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Here
we see the aftermath of an eviction, one of the innumerable ways
governments in the United States serve the nation's increasingly
merciless capitalist masters, in this instance by the forcible ouster of
a formerly middle-class woman too old to be exploitable for maximum
profit – that is, too elderly to be allowed another job in the
capitalist economy, but probably a decade too young for the meager
refuge provided by Social Security. After government goons forced the
woman out of her apartment, they piled all her possessions in the
building's side yard. The date of the eviction, 22 November 2013, was
the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John Fitzgerald
Kennedy, who had sought to make the U.S. a land in which poverty and its
consequences were afflictions of the past. Top: scavengers, themselves
desperately poor, began gathering within hours. Bottom: as it looked the
next morning, after people swarmed all night to snatch away anything of
value. Fujicolor 800, Pentax MX, Tokina 70mm-210mm f/4, exposures not
recorded. Photographs by Loren Bliss copyright 2013.
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*
AS
IF TO CELEBRATE the coup of 22 November 1963 – President John
Fitzgerald Kennedy gunned down in Dallas, the United States set on the
road to becoming the most omnipotently powerful and wantonly murderous
empire in recorded history – the enforcers of capitalist governance in
the seaport city of Tacoma chose the assassination's 50th anniversary to
evict an elderly woman from a ramshackle apartment building. The irony
is almost too perfect: the ruination of a human life on the date the man
who increased Social Security stipends by 20 percent
and fought to end economic atrocities was slain by those One Percent
aristocrats who would ruin us all – exactly as their sons and grandsons
are doing today.
In
this context it is not inappropriate to describe the personal horror
inflicted by eviction, a toxic muddle of terror, shame, fury and woe, as
an emotional microcosm of the horror inflicted on an entire nation by
the assassination itself. Either is impossible to know unless you have
experienced it firsthand. Both are terminal in the sense that whether
you realize it or not, life as you knew it has ended forever.
In
an eviction, whatever material or psychological assets remained in your
life are ripped away as if by volcano or earthquake or tornado or
bombing. It is, as I know too well, the same when you are victimized by
fire. Everything you thought defined you as you, everything that
sustained your identity, is destroyed without mercy, exactly as
suggested by the above photographs. The devastation is total. Though
post-traumatic recovery is possible, the worst-in-the-industrial-world
economic viciousness of today's USian Empire guarantees your healing
will painfully slow – if indeed it is allowed at all.
I
do not know the evicted woman's name. I saw her only once. She was
scurrying back and forth around her piled possessions as if she could
protect them from the inevitable scavengers and thieves. She was alone, a
slender and bespectacled woman in a long black wool winter coat that
was trimmed with fur. It was a fine coat, something a self-assured
professional might have worn to work. But now its wearer moved with the
same bewilderment and terror I had once seen displayed by a little gray
vole who darted in and out of my rural Washington cabin after I had
discarded and burned an old armchair and unknowingly destroyed her nest
and killed her brood of tiny young, an error for which after 18 years I
yet grieve, an example of the harm we humans do even without ill
intentions.
Journalistic
instinct, powerfully alive despite decades of involuntary retirement,
demanded I speak with the woman and photograph her with her belongings.
Human instinct, equally powerful, restrained me from intruding on her
wretchedness. But my day was already allotted to private errands via
public transport, and the arrival of a city bus rescued me from the
angst of indecision. Now, because I never talked with her, I know her
only by the many books she was forced to abandon, one of which was a
publication of the Princeton Science Library, The Miner's Canary: Understanding the Mysteries of Extinction,
written by Niles Eldredge. Yet who, I wondered, would understand the
mysteries of this woman's hopes and dreams? Who would unriddle the
destruction inflicted on her by capitalism? Who would care enough to
chronicle her fate?
***
The
victimization inflicted by assassins is usually as immediate as the
victimization inflicted by an eviction. Whenever the assassins' purpose
is the death of liberty and the imposition of tyranny, we the people are
the ultimate victims. In Chile, for example, Augusto Pinochet's
USian-trained and funded agents began torturing and murdering terrified
mothers, fathers and children literally minutes after the death of the
nation's democratically elected president, Salvador Allende.
But
here in the USian homeland, where the capitalist masters of the world
have proven themselves the most diabolically cunning tyrants in human
history, they use a more gradual approach.
After
they murdered President Kennedy, they liquidated all the other
influential men for whom democracy was more than a convenient Big Lie.
They killed Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. and Sen. Robert Kennedy.
Then the killers stole our freedom gradually and by stealth, taking it
piece-by-piece in the duplicitous and tragically accurate belief we
were too stupid to notice and too cowardly to resist. The result is the malevolence that oppresses us today, a perfect example of which is the eviction that was imposed on the old woman in Tacoma.
This
is not, of course, what the government tells us. But any 99 Percenter who still doubts it
is essentially the true story of what has been done to us needs only read JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, a genuinely pivotal work by James W. Douglass (Maryknoll: 2008). The antithesis of conspiranoid dreck, its text is an epic of historical analysis.
It details the long slow death of democratic process that culminated in
the most destructive Big Lie ever fed the now hopelessly dumbed-down
U.S. electorate: “change we can believe in” – as if, after 22 November
1963 and the events it facilitated, there might ever again be a new
American Dream.
And
now we are learning the dream is dead beyond resurrection. Now we are
awakening to the fact that under capitalism there will never be an end
to joblessness and inescapable debt-slavery and foreclosure and
eviction and homelessness and death by untreated sickness and murder by
government-inflicted starvation and everywhere the ruins of hope such as
were left in the wake of this morning's ironically celebratory
eviction.
***
Because
ammunition is expensive and shooting-related paperwork is a pain in the
ass, the official goons who carry out evictions typically bang on your
door before first light. They know there is much less likelihood you
will fight when you are rousted from slumber and assaulted immediately
thereafter. The goons flash their badges and force you out of your home,
sometimes at gunpoint, often still in your pajamas or nightgown. Then
they pile your cherished belongings helter-skelter in the yard, and if
they are feeling especially sadistic, which frequently they are, they
make sure your furniture grinds your best clothes into the dirt and food
spills onto your books and papers.
Next
they warn you that if you try to re-enter the premises, you will be
jailed for criminal trespass, which used to be mostly a misdemeanor but
now in these times of ever-worsening poverty is vindictively
re-criminalized as a felony to help guarantee the masters of for-profit
prisons an endless supply of slaves. Sometimes you're given eight or 12
or 24 hours to clear your property off the landlord's yard, after which
everything you couldn't move is his. Finally you are alone and in
bottomless shock.
The
unthinkable is now real. You are homeless. Your entire consciousness is
fear. And now in addition to the emotional horror, there is also the
physical horror of life in the jungle of the streets – the total
negation of everything you ever achieved or were. Now your only reality
is the absolute certainty you will be victimized by everyone stronger
than you are, that you will be raped if you are a woman however plain or
man of less than obviously formidable strength and violence. You are no
longer considered a person. Unless you have a damn good lawyer – and
what homeless person can afford that – you are no longer allowed any of
the rights and privileges of personhood whether individual or corporate.
Now you are merely one of The Homeless, which means that under the Ayn
Rand credo that now rules the USian Empire, the very best you can expect
from your fellow humans is derision, rejection, contempt and hatred if
you are very lucky, and savage beatings – especially by the teenage
children of the rich – if you are not.
As
it is done unto the least of us, so it is done unto us all – equally
true whether said by Jesus or Marx, no matter in terms biblical or
dialectic. But capitalism by its elevation of infinite greed to maximum
virtue consciously rejects every moral and ethical precept our species
ever dared assert. And because the capitalists are ever more in need of
protection from their victims, soon they bribe the politicians into
capitalist governance, which is absolute power and unlimited profit for
the One Percent, total subjugation for all the rest of us. Such is our
lot 50 years after the murder of President Kennedy, the assassination
that killed both a man and a nation, hexed it and vexed it into the
realm that hurls an old woman out into the merciless cold and the deadly
damp of the zero-tolerance late November Pacific Northwest coastal
streets.
LB/24 November 2013
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