From Synchronous Events of My Absence, a New Hope

 

Woman sharing a bowl of salad. From “Living Apart,” a work-in-progress. (Canon T5 DSLR, Canon 18mm-55mm f/3.5-f/5.6 zoom, 35mm equivalent focal lengths 28mm-90mm). Photograph by Loren Bliss © 2015. (Click on image to view it full size.)

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I BRING TO today's long-delayed writing an admittedly embryonic but unquestionably powerful sense of hope, its strength defined by its metaphorical similarity to concrete reinforced with steel or iron, the rebar beloved of structural engineers since the 15th Century or so.

Like concrete itself,  my new sense of hope contains seemingly disparate elements compounded into a robustly functional whole. The elements include one of this year's U.S. election results, Beat Generation poetry and a European musical phenomenon that began in Germany probably 15 years ago but really started with the folk-music revival  of the 1950s. Think of the political elements and the poetry as the aggregate, the music as the rebar, and the bonding element as the groundswell of obviously rising anger against capitalism's ever-more-methodical victimization of the 99 Percent.

Alas – albeit with apologies to those whose concept of dialectical materialism still stubbornly excludes the (misleadingly named) “supernatural” – we cannot discuss hope of this sort without first considering the prophetic function of art.

Like the core wisdom at the heart of the present-day Gaia Hypothesis  – the now-revolutionary notion our planet is alive, conscious and self-regulating – the prophetic function of art is a breathtakingly ancient concept. Its origins are lost in the ignorance and suppressed knowledge that unfortunately shrouds most of our species' 200,000 years. But what we are learning of so-called “primitive” peoples suggests it, like the Gaian ethos, was among the definitive characteristics of human society until the advent of patriarchy – a tragedy Barbara Mor  convincingly defines as humanity's one and only unnatural act – the precursor to the cancerous shrinking of human consciousness to the zomboid moral imbecility  necessitated by and for the maintenance of capitalist profit and growth.

During the five or six millennia that followed patriarchy's emergence, the tyrannies essential to expanding and sustaining it methodically marginalized art to exclude public awareness not just of its prophetic potential, but of all its psychological and ritualistic potencies, which the patriarchal authorities (correctly) feared as dangerously subversive. This was – and is – the fear implicit in the persecutions of art and artists launched even now by the Abrahamic religions and by the patriarchal authorities in general. It is the real reason that under capitalism, which is revealed by its master-slave dichotomy to be patriarchy in economic disguise, art has been officially marginalized, first to decoration and/or entertainment, ultimately to an esoteric medium by which the One Percenters declare their financial and cultural status, mostly to one another.

But some ideas – especially those powerful enough to evoke the spinal-chill imprimatur that signifies an encounter with poetic truth – refuse to be suppressed. Thus, just as the scientists James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis would propose the Gaia Hypothesis in 1972 (appropriately, its name was suggested by the novelist William Golding), so in 1933 did Carl Jung rescue the notion of art-as-prophecy  from obscurity. Marshall McLuhan followed suit in 1964,  proclaiming art “a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.”

Enter, as exemplars, three categories of art: Edvard Munch's four versions of The Scream (1893-1910) ; Allen Ginsberg's  “Howl” (1956) and Faun's  “Alba” (2011), here on the album Eden.

The four portraits in the Scream series are expressions of stark horror, all the more intense for the fact we are left to imagine their source. Though the anguish in the opening line of “Howl” could surely describe what it was Munch found so horrific:

I have seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness...

But 55 years later in “Alba,” we discover the suggestion those seemingly endless years of unmitigated darkness may at last be ending:

Lauf nicht davon, ich lann den Morgen sehen
Wir liefen writ, nun lassen wir den Winter ziehen.

In English, in the context of the piece itself, this translates to:

Do not run [anymore from the cold and darkness], I can see the morning.
We ran far [enough], let the winter pull us [as it might].

McLuhan's art-as-warning hypothesis provided, as many OAN readers will no doubt recall my having said before, a key part of the conceptual framework of “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer,” which defined the 1960s Counterculture – largely on the basis of its art and its expansion of female-male relationship models – as the first wave of a global revolution against patriarchy. That book, the product of 24 years of research conducted mostly in the spare moments allowed by a newspaper career, went unpublished because its manuscript, photographs and research notes were destroyed in a 1983 fire, probably arson.

Now, particularly with the addition of Jung's observations, the notion of art-as-prophecy applied to Faun (and thus to the renaissance of goddess-centered paganism that is sweeping Europe), gives us a profoundly reassuring glimpse of our post-apocalyptic future. It tells us the capitalists were not able to kill the Counterculture after all – that its anti-patriarchal aesthetic is thriving in Europe and, despite the vehement opposition of the One Percent, is now by a kind of cultural osmosis seeping back into the USian homeland – all of which, especially from the Jungian perspective, suggests our species is making psychic and psychological preparations for its future. The long term implication is that we will survive the disasters thrust on us by capitalism, and that we will eventually emerge from the shark-womb of capitalism's toxic darkness with a genuinely healing vision of ourselves, our Mother Earth and the universe of which we are part.

The point at which all these seemingly random impressions coalesced into a synchronistic whole was an apparently coincidental conversation with a much younger woman named Suzanne at the 15 Now Tacoma election-night party celebrating last week's vote by a 70 percent majority of Tacomans (see here,  here and here)  to raise the minimum wage.

Though the proposed $15 minimum wage did not win – the (obviously intimidated) voters overwhelmingly chose the $12 minimum instead – the victory was clearly 15 Now's. Their campaign so frightened theTacoma-Pierce County Chamber of Commerce, it ordered the Tacoma City Council to put the $12-eventually option on the ballot in competition with the $15-immediately proposed by initiative.

Persons unfamiliar with USian municipal government should note that “ordered” is most assuredly not hyperbole. As in most cities of the imperial homeland, the overwhelming economic resources of the local chamber of commerce grants it absolute power. Tacoma is no exception. Note the lockstep opposition the chamber mustered in its unsuccessful effort to unseat City Councilman Anders Ibsen.  In essence the chamber owns outright seven of Tacoma's nine city council members – precisely as a medieval baron might have owned the lesser aristocrats who were his vassals.

The result was a ballot that first asked whether the voter supported a minimum-wage increase and next asked whether the wage should be raised to $12 per hour or to $15. The chamber obviously hoped the question's complexity would result in a negative vote. And the chamber's hope was a rational one: Washington state voters have a long history of rejecting any ballot measure that requires careful thought.

But...as Bob Dylan prophesied back in 1964, “the times they are a-changing.”

The magnitude of that change is apparent in how a small and profoundly dedicated group of women and men – a cadre of about 25 people supported by about 115 additional volunteers (most of them avowed socialists) – gained a victory for the Tacoma Working Class that two years earlier was unimaginable.

(Disclosure: I was one of the original 15 Now Tacoma volunteers, but dropped out late last year after a potentially fatal kidney infection taught me to be less forgetful of my age – then 74 – and to be more miserly with my time.)

The broader significance of the minimum-wage victory lies in the fact approximately 60 percent of the Tacoma's workers – individual women and men but mostly families with children – are officially “lower income.” This means they struggle to survive on earnings of less than $30,000 per year. Forced into poverty by outsourcing, downsizing and other expressions of capitalist savagery, they (like so many other members of the USian 99 Percent) originally saw themselves as powerless to resist.

But the victory of raising their own pay by the electoral process has shown them they have the option of fighting back and winning.

Their triumph – and that is truly what it was – thus provides a potent object lesson in how organization and solidarity translate into a restoration of the collective power formerly provided by unions – the very power the local Ruling Class imagined had been abolished forever.

Suzanne, whose eyes, depending on the light, wondrously change from blue to green and back to blue again, broadened the focus of our conversation to what else might be done to foster Working Class resistance. It came to me then that in the wildly growing popularity of music by Faun and other such unapologetically pagan groups and individual musicians – all of them agitator-bards in service to the re-emergent Muse and the revolution she symbolizes – there is the promise of the far more elemental transformation necessary to bring about a society in which the ruling ethos is not infinite greed and selfishness but rather the ancient notion of “from each according to ability, to each according to need.”

Which – never mind the fact Faun is a continent away – makes especially appropriate its transformation of the chorus from “Alba” into an anthem of joyful defiance.  On the foregoing linked video it follows, most appropriately I think, Yulya Ayuna Kholeva's exquisite but too-brief Belorussian fire dance.

      ...I can see the morning. We ran far...

LB/30 September-9 November 2015

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Obama's Enactment of NDAA, Forcible Disarmament of Medical Marijuana Patients, New Schemes to Censor Twitter Highlight U.S. Transition to Unabashed Fascism

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NOTE: Though I have been invited back to TypePad (lorenbliss.typepad.com) and am again blogging there, I will continue to post Outside Agitator's Notebook here also as it seems TypePad does not circulate as widely in Europe and elsewhere outside the United States as Blogger aka Blog Spot does. The essay below was posted on TypePad two days ago (9 January 2012). Hence my apology to my overseas readers for not identifying this circulation problem sooner.

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OCCUPY TACOMA MARCHERS, 4 November 2011: because we can't afford to bribe the politicians, peaceful protest is our last remaining option.  Click on image to view it full size. Photograph  by Loren Bliss copyright 2011. 

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Jungians believe dreams are sometimes prophetic messages from our collective subconscious – hence for example the otherwise inexplicable nightmares reported by Carl Jung's earliest therapands, which today are understood as warnings of the previously unimaginable horrors that characterized the 20th Century.

It is in this context I glumly report that now since the President has finalized his transition from Obama the Orator to Barack the Betrayer by signing away our constitutional rights via the National Defense Authorization Act, I have thrice dreamt of being arrested without charge or trial and hauled off to lifetime internment merely because I am an outspoken opponent of capitalism.

This is significant because I have never had such dreams before, not ever – this despite a lifetime of risky political activism including false arrest and attempts on my life by the Ku Klux Klan in retaliation for my journalistic involvement with the Civil Rights Movement c. 1963-1965.

Nor am I alone in these new and disturbing nightmares. A friend describes having similar dreams, and I cannot but wonder how many others are likewise afflicted.

Which – if the Jungian hypothesis is accurate – suggests the proverbial road ahead is a very hard road indeed.

Not that the road behind us has been all that much easier.

If indeed there is any long-term human tomorrow – a prospect made increasingly doubtful by the capitalists' ecocidal greed – future historians will undoubtedly select 22 November 1963 as the true date for the death of the American Dream and the murder of its underlying experiment in constitutional democracy.

That date – the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy – will live in infamy far longer than 7 December 1941, when Imperial Japan attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor. For Pearl Harbor was merely a lost battle, the opening fight in a victorious war, while the assassination of President Kennedy was a coup, a conquest, the death of a nation.

Its hideous truth, that we are a people conquered and reduced to slavery, is the now-undeniable message-thread that ties together all the atrocities of the following years: murder and mayhem inflicted by needless wars – Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Grenada, Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq, 9/11, Iraq again, Afghanistan again; the murders of Malcolm X, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, Viola Liuzzo, Martin Luther King Jr., Robert Kennedy; the murders at Kent State and Jackson State; the murders of Fred Hampton and Karen Silkwood and the suspected murders of Paul Wellstone and John F. Kennedy Jr.; the torture-murders committed by Augusto Pinochet and all the other dictators supported by Wall Street and therefore bankrolled and protected by the U.S. government; now finally the horrors of capitalism brought home and imposed on us by the murder of the U.S. economy, downsizing and outsourcing and foreclosure and the deliberately murderous destruction of government services; and now too at home as abroad the psychological and often physical murder of capitalism's innumerable victims, our minds killed by deliberately shrunken schools and maliciously untruthful media, our bodies slain by the methodical denial of medical care or the inescapable horrors of post-industrial poverty and/or post-eviction homelessness – this unprecedented plague of murder and murderousness for profit the defining characteristic of our era.

All of these consequences of 22 November 1963 are either spelled out or implied in JFK and the Unspeakable, subtitled Why He Died and Why It Matters as if in apt anticipation of Warren Commission objections arising from the useful idiots of Moron Nation. 

 

Written by the avowedly pacifist author James W. Douglass (Orbis Books, 2008), JFK and the Unspeakable employs the classic technique of investigative reporting, following the money and power to show us who got ruined and who got paid off. It is not conspiranoid dreck but hard-edged historical analysis, available online for $14.28 or $9.99 as a Kindle download.

Yet despite its ready availability JFK and the Unspeakable remains obscure, marketed mostly by word of mouth, the victim of methodical marginalization by a Ruling Class Media blackout unlike anything I have ever seen, a campaign of silence so relentless it confirms all our terrible suspicions about the reality of censorship here in the alleged “land of the free.”

Not that we should be surprised. Ours has been the original realm of the Big Lie for many more than my nearly 72 years. Nazi Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels made no secret of the fact he learned his techniques from Madison Avenue. A few even say Goebbels learned his techniques on Madison Avenue, a story I would love to report, though I have never been able to find confirmation Goebbels actually worked in a U.S. advertising agency.

In any case it is only fair to point out the Nazi war criminals absorbed by the U.S. government after World War II added nothing new to the Big Lie arsenal but merely brought the technique back home.

The truth of the Big Lie's homecoming is underscored by the postwar Big Lie that blames the Soviets for originating the tactic of “disinformation” – a long-standing U.S. claim accepted with typically ignorant submissiveness here in Moron Nation despite the ironically contrary fact the Russian word for disinformation is dezinformatsiya, a term obviously of English-language origin.

Nor does the post-war welcome given the Nazis by the U.S. Ruling Class surprise any of us who understand that beyond all the deceptive euphemisms of academic economics, capitalism is merely infinite greed exalted as maximum virtue, just as capitalist governance can only mean absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for all the rest of us: in other words, fascism. Or as Il Duce himself defined it, absolute rule by the corporate One Percent.

Thus we recognize fascism and its still-more-sadistic twin Nazism as capitalism's ultimate form – Wall Street's only logical evolutionary fulfillment – which in turn enables us to know World War II for what it truly was: a war between rival factions of capitalists: the jackboot-and-deathcamp-capitalists who ran Italy, Germany and Japan versus the velvet-glove capitalists who ruled the United States, Great Britain and France.

Thus too the far more accurate Soviet name for World War II, “the Great Patriotic War against Fascism,” which from the viewpoint of the 170 nationalities of the Soviet Union it most assuredly was.

All of which is prefatory to the four reports linked below, each vital if belated New Years reading. The first report tells us the Obama Administration has quietly and without public announcement decreed any firearms owner who uses medical marijuana is guilty of a felony punishable by ten years in prison. The second, from the Electronic Freedom Foundation and forwarded to me by a reader, exposes the U.S. campaign to censor Twitter. The next two look at the National Defense Authorization Act and its role in facilitating the (inevitable) progression of the United States from the velvet-gloved fascism of the World War II era and my boyhood years (1940-1958) to the bare-knuckled truncheon-and-Tazer fascism of today. In which context the semioticians amongst us will also note the Nazi-style helmets the U.S., its allies (and many domestic police departments) adopted after the Vietnam Era.

Once again, the medium is the message.

Yes. that frightening sound you hear at the edge of your mind may well be an 80-year-old echo of snare drums.

And just because the U.S. military doesn't goose-step (yet) is no guarantee it isn't already dominated by fascists – especially now that Barack the Betrayer has given it full-fledged Gestapo powers by signing NDAA.

Indeed the one unanswered question is whether the military can delegate its new authority to mercenary organizations like Xe, aka Blackwater, already infamous for its presence during the forcible disarmament of New Orleans after Katrina – so much for the notion the (Ruling Class) GOPorkers are any different from the (Ruling Class) DemocRats in opposition to a citizenry armed for self-defense. 

In this instance the GOPigs are merely the better liars. Just ask the citizens of Lousiana.

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Feds Impose Mandatory Pacifism, Compulsory Victimhood on Medical Marijuana Users

I read Rightist websites because they're sometimes sources of information the (pseudo) Left here in Moron Nation maliciously suppresses.

That was how I discovered the following – a stunning report the Obamanoid Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has administratively decreed  obtaining a medical marijuana prescription forcibly disarms you forever, no exemptions, no appeal. I found this information when I was searching the admittedly hard-Right Gun Owners of America website to refresh my memory on the attempted disarmament of New Orleans and its environs, an atrocity on which GOA alone provided adequate reporting.

“With the stroke of a pen, the U.S. Justice Department has just subjected hundreds of thousands of Americans to a lifetime gun ban,” says the GOA report, by John Velleco of NewsWithViews.com.

“In an open letter to all licensed firearms dealers, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) unilaterally decided that any person who is prescribed marijuana for medical purposes is prohibited from possessing a firearm,” the report continues.

“That means over 300,000 people in the states that allow medical marijuana suddenly cannot buy or possess a gun. Oh yeah, and for the many who already own firearms, watch out. They are now felons and could be subject to lengthy prison terms of up to ten years.”

Because many states deny all rights of self-defense to anyone who is prohibited firearms ownership, the BATFE's decree is exactly as my headline states: mandatory pacifism and compulsory victimhood for medical marijuana users.

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U.S. Officials, Ruling Class Politicians Seek to Censor Twitter

A new disclosure by the Electronic Frontier Foundation forwarded to me by a reader describes federal efforts to censor Twitter.

The report – alarming in its own right – acquires additional significance given last fall's test of cell-phone censorship in San Francisco, for which see “San Francisco's BART Turns Off Cell Phones to Suppress Protests” (Outside Agitator's Notebook, 14 August 2011). Together these episodes provide additional proof of the national transition that's moving us ever closer to a stars-and-stripes variant of Nazism.

“EFF has witnessed a growing number of calls in recent weeks for Twitter to ban certain accounts of alleged terrorists,” the report says.

“In a December 14th article in The New York Times, anonymous U.S. officials claimed they 'may have the legal authority to demand that Twitter close' a Twitter account associated with the militant Somali group Al-Shabaab. A week later, The Telegraph reported that Sen. Joe Lieberman contacted Twitter to remove two 'propaganda' accounts allegedly run by the Taliban. More recently, an Israeli law firm threatened to sue Twitter if they did not remove accounts run by Hezbollah.”

“Twitter,” EFF concludes, “is right to resist.  If the U.S. were to pressure Twitter to censor tweets by organizations it opposes, even those on the terrorist lists, it would join the ranks of countries like India, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Syria, Uzbekistan, all of which have censored online speech in the name of 'national security.'”

The only quibble I have with the EFF report is that in the United States – as for example the BART incident and real but difficult-to-document ousters from Facebook – online speech is already being censored. Nevertheless EFF is our one effective guardian of online First Amendment rights, which means it should have not just our universal applause but donations from anyone who still has any discretionary income.

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Naomi Wolf Says NDAA Could Foster Military Coup, Arrest of President and Congress

The newly imposed National Defense Appropriations Act, specifically its Amendment 1031, allows the military to round up U.S. citizens without formal charges and detain us without trial literally for the rest of our lives, presumably in Guantanamo-like concentration camps or worse.

But author/journalist Naomi Wolf points out another atrocity the rest of us missed – that it also facilitates a military coup. She originally published her analysis on December 12, 2011, but it took on new relevance when Barack the Betrayer hid behind the holiday media blackout to quietly sign the bill during his Hawaii vacation – literally as if he were engineering his own overthrow. Hence Reader Supported News thoughtfully resurrected Ms. Wolf's text. 

Congress and the President, she wrote, “may have supported this bill because - although it's hard to believe - they think the military will only arrest active members of Al Qaida; or maybe, less naively, they believe that 'at most', low-level dissenting figures, activists, or troublesome protesters might be subjected to military arrest. But they are forgetting something critical: history shows that those who signed this bill will soon be subject to arrest themselves.”

“The moment this bill becomes law,” she explained, “the power roles will reverse: Congress will no longer be directing and in charge of the military: rather, the military will be directing and in charge of individual Congressional leaders, as well as in charge of everyone else - as any Parliamentarian in any society who handed this power over to the military can attest.”

“Perhaps Congress assumes that it will always only be 'they' who are targeted for arrest and military detention,” Ms. Wolf speculated. “But sadly, parliamentary leaders are the first to face pressure, threats, arrest and even violence when the military obtains the power to make civilian arrests and hold civilians in military facilities without due process.”

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Citing 2012 Parallels to 1932, a British Journalist Asks If the Future Is Fascism 

 

“The dawn of a new year is usually a time of hope and ambition, of dreams for the future and thoughts of a better life. But,” wrote Dominic Sandbrook of The Daily Mail, “it is a long time since many of us looked forward to the new year with such anxiety, even dread...For the most chilling parallel, though, we should look back exactly 80 years, to the cold wintry days when 1931 gave way to 1932.”

Redistributed by Reader Supported News, Sandbrook's piece laments “there seems little point in looking across the Atlantic for inspiration. In 1932, President Herbert Hoover, beleaguered by rising unemployment and tumbling ratings, flailed and floundered towards election defeat...Barack Obama cuts a similarly impotent, indecisive and isolationist figure. The difference is that in 1932, one of the greatest statesmen of the century, the Democratic politician Franklin D. Roosevelt, was waiting in the wings.”

“Today, American voters looking for alternatives are confronted only with a bizarre gaggle of has-beens, inadequates and weirdos, otherwise known as the Republican presidential field. And to anybody who cares about the future of the Western world, the prospect of President Ron Paul or President Newt Gingrich is frankly spine-chilling.”

Not that Mitt Romney is any less frightening – especially now that Barack the Betrayer has signed NDAA, thereby ensuring Romney or any other U.S. president will never again be more than a tool of the military – and of course the military-industrial complex.

Happy New Year!

LB/9 January 2012

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