Postmortem; DAPL Escalation; Gratitude for a Pivotal Gift

DESPITE ALL THE intensified and now obviously never-to-be-diminished nastiness spewing from the Hillaryites, the one certainty about President Elect Donald Trump is that we cannot yet be certain what sort of president he will be.

As I emailed a profoundly distraught friend early this morning, Trump's acceptance speech was a model of reconciliation – and no I am not being sarcastic. He said, in essence, that he intends be president "for all Americans," and that he wants to befriend  any nation who will befriend us.

Shortly after the president-elect had spoken, RT (which had provided what was by far the most professional election-night coverage), reported that – as Western European leaders were still dithering about in shock  and horror  – Russian Premier Vladimir Putin had sent Trump a message of congratulations,  the first national leader to do so.

Putin's reaction means I can sleep much better tonight. Take it from me – because I was part of the last Civil Rights Movement – it is a helluva lot easier to fight domestic racism than it is to stop global war-mongering: in which context note the (temporary) successes of the Civil Rights Movement versus the permanent debacles of Vietnam, Somalia, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan etc. ad nauseam.

It is something of an aside, but in defense of the individual USian soldier, Marine, sailor and air-person, – and bearing in mind I was once a U.S. Regular Army soldier myself (active duty 1959-1962; reserves 1963-1965) – it should be noted a major part of the blame for our now-obviously permanent inability at conventional warfare is the fact that under capitalism, military equipment is designed for maximum profit rather than maximum battlefield efficiency. The classic example is the current U.S. service-rifle, the M-16 and its newest variant the M-4 carbine, each so notorious for fatal malfunctions it is often “lost” on the battlefield and replaced by AK-47s taken from enemy dead. The AK-47 and its successor the AK-74 – like all Sino-Soviet equipment – is designed to kill the enemy rather than to fatten the bank accounts of obscenely wealthy military-industrial profiteers and their bureaucratic collaborators.

Thus, despite the USian Empire's permanent-war mentality and militarily aggressive war-dependent capitalism, U.S. troops have not won a conventional war since 1950, when they conquered North Korea. But they were then battled into headlong retreat when the Chinese, employing Sun Tzu's principle of “when near, make it appear you are far away,” infiltrated 300,000 combat-seasoned soldiers across the Yalu River into North Korea, launched a surprise offensive along the entire front and sent United States and United Nations troops fleeing for their lives. The result, after the Chinese took back North Korea and returned it to Kim Il Sung, was the (oft-violated) armistice of 1953, which remains in effect. Clearly as embittered by the Empire's endless failures at conventional warfare as Sen. (“Nuke Hanoi”) Barry Goldwater was, Goldwater Girl Hillary unquestionably intended to use nukes to compensate for the now-notorious U.S. inability to win at conventional warfare – never mind the result would exterminate our species and kill the planet as well. That's why so many people, I among them, were legitimately terrified by Hillary's ever-more-obvious intent to start World War III, quite possibly with an unprovoked thermonuclear attack on the Russian Motherland.

But neither could I bear the thought of a Trump presidency and its threatened Holocaust against African-American, Hispanic, First Nations, Lesbian-Gay-Bisexual-Transsexual-Queer, Communist, socialist, anarchist and libertarian peoples – not to mention the Christian jihad against female sexual freedom promised by its opposition to abortion and birth control. Hence I voted for Jill Stein, literally – as I said in a comment-thread post repeated below – so I could die with a clear conscience in another manifestation of Christian doctrine, Hillary's intended “better-dead-than-Red” enactment of the biblical End-Times Apocalypse.

Prior to Hillary's malicious and undoubtedly criminal theft of the Democratic (sic) Party's nomination from Sen. Bernie Sanders, I was of course a Sanders supporter. But Sanders betrayed us, becoming in the end a dedicated Hillaryite, thereby – or so I suspect – reducing his future political significance to absolute zero. The Democratic (sic) Party has in all probability similarly doomed itself. 

As Robert Parry of Consortium News wrote earlier this morning, (i)n the end, Hillary Clinton became the face of a corrupt, arrogant and out-of-touch Establishment, while Donald Trump emerged as an almost perfectly imperfect vessel for a populist fury that had bubbled beneath the surface of America...voters chose him in part because they felt they needed a blunt instrument to smash the Establishment that has ruled and mis-ruled America for at least the past several decades. It is an Establishment that not only has grabbed for itself almost all the new wealth that the country has produced but has casually sent the U.S. military into wars of choice, as if the lives of working-class soldiers are of little value.

By his use of the euphemism “Establishment,” Parry seemingly hoped to give British respectability to what in the post-Occupy USian homeland are more correctly known as the One Percent and their Ruling Class vassals – the malevolently greedy politicians, bureaucrats, generals, police chiefs, academics, religious leaders and mainstream-media propagandists who, as the Oberführers of capitalist governance, oversee its efficiency in assuring maximum power and unlimited profit for our overlords, total subjugation for everyone else.

Interestingly, though Consortium News has often joined in the protests  against Barack Obama 's self-proclaimed presidential power to order the murder of anyone  – U.S. citizens included, Parry makes no mention of this policy as a possible post-election factor. Let us hope it is not; the USian reputation for banana-republic politics, which dates to 22 November 1963 but is underscored by Obama's nullification of the U.S. Constitution,  is already damning enough.

Were I Parry's editor, I would have insisted he add three additional elements to his analysis.

One is the irrefutable statistical proof that non-Ruling Class USians are in truth as politically powerless  as medieval serfs or antebellum slaves. While the Moronic Majority are far too ignorant and reflexively anti-intellectual to understand the statistical proof of their ever-worsening plight or the ever-more-obvious fact its only lasting remedy is the permanent overthrow of capitalism, they most assuredly understand – as Parry correctly reported – its day-to-day financial realities, the suffering and death of which Trump promises to ameliorate. But Parry's report was most assuredly weakened by the absence of the statistical corroboration.

On another element of the same topic of the 99 Percent's powerlessness, the report was also weakened by omission of the fact many people my own age – including most of my 90 neighbors in the low-income senior housing complex in which I dwell – are painfully aware that in the notoriously dishonest difference between Hillary's “public” and “private” policies (the latter including the austerity promises she secretly makes to her One Percent masters), lurks her intent to continue the slow-motion genocide of the devastating but mostly unpublicized cuts Obama and the Democratic (sic) Party in general have made in Medicare, Medicaid and food stamps.

Two is the equally irrefutable proof the white segment of the Moronic Majority is reflexively, even malevolently racist – albeit often unconsciously so. This evidence is in post-Hurricane-Katrina studies by the Pew Foundation, perhaps the most credible of the USian polling organizations. Quoth a 2005 Pew report:

(B)lacks and whites draw very different lessons from the tragedy. Seven-in-ten blacks (71%) say the disaster shows that racial inequality remains a major problem in the country; a majority of whites (56%) say this was not a particularly important lesson of the disaster. More striking, there is widespread agreement among blacks that the government’s response to the crisis would have been faster if most of the storm’s victims had been white; fully two-thirds of African Americans express that view. Whites, by an even wider margin (77%-17%), feel this would not have made a difference in the government’s response.

Given that the victims of racism should be the sole source of any definition of what racism is, given also how 77 percent of the whites arrogantly dismissed the blacks' post-Katrina grievances, it seems to me the implicit racism is undeniable.

(Disclosure: my own hostile encounters with racism include a plethora of nasty white reactions to the fact that, over the years, I had two black girlfriends, and of course the vindictive fury of Guy L. Smith, editor and publisher of The Knoxville Journal, that after my arrest in a 1963 civil-rights incident severely crippled my journalistic career-prospects; the same arrest prompted a venomous outpouring of hostility from professional colleagues, alleged friends, other fellow students, one of my four half-sisters and several maternal relatives. And let us not forget the Ku Klux Klan's subsequent efforts to murder me in retaliation for my resistance to the racist agendas of The Journal, The Knoxville News-Sentinel and most especially the University of Tennessee.)

Thus it seems to me the white USian population is no less racist than, say, the 1930s Germans were anti-Semitic. Thus too, when Trump began spouting racist invective, I concluded he was verbalizing the hitherto closeted and/or officially denied racism of Moron Nation whites, and on that basis predicted he would win the election. As a friend e-mailed me last night, “Fuck. You were right.”

The third element in Trump's victory is the methodically conditioned and thus truly limitless USian fear of material loss, a bone-deep cowardice that is easily mustered by our overlords to eternally prohibit even the mildest amelioration of capitalist depredation. As I emailed to another friend last night, “the problem – as common in the countryside as in the towns and cities – is that we are all taught from birth that our only real identity is in our material possessions. Hence we are terrified to lose them; hence too anytime that loss is threatened, we as a nation react with infinite savagery. Though I understood this dynamic from a very early age, I also scorned it, not recognizing the universality and literal bottomlessness of the associated fear until my own material possessions – i.e., the 'Dancer' manuscript and all the rest of my writing and photography – were taken from me by the 1983 fire. As a result I was utterly destroyed – destroyed forever and beyond repair – by their loss. This is, I believe, an extremely important lesson in how the psychic-vampire function of capitalism – especially aided as it is in so many USians by the sadistic opiate of Abrahamic religion – keeps us enshackled.”

Trump, therefore – in exactly the same way Hitler was unquestionably the ultimate expression of post-Versailles Germanism – is unquestionably the ultimate expression of post-New-Deal “Americanism,” whatever that may bode.

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I WROTE FOUR comments on the Reader Supported News website since my last post here on OAN, on 29 October. (Yes last week I entirely missed my self-imposed mid-week deadline; I had momentarily forgotten the horrendous amount of time consumed by running – hobbling, actually – first-of-month errands without an automobile; even with a ride to the supermarket provided by a friend, what used to take me one day by car now takes at least five days – often more – by bus.) In any case three of my RSN comments focus on pre-election issues; one is reprinted in full below; the others are merely titled, described by a few sentences and linked for the sake of the record. The fourth is a denunciation of the escalating war against the Dakota Access Pipeline protesters, also reprinted. And there was one other post I'm printing in totality, a short essay that began as a comment on a Chris Hedges piece published by Popular Resistance but – as if by visitation of the Muse – unexpectedly, even involuntarily turned into an expression of gratitude for a long-long-ago, far-far-away and profoundly influential gift from a young woman named Thias Smedley, who was as lovely as her given name, which is pronounced Tie-yeese, accent on the last syllable.

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The Real Clinton Email Scandal Is That a Bullshit Story Has Dominated the Campaign: Some time ago, Hillary Clinton and her advisers decided that the best course of action was to apologize for having used a personal email address to conduct government business while serving as secretary of state. Clinton herself was, clearly, not really all that remorseful about this...Eventually aides prevailed upon her to express a greater degree of regret, which they hoped would lay the issue to rest. It did not. Instead, email-related talk has...influenced public perceptions of her in an overwhelmingly negative way. July polling showed 56 percent of Americans believed Clinton broke the law by relying on a personal email address with another 36 percent piling on to say the episode showed “bad judgments” albeit not criminality.

My response was to repeat something I have already said many times, and will say once more for those who have not voted:

“The choice our overlords offer us is very simple: either Hillary Hitler (who believes she can top Adolf Hitler, Bonaparte, Charles XII of Sweden, the Teutonic Knights, the Mongols and the Persians in being the first-ever conqueror of Russia), or Donald Hitler, who promises to persecute African American, Hispanic, First Nations, LGBTQ and Leftist peoples.”

“Put even more simply...a vote for Hillary Hitler is a vote for World War III, thermonuclear apocalypse and the extermination of our species, while a vote for Donald Hitler is a vote for a new Holocaust.

“Which is precisely why I voted for Jill Stein. That way, in that final millisecond of consciousness as I am turned into radioactive vapor, I won't be blaming myself for having voted to turn our Mother Earth into a radioactive cinder.

“Yes, it truly is that simple.”

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Obama Is Pathetic on Human Rights in North Dakota (By William Boardman) – The President gave lip service to “the traditions of the first Americans.” He didn’t mention treaties between sovereign nations, of course, because he’s not about to break with the traditions of the second Americans: that such treaties are only a means to a genocidal end and aren’t to be taken seriously by the United States of exceptional, manifestly destined Americans whenever such treaties interfere with what the US wants. That’s what “properly attentive” means historically. Freely translated, “properly attentive” means “make a show of peace talk, then roll over them with whatever force necessary after it’s too late to affect the election.” The legal mind is nothing if not properly attentive to elegant turns of phrase in its unyielding hypocrisy.

“I think Mr. Boardman should have used much stronger language. 'Pathetic' is a bird with a broken wing, a child burned by USian napalm, and most assuredly not the exemplar of lies, corruption and genocide (whether by drone or austerity) who – thanks in tiny measure to my own two unforgivably optimistic votes – now inhabits the White House. But because I myself am a professional writer and editor, I understand Mr. Boardman's problem. The only truly accurate description of Obama is 'evil,' but – due mostly to the atrocities committed by Abrahamic religion – that noun is no longer fashionable.”

“You (on RSN) are all too kind in your denunciations of this most malevolent of presidents. Here we see the true legacy of 'change we can believe in,' the most maliciously premeditated Big Lie ever told by a presidential candidate, the prelude to his years-in-the-planning shape-shift from Obama the Orator to Barack the Betrayer.

“His intent – now in North Dakota proven to be what the far Right has claimed from the beginning – is obviously the reduction of the entire USian 99 Percent to the inescapable powerlessness and degradation that is the eternal lot of the (White Exceptionalist) Empire's African-American and Hispanic subjects, and even harsher subjugation for First Nations peoples – this so he can gleefully point to the Standing Rock Sioux and say 'see how I made their lives even worse, so don't you others dare complain.'

“It is indeed 'change we can believe in': change from less brutal charade of representative democracy to the overt savagery of unabashed fascism. And because there is no force on this planet capable of stopping the USian neo-Reich, the casualties are only beginning. Mark my word, the cops and soldiers and private-security stormtroopers – every one a wanna-be serial killer (and most of them already kill-hardened in the Middle East) – will soon be firing for lethal effect, just as occurred at Kent State University and Jackson State College. The propaganda preparation is already underway. And the orders are no doubt coming from the Betrayer himself.”

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Spiritual Blackout in America: Election 2016 (By Cornel West) – (T)he neofascist catastrophe called Donald Trump and the neoliberal disaster named Hillary Clinton are predictable symbols of our spiritual blackout.

Quoth I: “While the leaders are certainly as much to blame as the masses, don't forget that (precisely as happened in Nazi Germany), it is the USian masses' obscenely capitalist, lockstep conformist selfishness – each USian's psychopathically craven terror of suddenly having even one penny less than the proverbial Joneses – that has fueled the transition from limited democracy to zero-tolerance plutocratic tyranny. And – again like the Nazi Germans – as they have sown, so shall they be reaped.

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Animosity Towards Clinton Runs Deep at the FBI (Guardian UK) – Deep antipathy to Hillary Clinton exists within the FBI, multiple bureau sources have told the Guardian, spurring a rapid series of leaks damaging to her campaign just days before the election.

“Has it occurred to anyone else we are perhaps witnessing the opening moves of a soft coup by factions of the Ruling Class who are rightfully terrified by Hillary's (Goldwater Girl/Christian fundamentalist) intent to bring about the Apocalypse?”

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American Irrationalism (By Chris Hedges) – There is no shortage of signs of impending environmental catastrophe, including the melting of the polar ice caps and the rise of atmospheric carbon to above 400 parts per million... We are led to succumb to the racism, allure of white supremacy and bigotry that always accompany a culture in dissolution.

“Chris Hedges' 'American Irrationalism' is a protest so powerful it is strongly reminiscent of Allen Ginsberg's epic Howl, to which I was introduced by a keenly perceptive fellow University of Tennessee student named Thais Smedley whom I met, seemingly by random chance, as we were walking from opposite directions on a campus sidewalk.”

“It was 1959, when possession of the Howl text anywhere in the South was a felony.

“Thais was a senior bound for graduate school, I a 19-year-old freshman soon to run out of college money and enlist in the Regular Army to fulfill the six-year military obligation the Empire imposed on all save the most financially privileged of the draft-era's males. But on that hot May early afternoon I encountered Thais – whose raven hair fell below her shoulders in what was then a gesture of bohemian defiance, who was clad in the more subtle rebelliousness of a white linen blouse with matching white shorts and bare-legged black leather t-strap sandals and whose appearance thus drew from me the spontaneous salute of a memorably face-stretching grin – my poverty-imposed denouement was yet five months away in the unknown future. Thais grinned back, and now suddenly I was wealthy with the unanticipated gift of her presence, enchanted by her soft-voiced eloquence, smitten by the uniqueness of her beauty and flattered by the attention of a woman three years older than I.

“But I was also lost, lost in the dark miasma of contradictions between the undefined but nevertheless implicitly Marxian values with which I had been raised – my father had been a Communist during the 1930s – and the quagmire of incipient fascism in which the anti-intellectualism and lockstep conformity of the Joe McCarthy realm seemed intent on drowning me.

“Thais somehow sensed my existential quandary, invited me to her dwelling – with its painted stone walls and potted plants it was a study in green and white, the brightest, most airy, most welcoming basement apartment I have ever entered – and there we talked for perhaps two hours, during which she fed me a bowl of Campbell's beef noodle soup, gave me her copy of Howl – 'I think this will speak to you,' she said; 'and I don't need it anymore' – then oh-so-gently sent me on my way so she could continue packing for her move elsewhere to another university.

“She was right, of course; even at 19, I somehow knew better than to ignore the perceptions of a woman who, like some personification of the Muse, had momentarily appeared as if by magic in my life. Ginsberg did indeed speak to me, and Howl was for me the doorway to a new consciousness, an eventual synthesis of my father's Marxism and my own outrage at the casually brutal ignorance of the nyekulturniy state I have since come to damn as 'Moron Nation.' The key that unlocked it – the mechanism of epiphany for which I am forever grateful to Thais – is Howl's opening line: 'I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness...'

“Let us therefore hope Hedges' opening line, 'There is no shortage of signs of impending catastrophe...' awakens as many in the millennial generation as Ginsberg's words awakened in mine; let us also hope Doctor Margaret Flowers' gift of 'American Irrationalism' here via Popular Resistance is as pivotally influential on the multitudes as Thais Smedley's gift of Howl was to me 57 years ago.”

Later, in a dialogue with another reader, I added a defense of Hedges:

“(He) is one of the very few who dare tell us how dire our circumstances truly are. Yes this can cause despair, but if that's what it takes to awaken Moron Nation to what it has done to itself and is now doing not just to our entire species but to our entire planet, so be it. With its total surveillance technology, its domestic policy of slow-motion genocide (to exterminate all of us who are no longer exploitable for profit), and its doomsday foreign policy, the USian Empire is in hideous truth the most malevolently oppressive regime in our species' history. I know this sounds pessimistic, but it is in fact the opposite. As Sun Tzu so clearly understood, if we are to evolve an effective response, we must grasp the totality of our enemy's (oppressive) capabilities and (genuinely evil) intentions. And because I do believe we are capable of evolving such a response, beneath my apparent pessimism lies a profound optimism.”

LB/9 November 2016

-30-

As in Ferguson, So Throughout the USian Empire

THE ATROCITIES COMMITTED by federally militarized local police in Ferguson, Missouri  and in a Wal-Mart store  near Dayton, Ohio tell us the operational truth about today's Imperial United States. That's because – in terms of the causative factors – there is no difference between the wanton murders of two men of color by trigger-happy white cops and George Bush's wanton invasion of Iraq or Barack Obama's equally wonton war-making in Ukraine.  Might now officially makes right, the charade of democracy be damned, and woe be unto those who – even accidentally – neglect all the demeaning protocols of submission.

In the overseas regions of the USian Empire, in places like South Vietnam or Pinochet's Chile or the USian conquests in the Middle East, nonconformity or disobedience has always meant imprisonment and torture and death. In these relatively distant realms, capitalism's credo of infinite greed as ultimate virtue has always demanded the moral imbecility of capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation for everyone else. Meanwhile we here in the USian homeland were inadvertently protected by Soviet and Chinese Marxism, which forced capitalism to conceal its greedy malevolence behind the humanitarian facade of representative democracy. But now capitalism has no rivals. It no longer bothers to hide its relentless savagery. Even here at home, it is maturing into its inevitable final form, which is a new and infinitely more diabolical form of fascism. And We the People – capitalism's newest colonial victims – are becoming ever more angry and rebellious.

In response, the local police are ever more federalized and militarized. In the eyes of our masters, We the People are nobodies, üntermenschen, non-persons, no different from the people of Radda'  or Odessa.  Now, as it always was in the overseas USian colonies, so it is here at home – no matter how stubbornly some of us may deny what is being done to us and why.

Because African Americans have a proud history of rebelliousness  that predates the Civil Rights Movement by 429 years, they are invariably the authorities' first targets,  the first demographic group from within which the Ruling Class extracts its most brutal examples: Michael Brown gunned down in Ferguson and his body obscenely displayed for the next four hours; John Crawford III slain in the Dayton suburb of Beavercreek, Ohio merely because he was a black man who decided to buy a BB-gun. And who knows how many others have been unjustifiably shot  by police? A bitter truth: such statistics aren't kept because the Ruling Class doesn't care – or doesn't want us to know. Just as, for example, the atrocities at Baghdad were covered up until they were leaked by Chelsea Manning.  And let us not forget her fate: guilty of embarrassing the imperial military machine, she was sentenced to 35 years in prison.

As I have noted before, any one of us – especially those of us who have darker skins – could be Michael Brown or John Crawford III. And any one of us who dares expose the reality of capitalist governance could be another Chelsea Manning. In which context note again the fate of Gary Webb.

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The connection between white Christianity and Caucasian racism has long been evident in the southern colloquial name for the Ku Klux Klan: “the Saturday Night Men's Bible Study Class.” Now a carefully researched report by historian Randall Balmer in Politico reveals how the rise of the so-called Religious Right was fueled not by abortion but by a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that denied tax-exempt status to racially segregated Christian schools.  As Amanda Marcotte puts it in a more recent commentary in Slate, “Anger about forced desegregation of private schools galvanized conservative Christians.” And their leaders were so eager to ally themselves with the Republicans, they “blamed the Democratic president for the IRS actions against segregated schools—even though the policy was mandated by Nixon.” Men of god perpetrating a Big Lie? You betcha; it happens all the time. Read Jeff Sharlet's The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (Harper: 2008).

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I cannot conclude these observations about the broader significance of the deaths of Michael Brown and John Crawford III without pointing out the apparent hypocrisy of the USian (pseudo) Left as demonstrated by how it is  ignoring the latter atrocity.  Thus far, only a socialist publication has covered Crawford's murder and its aftermath in any real depth. (Another account, focused on Ohio's post-shooting activism, is here.)  Note too how the text of a newly circulated petition to the Obama administration, Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense makes no mention of the Ohio incident: “In the wake of Ferguson, we must secure a positive transformation in nationwide policing. Join us in calling on the executive branch of the federal government to take definitive steps to protect civil and human rights in every community by setting a higher standard of policing, strengthening accountability mechanisms, investing in strengthening economic infrastructure (employment, education, healthcare), and securing critical reforms to end abusive, militarized, and biased policing targeting Black and brown communities.”

The Nation magazine, which is one of the petition's sponsors, emailed please-sign requests a week ago, the point here being the timing: the document obviously post-dates by nearly two months the clarification of the initially distorted circumstances of the Ohio shooing. The petition's other sponsors are: Advancement Project, Center for Popular Democracy, ColorofChange.org, Daily Kos, Democracy for America, Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment, RH Reality Check, RootsAction and Working Families.

While I am not familiar with the views of all these groups, I know most of them are fanatical opponents of the Second Amendment  and equally fanatical supporters of forcible civilian disarmament. I have experienced firsthand the hateful hysteria of such people. They claim mere legal possession of a firearm is “an act of violence,” and they damn all gun owners as “Nazis” and “wanna-be killers.” Hence it is not difficult for me to imagine the anti-gun frenzy of a debate that might have banished from the petition any citation of the Beavercreek outrage – never mind its circumstances are far more egregious than those of the Ferguson incident. Therefore I am forced to ask: is the fact Crawford apparently wanted to buy a BB gun the reason the petition ignores his tragic slaying? Obviously I don't know – but I think the absence of Beavercreek from the text is significant, and if I were a gambling man, I'd bet the BB gun is the reason.

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Which reminds me: apropos the claim that civilians with small arms are powerless against modern weapons, note how tragically under-equipped Kurdish women are said to be defeating the rabid minions of the newest caliphate.  (Historical reference: the last aggressive caliphate was the creation of the Mahdi in Khartoum. Though most of my comrades on the Left will denounce as heresy what I am about to say next, I'll say it anyway: where is Lord Kitchener now that we need him?)

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The Washington Post, as reliable a propaganda outlet for the USian Ruling Class as der Voelkischer Beobachter was for the ruling elite of Nazi Germany, nevertheless sometimes publishes enlightening material. Such is “Wages should be growing faster, but they're not. Here's why.” The head is self-explanatory.  The money quote – no pun – tells the whole story. “Raising pay is simply not part of the business model of American employers. They will not do so until they’re absolutely forced to by a labor market that’s much tighter than what we’ve got today.” In Marxian terms, this means the proletariat – We the People – will be imprisoned in wretchedness by the One Percent until we unite, rise up and cast off our chains. Two other news reports provide variations on the same theme: “Scott Walker says $7.25 an hour is a living wage,” here,  and “Amid Soaring Profits, Walmart to Cut Off 30,000 Workers From Health Insurance,” here.  Lastly, since USian colleges and universities are ever more subservient to capitalism, it's no surprise they also reflect capitalism's incipient racism, as revealed in “Applying to College With a Criminal Record.” Such is our lot in a system governed by the credo of infinite greed as ultimate virtue – the conscious rejection of every humanitarian principle our species ever set forth.

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Two of this week's reports on the USian approach to policing are unusually informative, which is why I list them here as recommended reading. “FBI and Shattering of Students for a Democratic Society” describes how the USian secret police destroy dissent – an important disclosure for any present-day dissident, particularly those who chronically underestimate the cunning of the capitalist authorities. In the Imperial United States of today as in pre-revolutionary Imperial Russia, Leon Trotsky's dictum remains an absolute truth: “In every gathering of three revolutionaries, there is at least one agent of the Okhrana.” Then there's “Asset Seizures Fuel Police Spending,” a Washington Post investigative report that is probably intended to distract us  from the inconceivable sums of money by which the Defense Department and the Department of Homeland Security are training, equipping and federalizing the local police as a surrogate army of occupation in the homeland colonies. But the WaPo piece contains vital information: it tells us why the cops love the so-called war on drugs, and another reason the fascists love municipal budget-cuts, which guarantee local-police insistence on (obscenely profitable) drug prohibition will intensify rather than diminish.

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Outside Agitation Elsewhere: I posted on only three comment threads last week. “Secretly Buying Access to a Governor,” a New York Times editorial reprinted by Reader Supported News, prompted me to hope it “is the opening volley in a no-quarter war by the (few) humanitarian-minded members of the Ruling Class against its now-dominant faction, the morally imbecilic disciples of Ayn Rand who are maliciously reducing all the rest of us to slaves.” I agreed with “Obama Hates the Press,” pointing out the president is “so shamelessly obvious in his transformation from Obama the ('change we can believe in') Orator to Barack the ('worse than Richard Nixon') Betrayer, even the stenographic Ruling Class media cannot avoid reporting his lies and deceptions.” My remark triggered a predictable flury of thumbs down  from Democratic Party operatives. They are out in force during these last weeks before what – largely because of public anger over presidential betrayals – looms to be their worst mid-term election loss in years. And “Scientists Discover World's Oceans Warming Faster Than Predicted” prompted a bitter eulogy to our planet and our species: 

We're doomed – and because we've been in denial so long, it's now far too late to do anything about it.

Given the fact the inertial momentum of all matter is toward consciousness, our failure is unequivocal proof of the lack thereof – which is precisely why our extinction as a species is now guaranteed.

The great irony is the source of our extinction – fossil fuel – is the putrefied remains of other failed species. This is especially true of petroleum, which is literally the liquid putrescence of dinosaurs.

Thus the carrion of one age of failed species ensures the failure of another age and species, an equation in which there is surely a lesson, though perhaps only in karma, specifically the now obviously irremediable curse we have inflicted on ourselves by basing an entire economy on a form of grave-robbing.

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Another major element in our impending extinction is no doubt our species' astounding propensity for hatred. It is an inclination so venomously dominant, it suggests that instead of Homo Sapiens Sapiens, we should be renamed Homo Sapiens Odibilis – “human, thinking and hateful.”

Yes, very rarely we seem to beat the hate mongers, as in Jacksonville, Florida's Duval County, where a nationwide petition campaign has forced a local board of education to rename the Nathan Bedford Forrest High School, which die-hard segregationists had defiantly named to honor the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. 

But these victories over hatred are always more apparent than real. A name change is just that – it does nothing to alter internal psychological reality. 

Meanwhile, racism, sexism, ageism – indeed every form of hate-mongering imaginable – is given new and unprecedented malevolence by the unfettered anonymity provided by the Internet.  And given the abusive realities of global patriarchy, it is not surprising “The Unsafety Net: How Social Media Turned Against Women” shows a preponderance of the Internet's victims are females.  (Thanks to my friend Katelyn Driskill for bringing this profoundly disturbing report to my attention.)

But it seems to me the real issue transcends – without diminishing – the focused victimization of any single group of people. What is evident here is synergistic hatred of a hitherto-unimaginable magnitude, the expression of a formerly suppressed hatefulness that seizes upon new technology to intensify and metastasize its malice, seemingly to infinity. But why now, when – ironically and paradoxically – we need cooperative solidarity more desperately than at any other time in our species' history? Is patriarchy and its ultimate expression as capitalism that self-destructive? Could it be that hatred of our fellow humans – especially the hatred of the life-bearing gender who mothers us into being and without whom we would all perish – is but a subset of our now-undeniable (and now undeniably suicidal) hatred of the environment? Is this the real, hitherto unacknowledged barrier that fatally obstructs all our efforts to cope with terminal climate change? Perhaps the New Agers were right after all – that there could be no healing of our environment until our psychological selves were healed. But who – or what – could have accomplished such a feat? And what does that tell us about our species' fitness for survival?

LB/6-12 October 2014

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Are Ruling-Class Feminists Out to Kill 99% Solidarity?

(Note to readers on Blogger: a much more graphically sophisticated version of this blog -- identical text, slightly different headline due to format spacing -- is available at http://lorenbliss.typepad.com/. The TypePad version also includes several portfolios of my photography, much of it previously published, some of it dating back to the 1960s.)

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NORMALLY I AM uncomfortable writing about feminism because, being male, I can never have an insider's appreciation of its dynamics. Moreover I believe the blessing (or curse) of a womb – and with it the implicit responsibility for mothering (or not) – creates in every female a perspective we males might approach intellectually but cannot possibly comprehend emotionally. Hence my usual response to feminism is akin to the respectfully inquisitive silence with which a hopelessly left-brained student might approach a Zen master. I know I will never achieve enlightenment – at least not in this lifetime – though I am unquestionably willing to learn whatever wisdom the master deigns to impart.

But twice this year already, the lily-white exponents of a uniquely USian brand of feminism – the “material girl” ideology so antagonistically antithetical to feminism's socialist roots I am compelled to label it “Ayn Rand Feminism” – have sunk their incipiently fascist fangs into progressive people and causes, first by public repudiation of reproductive-rights heroine Sandra Fluke  in retaliation for her progressive economic views, now more recently by denouncing the hacker-collective Anonymous and the women's-equality collective UltraViolet as “white-knight vigilantes” for their courageous defense of rape victims. Thus the Ayn Rand feminists have begun to brandish their fealty to the Ruling Class much as the Teabag Party asserts its lockstep adoration of the One Percent, which means these particular feminists are now – like any other organ of capitalist governance – a legitimate target of socialist criticism regardless of the critic's gender.

What therefore follows is a much-enlarged version of a commentary I posted two weeks ago on Reader Supported News in response to a startling piece of gender-war invective entitled “Brad Pitt's New Movie on the Steubenville Rape Case Has the Wrong Protagonist,” the text cited in the second of the above links. By Tara Culp-Ressler, it offers an updated version of the old gender-warrior doctrine that no man should ever be allowed to help the women's movement lest his good deeds reinforce not only his (despicable) male ego but strengthen the shackles of patriarchy as well – and that any woman who disagrees is a hopeless reactionary, part of the problem rather than the solution.

I ran afoul of that uniquely white-bourgeois dogma nearly 40 years ago, when I was an investigative reporter, and its resurrection renews a sense of shame that prompts me to reveal now a fact I should have disclosed then. Here is the whole story:

An assertively Christian hospital that served a large and populous suburb of a major city refused to treat rape victims lest the association with sex and violence taint its godly image. Despite the fact an executive of the local rape-relief organization was my lover, I got the story not from her but because in those days I had the best cop sources in the area, probably in the entire state, and the cops complained to me about the hospital after one of their fellow officers ran afoul of its atrocious policy while seeking emergency-room care for an especially distraught rape victim. The cops, who in that era still believed their job was to protect and serve the citizenry rather than to serve the One Percent as its army of occupation, were genuinely furious. Several officers correctly likened the hospital's coldly enforced anti-rape-victim policy to psychologically re-assaulting the victim. After my usual telephone-and-shoe-leather effort unearthed an extended pattern of such abuses, I confronted the perpetrators and wrote my report, a blistering story that ran atop Page One.

But to my lingering shame, I omitted from follow-up stories how the local rape-relief group had known of the problem for years but had deliberately kept it secret – apparently for two reasons: they hoped to get sole credit for negotiating a solution, and they feared some (male) “do-gooders” might discover the problem, forcefully solve it (exactly as the cops and I did), and thereby – or so these gender-warriors reasoned – perpetuate male supremacy. In other words, the white, petit bourgeois feminists who ran the rape-relief organization believed it was better for rape victims to be denied proper care at their local Christian hospital (and thus be forced to travel as much as 50 crow-miles to a secular hospital), than for anyone other than the feminist movement – and better yet this specific rape-relief organization – to get credit for solving the problem.

Again to my shame, I half-assedly rationalized my act of self-censorship by telling myself my inside knowledge of the group's operations and policies was off-the-record information. Now nearly five decades after the fact and with the unforgiving, pre-graveyard clarity of old age, I confess my rationalization was total bullshit. The truth is I suppressed that vital detail merely to sustain my relationship with the rape-relief executive; I was living with her in her own house, and the alternative would have been instant homelessness. In any other circumstances, such a deliberate cover-up of atrocities would have either been in my lead or in my second and third grafs. Given a time machine to go back to the where and when, here is how I would write the story now:

Rape victims in Gastropoda County are thrice victimized – first by the rapist, then by Gastropoda Christian Hospital, finally by the very rape-relief organization that claims to be the victims' advocate and protector.

These circumstances came to light after police sources described the chilling ouster of a distraught rape victim from the GCH emergency room two weeks ago. Subsequent investigation brought to light at least a half dozen other such incidents.

Now GCH executives reluctantly admit it bars rape victims from its emergency room and has forcibly ejected the few who have managed to get past its gatekeepers.

Meanwhile, Gastropoda County Rape Relief officials just-as-reluctantly admitted they've known about the problem for years but have kept it secret. They claim the secrecy was essential to what they describe as an “ongoing” effort to negotiate with hospital management to change its anti-rape-victim policy.

But no such negotiations, spokespersons for both organizations concede, have ever taken place.

Moreover, the hospital's executive director insists he and his managerial colleagues were never asked to undertake such talks.

The hospital's longstanding opposition to treating rape victims – which inside sources say grows out of its owners' fear any association with sex and violence will besmirch the institution's image of “Christian godliness” – is confirmed by records in...

(The anonymity with which I am now cloaking this report is in response to three facts: [1]-my clips of the original story, and therefore my ability to confirm its published details, were destroyed by the same fire that in 1983 obliterated all my life's work, and I cannot replace the clips as the newspaper's morgue of bound copies did not survive corporate bankruptcy in the mid-1980s, nor – for reasons I am unable to determine (especially since it was the local paper of record) – were its editions ever microfilmed by the local library; [2]-the hospital long ago changed hands and is now under secular ownership; [3]-the sources and perpetrators are either retired, dead or otherwise unable to defend themselves.)

Significantly, my lover had made it clear she was uncomfortable with the story from the moment I told her what I was working on. But we never had time to discuss the details of her discomfort. Hence I did not foresee her anger, much less its intensity. When I with my bottle of celebratory wine arrived at our dwelling the night after the story broke, I expected a joyful and exuberant welcome – at the very least a thank-you embrace and a “well done” in recognition of the quality of the work. Instead I was greeted with an unprecedented outpouring of anger and contempt. My reporting, she said, had damn near gotten her fired; some of the members of her board of directors accused her of using her relationship with me to foster publication of the story, thereby perpetuating the sex-for-favors dynamic of patriarchy; others condemned her for allowing a male to “invade” a realm of advocacy they believed should be exclusively female – never mind at least 10 percent of all rape victims are male; still others insisted she should have clandestinely pressured my editor and even my publisher to reassign the story to a woman. When the board voted on her proposed firing, she said, the termination motion failed by only one vote.

To say I was shocked is an understatement, but mostly I was enraged by the indifference to victims that to me had suddenly emerged as the common stance of everyone but the cops and had therefore become the core issue of the entire story. Finally I responded accordingly: “You of all people know how good a reporter I am; you know I'd have found out about it even if you and I had never met – and what I should do now, what I fucking-A-tweet would do right this minute if our circumstances were different, is write a new story revealing everything you told me tonight.” What I did not say, not only because it was too painfully embarrassing for me to verbalize but because both of us clearly knew it already, is that she could goddamn well thank her lucky stars I was living in her house, which meant there was no way I could write the rest of the story without condemning myself to instant eviction. Needless to say, the confrontation killed the relationship, though the process of breaking up would consume another month or two. It also tossed a huge bucket of cold water on my journalistic pride.

Nevertheless the story made a helluva big wave – big enough the hospital's management was forced to reverse their anti-rape-victim policy literally hours after the paper hit the street. They were also forced to pay for their emergency-room personnel to get the medical and psychological training necessary to provide proper care for rape victims of both genders. As ashamed as I am of my act of self-censorship, I remain fiercely proud of what my story accomplished.

(I should note here that journalism of that era – at least as it used to be practiced on a good many local newspapers here in the pre-global-economy United States – was mostly a Working-Class calling. It drew from blue-collar families the same sorts of aggressively bright kids who might otherwise have gone into the cops or the priesthood or maybe the military. Sometimes it even enabled a declassé proletarian like myself to actually better people's lives, which to me was always its biggest attraction.)

Apropos the malice directed at males accused of poaching in political or conceptual territory certain feminists believe should be theirs alone, that hospital story was not my first encounter with it. A few years earlier, when I was an undergraduate, it hamstrung a major research project of mine, part of the work that would become the forever-lost book “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer,” which was destroyed with all its research notes and most of its photography in the 1983 fire. “Dancer,” an investigative reporter's 24-year probe of the origins and significance of the '60s Countercultural Rebellion, concluded the rebels were resurrecting a modern variant of the ancient matriarchal or at least pre-patriarchal consciousness. My findings were based on the Counterculture's music, poetry, journalism, ritual, social structures, economics and the expression of its values in environmentalism, feminism, the back-to-the-land movement and the neo-pagan renaissance. (It is an aside, but the Jungian Edward Whitmont reached a similar conclusion from very different data. But Whitmont's work, unlike my own, was carefully apolitical and therefore achieved significant publication, for which see The Return of the Goddess, Crossroad: 1982.)

While working on “Dancer,” I had foolishly imagined, exactly as I had while putting together the hospital story, that feminists would applaud my disclosures. After all, the pioneers in the “Dancer”-relevant fields of folklore and myth were themselves males. But by the early '70s, the gender-war feminists believed they had appropriated these realms as their own, and they defended their conquests with the passive-aggressive nastiness and backstabbing that characterizes academic ferocity whether male or female. Meanwhile the males associated with my project, an undergraduate thesis, seemed to regard me as a traitor to my gender. Hence though I got enough credit for the research and writing to win my bachelor's degree, my thesis itself was rejected.

And now, decades later, Culp-Ressler has resurrected the same hateful doctrine of gender-exclusivity not just to belittle Anonymous and its breathtakingly courageous defiance of draconian prison terms, but to denounce UltraViolet, which unlike its (white bourgeois) sister organizations defends oppressed women without (ironically) discriminating on the basis of caste, ethnicity or the presence of male allies.

In this same context, the Emily's List endorsement of “fiscal conservatism” – a euphemism for the genocidal savagery of Ayn Rand economics – is typical of the feminism spawned by capitalist co-optation and redirection of the USian second-wave feminist movement. (See again the first of the above links.) Because Second Wave Feminism was a daughter of the New Left of the 1960s, its dominant vision was overwhelmingly petit bourgeois and often fiercely anti-intellectual; therefore, despite its “women's liberation” label and its use of socialist rhetoric, it was frequently hostile not just to the historical truth of class struggle,  but to any analysis based on the revolutionary traditions of socialism and Marxism. Stripped of socialist armor, it was therefore easy prey for infiltrators and agents provocateur. That's why the USian feminism of the so-called “mainstream” remains indifferent to the outsourcing of jobs and downsizing of paychecks characteristic of the capitalist (Ayn Rand) moral imbecility that subjugates the USian 99 Percent. It does not acknowledge the fact that for a Working-Class woman, the loss of health insurance inflicted by global-economy outsourcing is often the total loss of reproductive freedom, an ugly reality carefully suppressed by Emily's List and the (Free Trade) Democrats in general. Nor – despite Big Lies to the contrary – is there any guarantee of rescue from the theocratic Christian effort to prohibit Obamacare from providing any satisfactory alternative.  Meanwhile, Rand herself has become an USian feminist heroine,  which explains not just the Emily's List stance, but bourgeois white USian feminism's unabashed support of capitalism itself, particularly as exemplified by the all the women who define themselves as “anti-union progressives.”

Could it then be a coincidence such divisiveness reappears just as we in the USian Imperial Homeland seem to be making genuine progress toward proletarian solidarity? Surely not, as every available indication points to the Ruling Class mustering all its resources to suppress what it fears is looming revolution. This mustering includes not only the obvious efforts – for example the attempt by the Democratic Party to co-opt (and thereby betray) Socialist Alternative's demand for a $15-per-hour minimum wage – but the newly exposed program under which secret-police agents accompany the military into overseas combat (for which see “Outside Agitation Elsewhere” below). Obviously, such a program has only one objective: to ensure the agents are kill-hardened enough to reliably follow orders when they are commanded to exterminate suspected revolutionaries at home. In this oppressive context, I am not surprised by the anti-99 Percent treachery of the feminism discussed above. In truth it is an old story, so old we should expect nothing else from a movement that was in too-large measure co-opted by the One Percent  from about 1970 onward, with the result its exclusion of impoverished women and women of color has long been infamous.

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Outside Agitation Elsewhere: The big news is the ongoing neo-Nazification of the United States, the result of capitalism maturing into fascism, thereby not only fulfilling the predictions of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Vladimir Lenin but validating Marxism itself. (Aside: what the founders of Marxism called “imperialism,” we today know as fascism or Nazism.) Here are two links, with brief expositions of outside agitation on each of the comment threads: “Now We Know What's Being Done in Our Name,” in which Esquire's Charles Pierce writes about the leaked torture-memo scandal,  and “FBI Agents Were Deployed in Hundreds of JSOC Raids Conducted in Iraq & Afghanistan,” which describes how the USian equivalent of the Okhrana (or maybe the Gestapo) is being trained to suppress  the inevitable uprising against capitalism that is bound to occur here in the post-American-Dream wastelands.

LB/13 April 2014

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