, Paul von Hindenburg, who appointed Hitler as chancellor and thereby enabled all the horrors that followed. I lead with this comment because – given that the USian Empire remains the global hegemon, by far the most ecogenocidally powerful tyrant in our species’ existence – it is pivotal in explaining all that obtains.

History -- the one subject we USians are methodically conditioned to avoid as if it were a no-antidote poison -- proves the "Democratic" (sic) Party's only (post-JFK} functions are preserving the Big Lie of USian democracy while serving the "Republican" (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party as its Fifth Column. Thus Biden the Beguiler's combination of bottomless corruption, geriatric senility and now-closeted racism make him the capitalist ruling-cabal's perfect choice to ensure the 2024 elections complete the Empire's nazification.

Those who dare examine the (ever-more-irrefutable) historical evidence will discover our final passage to that now-inescapable denouement began in 1934 when the Bankers' Plot perpe-traitors -- many of them fathers and grandfathers of the Empire's present owners -- were granted federal immunity for their treasonous conspiracy to make USian industry and natural resources the enabling elements for world conquest -- today's "full-spectrum dominance" -- by what would become the Rome/Berlin/Tokyo Axis.

Failing that -- and no doubt inspired by the infinitely evil genius of Hitler and Josef Goebbels -- our relentlessly misogynistic white-supremacist rulers seized Madison Avenue's mass-marketing techniques to fuel their retaliatory scheme of slow-motion, multi-generational nazification. In 1938 they began co-opting fundamentalist Christianity, reconditioning it into a reliably nazified auxiliary. By 1944 they were adopting upper-echelon Original (N.S.D.A.P.) Nazi war criminals as advisors and comrades-at arms. Then, "as the night the day," followed the 1963 coup and all that has come after, including the sparks of white Moronic Majority racism cunningly blown into unquenchable conflagration by the Obama presidency's innumerable "change-we-can-believe-in" betrayals and thus exploding into Trumpite Christonazism.

Yes, especially because of its implicit premeditation, this is an utterly terrifying hypothesis. But as Sun Tzu tells us, it is suicide to underestimate our enemy. Yes, most of the evidence is circumstantial. But USian juries routinely impose death sentences on far less. And this is the only  hypothesis that fully explains both the Republican conversion to unabashed nazism and the enabling Democrat paradox of progressive promises repeatedly asserted yet infuriatingly broken -- the ultimate form of the Big Lie weaponized to impose terminal nazification -- terminal not just to our nation, but to our entire species as well.

*****

US Announces Plans to Send F-16 Fighter Jets to Ukraine

Like the “Democratic” (sic) Party itself, Biden the Beguiler always lies to the citizenry.

The hopelessly gullible Moronic Majority reliably behaves as if the lies were truths, then does no more than whimper in craven submission when the falsehoods are overturned by obviously premeditated socioeconomic atrocities or apocalyptic escalations.

Indeed such lying is a pattern that -- with the post-JFK Democrats now functioning solely as the Fifth Column of the "Republican" (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party -- has become as predictable as sunrise.

That's why -- just as we now know the Beguiler lied with his implicit promises not to escalate the Ukraine War into a greater conflict (and thus most likely into a thermonuclear apocalypse that will exterminate our species and reduce our Mother Earth back to a bug planet), we know he's also lying when he pledges the debt-limit fight won't be weaponized to further savage the working class.

***

Zelensky’s Wartime Visit to Berlin and Germany’s New “Drive to the East”

Apropos the defiant resurrection of German militarism, it is undoubtedly of great semiotic significance the Bundeswehr has already brought back the traditional jackboots -- albeit modified by a cynically labeled "democracy buckle" -- as their parade-uniform footwear. Hence the goose-step will no doubt soon follow. As my long-dead paternal grandmother, a Scot, so often said, "the Germans are a fine people -- as long as you don't allow them military uniforms."

Hence my clenched-fist salute to Comrade Stern, though he omits the historical fact the already nazified USian ruling class made its wholly owned U.S. government a de facto puppet of German foreign policy by its eager adoption of legions of Nazi war criminals as advisors and comrades-at-arms -- the premeditated post-World-War-II atrocity for which not only our entire species but our Mother Earth herself will soon pay Hitler's terminal, better-dead-than-defeated price.

Unless, of course, there is a truly global uprising by the working class…

*****

Inflation Drives US Household Debt to Record $17 Trillion

And our potentially deadly plight -- that is, the plight of the entire USian working class, 99.9 percent of the domestic population -- will become infinitely worse once Biden the Beguiler completes the "Democratic" (sic) Party's cunningly pre-scripted debt-limit betrayal, thereby  enabling the "Republican" (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party to complete the genocidal destruction of the socioeconomic "safety-net" remnants long targeted by the ruling-class.

But it's really nothing new; it's just another (terminal) example of "change we can believe in" -- the most malevolently destructive Big Lie ever pimped to the hopelessly gullible USian Moronic Majority.

*****

Manufactured Crisis over US Debt Ceiling Sets Stage for Bipartisan Assault on Social Security and Medicare 

NOTE: see updates at US Budget Deal Will Accelerate Savage Cuts to Public Education and Biden-McCarthy Austerity Debt Ceiling Bill Moves to Vote in Congress, also background at  White House Debt Limit Talks: a Manufactured, Bipartisan Conspiracy to Make Workers Pay for War

Given that the capitalist nations are now ruled by a cabal that amounts to a de facto nazi international, we dare not dismiss the possibility a carefully scripted USian default is intended as weapon of economic genocide -- that is, to deliberately inflict murderous  hardship of genocidal magnitude on the entire global working class. This would at least partly accomplish the stated ruling class goal of eliminating "surplus workers" even as  the inconceivably obscene wealth of the .01 Percent and their vassals would, precisely as intended, insulate the ruling class from any collateral damage. I dearly hope I am wrong -- that this is not the ruling-class plan --  but history is unequivocal in its proof there is absolutely no limit to the horrors the ruling class will inflict on us in its quest for eternal omnipotence.

***

Biden’s Debt Ceiling Betrayal Is a Democratic Party Tradition

This analysis by Margaret Kimberly exemplifies why Black Agenda Report should be regular reading for every real leftist in the USian Empire. It is, hands-down, the best (domestically written) political reporting on the Internet, its courageous accuracy and fearless truthfulness a powerful antidote to the Big Lie propaganda in which we would otherwise be drowning. Qualitatively, it is equal to the international reporting and analysis provided by the World Socialist Web Site -- thus my heartfelt gratitude to PR for regularly reprinting BAR's material.  

*****

Atlanta: We Do Not Need a School for Assassins

This is excellent, courageous reporting that is not available in USia's so-called "mainstream media," which -- let us not forget -- is actually the world's first privately owned, for-maximum-profit version of Josef Goebbels' Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, serving the de facto Fourth Reich of the USian Empire in exactly the same way the Goebbels group served Hitler's Third Reich.

As a near-lifelong professional journalist -- my sometimes award-winning career on newspapers and magazines began in my 16th year (and I remain somewhat active in the field even now at age 83) -- I recognize reportage of that quality and social-documentary photography produced with equal skill and fearlessness have become the defining qualities of the by-lined group's work.

Moreover, such top-notch journalism is desperately needed by the USian 99.9 Percent. That's why I dearly wish the news collective that radically demeans and discredits itself as a "Unicorn Riot" would dump its self-pitying, implicitly powerless,  Sesame-Streetish name and replace it with a label that would prompt a vastly larger number of people to take its vital work seriously.

*****

Myths and Reality: the Power of Nonviolence

Ms. Morrow speaks a truth, but history proves it is only partially true, entirely conditional on the ability of our foes to regard us as fellow humans.

The primary exception -- as relevant in today's USian Empire as it was in yesteryear's Weimar Germany -- is that non-violence is useless against nazis, whether Original N.S.D.A.P. Nazis,  their many Franco/Pinochet variants. or the USian Christonazis who disguise themselves as members of the "Republican" and "Democratic" parties. 

Let us not forget that nazism -- too often euphemized as "fascism" to downplay its horrors -- is the ultimate fulfillment of both the capitalist ethos of omnipotent greed and the patriarchal ethos of misogynistic omnipotence from which capitalism is directly descended.

All nazis are thus serial-killer-minded moral imbeciles who revel in the ecogenocidal embrace of infinite evil. As Neville Chamberlain learned at Munich, as the White Rose Society learned in the Third Reich, as the martyrs of the Civil Rights Movement learned in the USian fatherland and as Harry Turtledove pointed out in the short story entitled "The Last Article" (for which google), nonviolence actually encourages the nazis to ever more deadly atrocities.

Thus too, the only historically proven antidote to nazism was the Red Army, the permanent absence of which most likely damns the 99.9 Percent to lifelong slavery, dooms our entire species to greedy self-extinction and condemns our Mother Earth to reduction back to a bug planet.

*****

SCOTUS Case May Slash Regulation of Everything

I am not certain which is more ecogenocidally terminal  to ourselves, our species and our Mother Earth -- the Christonazi  judicial cabal that is dutifully following the Mein Kampf blueprint in reducing the USian Empire to the de facto Fourth Reich (much as Hitler's N.S.D.A.P.- nazified judiciary reduced the Weimar Republic to the Third Reich), or the pseudo-left's cowardly pretense there remains any doubt at all about our morally imbecilic Masters' malevolent intent.  

Each -- Christonazi activism and the pseudo-left's cravenly pacifist fraudulent indecisiveness  --  is a pivotal factor in the terminally apocalyptic destruction of  USian democratic process the Empire's clandestinely nazified  owners have been slowly but methodically  imposing since they were given free reign by the coup of 22 November 1963.

The third factor in our nation's permanent reduction to an electronically policed open-air death camp, our own reduction to inescapable slavery and the ultimate, ultimately misogynistic reduction of our Mother Earth back to a bug planet by the USian reich's wars of global conquest is of course the U.S. Moronic Majority, which is already hopelessly subjugated to unquestioning submissiveness and thus is no more to be blamed than its 1930s German counterpart.

Nevertheless the circumstantial but infinitely damning evidence remains obvious to the dwindling few of us -- mostly the tiny remnant of USia's once-thriving Marxian community -- who yet dare look: first the immunity granted the nazification-minded perpe-traitors of the Bankers' Plot; then the .01 Percent's infiltration,  co-optation and conversion of white fundamentalist Christianity into a fanatically nazified auxiliary; next the recruitment of innumerable Original Nazi war criminals as advisors and comrades-at-arms;  finally the murder of our president and all that -- "as the night the day" -- relentlessly follows.

What dooms us is the absence of Lev Bronstein and Vladimir Ulyanov, without whom it is ever-more-obvious there can never again be a working-class awakening.

*****

Continued Fiction? Yes, But Not This Time. (Sorry)
I’ve been so overwhelmed by our ever-more-wretched political reality -- not to mention a passel of surprise medical bills -- I haven’t been able to get the next installment past the conceptual phase. But I promise it's taking shape.

LB/31 May 2023

-30-

 

New Cellphone-Friendly Format; New Approach; My Promise I'll No Longer Resist Writing About Politics

13 May 2023

FIRST, MY APOLOGY FOR AN UNAPOLOGETIC CONCLUSION: As regular readers know, I have struggled for some time – years, actually – with my desire to move this blog “beyond” politics, with the explanation for my sarcasm quotes in this passage's concluding paragraph. I was motivated by the psychological nausea inflicted by the fact today’s politics are overwhelmingly those of the relentless capitalism-inflicted apocalypse, utterly hopeless and therefore infinitely depressing, a condition for which I had hoped to evolve textual and photographic antidotes for myself that would also serve those of you who regularly read this blog.

But now at long last I realize there are three reasons I cannot – indeed could never – do as I wanted. Each is existential. One is that a political journalist – no more, no less – is what I am. As a member of the working press, politics was what I thought about and wrote about most often. Two is that in the privacy of my own thoughts, and sometimes in revealing conversations with lovers or closest friends, I admitted I conceived of politics in the broadest possible socioeconomic sense, as for viewing crime as the consequences both of our national ethos of self-obsessed of moral imbecility and of the desperate poverty resulting from the deliberately murderous systemic malfeasance that ultimately defines capitalism as a form of nazism. By my late 20s I had come to recognize capitalism as the direct offspring of patriarchy, which in turn I had come to recognize as our species’ methodically ecogenocidal war against our Mother Earth, thus a suicide pact – and thus too an ultimately unnatural act, the one truly mortal sin that not only dooms us all but seeks to exterminate all other life (and even the possibility of life) as well. Three – of course (and with heartfelt thanks both to my Marxian father and the maternal aunt who was mindful both spiritually and intellectually) – is that I was long ago awakened to the necessity of not just socioeconomic revolution but metaphysical and aesthetic revolution as well. Though as a member of the working press what I most often wrote about was not the disease of patriarchy but immediate examples of its diverse symptoms, I realize now I have somehow been granted the freedom to do both simultaneously -- that is, to put the symptoms in their proper context (which was the ultimate purpose of the photographic and textual revelations of anti-patriarchal rebellion that were the conceptual backbone of the burned and forever-lost “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer”) -- and that I have been working toward an analogous clarification-of-post-fire-purpose throughout a retirement that at age 83 has already extended, seemingly as if by magick, far longer than ever I expected to live.

While the thinking outlined above began in my childhood, its present form owes a great deal to the Gaia Hypothesis, which restates in scientific terms the core belief of our pre-patriarchal ancestors and cousins, amongst them the First Nations peoples, that our planet is herself a living being, “conscious and self-regulating.” Thus I have come to recognize patriarchy as total war against all being and the present USian plague of mass shootings not only as a microcosm of the Empire’s definitively nazi policy of massive retaliation, but – exactly as in Islamic suicide bombings – a microcosmic fulfillment of patriarchy’s terminal misogyny, its intent to assert its alleged supremacy of male over female by literally destroying anything and everything born of Nature. Indeed, the patriarchal intent of destroying the planet to “save” it is ever-more-evident in our Masters’ refusal to act against self-induced terminal climate change.

Which brings us to my promised explanation of the sarcasm quotes around “beyond”: in this darkest of all human ages, there is literally nothing for us, whether as individuals or as a species, “beyond” the mandate for responding to the apocalyptic threat posed by patriarchy. Since politics is either the mechanism by which we rescue ourselves and ensure our species’ survival or the weapon by which we destroy all that is within reach – the notion of anything “beyond” politics is as absurd as the medieval notion of transforming lead into gold. More to the point, now that mere survival has thus become a form of revolutionary defiance, politics is the pivot upon which we live or die, about which I shall henceforth write without apology for anything save the limitations of my own vision.

**********

FORMAT NOTE: I have used Typepad’s catalogue of formats to redesign Dispatches to accommodate reception by cell-phone users. This will transform previously published headlines into text that sometimes either overflows its original spacing or leaves great voids in it and does likewise with previously published photographs, flaws that are anathema to me as a former (award-winning) news-and-picture editor, though after a long delay I have come to accept the resultant graphic ugliness as an unavoidable surrender to present-day technology essential for increased readership.

**********

THREE COMMENT-THREAD POSTS FROM OTHER WEBSITES:

On the debt-limit crisis (and why I am so utterly terrified of its looming consequences): We should fear a “compromise” that sells out seniors, kids, and the disabled.

I am 83 years old, a mostly retired, sometimes award-winning print journalist whose newspaper career began at age 16 in 1956. Since the economic debacle of 2008-2009, which cost me nearly 70 percent of my annual income and forced me into bankruptcy, my sole source of pay has been Social Security.

The most telling lesson of my career is therefore the certain knowledge all USian politicians -- whether members of the "Democratic" (sic) Party or of the "Republican" (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party -- are slavishly obedient puppets of the plutocracy, wholly owned and controlled by that tiny cabal of obscenely wealthy, fanatically neoliberal aristocrats who rule the United States and its global Empire with the same morally imbecilic omnipotence that hitherto defined only history's most notorious tyrants.

Their core principle -- here stated in the English translation of its original assertion in Hitler's Mein Kampf -- is that anyone too impoverished or disabled to thrive under capitalism is "life unworthy of life." Thus the only real distinction between the Democrats and the Republicans is the extent to which the former are infinitely more skilled at deceiving the Moronic Majority that functions as the national electorate. Thus too neoliberal "austerity," the slow-motion genocide by which our Masters have replaced death camps.

In fact the present crisis is but a repetition of recent history. Barack the Betrayer -- who campaigned successfully on "change we can believe in," the most ruinously brazen lie ever fed the Moronic Majority -- conspired with the Republicans to savage food stamps in 2011, using a carefully choreographed debt-limit fight to disguise the treachery of the "Democratic" (sic) Party, afterward lying to the public he had "saved" food stamps even as he radically cut food stamps for singles and elderly people, slashing my monthly allocation from $130 to $16.

Today's bitterly damning truth is the Democrats refused to raise the debt limit when they had the votes to do so. In other words. they deliberately engineered the present crisis by handing the Christonazis and Neoconfederates the tools to compel whatever socioeconomic savagery our Masters mandate. Despite his lies, Biden the Beguiler is obviously using the same strategy and tactics his predecessor the Betrayer employed.

Thus the political harlots who cater to our Masters' every plutocratic whim cunningly facilitate ever-worsening tyranny even as they dupe the Moronic Majority by preserving the Big Lie -- and that is precisely what it is -- of a troubled but nevertheless still functional democratic republic.

While I have no idea how deliberately murderous the looming socioeconomic savagery will be, experience tells me it will indeed be another step in the .01 Percent's effort to reduce the numbers of the 99.9 Percent, which means it will be as genocidal as our Masters believe they can achieve without sparking actual revolution.

Meanwhile my gratitude to Mr. Eskow for daring tell the truth, and my thanks to LAP for daring publish it.

*****

Ukrainian attack on Kremlin is a criminal provocation

Whether the drone-bombing of the Kremlin is as claimed by the Ukrainians or the Russians, its ultimate message is, again, that the global ruling class believes itself well-enough bunkered to survive not only a chemical, biological and thermonuclear apocalypse but the decade or so of nuclear winter that's bound to follow it.

And given the ongoing ruling-class refusal to take meaningful action against global warming, it is entirely possible our Masters see nuclear winter as the final solution to that problem too.

Meanwhile turncoat Putin's restoration of Russian Orthodoxy is methodically returning the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics to Tsarist tyranny, even as the USian Empire -- no doubt following the advice of the legions of Original (N.S.D.A.P.) Nazi war criminals it embraced as comrades-at-arms during and after the final year of World War II -- employs a Jewish puppet to re-nazify the Ukraine.

Exactly as Comrade Zaremba says in her comment, "This attack could get us all killed" -- as in the extermination of the entire global working class and the destruction of Earth as a habitable planet.

*****

Forest Defenders Appear For Preliminary Hearings

Actually -- this in supportive response to mwildfire -- Atlanta is infinitely more malevolent (and therefore infinitely more terrifying) than "an outpost of the Third Reich"; it is instead an embryo of the de facto Fourth Reich, the USian Empire, advised into being c. 1944-1968 by the legions of Nazi war criminals gleefully adopted from the defeated Third Reich and secretly resurrected to far greater ecogenocidal murderousness by the United States government and its capitalist owners.

So advised, the Empire's owners and their governmental vassals have since granted themselves irreversible omnipotence by fully weaponizing technology to fulfill their intent of "full-spectrum dominance" -- conquest of the entire world followed by universal zero-tolerance tyranny enforced by inescapable total surveillance. Their ethos is bottomless sadism and smirking moral imbecility. They will co-opt and exploit all human knowledge, either to fulfill Hitler's dream of subjugating all the peoples of the world or to fulfill the global version of Hitler's final stated wish, for which google Hitler's Nero decree and last will. Thus -- proclaiming of our world as they did of a village in Vietnam, "we had to destroy it to save it" -- they will exterminate our species and reduce our Mother Earth back to a bug planet rather than suffer genuine defeat.

That, my comrades, is the true unmitigated horror of our present circumstances, and that is what the "full-spectrum dominance" of the oppression that is ever-more-appallingly evident in Atlanta should be telling us. But -- alas and to our eventual doom -- far too many of us yet have our heads up that dark and smelly place I dast not mention lest this entire comment be censored.

************

SURPRISE, SURPRISE: The New York Times Publishes My Correction:

For those who’ve already spent their non-subscriber limit of 10 stories per month or otherwise cannot get past the NYT paywall:

All the four questions are from multiple-choice eighth-grade history tests. The question I addressed is, “Which of the following changes took place in Southern states immediately after the Civil War?”

The choices are:

(1)-Access to education became more available to African American people.

(2)-Most African Americans quickly switched from agricultural work to employment in manufacturing.

(3)-African American women were given the right to vote.

(4)-State governments were required to have African American people in legislative and executive offices.

Though I recognized options 1 and 4 were each correct, I answered option 4 as the more important – and my answer was marked wrong. According to The Times, the only correct answer was option 1.

Hence my comment and the comment in response:

Given my background in history -- a near-lifelong interest and a major part of my interdisciplinary BA -- I would debate the stated correct answer on the history question about the results of the Civil War. While it is indeed true the end of slavery enabled African-Americans legal access to education, it is also true the presence of federal troops throughout the secessionist states compelled the acceptance of African-Americans elected to local, state and federal government. (And of course it is equally true that by withdrawing federal troops in 1877, the U.S. government tacitly endorsed the re-emergence of the genocidal white supremacy that methodically purged African-Americans from the political system and radically curtailed their access to education.)

Loren Bliss (Tacoma, May 3)

(42 recommended)

In response:

@Loren Bliss my first thought was where were these black children going to school in 1866. My own state of Florida had no constitutional requirement for providing education until 1868 and we didn’t fully integrate until 1970. We did have black representation in congress during reconstruction though.

Alexander (Sunshine State, May 3)

(5 recommended)

As one of my Tacoma comrades said in response, “Good show! No wonder most USians are so ignorant about history. The media continues to peddle fables.”

**********

FICTION, MAYBE AS PROPHECY, working-titled “A Thing So Simple and So Huge,” a first draft of something, of course subject to constant revision:

Source of title:

And when the sand was gone and the time arrived
In the naked dawn only a few survived
And in attempts to understand a thing so simple and so huge
Believed that they were meant to live after the deluge

– Jackson Browne, “Before the Deluge”

***

THE STORY-KEEPER was awakened by a frighteningly improbable clamor of ravens. His name was Matthew Drusillason; he was a black-bearded, brown-skinned, olive-eyed  schoolteacher, a student of theocracy-forbidden subjects, a refugee from  the religious wars that yet raged beyond the Dead Lands. Three years ago he had been the sole survivor of a badly crewed sailing vessel fatally overcrowded with desperately hopeful emigrant escapees, a leaky, rot-weakened coaster storm-sunk amidst the always-treacherous rip-tides  of the  Sailish Sea. The Potlatch People had found him dying on Sanamo Island's Eastward Beach, and when he confessed to them his bewildered astonishment at having been borne  to the shallows by a pod of dolphins, they had nursed him back to health with their native medicines and afterward, relishing his unapologetically truthful stories of the tyrannies that characterized Before, they had adopted him both as a tribal member and as the keeper of the newest episodes of their struggle for survival in the relentlessly deadly wake of the Before's attempted murder of the formerly vengeful but now-gradually recovering  Mother Earth. His adoption was 14 moons ago; since then, guided by Potlatch  teachers, he had learned much of the locale's plants and animals,  and for a moment or two, knowing ravens do not ordinarily transform the late-night skies with cacophonies of rage, he thought he was dreaming.  But now he realized he was fully awake and the avian uproar he first believed imaginary was in fact happening in reality, and it was occurring at such uncanny loudness it seemed each of the thousand or so ravens he knew dwelt in the island's coniferous forest had taken wing in gratingly loquacious protest. Perhaps he had slept through an earthquake. Perhaps a quake was looming. Perhaps the volcano they called KomaKulsh was again erupting or was about to explode as she was said to have done three decades past. Perhaps a giant tsunami had flooded past the Sailish Sea's mountainous barriers and  was coming to drown Sanamo and obliterate all traces of its residents’ already unlikely survival. Ravens, he had learned, are magickal; they are also among the Earth Mother's chosen messengers; they would know of such events long before humans awakened to the dangers. Troubled by an ever-more-compelling sense of incipient disaster, a seasoned veteran of many post-Before horrors and thus haunted by a looming sense of more potentially terminal possibilities than he could envision, Matthew rolled out of his bed, silently cursed the surprising coldness of the early-autumn air, rebuked himself for not having fed an overnight-sized log into the stone fireplace, seized one of the three cherished red wool Before blankets that had warmed his slumber, wrapped his naked flesh against the now-presumed chill of the Fifth Hinge, stepped barefoot onto the  stones of the cabin porch and thence into the yet chillier dew-damp grass as the corvid clamor continued and yes grew louder, more insistent, more alarmed and therefore more alarming. The swooping, soaring birds had risen in such numbers they reduced the overhead starlight to fast flickers and darted ominously eerie black silhouettes across the round yellow face of the Three Sisters Moon seasonably low and already sinking beyond her eighth-lunation zenith in the southern sky. He had never seen its like, not even in the vast regional musterings of carrion birds that cleansed the post-apocalyptic battlefields of their reeking gore and stripped to bare-bone heaps of weathering skulls the mounds of severed heads that marked the territorial borders of the warring states beyond the Dead Lands. 

Fifty yards from the closely adzed and gray-mud-chinked cedar-log walls of Matthew’s cabin and the clustered, nearly identical dwellings of his immediate neighbors, his fellow Sanamo dwellers were hastily gathering in the village Round, children, adolescents and adults alike, most of the adolescents and adults already visibly armed, all gazing skyward in fearful bewilderment, their upturned faces dimly silhouetted against the slowly waning flicker of the Thanksfire they had kindled to greet the rising moon seven sand-glasses earlier. The Three-Sisters Harvest would begin at dawn today; that’s why the celebration had not continued until sunrise. But why these outraged ravens? What was so dreadfully amiss? No doubt gray-haired Wanda Wolfwise, the Potlatch People’s eldest teacher and the leader of this small band of racially indistinct human survivors, would soon arrive to interpret the ravens' message and – or so Matthew and his gathered neighbors dearly hoped – help them all discern their best options. Now knowing his presence both as story-keeper and warrior was essential, he hastened back inside, exchanged blanket for early-autumn buckskins and elk-hide moccasins, belted on pistols and throwing axe, shrugged into his boomer’s bag, grasped the ancient but meticulously cared-for Before rifle he had been given by the elders as an adoption gift, lifted it off its wooden bedside pegs,  donned his woven-reed hat and strode to join his neighbors at the Round. By now nearly everyone of fighting age who dwelt on the island, 203 adults and adolescents, had mustered, bringing their younger children to the safety of the cedar-log parenting hall as the caw, caw, caw continued  to fill the night sky, seeming even louder and more grating than before, its alarm so intrusive Wanda had brought a hastily improvised birch-bark megaphone to make herself heard above the din.

“It’s an invasion by rats,” she shouted. "Legions of rats swimming up from the south. Rats riding clusters of flotsam at least as wide as three adult armspans. The rats aboard the debris pushed toward us by as many more rats swimming. And when these rats exhaust themselves in the water, only a few drown; the rest change places with the riding rats. The South Shore Kayak Patrol spotted them, sent a lantern signal to the Shore Watchers, who sent a rider to me. Then the ravens started up. But the rats are still a glass away, which means thanks to our warriors and the ravens, we’ve just enough time to organize a defense. Everybody and all our dogs to the Southward Beach. Get ready to ignite the fire boats. Goddess knows what sickness these rats carry. Goddess help us keep them off our island.”

The ravens continued their enraged denunciations; the Potlatchers did as Wanda directed. Eleven family groups of five or six boomers and as many as 12 archers jogged along the packed-earth trail out past the seasonably red-leafed vine maples that grew like natural hedges around the village with its familial clusters of log cabins and its broad surrounding span of black-soil communal gardens bountifully pregnant with harvest-ready corn, beans and pumpkins. Moccasined feet padded a soft rhythm not unlike that of the previous evening's ceremonial drums. Then the joggers slowed to a quieter, more erratic pace, hiking with carefully placed feet down the trail's abruptly steep and hazardously rocky slope through an agedly high-branched stand of Douglas Fir to the Southward Beach, the boomers laden with spare ammunition for flintlock rifles already primed and loaded with trade-powder and bear-greased projectiles of scavenged lead home-cast from cherished Before molds and dependably deadly out to 300 yards, the archers laden with bundles of goose-feather-fletched, salvaged-iron-bladed arrows for their recurve bows, which were effective to only half the rifles' range but able to loose as many as 10 arrows to every boomer’s one painstakingly loaded round of powder and conical ball. The tide was in; small waves lapped softly on wetly gleaming moonlit pebbles; above the incessantly ranting riot of ravens the night sky suddenly flared with serpentine bands of bright green light; the Spirit Dance was reaching way further south than usual; another omen; the Dancers' message yet to be determined. Matthew was momentarily entranced, already thinking how he might describe what he was hearing and seeing and feeling, how he might later record the details of the astounding strangeness that had already occurred, how he might document it with his newly learned expertise in the Potlatchers' traditional mnemonic shorthand, blackberry ink on tanned buckskin...

(To [maybe] be continued, Muse inspiring. )

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LB/12 May 2023

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