Beware the Christian Fanatics: Are You Their Next Target?

“RAM”: more Tacoma graffiti from the newly rediscovered work I did in 2009. Of course I cannot state with any certainty the artist's intent, but the trinity of monster, phallic serpent and human appears to be mostly an expression of anger and disgust at life itself. Leica M4, Voigtlander f/1.7 35mm Ultron, Kodak 800 color negative film, exposure not recorded. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2013.  Click on picture to view it full size.

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THE FRIGHTENING SUCCESS of the stealth campaign by Christian fanatics to abolish the reproductive and deathbed rights of Washington state citizens  shows us just how devastatingly effective such extra-legal measures can be. Now even Group Health – the Puget Sound-area health care cooperative that was formerly a national leader in the fight for women's reproductive freedom – has retreated from its hitherto uncompromising stance on access to abortion and end-of-life choices. Not only have its agreements with Catholic hospitals severely restricted its members' options (for which see the OAN essay linked above), it has also omitted abortion coverage from its Obamacare programs. 
 
Meanwhile the Roman Catholic Church has already bought or acquired policy-making control of approximately half the state's hospitals, thereby imposing de facto bans on abortion and legally assisted suicide in all the associated service areas. Never mind the bans are brazen defiance of the will of the people, the voters who legalized abortion and approved death with dignity as an alternative for those who are terminally ill. The church fathers have learned, no doubt from the One Percent, how to use the institutional structures of capitalism to make the ballot box irrelevant and reduce the Constitution to executive toilet paper
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As if that were not scary enough, two ultra-conservative legislators – one a Protestant, the other a Catholic – are sponsoring a bill that would make it legal for Christian doctors, pharmacists and business owners to persecute nonbelievers  by denying birth control to women and refusing to provide care and services to gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender people.

Sen. Adam Kline (D-Seattle), who has emerged as the chief opponent of the measure, Senate Bill 3090,  warns its passage would also enable medical professionals and merchants who belong to white-supremacist Christian sects to withhold medical care, prescription drugs and many other services from African-Americans, Hispanics, First Nations peoples and non-whites in general.  Even the Ku Klux Klan – known throughout the South as “the Saturday Night Men's Bible Study Class” (and reported by the Southern Poverty Law Center to be active in Kirkland and Yakima) – could claim religious protection for its bigotry.

The bill's sponsors are Sen. Mike Padden (R-Spokane) and Sen. Steve O'Ban (R-Tacoma). Padden's credentials are summarized on his state Senate web site, with additional details on Google. O'Ban's political biography is likewise available from the Senate,  with a more inclusive portrait on the left-leaning Washblog site.

Political insiders assure me SB 3090 has no chance of passage during the 2013-2014 legislative session. But the mere fact of its introduction proves again the relentless intent of the Christian fanatics, who have traded their denominational antagonisms for the solidarity of a formidable political-action cult. Instead of battling one another, its members whether Protestant or Catholic now wage war against human sexuality. Ecclesiastical attorneys are meanwhile reinterpreting “freedom of religion” to include the alleged “right” of the faithful to discriminate against non-believers, with SB 3090 one of many kindred measures nationwide. In every instance, the goal of such legislation is to further the imposition of Christian theocracy on the United States.

The associated electoral strategy and tactics are exemplified in the state of Washington by John Connelly's 2012 campaign for a Tacoma state Senate seat. Unsuccessful despite his all-time-record spending, it provides a rare glimpse of the fanatics' organizational structure,  which not only transcends denominational boundaries but encompasses both major political parties as well. Though Connelly ran as a Democrat, it should be noted that particular label is often meaningless and not infrequently a deliberate deception, a confusing reality exemplified by the president's stunning shape-shift from Obama the Orator to Barack the Betrayer. Had Connelly won, it was feared he'd side with the Republicans against marriage equality and reproductive freedom.

What else was at stake is demonstrated by how two other conservative Democrats betrayed their constituents and enabled a state Senate coup that gave the Republicans control of the entire Legislature. 

In all probability the Republican takeover was scripted well before the 2012 election. And Connelly's record-breaking expenditures suggest he desperately wanted to be part of it. But even without the Tacoman's participation, the coup has paralyzed state government. (“Coup” is the label I correctly affixed to this cunning overthrow of representative democracy weeks before any of the state's other journalists dared so much as whisper the word, for which scroll down to the linked story's comment thread.)

Predictably, the paralysis has had dire consequences, especially for women and mass-transit users. The former were treated as if their demands for guaranteed inclusion of birth control in employer-provided health insurance marked them as sluts; the latter – myself included – are routinely damned as parasites who are dependent on the “welfare” provided by minimal bus service and pathetically undersized rail operations. 

If the situation in Washington state seems familiar, that's because an eerily similar affliction paralyzes the federal government. The result is unbreakable gridlock save when congressional Democrats and Republicans join hands in unanimous or near-unanimous votes to (further) nullify the Bill of Rights, the first 10 amendments to the United States Constitution. It's no longer Democrats versus Republicans. It's now the One Party of Two Names versus the entire 99 Percent. And that One Party is methodically imposing the new paradigm of USian governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation for all the rest of us. 

But why has Washington, of all the allegedly “progressive” coastal states, been singled out for theocratic transformation? Wouldn't the forces of Christian fanaticism be more successful if they continued their efforts in openly theocratic jurisdictions like Texas  or North Dakatoa?

 

Obviously, locale alone is not the answer. Wherever one might be in the United States, the imposition of despotism via the marketplace is actually quite easy. This is because there is no economic democracy anywhere in the nation. Big Business – which generously finances the drive toward theocracy as its favored means of guaranteeing a maximally submissive workforce – has nearly absolute power. Its lawyers have manipulated the laws to deny anyone who is on business property – particularly in workplaces and shopping malls – the liberties theoretically guaranteed by the Constitution. And private property rights generally trump all others, particularly when the property owner is an all-powerful corporation. Though abortion is at present a constitutional right, business enterprises (including non-profits) cannot be forced to provide it. 

Also, as proven by Washington's oft-demonstrated 45-year hostility to mass transit,  the state's voters hide a decidedly hypocritical preference for the savagery of Ayn Rand economics beneath their claims of “progressive” political sensibilities. Perhaps – recognizing how quickly one sort of bigotry can be morphed into another – the Christian fanatics believe they can gradually expand Washington's hatred of transit users into a more general hatefulness. That vindictive hope would surely explain the misogyny, homophobia and racism now evident in SB 3090. In any case, it's clear the state is again functioning as a test-lab for the One Percent's strategies and tactics of oppression.

Meanwhile the magnitude of the fanatical Christian threat to health care throughout the United States is revealed in the coverage given it on 12 May by The New York Times and by the website Think Progress the next day.  (These stories appeared less than three weeks after the Outside Agitator's Notebook report published on 25 April and linked in this essay's lead paragraph. It was not the first time OAN with its small but international readership has seemingly influenced coverage of U.S. domestic conflicts.) Nevertheless, the USian mainstream media refuses to acknowledge the theocratic threat as such. It's as if the editors and reporters believe they can eliminate the fanatical Christian onslaught merely by tabooing any mention of its long-range intent. The taboo is apparent whether in Ruling Class publications like NYT or pseudo-leftist Internet journals like TP. Meanwhile the anti-theocratic warnings by Chris Hedges, Jeff Sharlet and several other notably credible authors go unheeded, putting all humanity at risk.

For those who foolishly continue to doubt we are in deadly peril, I can only suggest they remember the direction taken by Rome after Constantine decreed Christianity its state religion. In its day, Rome ruled the greatest empire of the ongoing patriarchal age, just as the United States rules that age's greatest empire ever.  Now imagine the USian empire becoming the modern counterpart of post-Constantine Rome, like Romani imperii post Constantinum, a fanatical Christian theocracy maintained by the most powerful military machine of its time and, again like that Rome, believing itself divinely tasked to impose a new world order, commanding its subjects to bow down to the cross of Jesus or die. I can already hear the One-President-Under-God declaring his fulfillment of biblical prophecy: “brethren in Christ, it is with heavy heart I come before you to announce we have to nuke this planet to save our souls from the Devil.”

LB/15 September 2013

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Synergy: of Occupy Tacoma, a Group Health Seminar, Fr. William J. Bischel and an Episode of Personal Revolution

Fr. William J. Bischel SJ, center, an often-imprisoned practitioner of non-violent civil disobedience, has been with Occupy Tacoma's quest for socioeconomic justice since its beginning. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2011. (Click on image to see it full size.)

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THANKS TO THE curious synergy of Occupy Tacoma, a Group Health workshop entitled “Living Well with Chronic Conditions” and Fr. William J. Bichsel SJ, on 21 October 2011 I experienced a genuinely life-changing epiphany. But to explain what obtained in the wake of that rainy Friday and how it came about, it's necessary I back into the story, working from society to self and thus from the political to the personal.

Long and painfully aware of the overwhelming negativity with which capitalism teaches us to despise ourselves whenever we become nonprofitable, I assumed my knowledge was the best possible defense against this mind-numbing, soul-killing brand of psychological warfare. But it turned out my awareness was far less effective than I thought it was.

As I discovered, it seems I am as vulnerable as any other low-income person – senior, disabled or chronically unemployed – to the self-destructive messages with which capitalism deluges us when our Ruling Class masters deem us no longer exploitable for profit.

Though the form of these messages varies in accordance with the targets at whom they are aimed, the content is invariably the same: the zero-tolerance mandate to somehow elevate ourselves by our proverbial bootstraps (no matter our economic feet were amputated long ago), or subtle hints we must dutifully end our own lives – in either case sparing ourselves the odium of becoming parasites while relieving society of the burden of our alleged laziness.

That the term “suicide” goes unspoken in such declamations merely proves how effectively the message is reinforced by advertising, the core medium of the most viciously social-Darwinist society in the industrial world. Advertising is the goad that forces us to run the rat maze, its motivational impetus traceable to our first encounters with playground bullies, schoolhouse tyrants and boringly pedantic teachers in classes designed not to stimulate but to subjugate.

Within the resultant (definitively capitalist) context of lockstep conformity, we are all challenged to prove our usefulness – to prove it every minute of every day – but for those of us who have lived long enough to become elderly, there are additional and often increasingly difficult requirements. We must constantly prove our physical and mental abilities, and – more importantly – we must demonstrate our relevance: all this as capitalism tries to drown us in a quagmire of rejection that is equal parts terror and contempt.

The source of the contempt is obvious: it is capitalism's malicious dismissal of anyone who is neither rich nor famous. The terror's origin is more complex: our society's uniquely bottomless fear of death – the unspeakable horror of eternal damnation taught us from birth by infinitely sadistic Christianity – this compounded with capitalism's induced fear of personal failure and its carefully acculturated fear of the Other: specifically anyone whose being or ideology might suggest alternatives to capitalism and capitalist tyranny.

While the Ruling Class has always been hostile to seniors (as it is to all groups it rejects as unprofitable), in recent years it has expanded its definition of Other to include native-born U.S. citizens – any of us much past our 50th year. This is because the United States in which we spent our formative years is so alien to the United States today, our age marks us as potentially dangerous agitators – men and women who remember when liberty, though always definitively White and therefore sorely limited, was nevertheless infinitely more than Bush-Obama political theater and Big Lie slogans.

Surely it is no coincidence – now we can truthfully say of today's United States “this is not the country I was born in” – the label “elderly” is redefined, no longer just synonymous with “useless” but now a condition definitively bad, even shameful, with an accompanying burden of self-doubt (and often self-hatred) that assures our submissive silence as we are segregated into ghettos called “senior centers” and “senior housing.”

And though I knew all this – though it was the core theme of the commissioned book upon which I labored from 2006 through 2008 (the manuscript ironically entitled “Proof of Relevance” but now doomed to eternal obscurity by a bratty estate war between the subject's adopted children) – my knowledge was not sufficient to protect me from absorbing capitalism's core message I had turned not just useless but hopelessly enfeebled the moment I lived past retirement age.

Admittedly I am physically disabled, officially so, crippled by steady deterioration of spinal injuries inflicted on me 33 years ago by one of Washington state's notoriously coddled habitual drunken drivers, crippled too by a no-cartilage knee inflamed by arthritis, with both disabilities radically worsened by the seemingly inescapable obesity that has burdened me since I quit smoking 16 years ago, and those maladies intensified by high blood pressure and heart problems.

But until I began seeing myself as genuinely “old” and (therefore) truly “useless,” my core self-concept remained one of strength not weakness: my internal dialogues were about how I might prevail, not about how I might surrender.

Enter Group Health – the Puget Sound health care cooperative of which I am a voting member – and its “Living Well with Chronic Conditions” workshop, the underlying theme of which duplicates (and therefore resurrects) that of my former internal dialogues, the how-might-I-prevail paradigm that was mine before capitalism taught me to think of myself as “old and useless.”

Also enter, by whatever astounding synchronicity so often seems to govern my life, first Occupy Wall Street and then Occupy Tacoma: each another variant on the how-might-I-prevail paradigm, albeit this time in definitive collectivity: We the People, and How Shall We Prevail and above all else Solidarity.

Partly because I long ago recognized activism as the best analgesic (a point I have made repeatedly in the three Group Health workshop meetings I have had time to attend), though mostly because I see in OWS and OT the revolutionary democracy to which I (and my father before me) were so fervently committed, I gave myself over to OT as best I could, predictably via its Media Work Group.

Thus began my re-education: specifically the process of learning the difference between genuine physical limitations and the imaginary limitations imposed by capitalism.

At first I believed I could not participate in demonstrations. Then, because I somehow overcame my fear of collapsing in exhaustion midway through a three-mile march (or worse the public mortification of falling prey to heart problems and so disrupting the entire event), I marched and chanted, but dared not carry the added weight of even a single camera. Not surprisingly, I was soon filled with bitterness and self-pity at the sight of young photographers doing exactly what I used to do: the ineffably passionate Dance of the Photographers, for which see last week's essay.

A few nights later during a General Assembly meeting at Occupation Park, where OT maintains its 24-hour presence in downtown Tacoma and coexists in genuine harmony with police and passers-by, I encountered Fr. Bischel. 

I knew him of old, from one of those interludes in my life I tried to be a practicing Catholic but concluded, as always, I am far too damaged to find spiritual sustenance in any organized religion. I had no idea he was in the park. I merely suggested him as the best possible local resource on the politics of non-violence, only to hear his laughing voice say “Loren is my campaign manager” and to discover amidst my own surprise (and a great deal of gentle chuckling) he was standing directly behind me.

Fr. Bischel – Bix to his friends and colleagues – had been sleeping in the park each night, lending OT his formidable presence as an internationally renown, often imprisoned practitioner of non-violent civil disobedience. 

Now I wanted to photograph him there or in some other OT environment, not the least because Bix is 86 years old and I recognize him as a true Bodhisattva, embodiment of the wisdom of I Ching, particularly the First Hexagram, Ch'ien (the Creative), Nine in the Fifth Place: “Thus the sage rises, and all creatures follow him with their eyes.”

But to follow him with my own eyes I would have to attend Friday's demonstration. Hence again the vital practice of asking myself how might I prevail. I'd take one camera (a Pentax MX); two lenses (100mm and 28mm SMCPs); a pocket full of Fujicolor 800; a Vietnam-era GI poncho to protect my equipment from the rain; an Ace bandage for my knee; my cane; and – to lighten the load – an 8-ounce flask of water rather than 32 ounces in my 1945-vintage GI canteen.

That image above is Bix with two of his friends as seen through the 100mm lens.

I made a total of 48 pictures of the demonstration – literally a demo in a deluge – of which at least five are worth showing, with one more probably as much a portfolio piece as the portrait of Bix. But the Blogger software for posting portfolios is not just difficult but user-unfriendly, with instructions so vague its operation requires at least the knowledge of a professional Nurd, and – techno-moron that I am – I dread the requisite hours (and quite possibly days) of technological hassle and unavoidable public embarrassment necessary to figure out how to make it work.

Meanwhile though I have indeed prevailed, at least to the extent of learning how to continue working in the medium I love the most.

And hobbling nearly five miles for OT – about two miles last Friday – has clearly exorcised my compulsion to define myself as a cripple.

Such is personal revolution, especially as implied by my oft-repeated statement “in these times, survival itself is an act of revolutionary defiance.”

Hence I offer this picture and text in thanks and gratitude to my colleagues in the Living Well seminar, to my comrades in OT, to Fr. Bischel and of course to the Muse herself.

LB/25 October 2011

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