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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Life After Uselessness: the Old Man with an Old Rolleicord

Paper birch, Wright Park, May 2013. By its size and probable age, this magnificent tree was here long before the park was founded in 1886. To my eyes – though it's apparent only on maximum enlargement – the image is spoiled by slight camera motion. This was the result of being unable to use my medium-weight tripod, an otherwise-excellent all-metal Bogen from the early 1960s; I couldn't set it up on the steep slope from which I framed the image, hence resorted to hand holding despite considerable arthritic pain imposed by my position. For the re-shoot I'll use my heavy Tiltall, never mind how damn uncomfortable it is to lug around. Rolleicord III, Tmax100 in D-76, exposure  (after my Gossen Luna-Pro SBC went nuts and started reading 10 stops over), as suggested by the light meter in my head:  f/11 at 1/100th.  Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2013. (Click on image to view it full size.)

THE ONE COMPENSATION of being permanently blacklisted and therefore professionally dead is its freedom.

As those of you who regularly read this space already know, the ultimate legacy of the fire that in 1983 destroyed my life's work was a long and ruinous battle with clinical depression. The associated odium – the loathing with which USians view anyone afflicted by any sort of mental illness – effectively ended my journalism career. And even had it not, by the time I was fit to return to work, the nation's daily newspapers had been gobbled up by the media monopolists, whose first official acts invariably included imposing on hitherto independent editorial departments the exclusionary oppressiveness of Big-Business hiring protocols. In my day, to get a job on a newspaper you merely talked to the managing editor and showed samples of your work; most times you got an immediate and definitive answer. Now like any other corporate drone you have to go through a personnel office, which means trying to conceal even the slightest deviation from the Cleaver Family norm in order to lie your way past a succession of hostile, psychologically invasive gatekeepers who are also amongst the world's most skillful interrogators. Now too in newsrooms just as everywhere else in the corporate world, the only successful job supplicants, whether male or female, are modern versions of the archetypal Organization Man. This is how management ensures the lockstep obedience demanded of reporters and photographers who have been reduced to nothing more than stenographers for the One Percent, with even their most commonplace stories  deliberately crafted to reinforce the ideologies of Ayn Rand fascism. Moreover there is now also deliberate socioeconomic news-profiling; where reporters formerly lived by their so-called “noses for news” and stories rose and fell on the basis of the number of people to whom the information was significant, now news is defined only by its economic value, published only if it appeals to the upscale customer base demanded by the advertisers. That's why the opening of a new country club goes Page One, top-of-the-fold even as calculatedly murderous welfare and health-care cutbacks are relegated to the inside pages or, more likely, not covered at all. 

Those few journalists I know who still have jobs have repeatedly told me, always in furtive whispers, the resultant newsroom atmosphere is frightfully oppressive – so much so a Nazi time-machined from the offices of der Voelkischer Beobachter would in all probability assume the Axis had won – that Josef Goebbels and his descendants now rule the USian mass media as reichsführers of information. Given the Fourth Reich nature of the USian Global Empire, it's at least arguable they do. 

The overall Big Business goal, imposition of an entirely new paradigm of USian journalism, also of course demanded a sweeping change in the sociology of the workforce. Thus in an occupation once as famous for the blue-collar and/or déclassé origins of its editorial workers as it was for its iconoclasts and cynics, now the only allowable caste is the college elite, the only permissible attitude is unquestioning optimism and the only acceptable personality is therefore that of the abject conformist. In other words, to be hired on a newspaper today, you've got to pass muster either as a compliant, jock-worshiping frat boy or a Barbie-doll-minded sorority girl, complete with the characteristic bigotry produced by psychological self-conflation with the One Percent – or as we socialists say, “identification with the oppressor.” In this new, zero-tolerance editorial domain, which with its anti-union bias and social-club personality requirements is as cliquish and bully-dominated as any 1950s high school, I might have lied my way past the outermost gatekeepers, but eventually a credit-check or some other invasion of my privacy would have revealed the terminal blemish of post-fire traumatic stress disorder. By then though I'd probably already have been rejected as an unwanted misfit merely because some “human resources” inquisitor would have spotted the permanent scars of my (let us say) “challenging” childhood. Hence from the first time I heard the words “personnel office” in a sentence about journalistic employment, I suspected my days in the Working Press were numbered, and once “clinical depression,” was added to the paragraph, I knew life as I had known it was ended forever, though for a while I was still sometimes able to get part-time work. Now, having publicly declared myself not only a Goddess-worshiping pagan but an eco-socialist (and a Marx/Engels-influenced eco-socialist at that), there is not even the possibility of freelancing – not that my prospects would be much different given the genocidal, starve-all-the-surplus-workers reality of the post-American-Dream economy, particularly its now-endemic exclusion of elders, no doubt because we (dangerously, subversively) remember when “worker” was not necessarily synonymous with “slave.” 

A former colleague of mine told me several years ago one of the big reasons he went into journalism was he loved the camaraderie, the we-don't-take-shit-from-anybody esprit de corps of the old-time newsroom. Though my own primary attraction to journalism was a subset of class-consciousness – recognition it was the only avenue by which a non-aristocrat could sometimes foster genuinely progressive change – I too was drawn by the quality my colleague cited. It was an almost-military solidarity that prevailed even on non-union papers, probably because – whether a paper was Guild or not – the old-time editors were almost always promoted from within the ranks. The result was typically a unique bond uniting reporters and photographers with the editors who supervised us – precisely why the practice is now forbidden under the CEO-as-god style of USian Big Business management and Ayn Rand capitalism – aka fascism – in general. “But I didn't want to work in a place like an insurance office,” my one-time colleague lamented, explaining how, having witnessed his father's executive-level struggles in sales and administration, he desperately wanted to avoid all the back-stabbing and brown-nosing and mutual out-ratting that characterizes the internal dynamics of USian business. But now under the corporations that's exactly what newsrooms have become – “not just any old insurance office, but an insurance office from hell.” The last time we spoke, in the mid-1990s, he had come to despise the job he once loved, and now only hoped he could keep it another decade until retirement. Whether he succeeded or not I cannot say: we have lost touch with one another. And I am enough persona non gratia in today's newsrooms, I dare not inquire, lest it jeopardize the respondent. 

Hence the compensation I referenced in my lead – the good part I celebrate every day – is the blessed freedom that comes from the fact I no longer have to cope with the new but at the same time horribly familiar fear that now permeates todays newsrooms. For me, it was the huge anxiety potential employers might find out who and what, from their unforgiving perspective, I really am: not just repugnant for having been (in their merciless judgment) so weak and worthless as to have “chosen” (according to an aristocratic half-brother's denunciation) to be felled by depression; but also (and under today's corporate protocols at least equally damning), the fact I am (again from the executive vantage point) a genuine deviant, the spawn of a childhood forever warped by truly savage familial dysfunction. The fear that was mine in these recent years was thus, perhaps ironically, the age-extended version of the fear that ruled my childhood, the constant, almost bottomless terror my school-mates would discover my familial circumstances and banish me from their tribe – as they invariably did, a couple of times nearly fatally. But now I am free of all that. And age has liberated me also from the parallel necessity to hide myself from the parents of lovers and wives and friends. Now I can say things I never before dared say in print – witness this blog – and do things I would never have allowed myself the time or guilt-free pleasure to do, as for example experiment with my old Rolleicord, perhaps even reanimate it as my primary camera. Indeed it is a wonderful tool. As long as I limit myself to black-and-white film, I can develop it in my own bathroom, then have the imagery digitized by Robi's Camera in Lakewood, three 12-exposure rolls at a time, for $25.06, tax included. It is a sum I can afford probably only once every two or three months, and then only if I have no unforeseen additional expenses, but it is maybe the most worthwhile expenditure in my entire budget. Meanwhile though I am intensely curious as to how this new discipline might change what I see and how I see it, what the images will be, what I will learn about my environment and myself and above all else what the Muse might deign to show me. 

A couple of weeks ago, when I first acknowledged my fondness for twin-lens reflexes, the need for brevity and the avoidance of distractions from the story's main thread prompted me to omit four relevant facts about my infatuation. The first and most important of these is I regard a TLR with its its 2¼-inch square format as an impoverished person's view camera – not the machine I've (secretly) wanted ever since I realized the Pacific Northwest had become my permanent home, but close enough in terms of 120 roll-film's much bigger negative size, and (particularly given how crippled I'm becoming), a damn sight more portable than even the smallest view cameras, which utilize the 4x5-inch sheet-film format. The second fact explains why despite my photojournalistic bias I'm drawn to larger formats: the truth is I am fascinated by their heightened ability to explore textures, as in the image above, which I will probably eventually use in a sandwich, though it seems to me it could also stand alone, a celebration of the textures I see as yet another dimension of the vast choreography of being that is Nature. The third fact is the xenophobic, sometimes violently enforced taboo on street photography that prevails in these parts often makes the TLR a better carrying camera than even the smallest 35mm or digital machine. This is because a TLR is so baroque, so archaic, there is seldom even a temptation to try for decisive-moment reportage, the recent nastiness in Wright Park not withstanding. (Someday, just as the photographic equivalent of an uplifted social finger, I probably will take pictures of the kids playing in the Sprayground, and if I do, I'll publish them here – if only to vex the censorious parents. But I'd do it fast, in 35mm with glass no shorter than 100mm, and I'd be gone before anyone could react.) Which brings us to my fourth and final TLR fact, a pure act of confession: that I am reluctant to admit the depth of my fondness for TLRs because of my contrary and equally deep loathing for the local Ansel Adams cult, which in unacknowledged but nevertheless archetypal Ayn Rand fascist malevolence damns all human-condition photography as “politicization of art,” hence a waste of film, chemicals and paper. Indeed I have clashed with the cult's sneering Zone System disciples almost since the day of my arrival here in 1970, when one of their number haughtily informed me I should have “pre-visualized” and “carefully metered” a picture I had shot in Washington D.C. during the anti-Nixon, anti-Southeast-Asian-War demonstrations immediately after the massacres at Kent State University and Jackson State College. “Maybe so,” I said to the Adams Zone sycophant, “but it's a bit difficult getting an accurate light reading off a rapidly dissipating cloud of pepper gas.” 

LB/30 May 2013 

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On the Conflict between Photography and Writing

One of my innumerable grab-shots of Adrienne in our East 5th Street apartment, summer 1967. The negative, part of the film salvaged from the rubble a year after the 1983 fire, was wormed and pinholed by water damage, but Gimp photo software's combination of spotting, contrast adjustment and sepia toning enabled me to heal most of those wounds. I don't remember the lens-and-camera combination, but it was most likely one of my VT Canons, probably at 1/30th of a second with the 35mm f/2 screw-mount Summicron wide open; the light was late afternoon sun reflected into the windows from the backs of buildings on First Avenue. The film was Tri-X, given the year, no doubt in Diafine at 1200. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2013.

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THOUGH I WOULD realize it only now, two days before my 73rd birthday – and my epiphany the result of watching a young single mother cuddle her tiny infant daughter on a crowded bus as I cursed myself for not having a camera with which to record this potent visual haiku of universal femaleness – the defining conflict of my adult life has always been a who-am-I struggle between the two hemispheres of my brain.

 

Sometimes my right brain prevails, as in my passion for the poetry-as-a-verb Zen of making photographs, or in how I relish the exquisite sensuality of seeing, or in my fondness for visual art in general and for music of nearly any unhackneyed form, or in my compulsion toward the agnostic but nevertheless faithfully pagan spirituality summarized in the phrase She Who (maybe) Is, and – perhaps most of all – in my powerfully emotional, sometimes desperate need for the sanctity and sanity of true country, for any modern equivalent of northern Lower Michigan's pre-electrification Au Sable region, specifically the South Branch, the river and the adjacent woods east of where, in the time of which I speak, 1944 through 1955, the two-lane M72 blacktop turned abruptly to gravel. Maybe two miles later the road crossed Smith Bridge. North – downstream – was the blessed realm of troutly water and sweet-fern scented air that was the only sanctuary my disjointed childhood ever allowed.

 

At other times my left brain dominates, as in my equally desperate need to live in The City, New York, not so much where I was born, Brooklyn,  but in the borough of Manhattan, the one place my intellect has ever been accepted and honestly critiqued and thus encouraged, nurtured, expanded, not only by the bohemian women who were my friends and/or lovers or by the bohemian men who were my friends and colleagues but even by a few well-placed representatives of the powers that be. It is my left brain from which I write, a mode of expression that never rises above intellectual exercise because it is always dragged down to (mere) rationality by the imperative but nevertheless cripplingly self-conscious battle against dyslexia thrust on me by bad genes. Formerly, during my years as an investigative reporter, it was my left brain at work in the always calculated, often clandestine process of exposing outrage or scandal, or in far more apparently benign reportorial quests that included extensive research into the psychological and psychic wellsprings of the old Counterculture – the forever lost text that supplemented the also-lost thousands of frames of Tri-X and High Speed Ektachrome “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer” – or the never-named book-in-progress about the anomalous archaeological evidence of a prehistoric Minoan/proto-Celtic/North African presence in what is now the United States, data that abounds throughout North America including here in the Pacific Northwest, but is nevertheless aggressively suppressed by USian scholars.

 

Ultimately my struggle had but two focal points. One was whether would I live my life amidst the intellectual safety and comfort of Manhattan (which, exactly as James Baldwin labeled it in 1962, truly was Another Country), or whether, in the name of my spirit quest and its need for wilderness, I would instead endure the manifest cruelties and sometimes-wrenching loneliness that define the intellectual barrens of The Lands Beyond the Hudson. The other was figuring out who I am: photographer or writer.

 

For a long while, it was easier for me to label myself a writer. For one thing it was cheaper to be a writer – I needed no cameras, which were always prohibitively expensive, in fact I required nothing more than a typewriter, this lack of mandatory prerequisite expenditures a major consideration, as there was never a time in my life I was not financially poor, often desperately so. For another, writing was a field in which it was infinitely easier to find work: even in the 1950s, ours was a nation so illiterate, the basic skills of grammar were alien to the vast USian majority; the educational system was already hell-bent on hammering the nation's children into submissive, reflexively conformist drones, which among other atrocities demanded the deliberate suppression of natural human curiosity. But the very wounding inflicted on me by my savagely dysfunctional family bred in me the cynicism and determination that enabled me to escape the wounds of ignorance and apathy that dumbed down the masses. The result – or so it seemed to prospective employers – left me ideally qualified to be a reporter. Hence I had my first daily newspaper job at age 16: half a copy-boy, half a stringer writing stories for the sports department and the Sunday youth section. It was November 1956. I turned 17 the following March. Within two months, May 1957, I had landed a summer job as full-time sportswriter.

 

Meanwhile I instinctively began to downplay my skill with a camera: the linear/logical abstraction required of the writer is the diametrical opposite of the Zen immediacy demanded of the photographer, which as I had already learned is a ruinously crippling conflict when one is trying to adequately cover a story. To succeed as a reporter is to fail as a photographer; to succeed as a photographer is to fail as a reporter; to attempt both simultaneously is usually to fail at both. Nevertheless I had begun to earn a reputation as a competent photographer too. My father had given me my first camera, a Kodak Brownie Reflex, as a 12th birthday present, then a fully adjustable f-stop/shutter-speed Polaroid on my 14th birthday and an Agfa Press Miniature two years after that. It was with the two latter machines I shot most of the unposed pictures for my 1957-58 high school yearbook and made some action pictures that caught the attention of the Knoxville Track Club. But my early searches for jobs in professional photography invariably failed; it had no common standards, no equivalents of grammatical rules, hence was mainly a game of personalities, a contest I always lost. Writing, I convinced myself, was therefore my primary medium, never mind the difficulties – transposed letters, misspelled words, awkward sentences, mis-remembered names – inflicted by dyslexia. When my editors assured me I was a “damn good reporter,” that “everybody makes mistakes on deadline,” my subconscious told me I was nothing but a phony, that my writing ability, crippled as it was (and is) by dyslexia, was nothing more than a sham, perhaps even a scam.

 

That proverbial chicken, actually a vulture, came home to roost in a 1965 conversation with a woman named Roberta Tyson, an editor at Viking Press who was then married to my friend Chris Rawlings. Tyson – a southerner, she had adopted the curious preference of so many southern women for being called by their last names – had been a friend of mine for about a year before I met Chris, and our friendship continued during and after their marriage. In a lengthy discussion with Tyson about the angst suffered by great writers, I thought of my own then-unspoken visual-versus-verbal dilemma and said yes, I understood, but Tyson suddenly bristled and said “no you do not,” adding that I had no basis for understanding such anxieties because I myself was nothing more than a mediocre writer. I was a good reporter, she said, even (given my eye for pivotal facts), an exceptionally skilled reporter, but I was no “great writer” under any circumstances, nor would I ever be. Tyson's words were deeply hurtful, but they were also rewardingly honest and profoundly clarifying, a poignant example of how one of the most important functions of a competent editor is articulation of a writer's – or, yes, a photographer's – subconscious.

 

Reason thus suggested I should content myself with being “just a journalist” and nothing more. My left brain, it seemed, had won.

 

But that is of course a lie, just as my presentation of this entire clash as the triumph of one hemisphere over the other is also a lie, both lies forced upon me by the inability of language to deal with the very ambiguity that is the underlying theme of so many of my photographs. Beyond the confusion and contradictions and disclaimers and acts of denial, even beyond the associated disasters like the ruinous fire of 1983 or the termination of my journalistic career by the odium of the subsequent clinical depression, it was invariably my right brain, paradoxically and by the sublime process of knowing via what we label “gut feelings” or “intuition,” that provided the clues and directional guidance to unriddle whatever riddles I dared take on. In this sense my right brain always manages to win the struggle – though in another far more important sense it is less a victory than a rapprochement, an abandonment of differences in the name of cooperation, yet it took that young mother on the bus to bring this reality into sharp focus. As I emailed a friend after I returned home that day: “Just had, thanks to Pierce Transit and a rather fetching young mother with a truly beautiful infant, a stunning epiphany about the difference between thinking as a photographer (the resurrection of instinct the scene on the bus demanded) and thinking like a writer (as the lack of a camera on the bus forced me to do). Bottom line, the visual is concrete, real, immediate, sensual, impassioned; the verbal is abstract, a (mere) construct, second-hand, devoid of physicality, definitively dispassionate. In that instant I perhaps understood more about myself and my own internal conflicts than in any comparable moment ever.  Let's hope the Muse grants me the clarity to write about it for OAN.”

 

So now two days before my 73rd birthday I think about my writing that won me a dozen local journalistic awards and commendations but ultimately as Tyson implicitly predicted went nowhere and my now-mostly lost-in-the-fire pictures for which the publication credits start with Paris-Match and Newsweek yet were still insufficient to rescue me from poverty. I think of what Tyson said to me in 1965 and what she said to me in 1969 about my photographs – that they were “so far out,” so cutting edge, they were “beyond (her) ability to describe.” I think of the discontents that nagged me as a reporter and the deep almost physical gratification that was mine as the social documentarian for New York's Beth Israel Hospital or as the founding photographer of The Seattle Sun and I think of all the people who helped me learn photography and/or critiqued my pictures and/or were emotionally supportive of my camera work but remained mostly politely silent about my words – my father and my Aunt Alecia and Jim Newby and Karen Rowland and Mary Payne and Chris Rawlings and John Shuttleworth and Emilio Murillo and Joan Condolino and Grace Strub and Cicely Nichols and Stephanie Wilson and Kathryn Habbestad and Dick Clever and Melinda Mohn and Tawna Pickens and Rebecca Valrejean and Jim and Mary Plante and Melanie St. Ours and of course Adrienne and so many more to whom I owe debts of gratitude – and I think of how back trouble and arthritis had finally harried me into abandoning the camera (hence the need for “resurrection of instinct”), but mostly now as I write this I think of the young woman with her baby on the bus who by their presence alone at last forced me to unequivocally answer the lifelong question: yes, damnit, I really am a photographer – that before anything else.

 

I thought I had given up photography nearly a year ago but for some strange reason – fate, astrology, the proximity of the Muse – I saw and continue to see the woman on the bus with her infant as I would have seen them had I been photographing them. I see the visual geometry of their forms in concert with the implicitly softened form of their new perambulator, its bulk too filled with baby-care items to be folded under a bus seat, all this in the context of the hard-edged delineations provided by the bus itself. I see the ancient choreography of mother and child. I who think almost exclusively in images of black and white see the associated colors of this scene with an intensity that is almost breathtaking. Furious with myself for not having a camera – never mind I had forsworn photography, never mind I was grocery shopping and could hardly carry a camera in the ancient olive-drab canvas 1942-issue ski-trooper rucksack I use to lug food from supermarket to apartment – I try to describe the mother and her child in words, but nothing, not then, not now, conveys the iconic and mysteriously comforting power of their presence. The mother is paradoxically compelling but scarcely notable. As many young women do, she wears her hair longish, shoulder-length; she has dyed it a bright color – red, nearly crimson – and she dresses to match: a revealingly low-cut purple blouse, form-fitting red skirt, purple leotard, silver and white tennis shoes with a red and purple motif, all this topped by a red and purple headband. Her eyebrows and eyelashes say she was originally a brunette. Something in her face, perhaps a hint of sullenness and defiance, gives me the sense she might be what my 1950s teen self would have joyfully recognized as a fellow “hood.” She has lost nearly all her pregnancy fat, is attractive, a bit busty but nevertheless well proportioned, already tanned enough to suggest time under ultraviolet lamps or a recent trip to some warmer climate. Her daughter is tiny, no more than three months old – as another passenger said, “hardly bigger than a pekingese pup.” The soft yellow blanket that wraps the baby girl is spotlessly clean, and when the infant awakens, we all see she is truly beautiful – and beautifully content. As the bus rumbles its herky-jerky passage toward my destination, this transit-system Madonna-and-child are softly highlighted through the windows by alternating bands of over-building sunshine, wan with late afternoon Pacific Northwest latitude and its thin but seasonally omnipresent clouds, first illuminating the mother's face, then the infant's, repeatedly, as if Gaia or the Sky Gods could not decide who was to be haloed. I cannot forget this strangely dappled light nor how the mother and her daughter glowed in its embrace, how they moved, how by merely being there they soothed a busload of weary and potentially antagonistic strangers.

 

Hence my new resolution for whatever remains of this old lifetime: I will do as I did in most of the years after my 1965 conversation with Tyson and before the clinical depression that followed the 1983 fire; to the best of my ability, I will again carry a camera everywhere I go, the physical discomfort be damned. Perhaps I will thus fulfill the initial promise of this blog, to be – above all else – about photography. In any case I will strive once more to sooth the craving implicit in what my parents always said was the first word I ever spoke, “light,” as if the rest of the sentence were to be the summation of all my yearnings: “Light. Give me light...so that I may truly know completion.”

 

LB/28 March 2013

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Senate Measure Would Nullify Bill of Rights, Give Military National Police Powers; Washington State Pioneers Vicious New Tactic in Welfare Bureaucrats' War on Poor

Avowedly non-violent demonstrators such as these -- men and women willing to brave heavy winter rain to picket at the doorway of the building housing U.S. Senator Patty Murray's office in Tacoma --  are frightening the capitalist Ruling Class into desperate measures. Not only do the plutocrats regard such activism as alarming; they also fear disclosures, as on the placard above, of the intimate connection between capitalism and Nazism -- how the latter is merely the logical outgrowth of the former. Thus the oppressive anti-Bill of Rights proposal under contemplation by the Senate (see below) is a predictable Ruling Class response to the nation's rising tide of Working Class anger. (This is another of the 72 pictures I made during the 16 November picketing: FujiFilm 800, 135mm F/2.5 Takumar, Pentax K-1000. Click image  to see it full size.) Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2011. 

*****

Emergency Action: Help Stop Congress from Nullifying Bill of Rights

U.S. SENATORS OF both parties are secretly ramrodding a bill through Congress that would give the military the functions of a national police force and allow for the indefinite detention of US citizens – apparently the newest Ruling Class response to the revolutionary impulses incipient in Occupy Wall Street and its local movements nationwide. 

According to an emergency call for action issued by the American Civil Liberties Union, the Senate will vote Monday or Tuesday on a bill redirecting U.S. military resources to acts of aggression against American citizens and other civilians far from any battlefield - including people in the United States itself.

“Senators need to hear from you,” says the ACLU letter, “on whether you think your front yard is part of a 'battlefield' and if any president can send the military anywhere in the world to imprison civilians without charge or trial...The power is so broad that even US citizens could be swept up by the military and the military could be used far from any battlefield, even within the United States itself.” (Please note the first sentence of this paragraph includes an active link to enable readers to contact their senators via the ACLU website.)

The provisions for worldwide indefinite detention without charge or trial are included in S. 1867, the National Defense Authorization Act bill, which will be on the Senate floor on Monday.

Exemplifying the Big Lie of U.S. democracy – how the Democrats and Republicans are actually united in a single party sworn to defend Ruling Class interests – the bill was drafted in secret by Sens. Carl Levin (D-MI) and John McCain (R-AZ) and approved in a closed-door committee meeting.

Even Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), expressed deep concerns about the NDAA detention provisions during a recent Republican debate, says the ACLU document.

DISCLOSURE: Though a member of the ACLU for a substantial part of my adult life, I permanently canceled my membership after the organization wantonly betrayed not just the U.S. Constitution but all underlying principles of representative democracy by its judicial support for the Citizens United decision, the Supreme Court verdict that gave the capitalist Ruling Class unlimited financial power to dictate U.S. political affairs. The court's decision is rightfully damned as the death of the American Experiment in governance. ACLU's amicus curiae brief endorsing the Citizens United lawsuit (and thus the court's decision) proves beyond argument the group is merely another Ruling Class front, an organizational Father Gapon that functions ultimately to vent the anger of the 99 Percent, thereby obstructing the emergence of proletarian consciousness. Nevertheless ACLU's emergency-action bulletins are of some use, particularly to circumvent the ever-more-aggressive censorship of Ruling Class media. Hence the link above: please use it. 

*****

Wrongful Cutoffs: Welfare Bureaucrats' Newest Tactic in War on Poor

I RECENTLY LEARNED via U.S. mail the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services has striped me of $130.70 per month in Medicare stipends. Though these are federal funds, they are overseen by state bureaucrats, malevolent drones who falsely charge I refused to comply with their 15 November deadline for eligibility recertification.

Nor am I alone. Thousands – more likely tens of thousands – of elderly, disabled and otherwise chronically impoverished people are receiving the same notices: anguish-generating paper announcing death-dealing cutbacks based on the same bogus charges of noncompliance.

Never mind I mailed the bureaucrats their seven pages of mandatory paperwork on 31 October, DSHS has now reduced my monthly Social Security retirement-pension from a barely survivable $1161 to an impossible $1030.30, the cuts effective the last day of this month.

The terror this inflicts is unimaginable to anyone who has not experienced it.

Nor have I any alternatives. Thanks entirely to the tyrannosauric nature of Bush/Obama capitalism, Social Security has been my sole source of money since early 2009, when I suffered an income loss of nearly 70 percent inflicted by the permanent demise of the journalism market.

And now the welfare bureaucrats have slashed my income another 11 percent – just enough to condemn me to death. I probably won't die immediately – though the associated anxiety has already triggered two episodes of atrial fibrillation – but eventually the malicious denial of life-sustaining medical stipends will prove as deadly as Elizabeth Bathory's knife, whether I am killed by the resultant obstruction of access to clinical care, or by the cutoff of affordable prescription drugs, or by both atrocities combined.

In any case – whether for me or untold thousands of other victims – it is the socioeconomic equivalent of being cast adrift on a terminally-shrinking iceberg.

The best guess is our massive ouster from life-sustaining programs is yet another scheme by the self-serving welfare bureaucrats to save millions of dollars and thus preserve their jobs – in this instance by temporarily dumping us from the assistance rolls, then restoring the stipends to those of us who manage to survive the (deliberately) inflicted fear and other associated stresses long enough to file formal appeals.

I can't say I'm surprised; the self-protective malice of the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services – its policy of saving its jobs by savaging its victims – is already legendary. DSHS is at least as notorious for such measures as any other welfare bureaucracy in the United States.

In this context note again the obscenity of how all these bureaucrats feathered their own nests between 1970 and 1990. They increased administrative costs by 5,390 percent even as they slashed stipends and services for desperately impoverished women, children and men – especially men – by 66 percent.

And no, that 5,390 percent is not a typo. It's proven by The Statistical Abstract of the United States, the final word on the nation's socioeconomic and demographic data.

Here's another telling figure from Statistical Abstract. In 1970, 87.7 percent of the nation's federal and state welfare expenditures went to stipends and services for poor people, while the remainder, 12.3 percent, paid administrative expenses. By 1990, aid to the poor had been downsized to 24.5 percent of the total, with the remaining 75.5 percent going to the bureaucrats, most of it for radically expanded payrolls.

A longtime friend – and “friend” in my lexicon has a very specific meaning, not a casual synonym for an “acquaintance” but instead the mental and spiritual equivalent of a brother or sister – tells me I'm being too harsh on the bureaucrats, that they are after all part of the Working Class, the oppressed proletariat, the 99 Percent. He thus urges me to refocus my anger on the One Percent, the capitalist aristocracy the bureaucrats serve so faithfully.

He is usually correct in such matters, often enough he functions as my closest advisor in matters of conscience.

But the forgiving approach he urges – absolutely proper in every other socioeconomic context I can imagine – does not apply to the U.S. welfare bureaucracy.

Look again at the above statistics: the 20-year period from 1970 through 1990 was mostly one of relative abundance for government programs. Never during that period were the welfare bureaucrats operating in accordance with today's Ruling Class mandate to exterminate all non-profitable peoples by denying us life-sustaining food, shelter, medical care and prescription drugs.

Instead the bureaucrats imposed their transformation of the welfare system purely on their own initiative. Again note the 66 percent reduction in stipends, the 5,390 percent increase in administrative costs and above all else the decades of its occurrence.

For this reason I take the U.S. welfare bureaucracy is the ultimate example of how the entire Working Class has been conditioned to accept the core ethos of capitalism: infinite greed redefined as ultimate virtue (and thus the implicit rejection of every code of morality or ethics humanity ever uttered).

As I have written before – and it cannot be said too many times – it is this conditioning that challenges us whenever, in today's struggles, we encounter the me-first/fuck-you values of the Ruling Class amongst Working Class people who – at least in their subconscious minds – should know better.

But the welfare bureaucrats have no such excuse. Since the late 1970s, the primary function of a welfare bureaucrat is not to provide stipends and services but rather to find reasons for withholding them. And the bureaucrats embraced these roles as gatekeepers long before the Ruling Class began publicly claiming capitalism could not afford the social-safety net.

Years before the plutocracy decreed that those of us who are impoverished would be abandoned by the state – that we would either have to find some way to make ourselves exploitable for capitalist profit or we would be left to die – the welfare bureaucrats were willfully facilitating our extermination by neglect. And though the welfare bureaucrats can now claim they are “just following orders” in waging deadly war on elderly, disabled and chronically impoverished people, in the early years of their war against the poor – the '70s through 1990 – they can offer no such rationale.

What we have here is thus a classic teachable moment, a lesson in the new U.S. paradigm of genocide, genocide without gas chambers, genocide as perpetrated by an ironically named “welfare” system, genocide enclosed by the invisible barbed wire of gleefully sadistic bureaucratic tyranny, genocide inconceivable to those who have not experienced its reality firsthand – the welfare system as a vast invisible concentration camp in which the chief executives function as Adolf Eichmanns and the case workers serve as equivalents of Ilse Koch, their paychecks sustained by agonies heartlessly inflicted on the poor – we the 99 Percent – much as Ilse's lampshades were made of the skins of the Nazis' victims.

And no the Ilse Koch analogy is not too extreme: whether you are methodically murdered in a gas chamber or are deliberately slain by the malicious withholding of medical care, you are equally dead – equally a victim of genocide.

Which – again the teachable moment – brings into painfully sharp focus why the U.S. Working Class boils over with such hatred and contempt for government: the very emotions the Republicans cleverly muster into votes, most notably the landslide of 2010.

The more the economy is downsized, the more of us are flung into poverty. The more impoverished we become, the more we are forced into dependence on the smirking tyrants of the welfare bureaucracy. The more we are tyrannized  – and this too is how the welfare bureaucracy serves the One Percent – the more  we are duped into hating government itself. The more we despise government  – the more intense our rage and desperation  – the more likely  we are to vote   for the 21st Century American equivalent of the Nazi Party.

LB/23 November 2011.

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    Pictures and essays published in Outside Agitator's Notebook prior to 1 August 2011 remain available at lorenbliss.typepad.com.

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Coup Fears and Supercomputers Highlight New Banana Republic Lifestyle; GOP May Make Obama Jobs Speech a Con Job; What Perry and Texas Tell Us About Our Future

Small-town poverty in Washington state c. 1971; one of a series of pictures I made for the Whatcom County Housing Coalition and showcased as a portfolio piece. The associated negative was among the few semi-preserved in files dug out of the ashes six months after the 1983 fire; the white spots visible throughout the image are emulsion damage due to heat and water. Tri-X at 800; Nikon F w/28mm f/2.8 Nikkor. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2011. (Click on image to view it full size.)

*****

THIS WEEK'S ESSAY will be relatively brief, and not because of a lack of material.

No sooner was I recovering from the early, nasty-surprise influenza that struck me down last week than it was time for the physically painful ordeal of cleaning this apartment from top to bottom in preparation for its quarterly inspection. The pain – the fact it hurts terribly to bend over and the corollary fact I will be effectively bedridden for two or three days after preparing for the inspection – is the result of the steadily deteriorating back injuries inflicted on me by one of Washington state's notoriously coddled alcoholics, a habitual offender who, when he rammed his car into mine in 1978, had at least 19 arrests for drunken driving – every one dismissed.

Meanwhile the inspections are themselves noteworthy. They are among the insultingly intrusive measures by which occupants of lower-income senior housing are repeatedly reminded how we are viewed by the Ruling Class: as failures (else we would not be low income enough to qualify for such facilities), and as hopelessly irresponsible (hence not only the mandatory inspections but – for example – an unwritten but nevertheless total ban on gas cooking in all such accommodations locally). 

The latter has forced me into constant combat with the culinary atrocities characteristic of an electric range – decades of seasoning irreparably burned off my three cherished antique cast-iron frying pans, the pans themselves damn near useless as a result, and everything now prepared in them charred on the outside and raw in the middle. Though I never considered myself a gourmet cook, making meals on the gas stoves of my former life was a pleasant and sometimes genuinely rewarding adventure, but now – thanks to capitalism's relentless hostility toward old people as expressed by restriction to electric burners – it's a chore hardly less repugnant than cleaning a refrigerator of contents reduced to reeking compost by long abandonment. My nutritional intake no doubt suffers gravely as a result, though I try to compensate by dosing myself with vitamin supplements.

But enough kvetching. At least I still have a roof over my head...a commodity that under capitalism becomes ever more in doubt.

*****

Coup Fears and Computers: Life in a 21^st Century Banana Republic

Originally I planned to lead with a story e-mailed me by my sister Elizabeth Bliss, to whom many thanks for a credible report the capitalist Ruling Class is developing a supercomputer that can reliably predict the intensity of socioeconomic oppression likely to trigger insurrection.

Presumably the new computer will give enough advance warning of impending rebellion, the capitalist aristocracy can either neutralize our rage with pseudo-humanitarian reforms or mobilize the soldiers and police to complete our enslavement.

But that wonderfully heartening news, for which see below, was shoved out of the top spot by an exposé from the Justice Integrity Project via Reader Supported News implying Obama Administration policies are influenced by terror of a corporatist and/or military coup.

“President-Elect Obama's advisors feared in 2008 that authorities would revolt and that Republicans would block his policy agenda if he prosecuted Bush-era war crimes, according to a law school dean who served as one of Obama's top transition advisers,” said the Integrity Project report.

The dean, Christopher Edley Jr. of the University of California (Berkeley) Law School, was “the sixth highest-ranking member of the 2008 post-election transition team preparing Obama's administration,” the report said.

Voiced at a public forum earlier this month, the dean's disclosure “implies that Obama and his team fear the military/national security forces (the president) is supposed be commanding,” the document concluded. “It suggests also that Republicans have intimidated him right from the start of his presidency even though voters in 2008 rejected Republicans by the largest combined presidential-congressional mandate in recent U.S. history.”

If the account is true – and though it is in dire need of a competent editor, its turgid prose seems thoroughly credible – it adds yet another dimension to our understanding of how “change we can believe in” became the biggest Big Lie in U.S. political history and how the candidate of “hope” became Barack the Betrayer.

A real paranoid would thus presume the emergence of a new rationale for President Obama's treachery might be exactly the sort of temporary remedy suggested by the archons of Nurd who operate the supercomputers – such as the Nautilus at the University of Tennessee’s Center for Data Analysis and Visualization – that track and quantify our responses to oppression.

*****

Obama Jobs Speech: Many Promises, Few Rational Hopes of Fulfillment

The big story last week was of course Obama's jobs speech, but buried beneath all the Ruling Class Media boosterism was the fact the nation's two most relevant public intellectuals gave it mixed reviews at best.

Economist Paul Krugman  called it “bolder and better than I expected,” but added “it isn't likely to become law, thanks to GOP opposition. Nor is anything else likely to happen that will do much to help the 14 million Americans out of work.”

Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich  meanwhile asked the sort of questions real journalists would have asked were they anything but stenographers for the Ruling Class and propagandists for capitalism:

“Why did the President include so many tax cuts, and why didn't he make his proposal sufficiently large to make a real impact on jobs and growth?” Mr. Reich then answered his own inquiry: “Because (Obama) crafted it in order to appeal to Republicans. To get it enacted, he needs their votes.”

The third significant commentary on the jobs speech came from AFL/CIO President Richard L. Trumka, whom MSNBC reported was in the audience as a guest of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. 

Mr. Trumka was optimistic but skeptical. “The plan announced by President Obama to create jobs is only the opening bid in a national conversation we’ve needed to have for a long time,” he said via an e-mail to the nation's AFL/CIO union members.

Then – no doubt to quell rank-and-file fears he had somehow been co-opted by Ms. Clinton's invitation – he quickly added a warning: “some politicians claim cuts to our social safety net, deregulation and lower taxes for the rich will fix our problems. But they’re flat wrong. If we continue down this road, it only will destroy more jobs and send us into a vicious downward spiral.”

The e-mail linked to a petition, Tell Congress:   Working families will judge our elected leaders by whether they act with integrity and energy to create good jobs now.  

While none of these three men are (yet) willing to concede that capitalism is evil incarnate – infinite greed as maximum virtue (and thus the implicit overthrow of every code of ethics or morality humanity ever uttered) – each is nevertheless a voice in the proverbial wilderness, a bold rebel who dares shout (some) truth in defiance of power. 
 

*****

And Beyond the Small Momentary Optimism, a New Prognosis of Doom

Alexander Cockburn  has long been one of my favorite columnists, and here with his customary lucidity he reads the omens in the jobs speech:

“You can find Amer­ica's fu­ture in blue­prints minted in busi­ness-funded think tanks 30 to 40 years ago at the dawn of the neo-lib­eral age: de­struc­tion of or­ga­nized labor, at­tri­tion of the so­cial safety net, ero­sion of gov­ern­ment reg­u­la­tion and a war on the poor that will be fought with­out mercy at every level.”

“Texas, near the bot­tom in so many so­cial in­di­ca­tors, is the model: Rick Perry is its lat­est sales­man. But who­ever the Re­pub­li­can pres­i­den­tial can­di­date may be, they face in Obama an op­po­nent who agrees with at least half of what they say. In 40 years, I've not seen a gloomier po­lit­i­cal land­scape.”

LB/10 September 2011

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