Why I Was Gone So Long; Apology to Readers; U.S. Escalation in Ukraine; Protesters as 'Enemy Forces'

A NUMBER OF people have asked me why I withdrew so suddenly from the blogosphere last December and why I have been mostly absent since then, not only posting nothing significant in this space but making only minimal contributions to websites I formerly frequented daily.

As with so many things human, the answer is complicated. It has at least three parts.

The first of these, the fulcrum upon which fate leveraged everything that followed, was as I said at the time “a conjunction of obligations and disasters.” 

My obligations were to write, photograph, edit and produce the monthly newsletter that serves the community of elderly and disabled people in which I reside, and – at the same time –to help a friend with a suddenly essential project that had to be completed by 31 December.

The initial disaster was the death of my computer's printer, chiefly because I cannot edit my own writing effectively on a monitor. I'm not sure what the problem is that causes me to miss so many errors when I try to edit on-screen, but I am certain it has to do with only seeing a small part of the text at one time and also with being dyslexic.

Hence I if I am to write for OAN (or for any other medium in which it is imperative I not look like an illiterate idiot, a muddle-headed moron or a geezer doddering into dotage), I need the printer to provide me text I can edit in the traditional copy-desk manner, green visor, pica stick and all. I mark the corrections on the paper. Then – like an old-time Linotype operator (one of the many categories of highly skilled workers who were flung into permanent joblessness by that electronic scab known as the computer) – I type the changes into the virtual text.

As I do so I hope desperately I do not make other errors – for example the dyslexic but comically literal “fucendate” (from “fecundate”), or the arthritic-fingered blunder that turns “working press” into “wormking press.”

(I leave it to you readers to decide the Freudian appropriateness of “wormking press” as it applies to the so-called “mainstream media” of the United States. Suffice it to say that in historical truth it is our species' first wholly privatized Ruling Class propaganda machine, a microcosm of the larger socioeconomic triumphs achieved in the U.S. by Ayn Rand, Adolf Hitler and Josef Goebbels.

Remember too – especially in the context of the warning to never eat yellow snow – how this “main stream” functions to facilitate the trickle-down economics in which we are all...well, er, drowning.)

Returning to the circumstances of my departure, I had intended, as noted in December, to resume blogging after the first of the year.

By then, thanks to the continuing generosity of Adrienne, who was my second wife and is now amongst my dearest friends, I had a new printer – the highly rated Hewlett-Packard Envy 5530.

But the new printer crashed my old computer, forcing me to undertake a project I had long dreaded: replacing my old familiar machine with the new, substantially more powerful but totally alien Samsung NP355E5C Adrienne had given me the previous Christmas.

I had not started using the new computer – in fact I had not even unpacked it – because I knew from past experience the process of changing computers would probably keep me off-line for at least a month. And I wanted to re-start OAN before my absence cost me too many more readers.

Fate, however, had other plans. The old computer could not be resurrected without the expenditure of far more money than I had. Nurds here in Bill Gates land charge as much as $265 per hour, and what the old computer needed – a near-doubling of its random access memory plus upgrading from an Ubuntu 10.10 operating system to the present Ubuntu 12-whatever – would take many many many more hours than one.

That was the bad news. The worse news was the crash had obliterated my e-mail address book, which I have since been able to only partially reconstruct.

The most devastating news of all was that Samsung and Microshaft had cut a maliciously monopolistic deal that made it impossible to reconfigure the new laptop to run Ubuntu, which I had come to love for its clarity, simplicity, intuitive protocols and a friendly discussion board to help compu-ignoramuses like myself navigate its Nurdly esoterica.

Thus I had to learn Microshaft Windows 8.1, which after running anything Ubuntu was like being told the only allowable route to Portland, Oregon was via New Orleans, Baltimore, Chicago and Hungry Horse, Montana rather than by the direct route 143 miles (230 kilometers) south from Tacoma on Interstate 5.

Finally, near the end of March and with the help of two computer-savvy friends and an auxiliary keyboard, I was able to run the Microshafted Samsung without having to call for help every 15 minutes.

But on my 75th birthday – literally just as I was writing the preceding paragraph – yet another crisis arose.

For the past six months, the faceless, mostly nameless executives who lord it over the apartment complex in which I'm a tenant have been harassing us with threats of a one-or-two-day temporary eviction, ostensibly so the entire building can be renovated in the shortest time possible.

The temporary evictions, we are told, are non-negotiable.

But the executives refuse to tell us when these evictions will occur – only that we will have 48 hours notice to prepare, which of course means we should box up our belongings now and then live as denizens of storage lockers until management deigns to act.

Needless to say, the dislocations we are suffering as a result are in some respects worse than the life-disruptions of a full-fledged move to a new address. At least with an address-change, there's a known schedule, presumably with reasonable time for planning, packing and unpacking.

What in landlord-speak is dismissed as a minor inconvenience is for us a debacle. Add in that we're all either old and/or disabled, many of us both, some genuinely fragile, and the stress and anxiety inflicted by the temporary-eviction threats ramps up into the stroke-and-heart-attack zone.

Moreover the fact the need for such haste has never been explained combines with the fact the neighborhood is a known gentrification target to evoke strong suspicions we are being not-so-subtly encouraged to move elsewhere.

Then on my birthday – happy birthday from Jesus – we were hit with the written threat of a $75-per-month rent increase and its unexpressed but implicit and abjectly terrifying threat of instant homelessness.

Hence, acting both as the volunteer founder and editor of the apartment-complex newsletter and in my own defense, I consulted with a local lawyer. On his advice, I wrote, assembled and filed a 51-page formal complaint complete with 11 pages of narrative and 40 pages of documentation.

Though there is no effective tenant-protection apparatus in Washington state – tenants here have probably fewer rights under state and local law than anywhere else in the U.S. – the fact this particular apartment complex was at least partly financed with federal funds means we may have some rights under federal law.

Or so the lawyer said. Hence the complaint – which took me 16 gruelingly long 14-hour days to prepare – was mailed to U.S. Rep. Derek Kilmer (Democrat/Washington state) on 13 April.

Truly I have not worked so hard since I was a full-time investigative reporter. Worse, it was the first time I had written about anything so damnably complex since I quit tobacco, 20 years ago this coming 23 September. I was not even one day into the project when I began to fear I could not finish the work without starting smoking again. Indeed I became so fearful of yielding to nicotine seduction I enrolled in a quit-smoking program offered by Group Health Cooperative, which is my Medicare (health care) provider and in which I am a voting member.

My problem, as regular readers of OAN know, is that I am dyslexic.  In days of yore, when I was a member of the working press, my two-and-one-half-pack-per-day cigarette addiction was a key part of my compensatory mechanism.

The nicotine one imbibes by smoking is a potent neurotransmitter, and one of its deadly benefits – the oxymoron is deliberate – is that it temporarily alleviates dyslexic dysfunction. It thereby evokes an instantaneous clarity of expression that now without nicotine often takes me hours – and sometimes literally days – to achieve.

In the instance of the complaint to Congressman Kilmer, it took me a total of 224 hours – the equivalent of 6.4 35-hour workweeks compressed into 16 days – to write a seven-sentence summary and a 5,000-word, 10-part report and then to assemble the supportive documents. In the old days, as a smoker, I'd have done the writing in maybe three days max and – working no more than my usual seven-hour days – had the entire project finished within a week.

But at last the complaint is now done and mailed.

Will our Democratic Congressman defend us? Or will he act upon his de facto Republican, military-industrial-complex ideology and throw us under the proverbial bus?

Surely we shall soon know the answer.

The question is legitimate. Not only are we lower-income people. Because we are elderly and/or disabled, we are truly surplus – no longer supportable for profit.

And now finally – for the first time since last December – I actually have the time and energy and inclination to again start doing this blog right.

***

IT OCCURRED TO me last night because of an “I-hope-you-keep-writing” note sent by a reader with the seemingly Eastern European name of Marija (as in the late Marija Gimbutas), that perhaps the explanation for OAN's readership in Ukraine and Russia was its regular linkage to the accurate Consortium News reports of events therein.

Consortium News and Reader Supported News,  a separate website that often republishes the Consortium reports, are the only indigenous U.S. sources that dare reveal how the USian Empire has imposed and is now defending its newest Nazi puppet state.

These websites also report how ethnic Russians are resisting the U.S./Nazi onslaught with the same breathtaking courage as defined the Soviet partizanska during World War II, which for the peoples of the U.S.S.R. was indeed what it is called in Russia even now: “the Great Patriotic War against Fascism.”

Could it be that due to electronic censorship by the U.S./Nazi regime in Kiev, OAN was one of the few reliably available sources of those Consortium and RSN reports? 

Obviously I don't know. But the suspicion alone is enough to fill me with guilt for my nearly four-month absence.

Hence my profuse apology if my personal problems made it more difficult for 

Ukrainians and Russians to get those reports. Providing the relevant links is a purpose – indeed an obligation – I will damn well take seriously in the future.

***

YET ANOTHER REASON I withdrew – maybe the most important reason of all – I confess in a letter to a colleague here in Tacoma:

During our recent telephone conversation my explanation of why I so suddenly dropped out of sight was less than articulate. Like most men I find it extremely difficult to talk about my own emotions, but unlike many men I do possess some small skill at writing about such things. Hence this hopefully more informative (and therefore more honest) explanation:

As you no doubt know from your work, as we approach our personal graveyards we often become brutally honest with ourselves. Though I have been in that general mode for several years, my brush with death via kidney infection and incipient septicemia last fall radically intensified the attendant process of self-evaluation.

When I was maybe 12 or 13, and without really giving it much thought,  I adopted a Boy Scout rule  – "always leave the campsite in better condition than you found it" – as the  motivating principle of my life. For many years my choice was scarcely conscious, and I am only now realizing the extent to which it nevertheless ruled my most important decisions: how, for example, it prompted me to choose journalism and journalistic activism as my primary career. 

But sitting one day last fall in Group Health hooked up to intravenous Cipro I had the darkest, most wrenching epiphany of my life: I realized that every cause to which I had committed time, energy and passion – including causes for which I sometimes willingly risked my life – has either failed or was later defeated.  

Organized Labor is dead beyond any hope of resurrection. Today's U.S. is every bit as racist as it was in the Jim Crow era. Women's reproductive rights are being reduced to pre-Roe-v-Wade levels (and in most states have already been abolished entirely). Vietnam taught us nothing. The alternative press is no more (its electronic ghost is but a flash-in-the-pan), and the mainstream press has been corrupted into the most diabolically effective Josef Goebbels propaganda apparatus our species has ever known. Meanwhile the Environmental Movement  is so impotent in the face of Christo-capitalist ecocide, it can do nothing to protect us from becoming a doomed species on a dying planet.

 

The mental list continued,  etc. ad nauseam for the entire two hours I was in the clinic that day and continues to haunt me – with the additional weight of shame for yielding to despair – to this very minute.  

In other words, though I participated in probably 60 years of efforts to leave the campsite of this nation and this planet in better shape than it was, every one of those efforts failed abysmally.

Why then, I asked myself, should I squander the final years of my life fighting for causes that either have no possibility of ever winning or that – even if they might seem to achieve small victories – are certain to be undone by the now-unavoidable extinction of our species? (The newest projections of terminal climate change say we will have rendered our planet uninhabitable by mammalian life – and ourselves extinct – within a hundred years.)

Obviously I am still debating this most vexing of all personal questions, which is why I remain unable to commit to anything much beyond the demands of living day-by-day, hour-by-hour, minute-by-minute. Factor in the growing probability of a thermonuclear apocalypse resulting from U.S. provocations of Russia in the Ukraine and I often feel as if I am living, albeit in slow motion, the script of Nevil Shute's On the Beach.  I therefore hope – because your friendship means a lot to me – you will forgive my angst-ridden retreat.

 

(It is so foolishly easy, even thrust ever deeper as we are into the de facto concentration camp Ayn Rand economics and total surveillance is making of the USian homeland, to forget that others have it infinitely worse, that for beleaguered people elsewhere, as in the eastern Ukraine, yielding to despair is possible only if one is willing to submit to immediate extermination. I understand this, not the least because of the violently dangerous wretchedness of my childhood. Hence my oft repeated statement that in times such as these, survival is itself an act of revolutionary defiance. Hence too my hope I have sufficient strength I do not falter again.)

***

  
BUT THE WEIGHT of despair is nevertheless undeniable. We are facing a magnitude of oppression that is unique in our species' experience. And if we are to survive it – which grows less likely every day – it will require evolution of an entirely new set of strategies and tactics.

This was the main point of my response to “Three Reasons Why the United States Is Broken, Bloated and Bleeding,” a Truthout piece in which Pierce Nahigyan posits the astonishingly arrogant, absurdly pompous argument all we need do to cure the nation's ills is “have a serious conversation about the big idea: What we want the United States to be”  – as if that alone would save our species from itself.

Needless to say, my retort was blistering. 

Here is an excerpt, edited and condensed from four separate posts:

Alas, it is far too late to have “a serious conversation about the Big Idea."

Indeed it has been too late since the Eleven Years of Political Murders (22 November 1963 to 13 November 1974), and the slayings of President Kennedy, Malcolm X, Sen. Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Fred Hampton, Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Scheuer, William Schroeder, Phillip Gibbs, James Green and Karen Silkwood.

Everything that has happened since then, the Patriot Act and the 2012 National Defense Appropriations Act included, has been nothing more than what the military calls a "mopping-up operation," the consolidation of victory, albeit performed in slow motion lest Moron Nation awaken to what obtains.

Though the Occupy Movement was in fact an awakening, it was predictably crushed. (For those of literary inclinations, our situation is identical to that described in the Harry Turtledove short story called "The Last Article," for which Google.

As a result there are now only two sorts of people in the United States.

There are those like Mr. Nahigyan, who believe we are still allowed significantly effective remnants of our former freedom and political power, but who thus by their breathtaking ignorance prove themselves to be utter fools if not victims of clinical delusion.

Then there are those like Chris Hedges or myself who know enough history to understand the USian Empire's technological supremacy means its de facto Fourth Reich is forever – that is, until capitalist savagery and/or the resultant nuclear war and/or environmental ruin reduces our species to extinction.

Nor will the oft-promised “technological solutions” ever save us. Murphy's Law is absolute reality. Anything that can go wrong will go wrong. And scientists with their breathtakingly selfish arrogance are Murphy's most devastating facilitators, witness Fukushima, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island etc.

Though it is considered heresy to say so, Rev. King's statement that the arc of the universe moves toward justice is meanwhile proven to be the biggest Big Lie of all time. In fact the reverse is true. The few interludes of "justice" in human history are but fleeting sparks in an infinity of darkness -- and the frequency and duration of those sparks are in inverse proportion to technological development.

The more advanced the technology, the less it tolerates individual liberty.

Technology's ultimate function is thus proven by its consequences: it is to grant our overlords ever-more-godlike powers and simultaneously reduce ourselves to ever-more-abject powerlessness.

Besides which there is the fact the notion of revolution is rendered meaningless when it arises amongst a dying species on a dying planet.

Most of us also fail to understand how revolutions succeed. The Germanic risings against Rome succeeded because they were part of a continent-wide onslaught that denied Rome any possibility of assistance from without. Likewise Islam, again part of a continent-wide onslaught that denied large parts of post-Roman Europe and finally Byzantium -- Constantinople -- any possibility of outside reinforcement. But in the modern world -- as the Marxians themselves concluded -- such widespread risings are impossible. Hence all revolutions have four requirements. These are: (1)-ideological solidarity; (2)-leadership and organizational discipline; (3)-access to, and know-how to use, extant military technology; (4)-the intervention (or at least the clandestine assistance) of a major power. In today's world, no revolution can succeed without all four of these prerequisites in place.

The movements that in the 20th Century dismantled the British Empire would not have succeeded without Soviet and/or Chinese assistance. Gandhi's pacifism was backed by the Red Army and its threat of violent revolution. The Sepoy Mutiny of 1858 would never have occurred without the agitation of Tsarist intelligence operatives. The American Revolution of 1776 could not have succeeded without French assistance and intervention. Nor would the Russian Revolution of 1917 have succeeded without the clandestine help of Imperial Germany.

But evolution of the requisite pre-revolutionary conditions is impossible today and will remain so for as long as present-day surveillance technology and weaponry exist. Thanks to that technology, the USian Empire's total control of the world's economy is also total control of the world's peoples.

Domestically, the truly savage anti-intellectuality in which we have all been conditioned since World War II means that no ideological solidarity is possible beyond that organized by the Ruling Class: note the emergence of the Tea Party and then of Occupy (of which I was part). Contrast the two, and note why one has gone on to become an incipient Nazi Party, while the other is dead beyond resurrection, torn apart as much by forces within as it was crushed from without.

Conditions abroad are even more hopeless: the instant the global surveillance apparatus detects effective resistance, the Central Intelligence Agency sends in its death squads (for the newest example of which see the Ukraine reports below). Or take Venezuela: without the Soviet Union to back it up, its progressive government is no more sustainable than the proverbial snowball in hell. And there, of course, you have it: with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the co-optation of China, any realistic hope for humanitarian revolution or even humanitarian reform anywhere on this planet died forever.

Those who doubt this should remember the New Deal happened only after the U.S. Ruling Class was terrified into concessions by the prospect of a U.S. Communist revolution backed by the Red Army.

Any Ruling Class responds only to force, and this is more true of the Capitalist Ruling Class than of any of its historical counterparts – for what is capitalism but infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue?

Thus without the sort of leverage the USSR provided – even if there were not the nullifying issue of a dying species on a dying planet – humanitarian change is impossible. Thus too the unspeakable reality of the present: the darkest, most hopeless epoch in all human experience.

But our individual and collective powerlessness does not prohibit (and may in fact encourage), small-scale community efforts to improve the immediate circumstances of our lives. For example, an environmentalist friend and comrade in Maine has reduced her mass-movement involvements and refocused her efforts into teaching organic gardening methods to individuals and grassroots organizations.. As she puts it, We the People are so totally disempowered, all we activists can do now is work to help our neighbors transcend the present and looming adversities and thus live better lives.

The essence of such efforts is embodied the Zen/Taoist phrase "nothing special." Anything beyond that is grandiose if not delusional. But ironically it is from reconfiguring the ordinary – the "nothing special" – that true community is born, thereby transcending (and at least potentially nullifying) the divisions hitherto inflicted by ideological, ethnic, racial or sexual differences. Thus – when you think about it -- there is no greater, more effective antidote to capitalism than true community.

(My apology to the family of Allison Krause for misspelling her name in the on-line version of this commentary, which is corrected above.)

***

EMPHATICALLY RECOMMENDED READING: “How Ukraine Commemorates the Holocaust”: on the 70th anniversary of the Red Army's liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, the U.S. puppet neo-Nazi government in Kiev honored the Ukrainian fascists  who helped the German invaders exterminate the region's Jews.

Another of Robert Parry's superb reports, the text also documents the (predictable) emergence in Ukraine of neo-Nazi death squads. They are (unsurprisingly) similar to the death squads the Central Intelligence Agency trained and operated elsewhere  throughout capitalism's New World Order, the de facto Fourth Reich.

Also emphatically recommended is the Al Jazeera America/ Agence France-Presse report the U.S. has already sent at least 300 paratroopers  into Ukraine to help Kiev bolster its death-squad governance.

As I noted in the comment thread, “This invasion of Ukraine is from the Russian perspective as great a threat as Soviet missiles in Cuba were to the U.S. in 1962. Indeed it is arguable the U.S. has just made World War III inevitable.”

In that same comment thread – somewhat revised for publication here – is my speculation on why the U.S. Ruling Class so fanatically despises the Russians, it would rather blow up the world than coexist with them – never mind the Russians our are natural allies in the fight against Islamic terrorism.

I have long assumed this anti-Russian hostility is a response to the fact the Russian people, in the person of the Red Army, beat back the capitalist powers' attempt to reconquer Russia  immediately after the revolutions of 1917. Even now, 24 years after the fall of the Soviet Union, the Communist Party remains the second largest party in the Russian Federation. This means the Communists could again become Russia's ruling majority, the mere thought of which is sufficient to terrify our plutocratic overlords into the suicidal madness of thermonuclear war-mongering.

Another toxic spasm of the U.S. Ruling Class hatred for Russia is no doubt evoked by the fact that – more than any other country (and at a cost of about 45 million people killed) – it was Russia in the form of the Soviet Union that saved the world from German Nazism. As proven by the Bankers Plot of 1934,  the Ruling Class wanted the Nazis to win.  But for the plot's failure, the U.S. would have been the fourth and ultimately dominant Axis power.

But now – given the neo-Confederate and neo-Nazi taints metastasizing through the nation (most noticeably in how the federally militarized police are murdering African-Americans, but also in radically intensified misogyny, the growing popularity of genocide euphemized as “austerity” and of course in the 2010 and 2014 election results ) – maybe the real reason the Ruling Class hates Russia dates back to the U.S. Civil War.

Had it not been for Imperial Russia's support of the Union  – note the Russian fleets in New York  and San Francisco c. 1863 – Britain and France would have recognized the Confederacy, entered the war on its side and probably facilitated a Confederate victory. But not even the two empires together dared confront a fully mobilized Russia.

The resultant U.S.-Russian alliance was subsequently immortalized by Oliver Wendell Holmes:

Bleak are our shores with the blasts of December, Fettered and chill is the rivulet’s flow; Thrilling and warm are the hearts that remember Who was our friend when the world was our foe. Fires of the North in eternal communion, Blend your broad flashes with evening’s bright star; God bless the Empire that loves the Great Union Strength to her people! Long life to the Czar! [15]

As I know from firsthand experience, the Ruling Class aristocrats have long and vindictive memories. Could it be they're still enraged at the Russians for helping Lincoln end slavery?

*

GLENN GREENWALD'S EXPOSÉ on the deceptive propaganda peddled by NBC  via the Richard Engel kidnapping tells a story that is, just as its headline says, “More Troubling Than Brian Williams Scandal.” 

But it also gave me an opportunity to write a concise summary of how the USian Ruling Class has actually outdone Josef Goebbels. It has followed Goebbels' rules for propagandizing a people so effectively, they reflexively reject any unofficial narratives. It has done so by designing and imposing the world's first fully privatized governmental propaganda machine.

What follows is a slightly revised variant of the comment-thread original: 

The ugly truth behind NBC's behavior in the Engel case is found in the fact so-called "mainstream media" is owned by the same cabal of plutocrats who own and control government at every U.S. level.

This means "mainstream media" is nothing more than a fully privatized, obscenely profitable government propaganda apparatus: same owners, same bosses, same goals of world conquest as those who own and control the government. In other words, just as government has been reduced to the executive-action agency of the Ruling Class, so has mass media been reduced to its mouthpiece.

This is not only fascism as defined by Benito Mussolini; it is in fact the ultimate, most perfected form of fascism, in which governance itself is a profit center – not just in "mainstream media" as state propagandists, but as in the prison-industrial complex, for-profit schools, etc. ad nauseam.

Meanwhile the "mainstream media's" deceptions about Iran are identical in magnitude and purpose to the German deceptions about Poland, authored by Josef Goebbels, that started World War II.

What we have here in the U.S. is not just fascism, but when you add in the master-race implications of U.S. "exceptionalism ," is in fact a new form of Nazism.

And let us not forget that fascism and Nazism are direct derivatives of capitalism. In fact they are capitalism's final, mature forms -- the only destinations allowed by capitalism's core value, the Ayn Rand precept of infinite greed as ultimate virtue.

Whether the goal is lebensraum and slaves or maximum profit by other means of exploitation, capitalism's corpse-littered pathway is identical and identically evil.

*

FINALLY THERE IS this: National Guard troops called out to suppress anti-racism protests in Ferguson, Missouri considered the protesters “enemy forces,”  never mind the demonstrations were – as one discussion-thread contributor aptly put it, “American Citizens exercising their First Amendment right to 'petition the Government for redress of grievances.'”

To which I replied: “Ferguson or Ukraine, it's the same war: on one side, the capitalist New Order, the de facto Fourth Reich. On the other side, all the rest of us, We the People of the World.“

LB/12-19 April 2015 

-30-

Blocked by Computer Problems, Terrified by Ukraine Crisis

MY APOLOGY TO EVERYONE for my prolonged silence. December was a cruel month, and January, damnit, has been no better. My desktop computer died just as I finally found my way out of the miasma of self-inflicted obligations I described on 7 December, my last entry here until now.

The computer's death was no surprise. A gift-horse into whose mouth I should have looked very carefully, it was a notably troublesome machine from day one, and it had been seriously ill for the past two years.

All that kept me from going mad with the resultant anxiety was the virtual life-preserver given me by Adrienne, my (still) dearly beloved second wife (to whom again thanks), who bought me a Samsung laptop Christmas before last.

While the presence of the laptop was as soothing as a bedtime backrub, my fear and loathing of alien technology -- that is, of anything that cannot be repaired or maintained with hand-tools,  a can of WD-40 and a roll of duct tape -- kept the little machine in its original packaging until the dying desktop's final electronic spasm. 

And then of course I discovered that learning all this new stuff -- Microshaft's Windows 8 versus the Ubuntu  (Linux) to which I had grown fondly accustomed -- was a hard-school detour through ignorance and vexation, a rite of passage in which I am now at the equivalent of kindergarten passing into first grade. 

If I live -- and I believe the prognosis is good -- I should be back and posting regularly to Outside Agitator's Notebook by next weekend. 

Meanwhile, apropos the Ukraine crisis,  here is a link to a vital report by Robert Parry on the relentlessly escalating U.S. imperialist aggression that could literally trigger the end of the world as we know it -- and quite possibly the end of our species as well.

Addendum 11:20 p.m.:

I seem to have been banished by Robert Parry from his ConsortiumNews website,  forever prohibited from ever again commenting thereon.  This is a surprise as I have only posted there a few times, often with applause from other posters, and have never been involved in any on-site disputes or other such unpleasantness. 

Here then is what I would have said in response to Parry's report had I not been electronically gagged:

Just as (another poster) observed, the culture-war issues implicit in Putin's curiously self-defeating persecution of Pussy Riot and Russian homosexuals have been parlayed by the U.S. government's privatized propaganda apparatus into a clever ploy to silence even the most steadfast opponents of U.S. imperialist aggression. Add that to the methodically conditioned U.S. ignorance of history plus the ever-more-inflamed manifest-destiny fanaticism evident in the sweeping Republican victory in last November's elections, and the probability of an apocalyptic outcome is overwhelming. Josef Goebbels would be proud.

That said, two points come to mind immediately:

Those who rule the U.S. today are most likely the descendants of the Bankers Plot conspirators of 1934, who sought to oust President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, impose fascist dictatorship and so join Washington D.C. to the Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Axis in its quest for a global empire. Berlin's primary ambition in those days was the conquest of Russia and the enslavement of its people. Given present-day events in Ukraine, I cannot but wonder if this same ambition was passed on to the present generation of U.S. Rulers by the Bankers Plot conspirators and their Nazi collaborators.

If this is indeed the case -- if the U.S. aggression in Ukraine is fostered by those influences and the boost they surely received via the influx of Nazi war criminals after 1945 -- then all that can save us from Armageddon is a sudden Ruling Class awakening to the indisputable fact the womb of Mother Russia is also the tomb of empires. That is the lesson learned by Darius the Great, the Mongols, Bonaparte, Hitler and a long litany of lesser would-be conquerors including the Teutonic Knights and the Victorian-era British, the latter of whom discovered in the Sepoy Mutiny the then-inconceivably long reach of Russian intelligence capabilities.

It should be noted too that Hitler's Germans believed themselves to be this planet's “master race,” an earlier expression of the divine-right-to-rule doctrine that is now resurrected as U.S. “exceptionalism.”

Let us therefore fervently hope We the People are not to be the next students of what invariably happens when the Bear Mother is goaded in her own den – especially since this goading, with its potential employment of thermonuclear weapons, could destroy our species and most other life forms as well.

It's a helluva grim way to begin OAN's new year, but for those of us in the 99 Percent, that's the nature of life (and death) under capitalism. As depressing as Parry's report is -- and as pissed off as I am at being banished from his website --  I nevertheless urge you all to read his text and disseminate it as widely as you possibly can. 

LB/24 January 2015

-30-

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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