Remedying an Omission: Notes on the Nature of Fascism

Somehow this oft-published, increasingly iconic war-protest photograph seems  appropriate as a  lament for the United States.  Tech data: Nikon F w/105mm f2.5 Nikkor; Tri-X at 800 ASA for development in D-76. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 1971. (Click image to view it full size.)

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A READER WHO is a friend, a fellow professional writer and therefore also a trusted critic says my otherwise accurate portrayal of the present-day United States as a “fascist nation”  is incomplete without a formal definition of “fascism.”

Then as I was contemplating my response synchronicity  provided me an all-too-typical example of U.S. fascism in action. Tacoma Mayor Marilyn Strickland had just postponed city council consideration of a proposed minimum-wage hike, thereby stuffing a procedural gag down the throats of about 200 workers who had intended to testify in favor of higher pay.

The hearing was later added to the council's July 7 agenda. But Max Hyland, a spokesperson for 15 Now Tacoma,  says the tactical intent behind the surprise agenda-change was to nullify the energies evoked by a pro-wage-hike demonstration  and simultaneously minimize the number of its supporters who would be able to address the council. Many had taken time off work to participate in the rally and testify at the June 30 meeting.

“A lot of these people,” said Hyland, “can't afford more time off their jobs – and Strickland damn well knows that.”

Having witnessed Strickland in action, I don't doubt Hyland's contention. Though she ran for mayor as a progressive, in office she has proven herself an obedient servant not of the public but rather of her masters in the Tacoma-Pierce County Chamber of Commerce, even unto her refusal to use the city's legal authority to protect residents from the chamber-supported radical downsizing of local bus service  imposed by openly racist white suburban voters in 2011 and 2012. (Scroll down to the paragraph beginning “Tacoma Mayor Marilyn Strickland...”)

By design, Tacoma city council meetings are already difficult for people with jobs to attend. As I know from my years covering local governments for various daily and weekly newspapers (1959-1981), U.S. municipalities that encourage Working Class participation in decision-making schedule their relevant public meetings during evening hours, typically at 7 or 7:30 p.m., as exemplified here,  here,  here  and here. 

But such meetings in Tacoma start at a deliberately exclusionary 5 p.m. – never mind State Rep. Laurie Jinkins has told me nearly 60 percent of the seaport town's 200,000 population is officially lower income – that is, below the federal standard of a family of four earning less than $45,000 per year.

U.S. Census figures  show that in 2013 – the most recent year for which data is available – fully18 percent of Tacoma's households eked out their existences with incomes below the official federal poverty line,  $24,250 for a family of four. That makes Tacoma the second most poverty-stricken municipality  in the state of Washington.

The tiny difference between the Tacoma poverty figures given by the census bureau and the University of Washington, 18 percent versus 17.7 percent respectively, is probably due to when the data was collected. Despite the claimed “economic recovery,” ongoing cuts in social services are forcing many Tacomans, especially those of us who are elderly and/or disabled, ever deeper into inescapable poverty.

Thus chamber-of-commerce vassal Strickland's rescheduling of the minimum wage discussion adds a new and obviously premeditated class-war injury to a deliberately inflicted and long-festering class-war wound – a topic to which we shall return.

Meanwhile, here are two points apropos last week's OAN edition: one, the incipient racism and class hatred in the comment thread attached to the Strickland/minimum wage story (linked again for ease of access) is yet another exemplar of the bigotry I described in “Fascist Nation”; two, the individual installments of this blog have become too long and too topically diverse for me to call them “columns” anymore. Hence “edition,” in acknowledgment of how OAN has evolved into a mini-journal.)

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MY FIRST REACTION to my friend's criticism was surprise.

That's because I cannot count the number of times I have defined fascism as the relentlessly logical, mature form of capitalism, which in turn is the direct, eventually extinction-level debacle thrust on us by what capitalism actually is: the morally imbecilic elevation of infinite greed into ultimate virtue.

Hence capitalist governance – absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent and its Ruling Class vassals, total subjugation for all the rest of us. That's the core reality of fascism, whether in today's United States and its imperial conquests, Ukraine included, or in fascism's earlier manifestations via Mussolini, Hitler and Franco.

Nor does it matter how the subjugation is imposed. In the U.S., with its ignorance-opiated electorate, it's done more often by political sleight-of-hand (as in Strickland's last-minute rescheduling of the minimum-wage discussion) than by the brute force routinely employed elsewhere. But there's brutality aplenty  whenever exceptionally brave U.S. citizens dare resist capitalist tyranny. 

And not only is such brutality a defining characteristic of fascism in action. It's also an expression of what has long been the uniquely USian form of Nazism, the antique but eerily Hitlerian philosophy of the U.S. as the Christian god's global übermenschen. Since World War II it has morphed into mainstream U.S. politics – probably with encouragement by all the Nazi war criminals  embraced by the government and private industry after 1945 – and it is now regurgitated as “exceptionalism”: the belief the U.S. has the divine right to conquer and rule the entire planet. 

Even without such (often censored) information, or so I said in mental response to my critic, surely everybody who took eighth grade civics remembers the working definition  provided us by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt – “ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling power.”

Moreover, you don't get out of junior high school – or “middle school” as they call it today – without passing civics. Right?

Wrong. Critics Left,  Right  and center  express grave concern about the abysmal ignorance of the U.S. citizenry, particularly its younger members. Which of course I should have recognized – not the least given my frequent condemnations of Moron Nation  (scroll down to “Understanding Media”). Nor can I count my denunciations of the dumbing-down that imposed Moron Nation, the induced intellectual deterioration I damn as “moronation.”

Indeed I had seen and recognized the results of moronation as far back as when I was teaching photography and journalism – mostly the former – at a couple of public colleges in Washington state. That was 1975 through 1981, truly another era. But already the induced political ignorance of my younger students exemplified the post-Vietnam, post-Civil-Rights-Movement, post-Counterculture curriculum-changes forced on U.S. public schools to ensure that never again would there be another era of protest and resistance as had erupted during the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s.

Don't teach the kids their legal and constitutional rights – or so the Ruling Class reasoned  – and then they won't know when those rights are violated or abolished.

Thus my older students, people who had graduated from high school well before the U.S. was routed from Vietnam,  were well enough versed in the democratic principles embodied in this nation's founding documents to see the infuriatingly vast and hypocritical difference between text and reality. As had I, they had been required to memorize the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution  and the Gettysburg Address,  and to be enough familiar with the Bill of Rights, the Emancipation Proclamation,  the 14th  and 19th amendments and President Roosevelt's Four Freedoms speech  to be able to discuss each in accurate detail.

But most of my younger students, the kids who got out of high school after about 1974, couldn't even summarize the First Amendment  – this in an introductory class about newspaper reporting.

I should have remembered this, if only because at the time of discovery it was so disturbing to encounter journalism students who didn't know their signature quest for information was protected by the U.S. Constitution. Sometimes though I get so focused on the proverbial trees – some of which were in this instance growing bitter-sweet seeds of memory and previously unexpressed emotion – I'm blinded to the metaphorical forest. And that's precisely what happened when I was writing “Persistent Racism Defines U.S. as Fascist Nation.”

My critic is therefore correct. (It's an aside, but that's why I so appreciate cogent critics and competent editors: they are often an oracular expression of my own subconscious, verbalizing that which I know or at least sense but have somehow ignored.) At the very least I should have included FDR's definition, which I have always cherished both for its get-to-the-point minimalism and its obviously prescient understanding of what the United States has become today. Here it is in full: 

The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism — ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.

Note how the late president's definition embodies the elements present in what I label “capitalist governance.” Indeed I use that term at least as often as “fascism” because the former does not always immediately evoke Moron Nation's (Pavlovian) closed-mind reflex.

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STRICKLAND, FOR WHOM I voted in two successive mayoralty elections and about whom I was originally enough enthusiastic I successfully pled her case to a number of neighbors, has turned out to be another example of what all (real) Leftists should by now in the era of Obama the Orator and his shape-shift into Barack the Betrayer recognize as a standard Ruling Class tactic.

A ploy Niccolo Machiavelli and even Sun Tzu would admire, it calls for recruiting a minority person who now as capitalism herds us into the age of inescapable poverty and de facto enslavement has special voter appeal because of his or her ethnicity.

Its false promise, though usually unspoken, is that because of minority ethnicity – Strickland is African-American and Korean – the candidate can readily empathize with the sufferings of all of us who are being crushed by capitalism, whether the oppression dealt us by the downpresser man  takes the form of joblessness, racism, sexism, classism, able-ism, ageism or the genocidal austerity by which such malevolence is enforced.

The tactic – yet another proof of the diabolical cunning possessed by our capitalist overlords – is enough effective at the ballot box to overcome the deep-seated racial animus that simmers beneath the (alleged) consciousness of four-fifths of the nation's white majority. Hence the deceptive anomaly of a black president as chief executive of nation that's murderously racist not just in the Charleston sense but also and far more often in the official, federally militarized context of Ferguson-type atrocities.

(For a brief but pointed discussion of our most revealing index to the extent of carefully closeted but nevertheless unreconstructed white racism in the U.S., see “Fascist Nation,” linked again here  for convenience, and scroll down to the last section, the graf beginning “In this context, the passage...”)

Hence too Mayor Strickland's little war of attrition against Working Class folk who wished to speak to the Tacoma City Council in favor of wage-hike measures that could literally enable us to vote ourselves a raise.

Obviously – as I have said repeatedly in recent weeks – the era of charade democracy is over, and the era of unapologetic tyranny is upon us.

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BUT IS IT really fascism?

Based on FDR's definition, it most assuredly is: private, for-profit greed vastly stronger than the democratic state, ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power, specifically the One Percent and its Ruling Class of executives, politicians, bureaucrats, generals and commanders of the federal and federalized police whether uniformed or secret.

The definitions given by Wikipedia – the one best compendium of definitions of fascism I have yet encountered on-line (its link repeated here for convenience and clarity) – mostly elaborate on the words of our late and still lamented president.

Since Wiki material is all in the public domain, I have copied and pasted herein some of its most relevant parts. Italic type indicates the material is copied word-for-word, complete with the variances in punctuation that distinguish computer-age texts from earlier works.

In his 1995 essay “Eternal Fascism”, Umberto Eco lists 14 general properties of fascist ideology. He argues that it is not possible to organise these into a coherent system, but that “it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it”.  (Emphasis added.)

Six of Umberto's 14 properties are as follows, copied and pasted as above with my comments in parentheses:

“Disagreement Is Treason” – fascism devalues intellectual discourse and critical reasoning as barriers to action; (Note the thoroughly documented cult of USian anti-intellectualism.) 


“Fear of Difference”, which fascism seeks to exploit and exacerbate, often in the form of racism or an appeal against foreigners and immigrants; (Self- explanatory; see again “Fascist Nation.”)

“Appeal to a Frustrated Middle Class”, fearing economic pressure from the demands and aspirations of lower social groups; (Note in particular the envy and hatred methodically churned up against immigrants, union-protected workers and minimum-wage workers who dare organize to seek higher pay.)

“Contempt for the Weak” – although a fascist society is elitist, everybody in the society is educated to become a hero; (Note the official, tacitly genocidal hostility expressed in austerity policies that victimize impoverished and/or disabled people.)

“Non-truths & Lying/Spread of Propaganda”. (Situational synonyms include Iraq, Afghanistan and Ukraine.)

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The Communist Third International in 1935 published the first definition of fascism I learned as a: child: “the open, terroristic dictatorship of the most reactionary, the most chauvinistic, the most imperialistic elements of finance capitalism”.

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Leon Trotsky wrote: “The historic function of fascism is to smash the working class, destroy its organizations, and stifle political liberties when the capitalists find themselves unable to govern and dominate with the help of democratic machinery.” (Emphasis added.)

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Stanley G. Payne created a list of characteristics that identify fascism:

Positive evaluation and use of, or willingness to use violence and war...

The goal of empire, expansion, or a radical change in the nation's relationship with other powers...

Extreme stress on the masculine principle and male dominance...

Exaltation of youth above other phases of life, emphasizing the conflict of the generations...(Note how today's youth are conditioned to scapegoat seniors  for the dystopian state of human society.)

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Emilio Gentile describes fascism as the “sacralization of politics” through totalitarian methods and argues that it has ten constituent elements:

These include: a police apparatus that prevents, controls, and represses dissidence and opposition, even by using organized terror... (For example the murder of Fred Hampton  and the slaying of protesters at Kent State University  and Jackson State College.)

(A) foreign policy inspired by the myth of national power and greatness, with the goal of imperialist expansion... (Precisely as mandated by USian exceptionalism).

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The definition of fascism by Ernesto Laclau includes implacable hostility to feminism and socialism (as in the bipartisan war against women  and Obama's Janus-faced embrace of the formerly Republican demand to privatize the Tennessee Valley Authority ).

Significantly, Laclau's work explains why a fascist nation grants marriage equality and permits the legalization of marijuana: Fascists are pushed towards conservatism by common hatred of socialism and feminism, but are prepared to override conservative interests – family, property, religion, the universities, the civil service – where the interests of the nation are considered to require it. Fascist radicalism also derives from a desire to assuage discontent by accepting specific demands of the labour and women's movements, so long as these demands accord with the national priority. (Emphasis added.)

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Then there is Robert Paxton, a professor emeritus at Columbia University, who defines fascism in his book The Anatomy of Fascism as: A form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion. (Emphasis added.)

All of which brings us back to the definition of fascism articulated by the man who, at some time in the future (if indeed capitalism does not reduce us all to extinction), will surely be honored as our greatest president ever: ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.

I rest my case.

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Time for Whites to Acknowledge Slavery's Horrors

ROBERT PARRY'S DENUNCIATION of white Southern recalcitrance prompted a lengthy discussion thread in which I made two contributions, each in response to other posters with whom I was generally in agreement:

When franpryor speculated on what might happen were the Germans to resurrect the Swastika, I noted:

The Swastika is being resurrected not by Germany but by the United States via its arming and financing of the U.S./Nazi conquest of Ukraine.

Moreover the U.S. puppet government that now rules the Ukraine flies not only the Nazi banners but also the Confederate battle flag and the flag of the Ku Klux Klan.

All of this is in keeping with the evil nature of capitalism, which – with its morally imbecilic ethos of infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue – inevitably matures into Nazism.

In this context, we see at last why the U.S. perpetually speaks with the proverbial “forked tongue,” claiming to defend liberty while in fact seeking global conquest to impose the zero-tolerance tyranny of a Fourth Reich on all the peoples of the world.

Which reveals the true (and truly horrific) reason behind the persistence of the Confederacy's emblems of slavery and genocide: they express the horrific truth of what the U.S. – or more specifically the U.S. Ruling Class – actually believes and intends.

Later when Granny Weatherwax wrote there is a “significant difference” between fascism and Nazism, I said:

Actually there's not. As Marx and Engels clearly understood, capitalism requires an “üntermenschen” – an allegedly inferior group – to maximize its profits and otherwise rationalize its savagery.

While the definitions of that “üntermenschen” often vary from country to country – Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, disabled people and Communists in Nazi Germany; communists and socialists in Fascist Italy; communists, socialists and non-Catholics in Fascist Spain; blacks, Hispanics, First Nations peoples, females of all races and ethnicities, lower-income elderly and disabled people plus all other lower income people in the “exceptionalist/under God” United States – the psychodynamic and socioeconomic reality is everywhere the same.

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No, Michael, It's Not 'a New America,' Not Yet

When Michael Moore claimed, “It is a New America,”  I was almost as outraged as I am by Hillary Clinton's ongoing, astoundingly dishonest effort to position herself – a war-hawk and an austerity advocate – as a latter-day Eleanor Roosevelt.  Hence I responded accordingly:

Mr. Moore's ignorance of history and the insufferable arrogance he shares with his fellow “Americans” whether Right or Left are surely on display in the above.

In the first place, the U.S. Working Class has NEVER been as impoverished – and as powerless – as it is now. In terms of the quest for economic democracy, there was never a better era than the New Deal and its immediate aftermath. Nor – without the total overthrow of capitalism – will there ever be again.

Secondly, ALL of the gains of the Civil Rights and Women's Liberation movements have either been abolished or are methodically being undone. Meanwhile the Environmental Movement, which might have saved our species from extinction, has either been co-opted by the capitalists or is paralyzed by its refusal to acknowledge the realities of the class war.

Thirdly, it is dishonest for Mr. Moore to claim “we have never been so free” merely because a wealthy, mostly white and often notoriously conservative minority has gained the right to marry. Though I applaud marriage equality, I also recognize it as a feel-good distraction that contributes nothing to the resistance against capitalism.

Lastly, the U.S. is not “America” and we are not “Americans.” We the People are USians, a people who unlike any other has wantonly discarded the potential of liberty and embraced the opiate of ignorance instead.

Thus to call ourselves “Americans” insults the inhabitants of every other nation on the American land mass.

Two post-expostulation points: one, the sentence “we have never been so free” appeared in Moore's original piece and was later changed, obviously in response to my criticism (for which thank you, Mr. Moore, as your revised version is much more accurate); two, my use of the inappropriate loudness of capital letters, a technique I normally deplore, is an index of just how much anger the original form of the comment evoked. (Yes, Moore is apparently at least an occasional reader of OAN.)

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Important Note to Readers on OAN Schedule Change

LIFE CHANGES, ALL positive, keep pressuring me to modify OAN's self-assigned schedule. Thus the blog's gradual but relentless transition to a Monday publication date.

But the most substantial change arises from the monthly newsletter I write, photograph, edit and produce as a volunteer for the 51-unit apartment complex in which I reside.

I began the newsletter project three years ago as a two-page, four-hours-per-month favor to the resident community, but it has expanded into a publication of at least eight pages with some color photography, a growing volunteer staff and readership that – because I make a point of including only stories of relevance – has come to depend on each month's edition of Community Chronicle for vital information as well as entertainment.

As a result its editorship has, throughout the second week of each month, become the equivalent of a full-time job. (As I have many times said, and not always approvingly, journalism is like organized crime in that you don't ever really get to retire.)

But that means there's not enough time left over for all the research that normally goes into OAN.

Hence starting this month and from now on, OAN will not – save as maybe a photograph or two or with such breaking news as in olden times would have demanded a daily newspaper print an extra edition – be published on the third Monday of each month.

Apropos the photography, thanks to the generosity of a friend, I now have a digital single-lens-reflex, a Canon Rebel T-5, so maybe – once I get past the mental mine-field of learning its computer-operation procedures – I can maybe at long last recover some of the passion for photography I lost after that 1983 fire destroyed all my life's work.

LB/28 June-6 July 2015

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When the Political Becomes Personal: an Epiphany

WHEN DISASTER STRIKES, I instinctively think of myself as being utterly and irremediably alone. I view myself as not just on my own in the context of the immediate crisis – as rising or falling solely on the basis of my own (severely limited) resources, but also as being cast off, banished, abandoned, alone in such a profound and absolute sense, I dare not ask for help lest it trigger my immediate, emphatic and quite possibly violent rejection as an unwanted burden. I remember encountering, about the time I was nine years old, the concept of being marooned – that is, transported to some desolately uninhabited isle in a dangerously tropical latitude and left there to live or die however fate might decree – a circumstance the emotional and material horrors of which I instantly understood and with which I fully emphasized, seemingly with every cell in my body. Such was the character of my childhood, a span of years the chief lesson of which was that any admission of neediness invariably invited retribution, the greater the need, the more severe the reprisal. I was, to put it bluntly, a thoroughly despised child – the legacy of which (as the events of the past week made clear) – I had not fully transcended even at age 74.

Even at the best of times, my relationship with computers is defined by an undertow of extreme anxiety. Not only is the computer the prime exemplar of invasive alien technology – an artifact of the morally imbecilic Otherworld of capitalism, where infinite greed is ultimate virtue and the tyranny of the One Percent over all the rest of us is reckoned a divinely ordained right – it is also the electronic scab that destroyed the realm of print journalism, which in the pre-computer era I assumed would always be my professional home. The computer abolished six of every seven newspaper jobs – copy editor, typographer, photo-engraver, compositor, proof-reader and stereotyper – and it piled all their duties on the reporters, reducing us all to miserably overworked, wretchedly underpaid clerks whose sole function is to fill the spaces between the advertisements with whatever drivel comes most readily to hand. Worse, the computer also permanently disempowered us; its downsizing of the workforce destroyed our unions, without which we are no better off, in terms of influence over working conditions and compensation, than the most abjectly submissive antebellum slaves owned by the most sneeringly sadistic masters. So – yes – not only do I fear computers. I also despise them.

 

My fear of these accursed machines has two components. One is the ruinous cost of repair and replacement, and with it all the self-contempt capitalism imposes on one's psyche when one is a financial failure. The other is the sure knowledge a single accidental keystroke can destroy hours, days, weeks, even years of work. As a consequence, each time I write something, each time I digitize a photograph, I relive the sheer horror that followed the loss of all my life's work in the 1983 fire and – because of my dyslexic penchant for fucking up even the most simple procedures  – I am again awash in the self-hatred that is an inevitable component of dyslexia. Plus all these factors are multiplied to the Nth power by the sure knowledge should anything go seriously wrong with my computer, repair and replacement is unquestionably beyond the inescapable limits forever imposed on my life by my fiscal inadequacies – the fact that, in capitalist terms (which are the terms now forced on every one of us from the moment we are born), I am a loser, a worthless piece of shit, white trash, a bum.

The great irony implicit in all this – or, if you will, the sadistic joke played on me by a malevolent god – is that the computer, this alien machine I so despise, has been made utterly indispensable to my self-fulfillment. Writing, especially now that arthritic crippling has radically reduced my ability to photograph, is as essential to my psychological survival as breathing is to its physical counterpart. But the easy world into which I was born, an implicitly democratic realm wherein the only tools one needed for writing were pen and paper, or at the most an (indestructible) mechanical typewriter and a ream of foolscap, is no more. It has been replaced by the fiscally malevolent, implicitly hierarchical, zero-tolerance world typified by the computer: a realm in which even the formerly free-for-the-taking potential of self-expression has been turned into a profit center, with the result those of us for whom such expression is vital now must live – unless we are genuinely wealthy – in constant terror we will be silenced by poverty, which in this new world is the most effective censor of all. Thus the computer – this accursed machine on which my psychological survival is hopelessly dependent – is also the instrument that forces me, literally every day and like nothing else ever in my personal history, into intimate interaction with the miasma of neurotic negativity that underlies my operational consciousness.

When this computer went bad last week – when it began crashing just as I was attempting to finish my volunteer production of a monthly newsletter 50 other persons had come to depend on for information and entertainment – I first struggled for several hours to solve the problem. I am its founder, editor, primary writer and chief photographer. In these roles I also do all the infinitely tedious work formerly done by mechanical department employees: typesetters, compositors, photo engravers, stereotypers and all the others whose jobs have been abolished by the computer. But my computer knowledge is woefully inadequate – I have neither the money nor, in all probability, the remaining years of life to earn the degree in computer science essential to achieve the level of competence I increasingly seem to require – and so all my efforts failed. My word-processing system, it seemed, was dead. So were three other voluntary editorial projects. Nor would I, so silenced, be of any further use to 15 Now Tacoma. I had fallen into the abyss of hopelessness that is the defining characteristic of today's inescapable poverty.

In that state I wrote two notes:

I'm sorry to inform you my computer's word processing system crashed last night and cannot be revived. This kills the July newsletter and – depending on repair cost – it may kill the newsletter entirely...I am so very sorry to have let everyone down this way. As poor as I am, I should never have made the newsletter commitment to begin with, for I should have anticipated that equipment failure would eventually terminate my ability to produce it.

My deepest apologies,

Loren Bliss

The second, to some of my comrades on the 15 Now Tacoma Organizing Committee, said much the same thing, albeit in more detail:

My word processing system is dead beyond resurrection, which essentially ends life as I knew it until such time as I can afford the hundreds of dollars it will take to get it repaired or replaced – if indeed I will ever be able to afford it at all. 

The system crashed last night as i was finishing the monthly newsletter I produce for the apartment complex in which I live, destroying the newsletter and inflicting on me the odium of unfulfilled commitments to my neighbors with all the associated loss of credibility.

This also ends for the foreseeable future my ability to do anything of real value for anyone else, either  for 15 Now or via my blog, and it probably kills the latter as readership once lost through atrophy is never regained. 

The crash is total, which is to say my entire document file is effectively obliterated as any attempt to access anything in it crashes the entire WP system. 

Yes I have another computer, a new laptop generously given to me by my second wife based on our mistaken understanding it would be compatible with this custom-made desktop machine, a gift  I have been running since 2009.  But it turns out such compatibility  – like so much else in my life – is forever  beyond my financial reach.  Hence the laptop is effectively useless, not just because of systemic incompatibility imposed by  Microshaft monopolization policies, but also because of the  fact that – since computers to me truly are alien technology -- it would take me at least three months to become even marginally competent with a new system.

For the computer cognoscenti amongst you, the desktop operating system is Ubuntu, with Open Office Writer word processing and Gimp photo software. The laptop is Microsoft – Microsoft 8 as I recall – and (or so I am authoritatively told) Microsoft 8  is designed so that it cannot be used with any open source software without the intervention of a professional Nurd, which is of course prohibitively expensive. 

So there was no way to retrieve data from my desktop machine and download it onto the laptop even before the desktop WP system crashed -- and now of course everything on the desktop is beyond recovery, irretrievable because of my inability to pay the horrendous costs of salvaging it.  Worse, Microshaft 8 mandates purchasing Microsoft Office and – if one needs photo software – also buying PhotoShop, either of which are forever beyond my financial capabilities.

Plus of course there is also Microshaft's notorious vulnerability to viruses and malware.

In short I am not only shut down but reduced to utter uselessness.

Moreover this comes at the worst possible time in my life. I am scheduled for cataract surgery on the 15th and again on the 29th, and though the surgery is actually relatively minor, the associated medication regimen is a full-time commitment that demands rigidly scheduling my life for the next approximately four weeks, shackled to an  alarm clock set to ring every four hours. 

Because I do not have an automobile, this puts me in the odious and frankly terrifying position of being utterly dependent on other people for all vital errands because the uncertainty of the local transit system could interrupt the medication schedule with dire results. 

This same medication schedule combined with my lack of an automobile plus  post-operative 30-day limitations on lifting anything heavier than 15 pounds also prevents me from being able to schlep the desktop computer around in search of a repair facility that will not rip me off – with a likelihood of success, even under the very best of conditions, probably  about equal to that of finding an honest used car salesman.

While I certainly am and will presumably remain capable of walking from my dwelling to the Methodist church for 15 Now meetings, I see no point in my attendance because without the machinery required for writing and editing, I am of no use to the group (or anyone else including my neighbors in this apartment complex), and I would therefore be nothing but a body presumptuously occupying space but contributing nothing.  Thus very regretfully I am going to have to drop out of 15 Now (and to divorce myself from all my other former activities too) until such time as the eye-surgery protocols are complete and these other matters are resolved. 

When that happens – or more truthfully (because of the financial prohibitions that could well mean my lack of a WP system is permanent), IF that happens – I  will of course happily rejoin the 15 Now community.

Sorrowfully,
Loren Bliss 

 

Note that nowhere in these despairing letters did I ask for assistance from any of the people to whom they were addressed. So conditioned was I by my childhood, it never occurred to me to ask – and had it done so, I simply wouldn't have dared. Automatically – and as I now realize, with implicit unfairness to my friends, colleagues and comrades – I assumed no such help would be forthcoming. Again I was trapped by the bitter lessons of my childhood: my repeatedly proven belief any request of such magnitude would trigger not just a contemptuous refusal but severe reprisals as well. Beneath that emotional quagmire was a residual layer of reflexive terror as compelling as any whip-wielding overseer in its mandate for silence. Meanwhile, in sheer panic, I kept wrestling with the computer problem, trying desperately to find some way to save at least the newsletter text, an effort that culminated in an exhausting series of all-nighters – three in four days (with never more than two hours of sleep at any one time) – a relentless drive fueled by rage, frustration and a sense of karmic obstruction more infuriating than anything in memory.

Finally I forced myself to ask a computer-wise friend named Pat Fletcher for help, but the conversation quickly deteriorated into an argument. Seemingly the clash was fostered by my inability to speak Nurdish – that is, to clearly explain what was happening, what remedies I had attempted and what I had already learned would not solve the problem. But knowing what I know now, I cannot doubt our differences were at least equally fueled by the silent inertial momentum of my childhood conditioning. In any case, when I managed to salvage the newsletter text – the result of the third overnight effort, a quest prompted by a hunch and culminating in a lucky accident (I cannot possibly explain what I did, nor could I ever do it again) – Pat became the true savior of the entire project by rounding up its separate pieces and herding them into printable form. As a result of her work, the newsletter was published and distributed this morning. Thank you Pat.

 

Meanwhile five fellow organizing-committee members – Max Hyland, Katelyn Driskill, Alan OldStudent, Terry Fuller and Sarah Morken – had responded to my letter of disgruntlement. That anyone bothered to reply was itself a surprise; I had intended to vanish until the computer problem was solved, felt I should explain my impending disappearance, and anticipated nothing more than silence in response. But here within hours – in one instance within minutes – were their emails offering useful advice and urging me to persevere. Max went even further, and now thanks to a four-hour effort on his part, I have a new word-processing system plus new-found friendships with him and his partner Katelyn cemented by our mutual discovery we can talk of politics and history and art and personal experience until the proverbial wee hours and – best of all – do so with the blessed bohemian intensity that characterized the most memorable interactions of my years in Manhattan. Thank you Alan and Terry and Sarah. And thank you most of all Max and Katelyn: indeed you remind me of my late and long-ago SWP friends from Chelsea: Joe Bevando and Marilyn Werstler, with whom I traveled to Washington D.C. in the politically uncertain days after the Kent State and Jackson State massacres, there to demonstrate against Nixon, the Vietnam War and capitalist atrocities in general.

But none of this came into focus until this morning, after I finally managed to get something approaching a full night's sleep. I awoke realizing the events following the initial computer crash, which occurred around 8:30 Thursday evening (10 July 2014), had somehow flushed a negative paradigm from my subconscious, a process eerily parallel to how Max purged the corrupted WP system from my computer. All I knew in my first moments of wakefulness was a collection of words, “epiphany” and “the political as personal,” but I arose vowing to pull into the sharpest possible focus whatever it was they might symbolize. The above text is the result. Now though I realize I had already been on epiphany's brink when I posted my “sandbagged” message last night: “a classic example of the reality embodied in the line 'I get by with a little help from my friends'...expressions both of friendship and Working Class solidarity...” But a note to Pat this morning said it all: “I had no idea I am held in such high regard by my comrades in 15 Now. I am stunned, moved beyond my ability to express it.  In Seattle, even as the founding photographer of The Sun, I was always despised as an Outlander; here (in Tacoma) I am not just welcomed but valued, much as I was when here c. 1978-1982,  much as I always was in Manhattan and NJ.”

Obviously the neurotic reflexes associated with such a longstanding paradigm as described above do not vanish overnight. But at least I have finally learned how to ask for help when I need it.

Hence I will say it one more time: thank you Pat, Max, Katelyn, Alan, Sarah and Terry.

* * * * * *

Outside Agitation Elsewhere: (In Case You Missed It)

The Hobby Lobby decision, which I am coming to realize is the anti-woman equivalent of the anti-African American Dred Scott decision  (see also below), continues to provoke a perplexing combination of futile gestures (e.g., the doomed effort to ameliorate it with legislation rendered impossible by a permanently deadlocked Congress), and boiling anger further intensified by the growing understanding of its ruinous impact.

Not only does Hobby Lobby undermine the rights of women and minorities; it also opens, as never before in U.S. judicial history, the door to the imposition of Christian theocracy – just as its obediently misogynistic, dutifully anti-democratic Roman Catholic signatories clearly intend.

(Which prompts an impertinent question that is dark indeed: could it be President John Fitzgerald Kennedy's avowed and oft-proven defiance of Vatican rule was yet another of the motives that prompted his assassination?)

Thus when Al Jazeera America reported on the latest misogynistic atrocities  inflicted by Justice Scalia and his surrogate Inquisition, “Court Expands Reach of Hobby Lobby on Eve of Holiday Weekend,” I posted a pair of angry comments to the discussion thread. The first was pro forma:

There's no “maybe” about it: that's exactly what's happening, though the perpetrators are Christian clergymen, not mullahs.

Meanwhile, a few of us – Chris Hedges, Nat Hentoff, Jeff Sharlet, Susan Jacoby, Kevin Phillips and myself – have been warning for years about the encroachment of theocracy.

Having encountered Christianity's hatefulness in rural Washington and the South (where the colloquial name for the Ku Klux Klan is “the Saturday night men's Bible-study class”), I damn the theocrats as “Christofascists” and “JesuNazis.”

Too extreme? Hardly; I know from experience that is precisely what they are.

But we are the Cassandras of our era. Our words are belittled as sensationalism, rejected as paranoia.

The secular public is too smugly self-absorbed to awaken to the threat.

 

Shackled by political correctness, the Left dares not acknowledge the growing might of Christian fanaticism. That would require acknowledging both the stranglehold Christianity has on the U.S. masses and the parallel menaces of radical Islam and theocratic Judaism.

The moderate churches, mosques and temples are gagged by ecumenicism. That's why they do not speak out against the threat.

And the two major parties were long ago taken over by the fanatics. Read Sharlet's The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (Harper: 2008).

Now, like some reincarnation of the Inquisition, the Supreme Court is pouncing.

* * *

My second contribution to the “Court Expands” thread is a short piece of which I will remain proud at least for the rest of my life:

 

Inspired by #m, may I suggest the following:

SCOTUS MALORUM (court of evil); SCOTUS MENDACEM (court of lies); SCOTUS IGNORANTUM (court of ignorance); SCOTUS HORRIBILIS (court of horror)...and then my favorite:

SCOTUS ASINORUM (court of asses).

This last has true Roman lineage. It is from "pons asinorum, literally 'bridge of asses': a humorous name for the fifth proposition of the first book of Euclid, from the difficulty which beginners or dull-witted persons find in 'getting over' or mastering it." (A Dictionary of Latin Words and Phrases, Oxford University Press: 1998)

Then of course there is Scalia, a disease so awful even medical writers are afraid to describe it, lest the description itself vector the bacteria.

* * * * * *

Now though the work of SCOTUS HORRIBILIS has wreaked so much emotional havoc, the response is deteriorating into terrified giggles of satire and disbelief.  Hence “Scalia's Major Screw-Up: How SCOTUS Just Gave Liberals a Huge Gift.” Hence too my caustic retort:

Ms. Ruden's too-cute assumption, that because of its Hobby Lobby decision, SCOTUS ASINORUM “cannot refuse religious exemptions from selected tax obligations,” belongs in an editor's garbage can.

 

Her pathetic belief the U,S, is still a representative democracy – and her implicit belief in the consistency of judicial principle – is absurd. The U.S. has become a plutocratic empire. The sole function of SCOTUS MALORUM is perpetuating capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation for all the rest of us.

In this context, making light of Hobby Lobby, which for the nation's women is the equivalent of the Dred Scott decision, is like laughing at the convulsions of a lynch-mob victim.

Meanwhile it's easy to imagine the Roberts Court granting “religious exemptions” to the Ku Klux Klan, known throughout the South as “the Saturday Night Men's Bible-Study Class.” But there is no possibility SCOTUS PRO DOCTRINA FIDEI would grant such dispensations to Left-leaning Protestants.

Indeed such a ruling from the Robber Court is even less likely than acquittal by the original Congregatio pro Doctrina Fidei – the Inquisition – which tortured suspected heretics until they confessed, then burned them alive in an “Auto da Fey” – a “celebration of faith.”

Besides which, all “religious exemptions” further the cause of theocracy, the One Percent's final solution to Working Class rebelliousness.

* * *

Then there was my response to a hostile poster on the same thread:

Since when is it "defeatist" to demand an unflinchingly realistic appraisal of reality? 

Indeed your accusation and Ms. Ruden's essay each illustrate major aspects of the most savagely counter-revolutionary (and therefore oppressively reactionary) tendency in U.S. society: making light of genuine horror, and denouncing those of us who are unafraid to name its awfulness.

Quoth Sun Tzu: "Know your enemy and know yourself and you can fight a hundred battles without disaster."

LB/14 July 2014

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