First the Bad News, Then the Amusements

THIS WEEK'S COLUMN is mostly a collection of confessions, observations, quotes and memos originally written on scrap paper or in my wallet-sized index-card notebook, the latter a thoughtful gift from my second wife Adrienne, to whom again thanks.

But before I share these always random, occasionally lewd and sometimes humorous jottings, here as stark reminders of the time and place in which we live (and therefore in fulfillment of OAN's journalistic obligation) are links to a few stories that typify the deteriorating human condition and the sorry state of our nation and our world.

As always in these darkest of years of our species' 200,000-year history, the applicable acronym is SNAFU. A linguistic relic of World War Twice, it stands for “Situation Normal, All Fucked Up.”

The week's most unsurprising but nevertheless vital news was another study that has confirmed the U.S. experiment in representative democracy is dead – that we 99 Percenters are now the ever-more-enslaved subjects of an increasingly tyrannical capitalist oligarchy. Meanwhile a separate poll confirms we the people are moving ever closer to the flash-point of rising up angry. Both reports were covered by Thom Hartmann in a single story. 

I did not have time to comment on Hartmann's work because my entire week was consumed by first-of-the-month chores. With an automobile I'd have accomplished these tasks in less than a single day. But because I no longer have a car and am thereby dependent on the “welfare” provided by mass transit,  what formerly took me about five hours by automobile now takes five days by bus.

The methodical reduction of mass transit  in the Puget Sound region and elsewhere throughout the United States exemplifies the increasingly obvious refusal of the One Percent to attempt even minimal amelioration  of terminal climate change – another factor in the 99 Percent's increasing rebelliousness.

Meanwhile the climate disasters described by Amy Goodman's too-cautious academic guests give us additional glimpses of the death-dealing future  our species will probably not survive. Such is capitalism's deadly curse upon ourselves, our descendants and our planet.

How the Ruling Class will respond if we dare foment effective resistance is already well known, exemplified not just by the crushing of the Occupy Movement,  but by the extermination-and-disruption campaign with which local cops and federal secret police destroyed the Black Panthers  during the 1960s and 1970s.

Obviously the de facto Fourth Reich is nothing new.

As Bill Quigley reports for Reader Supported News, already “2.2 million people are in our nation’s jails and prisons and another 4.5 million people are on probation or parole in the US, totaling 6.8 million people, one in every 35 adults. We are far and away the world leader in putting our own people in jail. Most of the people inside are poor and black. Here are 40 reasons why.” 

Lastly, there's One Percent's Final Solution, “we had to destroy the village to save it.” First applied in Vietnam, the destruction-is-salvation approach now jeopardizing us globally, as events in Ukraine take another step toward World War III: “we had to destroy the planet to save it.”

(Yes, dear readers, just as you might have surmised, the doctrine of destruction as salvation is derived from the dogmas of Abrahamic religion. Note the Biblical flood, the fates of Sodom and Gomorrah, and most especially the nauseating rationale for burning heretics  at the stake.)

The only remaining question is when will SNAFU become FUBAR, the Vietnam War's acronym for “Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition.”

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NOW THE PROMISED randomness:

Assuming reasonably long lives, it seems that as we age toward the grave, we become ever more brutally honest with ourselves. That's when we discover savoring our memories of love is a helluva lot more rewarding than remembering our professional triumphs. (Scribbled on the back of a grocery list while waiting in a Fred Meyer checkout line, probably in 2010.)

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FiboNazi numbers: mathematical data the Nazis (whether followers of Hitler, Ayn Rand or both), publish to support the Big Lies that conceal the ruinous and often deadly consequences of their policies. (Sometime in 2014, with apologies to Leonardo Fibonacci.)

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The greatest barrier to combating the U.S. plague of moral imbecility is the lack of a suitably magnetic role model. (Jotted on an index-card sometime in 2009, no doubt prompted by my dawning realization Barack Obama was the most calculatedly malicious liar ever to hold the presidency.)

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Tacoma – a place where people pick their noses in public. (Undated, probably 2012.)

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The lessor of two evils: a man or woman forced by poverty to lease a pair of demon-haunted rooms in a vampire-infested slum. (Undated.)

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Social documentary photography and photojournalism in general is ultimately about expressing human emotion as visual geometry and the choreography of light and darkness. That's probably why those of us who grew up in dysfunctional families so often make the best photojournalists. Normally in patriarchal culture, only women are taught to read and heed the nuances of nonverbal language, but in the hurtful and potentially deadly miasma of familial dysfunction, that skill is vital for survival regardless of one's gender. (Undated, probably 2010.)

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For a girl-child or a woman, any patriarchal family is definitively dysfunctional. (An epiphany while typing the above, 7 June 2015.)

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“You're not allowed to be yourself, so you try to be someone else, even if you gotta go schizo to do it.” (Said by a bus rider as he disembarked at a Pierce County mental hospital, 30 June 2012.)

 

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“Another goddamn public-disclosure document written in the incomprehensibly turgid language Ruling Class academics use to ensure their work remains obscure.” (Undated, probably 2011, the identity of the document in question irrelevant because the judgment is so broadly applicable.)

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Metro Gnome – an invisible creature who lurks on Seattle buses, making its presence known by chronic disruption of schedules. (Undated.)

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We must make peace with Mother Nature lest she make war with us. (Undated).

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Old men who become enchanted by music often do so because it is only way they will ever again hear a beautiful woman murmur in their ears. (24 August 2013.)

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In the old days, before the media monopolies took over, daily newspaper newsrooms were refuges for bright and rebellious people from the Working Class and the declassé, and we who became journalists did so with the proud and certain knowledge our reporting could improve the human condition.

Now though the only people allowed to report the news are the pampered sons and daughters of the Ruling Class – those who feel it their duty to protect the status quo – that is, if they ever pass beyond self-obsession to consider duty at all. (Undated, probably 2011 after reading an especially biased report on the Occupy Movement.)

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“All the adolescent boys of my generation had Circle-J races – sitting in a circle in the woods or a barn or someplace jacking off. The object was to see who could orgasm the fastest, who could shoot their load the furthest and who could produce the most come. Ever since I heard of that, I've wondered if it's why so many men have premature ejaculations.” (Anonymous female elder c. 2014.)

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“Her boyfriend bought her a cell phone. Now he's jealous. He thinks she loves the phone more than she loves him.” (Conversation between two teenage girls on a bus, 28 July 2013.)

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“Apropos brevity, nothing is more minimalist than a blank page.” (Note to another writer, context forgotten, 2012.)

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Transit therapy – riding the bus all day and talking to one's self or to imaginary companions – that's our new national mental-health program. (13 September 2013)

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If we are all how the Deity experiences herself, why are so many of us so metaphysically challenged? (During a bus ride; undated.)

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We each combat sordidness in our own way. (April 2015.)

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I can think of no better conclusion for this column than a heartfelt thank-you note to Thais Smedley, another of the women who so profoundly influenced my life.

In popular fiction one's initiation into manhood typically begins with the loss of one's virginity, often to an older woman. But I had lost my virginity five years earlier to a girl my own age, and the initiation you granted me that unforgettable summer afternoon in 1959 – you with your white blouse and white shorts and your wondrous mane of raven hair – was to intellectual manhood instead.

You invited me into the cool of your light and airy basement apartment there on 12th Street by the University of Tennessee, you graciously opened a can of Campbell's beef vegetable soup, heated it, poured it into a bowl and indicated I should eat it all. Obviously I was hungry. In fact I was too impoverished to afford even the 50-cent lunch in the student center, and somehow you sensed my need but were not offended by it, and we talked as I wolfed down the soup and for a few minutes afterward. Then you gave me a forbidden book, saying you thought its contents might speak to my mind and spirit, and you gently sent me on my way.

The book was Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems, and – just as you suspected – it began a process that changed my life, giving me a glimpse of the true power of language and helping break my writing free of the journalistic constraints I would eventually recognize as an especially insidious form of censorship. (From notes on scrap paper, December 2011, after awakening from a dream about the real-life episode described herein.)

Now in my 75th year, I dearly hope you, Thais, will somehow see this message and know the depth of gratitude with which I have always remembered our brief encounter. Thank you, Thais; for just a moment you embodied the Muse. Thank you indeed. I wish you the very best one's advancing years can offer: sustained health and deepening contentment with the life you lived.

LB/1-7 June 2015

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Quit Smoking to Get Healthy, Get Fat and Sick Instead

THE ORDEAL OF preparing my apartment for its quarterly premises inspection while I am afflicted by plantar fasciitis  in my left foot – which means I'm much more crippled than usual – has stolen my writing time. This week's OAN is thus limited to material I've posted on other sites.

Coincidentally – or perhaps not (because excess weight is among the chief causes of plantar fasciitis) – one of those posts was about the methodically suppressed connection between quitting smoking and inexplicable, uncontrollable and frighteningly fast weight-gain. It is a condition with which my post-smoking self is intimately, bitterly, god-cursingly familiar. But the facts about it – especially the hideousness it inescapably imposes on about 35 percent of former smokers, especially males – are carefully concealed by USian doctors, lest the dreadful knowledge encourage nicotine addicts to keep smoking.

Hence the following, an expanded version of the reply I posted two days ago on the comment thread of “5 Reasons Americans Are Getting Fatter: It's Not Just the Food,” an AlterNet report reprinted by Reader Supported News. 

While reporter Martha Rosenberg did an excellent job of rounding up the usual obesity-epidemic suspects – the long litany of for-profit additives and artificial sweeteners by which the capitalists poison our food – she wrote not a single word about the plague of post-smoking weight-gain. 

In this context it is important to understand the national quit-smoking campaign did not originate from any real public health concern. What began it is a condition unique to the USian Homeland: the fact the Ayn Rand doctrine that is the basis of USian economic policy defines health care as a privilege of wealth rather than a human right. The anti-smoking drive was therefore launched in response to for-profit insurors' anger over how tobacco-related deaths were reducing their obscene profits. In other words, the USian war on tobacco smoking started as a manifestation of capitalist greed – which is precisely why it has been conducted so relentlessly and therefore with such success. Contrast the totality of the USian anti-smoking effort with the USian effort to eradicate communicable childhood diseases. The latter is a program increasingly abandoned, with predictably catastrophic results, due to deliberately genocidal neglect of the poor combined with the ailments spread by Christian fanatics who are now granted theocratic exemptions that allow them to legally ignore formerly mandatory inoculation requirements. The difference between the anti-smoking and childhood-health programs undoubtedly lies in the bottom-line: apparently payouts for smoking deaths reduce insurors' profits far more than payouts for the deaths of children.

Though I intended my response to Rosenberg to be corrective rather than confessional, my fury at the cosmic unfairness and sadism of my post-smoking circumstances – the fact I quit smoking to get healthy but instead got grotesquely fat – made parts of my contribution uncomfortably Oprah-ish. Normally I would have deleted such lapses as inappropriate emotionalism. But on second thought, it seemed the disclosures might help others who, like myself, are now after quitting smoking forever entrapped in the mortification inflicted by balloon-sized flesh. Besides, I have nothing to lose: I am who I am, and in this instance what I am – that is, horrendously obese – combines with abject poverty, physical disability and age to ensure the female gender will never again look at me with anything other than indifference, if not outright disgust. 

The associated negative emotions – which slap me in the face whenever I look in a mirror – are intensified by the fact USian doctors generally insist you're cheating anytime you gain weight on post-smoking diets. Whether calling you a liar is prompted by ignorance or is mandatory protocol, the psychological devastation is the same. The only exception I ever encountered amongst USian medical personnel was the nutritionist I consulted through Washington state's Group Health Cooperative. She said the stress of nicotine withdrawal – which is now recognized as the longest and most wrenching drug withdrawal  known to humans – throws the body into what she called “concentration-camp mode.” Thus the body begins turning all food into the fat essential to protect muscles and bones from absorption during starvation. If this is indeed what happens – and the explanation seems as good as any I've heard – the implication is that nicotine withdrawal truly ends only at death, especially for those of us who suffer the lifelong post-smoking tendency to become circus obese. 

Unfortunately, my case is typical. I weighed 158 pounds in 1985, when, at age 45, rising blood pressure and occasional bouts of cardiac arrhythmia prompted me to begin what became a ten-year fight to quit smoking. I was in good shape, an attractive and reasonably successful middle-aged journalist, the editor-in-chief of Art Direction, an international advertising-industry trade journal. As a Manhattanite I routinely walked five miles a day – Gotham-dwellers average more miles afoot than any other USians – and my 158 pounds with its 31-inch waistline was only 10 pounds and two inches more than my best condition ever, this in the Regular Army c. 1962. But my first week off cigarettes I gained 12 pounds, my first month a total of 24.5 pounds – gains I would have dismissed as impossible but for the irrefutable testimony of my trousers, which I could no longer button, and the corroborative witness borne by my belt, which was soon extended to its maximum length. 

Within weeks I went back to smoking – mainly because I knew the fast-encroaching ugliness would end my romantic and sexual prospects forever. Then my blood pressure again soared, and I again tried quitting. Once more I tried cold turkey; then I tried Smokers Anonymous (which is where I first heard of the British studies linking nicotine withdrawal to radical obesity). I tried hypnosis; I tried gradual reduction of my daily cigarette-count; I tried various over-the-counter medications that promised to help me quit. But it seemed nothing could get the nicotine monkey off my back. 

Meanwhile I had discovered a new and even more formidable complex of barriers to quitting: without nicotine, I could not function as a journalist. I could still edit copy, but I could not converse intelligently, think clearly or write a coherent sentence. I am dyslexic; soon I came to realize it was nicotine's function as a neurotransmitter – and not any innate talent – that had enabled all my intellectual acumen and indeed my entire reporting career. 

Of my communication skills, only my photographic ability was enhanced by not smoking – this because of the vast improvement in peripheral vision and tonal sense that results from the absence of vaso-constricting nicotine in one's bloodstream.

There was no triumph in my gradually-winning battle against nicotine addiction because it was equally a forever-losing battle against becoming monstrously obese. I grew fat and fatter – ever uglier, ever more embarrassed to be seen in public, ever more inescapably lonely. I had gained weight even on the unspeakable misery of a two-week, 1000-calorie-per-day diet. Tests proved the gain was not related to metabolic deficiencies. And the failure of that diet proved the weight gain was so uncontrollable not even starvation would stop it. 

When I finally managed to quit smoking permanently – this via a combination of nicotine patches and prescription medication – I was 55 years old. I weighed 195 pounds. By then, I had learned to accept my post-smoking obesity – repugnant though it was – with the same bitter resignation with which one accepts other physical handicaps. Moreover, being grossly fat was no longer the pivotal disaster of my life. My career had been destroyed by the odium of the post-traumatic clinical depression that eventually befell me after all my life's works were obliterated in a 1983 fire, and that alone left me too impoverished to ever again be attractive to any woman. Thus my physical appearance no longer mattered – precisely the realization that finally enabled me to swear off tobacco permanently. My first day without cigarettes forever was 23 September 1995. I used my last nicotine patch sometime in January 1996. Since then I have never had nicotine in any form. Within a year I had blubbered up to 235 pounds.

It would take me nearly a decade to teach myself to write again; I will never be the fast, self-assured writer I was as a smoker. And it would be a dozen years before I could again comfortably socialize. 

But even without the obesity, quitting smoking would have destroyed my physical condition. For most of my adult life I worked out regularly: jogging, walking, the long-distance hiking associated with back-country trout fishing, the day-long exertion of upland bird hunting, various self-administered physical training programs including nearly a decade with the Royal Canadian Air Force Basic Exercise Program. Then after my spine was permanently injured by one of Washington state's defiantly habitual drunken drivers, I was prescribed a combination of physical therapy and yoga that gave me enough flexibility to work a season as engineer/deckhand on a commercial fishing vessel and kept me ambulatory until – you guessed it – I began my quit-smoking effort. 

Another of the deliberately downplayed effects of nicotine withdrawal is total disruption of sleep patterns, the result of which is a profound state of exhaustion – precisely the condition that discourages exercise of any kind. And in my case – as in many such cases (or so I am repeatedly told) – the sleep disruption has never gone away. I used to sleep like the proverbial log, but I have not gotten an uninterrupted night's sleep since I smoked my last cigarette, and now after 18 years and six months, it is obvious I will never know the comfort of a full night's sleep again in this lifetime. Exhaustion – sometimes mild, more often severe – is now my normal condition. With it comes a loathing of unnecessary exertion so intense no amount of will power – at least none I am able to muster – will overcome it enough to foster regular exercise.

I know now that without cigarettes, I will always be fat – which is to say I will always be ugly. In my years off nicotine, I've weighed as much as 275 pounds. As a result I've come to regard food as my enemy, to fear and despise it and hate myself for how it obsesses my mind and deforms my body. By constant struggle, I (mostly) manage to keep my weight in the vicinity of an (only) (moderately) repulsive 225. Like the vampires of legend, I avoid mirrors; I go out in public only when I have no choice, and never for pleasure. Such is my lot as a former smoker.

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The documentation on the weight-gain/post-smoking connection, which I first heard of through a British acquaintance in 1986, took me years to ferret out. It surfaced, albeit in much later forms, via two papers unearthed in 2010 by the skills of a talented reference librarian at the Tacoma (Wash.) Public Library, a woman I knew only as Sarah and that only by telephone. In this instance she outdid even her colleagues at the main (Fifth Avenue) branch of the New York City Public Library, who repeatedly told me there was no such material, never mind NYPL is ostensibly the finest such institution in the nation.

Here are the two references Sarah found for me:

“Smoke-Free and Fat: the Health Hazards of Kicking the Habit”; Kent Sepkowitz, Slate: 2008. Conclusion: quitting smoking makes you fat. 

“Smoking as a Modifable Risk Factor for Type 2 Diabetes in Middle-Aged Men”; S. Goya Wannamethee, A. Gerald Shaper, Ivan J. Perry, Diabetes Care, Sept. 2001 v24 i9 p1590. (No link available.) Conclusion: quitting smoking makes you fat, thereby increasing your diabetes risk.

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Outside Agitation Elsewhere: It's All About the Ukrainian Crisis

Most of this material is focused on the Ukrainian Crisis because of its terrifying threat of a thermonuclear World War III. As I have said before, to me it is scarier than the Cuban Missile Crisis because in 1962 I trusted President John F. Kennedy. But now in 2014 I have learned the hard way – that is, by voting for him twice – not to trust President Barack Obama at all.

However, thanks largely to an astute journalist named Robert Parry, the debate is beginning to focus on whether Obama has been betrayed by his own advisors or whether he is (once again) demonstrating his formidable skills at deception and manipulation by minimizing his culpability in provoking the crisis.

Predictably, I argue for the latter – that Obama the Orator is merely showing another aspect of his true Barack the Betrayer self, most likely to improve the Democratic Party's abominable prospects in the November elections. The relevant links – those on which I contributed to discussion threads – are here  and here. 

Medea Benjamin's disturbing account of how she was savaged by the Egyptian secret police – obviously on orders of someone in the USian government if not in the White House itself – is also relevant. It, like the atrocities committed against the Occupy Movement, shows us the true nature of the imperial mind: all the more reason to fear the U.S. will escalate the Ukraine Crisis into World War III. 

LB/16 March 2014 

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Notes on Betrayals Personal and Political, Old and New

(Edited 18/2/2014 to clean up the debris of writing in haste to avoid the pangs of painful memories.)

I APOLOGIZE FOR the tardiness of this post. The activities of “retirement” that included two days of volunteer editorial work plus responding to a wealth of relevant material on other websites seemed to have left me no time for the weekly contemplation, research and writing that usually keynotes this space. Instead I planned to note in passing how my compulsion to outside agitate on other sites had generated a total of eight posts in four days, which is probably a personal record for Internet contributions. I would then write a few sentences on the common concerns – deliberate disinformation, co-optation and political betrayal (mostly the latter) – that bind these eight posts into a topical anthology and headline it accordingly.

But – such is the undeniable (white, gray and sometimes black) magick of writing – what I intended wasn't at all what happened.

After I boasted of my eight-post output, I sat smiling at the fact I was fairly sure it's a high-water mark I haven't approached since the good old days when I was often summoned to stand in as a rewrite-man on The Jersey Journal (1969-1970), where I was a reportorial top gun, a presumably up-and-coming young journalist who was not only appreciated and respected by my employers but also well-liked by most of my colleagues.

Now I fondly remembered the uniquely welcoming smell of paper, machine-oil, tobacco-smoke and ink that characterized all big-city newsrooms of that era. I remembered the staccato of typewriters and the faster more assertive riffs of wire-service teletypes punctuated in random counterpoint by bulletin bells and ringing telephones and the suck-bang of the pneumatic tubes that carried skillfully edited copy to the composing room where with equal skill it was set in type cast from molten lead. I remembered too the self-assured expression of my own editorial talents that always seemed bolstered by this atonal but profoundly energizing symphony as it rose to its crescendo at our main deadline, straight-up noon for the big makeover we called the North Lift. And now as I contemplated these memories, I realized they had been rendered poignant by the sepia-toning that characterizes history and the quietude imposed by distance – that they were shaping themselves into a spontaneous eulogy to a breed of journalist and a rewarding intensity of life and work and commitment that is no more, and I began to write how good I felt about having been part of all that.

Next much to my surprise it came to me I had set my all-time story-production record not during good times at The JJ, but during the bad old days I was a reporter and sometimes photographer for The Federal Way News, from the fall of 1976 through the first half of 1981.

Such is the blessing – and the curse – of writing. To write is to remember, and sometimes, even amidst pleasant memories, it is to suddenly and unexpectedly recall painful, hitherto-suppressed details: in this case all the reasons why I have no fond memories of the The Federal Way News, none whatsoever. It was there I was paid the lowest wages of my career and evaluated not for the quality of my work but for whether I met a weekly word-quota and whether my personality meshed with the personalities of the other (disgruntled) occupants of the editorial hive, which mostly it didn't, not the least because I cannot respect people who flee from their own intellectual potential or cringe in terror and/or rat you out to management if you so much as whisper the word “union.” At first – remembering all this wretchedness here and now 33 years after the fact – I was merely taken aback. But then the rest of the details rose to haunt me like vengeful ghosts, and I was overwhelmed by hurt and anger.

Unlike The JJ, where we were proud of what we did and for whom we did it and proud too we were represented by the Hudson County Newspaper Guild AFL/CIO, The FWN was a journalistic sweatshop and was infamous as such throughout Washington state and maybe the entire Pacific Northwest. You never knew whether you were meeting the word-quota because it was deliberately kept secret – a sadistic albeit diabolically effective means of ensuring the subjugation of the staff. But that wasn't its only deficiency. As I was warned over drinks one night by a friendly editor at The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, FWN had such a bad reputation for suppressing stories to placate advertisers, even if you won a Pulitzer there, you probably wouldn't get any credit for it because of where you'd been working. “You wanna get back in the game,” he said, “you gotta get out of Federal Way and onto a real newspaper first.”

I wrote some significant and award-winning stories at FWN – exposés that changed local policies, won me a place on Gov. Dixy Lee Ray's enemies list and in one instance beat a sneaky Christian effort to close gay and singles bars – but all that really mattered to the bosses was whether the text was long enough to fill spaces between the advertisements. Not only did my writing suffer a ruinous lack of discipline resulting from FWN's operational shibboleth of longer is (always) better; my mental health was wounded too. Vicious, relentless bullying by the psychological thug who was FWN's glaringly talentless editor for most of my five years there was the most painfully wrenching workplace experience of my entire life.

Though I would not let myself admit it until now, his constant derision and belittlement had weakened me to the point I was unable to muster the emotional strength necessary to find a better job, much less return to the East Coast where I belonged. His undeserved but relentless antagonism was also, because of my own history, an especially wounding form of betrayal. Bullied and abused as a child, I had turned to journalism as a sanctuary, a realm wherein I could be myself and  demonstrate my true strengths without fear of ridicule or assault, and so it had been on every publication for which I had worked in New York City, New Jersey, Michigan and even during most of the years I worked in the South. But my experience at FWN soon became a nightmare, and a source of nightmares, and so it remained until the editor was fired.

Eventually, maybe a year later at the beginning of the downsizing that preceded the paper's bankruptcy, I got the boot too. At least I was laid off rather than fired, which meant I could collect unemployment compensation.

As for my alleged colleagues, they were obviously glad to see me leave. None attended my going-away party, a small gathering hosted by a few non-newspaper people, mostly cops who had come to know me as the one local reporter they could trust to get the facts right and never burn a clandestine source. Despite the nagging uncertainties of joblessness amidst the recession Reagan and his cronies imposed to begin the reduction of everybody's wages, I cashed my last FWN paycheck with feelings of joy I imagine are akin to those of a man newly freed from a hard-time prison. But by then it was too late for any rapid recovery; so damaged was I, it took a season as engineer/deckhand on the Caroline, a 96-foot salmon-seiner out of Bellingham's Squalicum Harbor, to even begin to rebuild my self-confidence, for which my eternal gratitude to Skipper Andy Zanchi.

Indeed this is the first time I have been able to write of my circumstances at The Federal Way News. In fact it is the first time I have even spoken of these circumstances save in denials voiced to my long-ago lover who (though she was two decades my junior), was nevertheless perceptive enough to recognize in me the symptoms of a victimization I could not bear to admit to myself. Perhaps my inability to confront the associated issues was one of the underlying reasons we broke apart. In any case she was a notably kind young woman who unintentionally took my heart with her when she left. But perhaps some good came out of those dismal FWN years too; perhaps that's why I'm yet so sensitive to the betrayals now routinely inflicted on us by politicians, bureaucrats and alleged advocates.

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(Note: The Federal Way News for which I worked from 1976 through 1981 no longer exists. Originally a weekly shopper, its management had intended to make it a daily newspaper – the promise that [foolishly] diverted me from a ticket-in-my-pocket return to New York City. Though the paper subsequently achieved thrice-weekly publication and at one point seemed sure to go daily – the pie-in-the-sky by which I rationalized enduring the editor's psychological brutality – FWN nevertheless went bankrupt during the 1980s. It was then bought by The Seattle Times and shut down. The present Federal Way News, a weekly, has no organizational connection to the former publication by the same name.)

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“Our Movement Must Desegregate, or We'll Lose”  Carl Gibson of Reader Supported News fumbles for euphemisms to enable his otherwise accurate reporting of how Ayn-Rand-minded Emily's List “feminists” betrayed Rush-Limbaugh-target Sandra Fluke and how her betrayal is a teachable moment. I sharply criticize the opacity of Gibson's language: “his chosen words are clearly intended to avoid the implicitly Marxist terms 'ideological solidarity' and 'ideological discipline' – both of which are necessities the USian Left self-destructively rejects.”  Then I commend his insight – and refute a comment-poster's absurd claim the Democratic Party might foster such solidarity and discipline. “The Democrats,” I explain, “who maliciously conceal their fascist zealotry beneath progressive slogans – are the primary deceiver in USian politics. By contrast, the Republicans have been a vessel of USian fascism since the 1920s and, now as then, make no secret of it. Thus the de facto one-party rule that defines USian governance...(Thus too) Emily's List's endorsement of 'fiscal conservatism' – another euphemism for economic savagery – is typical of the Ayn Rand feminism spawned by capitalist co-optation of the USian feminist movement. As the loss of jobs and income that subjugates the USian 99 Percent, women are denied reproductive freedom by the loss of health insurance, a fact deliberately ignored by Emily's List and the Democrats in general. Nor – despite Big Lies to the contrary – does Obamacare provide a 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 tacit approval of capitalist malevolence.”

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“The Empowerment Elite Claims Feminism” Jessica Valenti, the founder of the compellingly radical website Feministing, exposes a new effort to neutralize feminism. I reply that TEDWomen, the target of Valenti's reporting,  is undoubtedly (yet another) effort by the One Percent – the diabolical cunning of which we underestimate at our own peril – to co-opt the one radical movement that, despite all the odds against it, has nevertheless forced (some) amelioration on the ever-more-openly savage Ayn Rand capitalism that governs the United States. In this context, the lily-white, bourgeois nature of TED and TEDWomen should surprise no one: it is merely a reflection of the ethnicity of the USian Ruling Class and the bigotry therein...“As to TED's taboo on discussing reproductive freedom, this is a strong indication the organization is a clandestine collaborator with the forces of Christian theocracy -- the most obscenely well-funded, relentlessly fanatical subversives in USian history. (Apropos which, note the secret collaboration between Hillary Clinton and Sam Brownback, exposed by Jeff Sharlet in The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, [Harper: 2008], pgs. 272-277.)”

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“Is Hillary Clinton a Neocon-Lite?” Robert Parry of Consortium News lays bear some ugly truths that suggest the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee is no more a “change we can believe in” than President Obama was. I point out she's “infinitely worse than 'neocon-light' or even neocon-heavy,” again citing Sharlet's report she's a clandestine theocrat, secretly collaborating with Brownback and others of his ilk to impose biblical law on the United States. Her specialty, says Sharlet, is deceptive legislation “dedicated less to overturning the wall between church and state than to tunnelling beneath it.” The same strategy of stealthy oppression is enabling the Roman Catholic Church to ban birth control, abortion and end-of-life choices by buying up U.S. health care facilities,  already a crisis in Washington state.

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“Quit Talking About Equal Pay and Do Something”  Elizabeth Schulte of Socialist Worker explores how President Obama talks progressive change but then does nothing to make it happen and often actually sabotages the effort. She speculates the same presidential tactic will betray the struggle to close the wage gap that allows women only 77 cents for every dollar earned by men. In the associated comment thread I note this sort of treachery is in fact the president's defining characteristic. Forever Janus-faced, he presents himself as Obama the Orator, pledging “change we can believe in.” But then he invariably shifts to Barack the Betrayer – “his true imperial self” – and he allows no changes save those that define, advance and perpetuate capitalist governance. A subsequent comment by another poster prompts me to list seven ways Obama has done more harm than any other president in my lifetime, which began in 1940. 

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“Reagan's 'Liberal' Son Takes on Ted Cruz” Elias Isquith of Salon discuses another debate over Republican obstructionism. I say the purpose of all such debates is to normalize austerity – “a genteel euphemism for genocidal cutbacks by which the One Percent intend to kill off all of us they consider 'surplus workers' – that is, any of us (elderly, disabled, chronically unemployed) who are no longer exploitable for profit...The Republicans, I add, “are capitalism's trail-breakers, as in their proposed $40 billion cut in food stamps. The Democrats are capitalism's facilitators, as in the 'compromise' food-stamp cutback of $8.7 billion. It's rule by One Party of Two Names – the Capitalist Party – and we the people are the victims.

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“House Democrats Call for Discharge Petitions!” Thom Hartmann reports the House Democrats are planning a new ploy to move legislation obstructed by the Republicans. I respond: “What is obvious here --what makes me grin with glee -- is how mere mention of 'revolutionary socialism' (as by Councilwoman Kshama Sawant in Seattle) has terrified the Democratic Party into a  pretense of returning to New Deal values. That – and the fact it proves beyond argument socialism is anything but 'dead' or 'irrelevant' – is the real story behind these discharge petitions, though you'll never read it in so-called 'mainstream' (i.e., Ruling Class) media.” 

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“Distorting Russia: How the American media misrepresent Putin, Sochi and Ukraine”   Stephen F. Cohen reports via The Nation on the disinformation and outright lies USian “mainstream” (Ruling Class) media is disseminating about Russia. I suggest the real reason U.S. media is spewing anti-Russian propaganda is the fact the second largest political organization in today's Russia is the Communist Party. My comment then triggers a long series of exchanges on the comment thread, for which it's necessary to scroll way, way down. 

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“Will US Civil Liberties Survive the Occupy Trial?”  Chase Madar of the Guardian questions whether the USian homeland's ever-more-restricted freedom to peaceably assemble will survive the trial of an Occupy activist who was savaged by New York City cops. The resultant comment thread is taken over and hogged by a Christian apologist for fascism, but I try to bring it back to one of Madar's most vital points: that the USian incarceration rate now exceeds even those of the former Soviet Union and East Germany. I point out the only valid incarceration-rate comparison is between the Third Reich of Nazi Germany and the de facto Fourth Reich of the United States – and even then, including the Nazi concentration camps – Internet data suggests the USian rate is worse. Though my let's-get-back-on-topic post wins ten reader thumbs-up, my effort is to no avail: the Christian continues to demonstrate Christian love by shouting down everyone else. 

LB/16 February 2014

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Snowden's Disclosures Could Spark Real USian Solidarity

“Tea Partiers: You Should Be Here Too,” another of my Occupy Tacoma pictures, this one originally published by Reader Supported News. Pentax MX, 100mm f/2.8 SMCP-M, Fujicolor 800, exposure not recorded. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2011.

 
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(NOTE: Changes in the circumstances of my life – a welcome increase in activities unrelated to this blog – mandate I now make Sundays or early Monday mornings the time of my weekly posting. Please accept my apology for any resultant inconvenience.)

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EDWARD SNOWDEN'S GREAT GIFT to us, We the People of the United States, is the dawning realization our love for what used to be “our” country transcends the divisiveness that denies us the solidarity we need if we are to prevail against the One Percent. The Ruling Class is thus trembling, possibly as never before in my 73-year lifetime. Little by slow, more and more of us – even some of the most pampered politicians – are awakening to the personal dangers implicit in the hideous truth our government has been captured by a cabal of morally imbecilic plutocrats whose greed is infinite, whose potential for tyranny knows no limits and whose imperial ambitions have no earthly boundaries.

But it remains to be seen whether this fledgling coalition of patriots can thrive and mature. President Obama is already demonstrating his slithery skill at backstabbing  those who oppose his worse-than-Nixon despotism,  and far too many Democrats have abandoned their pretense of progressive values in nauseatingly hypocritical efforts to remain faithful to their leader and the total-surveillance police-state he has created. It is exactly as if they were fascists in some lockstep cult of personality, and Obama's title were führer rather than chief executive. 

Yet in this newly emergent, post-Snowden context, it seems there are nearly as many of us, myself among them, who would willingly sidestep our instinctive distrust of Ron Paul and even refrain from expressing our contempt for the Teabag faction, if only it would help form a united front for the restoration of constitutional governance. Such face-to-face, human-to-human political re-integration would probably be good medicine for us all. Though it would undoubtedly be revolutionary, it probably would not result in revolution per se, because it might go revolution one better and make it unnecessary. 

Nor is Snowden's protection by Russia without its own (obscure) pro-democracy precedent. It was Mother Russia, in the person of Tsar Alexander II with the might of the Russian Imperial Navy's Baltic and Far Eastern fleets, that saved the federal Union  by protecting our coasts from British, French and Confederate attack during the Civil War. (My profound thanks to my late father, Donald R. Bliss [1910-1971], more learned in history than anyone I have ever known, who when I was age 10 or 11 and in fifth grade studying the Civil War, revealed to me the long-suppressed facts of these nation-preserving events.) 

Could it be that, by granting Snowden temporary asylum, Vladimir Putin, Russian president and de facto Tsar, has given the restoration of USian constitutional democracy the international protection it needs to succeed? If this is indeed what obtains, if Putin thus empowers Snowden and his disclosures, the irony – and some would say the karmic or poetic justice – would be profound, establishing a subtle parallel between the events of 1861-1865 and 2013. Meanwhile, the Josef Goebbels clones of the corporate propaganda media not withstanding, Russia already helps the United States in a surprising number of ways, as reported by Juan Cole. 

Yes, the Russians are clearly acting in their own interests – but so was France in the events of 1775-1783. 

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Unfortunately the odds of forming a united front of patriots for the restoration of constitutional governance are considerably diminished by two large groups within the body politic. 

One of these is the growing cult of Christian theocrats, about which I sound the alarm as often as I can and usually in detail I hope is genuinely frightening. (If you're reading this via TypePad, click on “Archives,” then click on “Religion.” If you're on Blogger, it's more of a pain because you have to do it year by year: look under “Blog Archives,” click on a year, wait for for the search-engine blank to appear at the upper left corner of the page, then type in “theocracy” without quotation marks.) In any case, suffice it to say these “born again” followers of Jesus jeopardize us all. They are defined by their fanatical opposition to sexual freedom, female personhood, science, the primacy of Nature and anything remotely resembling political or economic democracy. They are as uncompromisingly hateful, particularly toward women, as any member of the Taliban.

The other obstacle to patriotic solidarity is the dominant majority within the USian Left, the demonstrably self-defeating, hopelessly white-bourgeois, Ayn-Rand-tainted arrogance of which continues to astound me, even though by now – having watched it destroy the Occupy Movement  – I should expect no better. Never mind its characteristic loathing of intellectuals, union members and blue-collar people, its ignorant rejection of class-struggle or any other formalized ideology or analysis, and its unthinking acceptance of Randite elitism long ago reduced it to nothing more than a pseudo-Left. Loud and petulant enough to shout down any attempt to re-form the genuine Left that was fatally weakened by the post-World-War-II purges  and slain by the class conflicts exacerbated by the Vietnam War,  its primary political contribution is sustainment of the angry divisiveness that protects the Ruling Class by discouraging solidarity amongst the 99 Percent. Thus, hiding its Randite instincts behind its progressive rhetoric, this pseudo-Left routinely wages vocal and sometimes violent warfare against loggers, commercial fishers, oilfield riggers, long-haul truck-drivers, mass transport workers  and anyone else whose job or lack thereof is deemed politically “incorrect,” which of course includes nearly all of us whose annual income damns us as “the poor.” Note how the prefatory article isolates us – the homeless, the elderly, the disabled, the minorities – the better to facilitate the genocide-by-abandonment  President “Slick Willie” Clinton peddled as welfare reform and the cutbacks in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid Barack the Betrayer continues to defiantly tout as a grand bargain.

Admittedly, my attitudes toward the pseudo-Left, which used to call itself the "New Left," are profoundly influenced by the late Jack Newfield. It's a tragedy his superb Village Voice reporting on the death of the New Deal coalition has apparently never been made available on-line. But it was through those stories of the late 1960s and early 1970s I acquired the tools to recognize the escalation of class warfare that, as I entered old age, would bring about the wholly dire half-fulfillment of my own father's oft-repeated prophecy: “the time will come when things in this country get so bad, the Red Army will be welcomed as an army of liberation.” Throughout the years after 1973 and everywhere in the nation, the costs of living had skyrocketed as wages stagnated or declined. But my editors demanded I remain silent. The closest I ever came to reporting what was really happening was a piece headlined “New York Creativity: An Uncertain Future.” Published in the August 1986 issue of Art Direction magazine – the last edition for which I myself was editor-in-chief – the report's boldface summary denounced “greedy landlords” for “jeopardizing the city's position on the cutting edge.” The text elaborated: “(T)he economics of New York living are becoming increasingly inhospitable...The situation in the photo district has become so critical that many established photographers have added their voices to a growing demand for commercial rent control...Village Voice writer Erika Munk predicted (three months earlier) that 'without a drastic change of direction, Manhattan will be finished as America's creative center'” – as in fact it has been.

But it is not just capitalist economics that killed the American Dream and overthrew the USian experiment in constitutional democracy. It was also the breathtaking stupidity of the pseudo-Left. As a press officer for an Office of Economic Opportunity program in 1971 – apart from the Army, the only government job I ever had – I remember all too well how the snooty condescension of the (white bourgeois) feminists doomed their efforts to organize welfare mothers, how the pampered collegians then damned all women on welfare as “hopelessly reactionary,” vowed to infiltrate the welfare bureaucracy and thereby make feminist consciousness-raising a mandatory prerequisite for receiving stipends and services. Of a kind with the draft-exempt academic elite who yet despise those of us who served in the Vietnam Era military, these sorority-house radicals soon joined with their male counterparts to foment the still-raging campaign for forcible civilian disarmament – the imposition of mandatory pacifism and compulsory victimhood that is one of the many forms of USian class warfare.

A decade later, the impending bankruptcy of a newspaper flung me jobless into the Reagan Recession and a hunt for employment that by 1982 had turned me into a commercial fisher – engineer/deckhand aboard a 96-foot purse seiner. Thus at age 42 a mostly benevolent fate allowed me to experience firsthand not only the quiet ecstasies and high-pucker-factor hazards of working at sea but the darker truths of USian blue-collar economics, realities about which I had hitherto only written from afar. One such sociological encounter, with a trust-funded student from Western Washington University's Huxley College of Environmental Studies, was particularly enlightening. The student, who could not see beyond the grease-stains on my engine-room jeans and therefore had no idea who or what I might be, presumptuously lectured me on the new paradigm of ecological economics: “you people,” he said, “are going to have to learn to live with less.” It was the same übermenschen mentality that in its most extreme form calls for spiking trees and threatening the lives and livelihoods of loggers – the sneering pomposity that, beginning in the Vietnam Era, has driven most  blue-collar men and women into the manipulative arms of the Republican Party.

Nevertheless I had thought the collapse of the Occupy Movement, which in large measure was the byproduct of college-age Caucasians who proudly label themselves as “progressives” but are as anti-intellectual as the late Sen. Joe McCarthy and as anti-union as the late Ayn Rand, had perhaps taught these pseudo-Leftists to at least partially muzzle their self-contradictory haughtiness. Not so, as Laura Gottesdiener demonstrated by implicitly dismissing all white victims of foreclosure as somehow magically immune to its heartbreaking, gut-wrenching horrors. “(T)he difficulties white America has faced during the foreclosure crisis,” she wrote, “don't compare with what Wall Street and the banks have inflicted, physically and psychologically, on African American neighborhoods.” In other words, despite the story's misleadingly inclusive headline (“Backyard Shock Doctrine: Wall Street's Destruction Comes Home”), Gottesdiener, herself Caucasian, says white folks just don't feel the pain.

As I (unpopularly) replied in the associated comment thread, “by defining foreclosure and eviction as a racial problem, she guarantees the indifference if not the overt hostility of the white majority – the approximately 75 percent of the USian Caucasians who are definitively racist.” Hence I feel she owes her readers a triple apology: to foreclosed, evicted and homeless whites for minimizing their misery; to foreclosed and evicted Blacks for marginalizing their sufferings by setting them apart from other class-war victims; and to the entire 99 Percent for re-inflaming the racial obstacles to solidarity.

To get a clearer picture of what Gottesdiener did wrong, it is useful to compare her above-linked prose with a new essay written by Chris Hedges.  Gottesdiener's research was seemingly detailed and in considerable depth, but she mis-assembled her facts into a lament for African Americans that simultaneously (and not very subtly) demonizes whites and thereby furthers the Ruling Class purpose of sustaining maximum 99 Percent divisiveness. Hedges meanwhile assembled similar and equally credible facts that, because of his reportorial thoughtfulness, does not minimize the significance of race but nevertheless becomes a lamentation for us all. Precisely because of its portrait of the universal suffering imposed by capitalism's transformation into Ayn Rand fascism, it furthers the evolution of 99 Percent solidarity.

Perhaps the difference between Gottesdiener on one hand and Hedges and myself on the other is a difference in backgrounds. Though Hedges is as famous as I am obscure, he is, as I am, a declared libertarian socialist, an unapologetic intellectual and a journalist of several decades' experience. Gottesdiener meanwhile labels herself a “freelance journalist” and declares herself “an organizer with Occupy Wall Street” – the latter a decidedly curious description, since I as an early activist in Occupy Tacoma know the entire Occupy Movement has been effectively dead since the spring of 2012. Moreover, since it was through Occupy I met some of the indescribably bitter adolescent children of white families who had been thrown out of work, foreclosed and evicted into homelessness – the kids themselves coalesced into an unspeakably angry subculture that will either form the core of a genuinely revolutionary movement or destroy itself in criminality – I am doubly perplexed by how she could be so dismissive of the associated trauma.

LB/4 August 2013

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