More on the Politics of Trauma: Hartmann Writes an Essay for the History Books -- If We the People Win

A Tacoma Clinic Defense volunteer displays her standard response – facial expression included – to harassment from male misogynists. However the vast majority of passers-by indicate their support of TCD workers. Clinic defense is one of the many ways we socialists serve the people, bypassing the oppressive power of the capitalist plutocracy. Click on image to view it full size. (Photograph by Loren Bliss © 2016)

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THE QUESTION ASKED by Thom Hartmann in  “What Happens When Neither Political Party Answers to the Bottom 90%” is answered with almost eerie synchronicity by how a Democratic official seems to be vengefully withholding vital information from a small local newsletter called Community Chronicle that serves at least 50 elderly and disabled women and men in Tacoma, Washington.

Apparently the malicious withholding is in retaliation for publishing – though not in the newsletter – a number of pointed observations about the worsening failure of the USian experiment in representative democracy. As I have often stated here in OAN, the lies purposefully told by today's Democrats are clearly part of a greater strategy of disguised malevolence that enables them to collaborate with the Republicans in fulfilling Ruling Class orders to deliberately inflict genocidal harm on low-income people.

Such an analysis, precisely because it is an (obvious) interpretation of recent USian political history rather than document-supported fact, has never appeared in the Chronicle, the publication for which I sought the information that is now being withheld. Nor will it ever appear in the Chronicle as long as the analysis (1)-has no relevance to local events and (2)-lacks the irrefutable proof that would be provided by, say, exposure of a strategic document defining the genocidal destruction of government services as clandestine compliance with the elitist demands for population-reduction  that have been part of the USian political dialogue at least since the 1960s.

More to the point, the people victimized by the Democratic official's withholding of information are not the politically motivated readers of OAN. They are instead the politically disempowered residents of the senior housing complex where I have dwelt for the past 13 years.

In other words, the elderly and disabled folk of a notably impoverished community are being punished for the activism associated with a sociologically different and geographically far-removed community. The Democratic official is thus apparently employing the same theory of misplaced vengeance we have tragically witnessed elsewhere, often with far more devastating consequences. It is noteworthy especially for how it suggests yet another dimension – a potentially malignant one – to the answer of Hartmann's oh-so-pointed question.

One of the functions of the Chronicle, as illustrated by the November 2015 cover shown below, is warning readers of impending cuts in government stipends and services. While this is a function that was formerly performed by so-called “mainstream media,” its publication of news specifically relevant to low-income people has been abandoned in compliance with the demands of its advertisers, who insist on excluding from readership those who lack enough discretionary income to buy the advertised products. Hence “news” – once defined as any information of

relevance to the public – has been  redefined by advertisers as that which is of interest only to the advertisers' specific demographic targets. Hence too the Chronicle, which I started four years ago. A big part of my intent was – and is – helping my neighbors cope with the politics of deliberately inflicted trauma by closing the information gap that results from mainstream media's increasingly discriminatory definition of news.

(Though it is something of an aside, one of the more obvious reasons for the steeply declining readership of U.S. newspapers is the rapidly deteriorating standard of living that afflicts the entire USian proletariat – those of us the Occupy Movement named “the 99 Percent” and Hartmann with greater economic precision more correctly labels “the 90 Percent.” Based on the most recently revised census data,  half the residents of the USian homeland are now officially “low income” – this as typified by a family of four living on $45,000 or less annually. [Note: fully two hours of Internet research could not unearth a comparably revised figure for one-person households.] Since low-income people no longer have the discretionary income that defines them as valuable to advertisers, and since much of the news that is specifically vital to low-income people is deliberately excluded from the newspapers, such an ignored [and thus effectively banished] population cancels its newspaper subscriptions and seeks information elsewhere, especially on the Internet.)

But only four of the Chronicle's 50 readers can afford the USian homeland's highest-on-the-planet costs of an Internet subscription, which means the other 46 persons are repeatedly denied vital information by the combination of their no-Internet poverty with mainstream media's redefinition of news. Worse, the information they are deprived includes facts that are essential for survival. That's because the ever-more-aggressive reductions in governmental stipends and services for low-income people – all such reductions due to the war against impoverished people  both parties have been waging since the 1976 election of President Jimmy Carter marked the end of the New Deal era – have potentially fatal consequences, especially for elderly and disabled folks. Which provides yet another detail in answer to the pivotal question Hartmann has dared ask.

Because I know the cuts' perpetrators cannot possibly be ignorant of their potentially fatal consequences, when I am writing in OAN or on various Internet websites I have no hesitation labeling the cuts as intentionally genocidal. The cuts are clearly designed to serve the same function, albeit in slow motion (and therefore with far less controversy), as the Nazis' Zyklon B. That is, the cuts are intended to exterminate those of us the politicians' capitalist masters have banished from the workplace as no surplus human beings longer exploitable for profit and thereby condemned as no longer worthy of life. Nor is this – at least to those of us who are its victims – especially big news; I am merely verbalizing what most of us already recognize and not infrequently – usually with extreme anger or bitterness – also say aloud.

Nevertheless, in the Chronicle – because I recognize my readers are already traumatized by constant, life-shortening economic anxiety and are therefore physically and emotionally fragile, I am careful to avoid expression of such hideous truths unless they are quotes, whether direct or indirect, and even then only when they are so essential to a given narrative they cannot be sidestepped. Otherwise there is nothing to be served by berating the powerless with the real-world purpose and consequences of the Ayn Rand/social-Darwinist savagery that is now the defining characteristic of U.S. economic policy – the maliciously imposed wretchedness we already know entirely too well.

Nor is the Democratic official likely to be unaware of the enormous editorial differences between OAN and the newsletter. One, as noted, is in the identity of readership itself. Another, already implied, is in content; the Chronicle is written only for local readers, while OAN is written for readers slightly more than half of whom are overseas, mostly in Europe, a few in Asia and Africa. Also, OAN is unabashedly opinionated. But in writing, photographing, editing and producing the Chronicle, I make a point of observing the traditional practices of so-called “objective” journalism. Lastly, OAN is strictly on-line, while the Chronicle serves a readership so impoverished – and therefore so computer-deprived – it is entirely an on-paper publication.

Moreover, though in the Chronicle I make no secret of my bias in favor of elderly and disabled persons (note again the edition illustrated here), I also go out of my way to be fair to all parties involved whenever the subject so requires, as in the ongoing coverage of the procedures by which the Republican and Democratic parties will indicate their respective choices of candidates in this year's presidential election.

In contrast, OAN claims neither fairness nor objectivity. It is – and always has been – the on-line equivalent of an editorial opinion column, the uncensored variant of an award-winning and often controversial editorial column I wrote for a local newspaper from 1977 to 1981, with all of the characteristic op-ed strengths and weaknesses.

But the Democratic official in this story – the identity of whom I am deliberately withholding – is either indifferent to the night-and-day distinction between OAN and the Chronicle or hopes the obviously punitive discrimination against the the latter's readership will silence the emphatically anti-capitalist resistance of the former.

The reason I am not now identifying this Democratic official nor even the office this Democrat holds is my hope the information embargo will soon voluntarily end – or better yet, that I misunderstood these circumstances and the embargo turns out to have been as unreal or unintentional as it was undeniably apparent.  If not – that is, if my pleas to end it are refused or ignored – then full details will be forthcoming, complete with all supportive correspondence.

Meanwhile my strongest suspicion is this particular Democratic official has never before dealt with a real journalist; that is, has never interacted with someone who – unlike the craven propagandists now hired to serve mainstream media (which after all is the for-profit propaganda machine owned by the same obscenely wealthy One Percenters who own most U.S. politicians and therefore all USian governments at every level) – will aggressively ask relevant questions and equally aggressively expose those who refuse to answer.

Which, finally, brings us to the money grafs of Hartmann's essay:

Both parties right now face a great crisis of ideology as well as a great opportunity for reinvention, and whichever party first reinvents itself successfully will begin winning elections the way the Democrats did in the 1932-1968 era.

If neither does, our nation faces a massive crisis provoked by the loss of democratic representation of the majority of the American electorate.

The root cause of this crisis is the fact is that neither party today does much of anything for the bottom 90% of Americans.

Here too is my comment-thread response, not italicized as I have revised it for publication here:

This the best, most informative, most compelling essay I have yet seen under Hartmann's byline.

It is most assuredly also – assuming We the People somehow triumph, and “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth” – an essay truly for the history books.

Indeed I have only one contrary comment: it is not merely  the “emerging generation of Millennials” who have become what Hartmann labels “radical cynics.”

The same is true of many elderly people like myself, who have been painfully awakened to the deadly malevolence of the forces arrayed against us – especially as manifest in  the genocidal policies of the One Percent and their Ruling Class vassals toward any of us old enough to remember how much better life was under the New Deal.

Awakening to the true magnitude of the Evil that threatens us, we are also awakening to the fact that only Marxism – and only Marxism in its Leninist/Maoist variant – offers the ideological discipline essential to overthrow those tyrants who would either reduce us all to slavery or exterminate us all by the slow-motion genocide of "austerity."

We realize that the One Percenters – and their wholly owned  Ruling Class of politicians, bureaucrats, academics, military officers and police commanders – now regard our memories of radically better times as definitively subversive. That is one of the reasons they are trying to kills us by slashing Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps and any other governmental stipends and services upon which capitalism forces us to depend for survival.

The other reason for their murderous intent – and it cannot be said too often or too harshly that is precisely what it is – is greed: they want for themselves the money and resources that now (barely) keep us alive.

Literally, our lives – and the lives of every member of the Working Class – are therefore at stake.

Moreover,  with the omnipotent secret police apparatus the One Percent has already built – total surveillance and federally militarized law enforcement – we need only look to our species' broader history to see, particularly in the example of Nazi Germany, the  irrefutable evidence that conventional USian politics are woefully inadequate. 

Given our dawning recognition that capitalism demands the embrace of limitless, mercilessly selfish, relentlessly greedy moral imbecility as its core principle,  we also question the effectiveness of any political ideology that does not as a first premise acknowledge capitalism as the most devastating, most potentially terminal affliction humanity has ever thrust upon itself.

Hence the “political revolution” Hartmann describes has indeed already begun. 

One hopes, as I surely do,  it will be accomplished via the ballot box. The alternative – our nation reduced to the ruin that now characterizes most of the Middle East – is too fearful to contemplate.

But knowing the murderous arrogance of the One Percent – demonstrated not just by such horrors as the Pinochet Regime in Chile but also by the emergence of death-squad police tactics here in our own homeland – it is tragically probable our smug and obscenely powerful overlords will reject a democratic solution here just as they rejected it in Iran in 1953 and in so many other places since then.

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Significantly, the secret-police/militarized-police apparatus already in place proves the Ruling Class intends in the near future to behave toward the rest of us exactly as it already behaves toward the African-American, Hispanic and First Nations population. That is proven by analysis of what in the military is called “enemy capabilities” (as demonstrated against Occupy and Black Lives Matter) and of “enemy intentions” (as demonstrated against Occupy and Black Lives Matter, and in killings at Ferguson, Baltimore, New York City etc.).

Those who question the appropriateness of my correct use of military terminology should note the U.S. military has already designated political protesters as “enemy forces.”

Thus the only question for those of us likely to be on the receiving end of the handgun rounds and rifle volleys is when the killing of innocents will become the national norm at any protest against capitalist or racist savagery.

My estimate, based on a lifetime of 76 years and a near-lifetime as both a journalist and a student of history, is that the obvious, no-longer-deniable death of U.S. representative democracy will be declared by the emergence of zero-tolerance, kill-all-resistance plutocracy soon after the 2016 elections, no matter whether the victor is Hillary Clinton nor the far more likely Donald Trump.

In this sense, there is no significant difference between Hillary and Trump: each is an unabashed fascist (although in deference to Trump it is worth noting he pledges to protect the very Social Security and Medicare programs Hillary wants to destroy) – and because each is an unabashed fascist, neither has any intention of preserving the freedoms guaranteed by the Bill of Rights.

Hence the  difference between the United States and fascist nations of the past will soon become more a matter of euphemisms and the identity of human targets than anything else.

In this context, history shows only the most disciplined resistance has any chance of achieving liberation. History also shows that only Marxism embodies that discipline. Thus, for example, were the opponents of Diem's viciously anti-Buddhist Roman Catholic (Christofascist) theocracy in South Vietnam compelled to adopt (and adapt) Marxism: no other ideology possessed the requisite discipline.

Remember too that Marxism failed in Russia not because of Marxism but because of the dark undertow of Russian history – the fact Russia had no democratic or even libertarian traditions to sustain its people's quest for liberation  against opportunists like Stalin.  

Marxism in the  United States – with its virtually ageless background of First Nations democratic traditions,  British Common Law,  241 years of constitutional governance and its ideology of representative democracy (no matter how the inherent principles have been nullified since 22 November 1963 by capitalism and its economic mandates for domestic enslavement and global conquest) – would prove to be a very different story.

Indeed it may be our only possibility of salvation – whether as an oppressed people or a species on the brink of environmental extinction.

Curiously – again with the subtle hint of near-eerieness that so often characterizes synchronicity – the response Hartmann's essay evoked from me seems, in retrospect, almost an elaboration on the response he engendered by an especially damning exposé last week  entitled “Businesses Exploit The Poor For a Buck”:

This sort of exploitation, the human equivalent of Exxon Valdez or Deepwater Horizon, is another example of why capitalism is the most malignant evil our species has ever inflicted on itself.

Indeed capitalism is so evil, its malevolence can only be described in religious terms. Capitalism is, in fact, the elevation of infinite greed to absolute virtue. In other words, just as religion exalts faith and piety above all other values, so does capitalism exalt selfishness and greed above other values.  As holiness is to religion, so greed is to capitalism.

What this means in practice is the deliberate rejection of every humanitarian value our species has ever articulated. Which, in turn, mandates the deliberate cultivation and imposition of moral imbecility – the psychological state that defines serial killers.

Thus capitalism is the mentality of a Ted Bundy or an Elizabeth Bathory deliberately and with malice aforethought applied not just to economics, but to governance and indeed to every other aspect of human experience.

No greater evil than capitalism has humanity ever knowingly inflicted on itself, and no greater evil has ever more relentlessly threatened human survival.

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TO FEND OFF the darkness that now ever more relentlessly encroaches upon all our lives, and therefore in keeping with my pledge to try to end these blog posts with some form of positive input, here is a nursery rhyme  – perhaps more suitable for adults than children – by the unabashedly pagan singer S. J. Tucker, whose voice in this performance is like a caress.

LB/22 March 2016

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Six Essays: Gratitude for the Restoration of My Eyesight, Pagan Music as an Antidote to the Politics of Despair

 

Emergence Nr. 17 (Click on image to view it full size.) Photograph by Loren Bliss copyrights 1971, 1976, 1985, 2016.

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THOSE WHO WERE appalled by my impending blindness will be delighted to learn an eleventh-hour charity paid Group Health Cooperative the obscenely prohibitive co-payments it charges for the surgery required to save my eyesight. (Group Health's fees, in no way exceptional, exemplify what obtains when health care is a privilege of wealth rather than a human right, and the care-giving organization's primary purpose is therefore to put oodles of boodle in executive pockets rather than treat the sick and heal the wounded.) That said, if there are any of you I have failed to thank for your supportive and/or prayerful good thoughts, please accept this expression of my gratitude as well as my apology for the oversight.

But I would be derelict in my journalistic duty were I to ignore this opportunity to note the likelihood there are also amongst OAN's readers a few who were cheering my blindness and praying it would silence me forever. Since Occupy Tacoma, http://occupytacoma.org/71-year-old-tacoma-veteran-on-why-she-got-involved-with-the-occupy-movement/ interference by the secret police will not allow me to email OAN's Internet address to anyone unless I first disguise it as a TinyURL. And let us not forget my 2010 ouster from Facebook in retaliation for suggesting the so-called “Great Recession” was deliberately engineered to usher in accelerated austerity and thereby speed the imposition of overt fascism.

Thus, in addition to thanking my benefactors, I give my most emphatic middle-finger salute to the vassals and functionaries of the One Percent – the spooks and police agents and soldiers and politicians and bureaucrats and cops and maybe even a welfare official or two – all of them fanatical defenders of capitalism and sworn enemies of the Working Class, each of them a-boil with Heinrich Himmler hatefulness perpetually inflamed by Christofascist or JesuNazi cults whose Yeshua is “der Führer Who Art in Heaven” and whose sadistic intent toward the 99 Percent is to brutalize us into slave-camp submission no matter our race or gender or how we define ourselves politically or spiritually or sexually – and then, when we are too old or crippled or mentally mangled to be exploitable for profit, to cast us off like worn-out machinery and exterminate us by “austerity” and whatever other methodologies of genocide can be hidden beneath cloaks of euphemisms, disinformation and Big Lies. Let us also in this naming of enemies note all those 99 Percenters who yet stupidly believe capitalism will someday let them “hit it big” – that is, to get so rich they can brazenly fuck over everybody else – and now either sit at home opiated by Mainstream Media and awaiting the Rapture or have already joined Moron Nation's roving bands of misogynists and homophobes, banging their Bibles and brandishing their biblical bellicosity to terrify women and lesbian/gay/bisexual/transsexual folk and anyone else who might dare rediscover the holiness of sensuality and everything else stolen from us by patriarchy in the name of “God's divine plan for salvation.”

To all such adversaries I turn the other cheek – that is, the other cheek of my arse, that they may glimpse the defiance implicit in a Full Moon.

Plus in my case there were probably also less fingerworthy, less cheekworthy detractors, a very few hateful kinfolk breathing sighs of malicious relief at the apparent end to my periodic disclosures of familial dysfunction. There's even a faint possibility the personal-adversary list includes the first woman I truly loved, she who at age 17 captured my heart by teaching me Plato's Republic. Though our relationship lasted three years, in her eyes I was never more than a stepladder for escaping the slums. Despite her sociological origins, she was boldly articulate and beautiful and memorably shameless in bed, but she thought my talents inferior and regarded journalism as an insufficiently glorious choice in comparison to the worlds of literature, fine art and academia. As soon as I was bailed out of jail, she demanded to know if I was “getting involved with Communists and stuff.” I answered truthfully – “probably,” I said – and without a moment's hesitation she replied, “then I'm leaving.”

This last event was long long ago and far far away on geography I have not visited since 1969 and will probably never trod again, but I remember it whenever I review my life as I am doing now in rescued-from-blindness introspection, and I am always surprised to discover her rejection still hurts, no doubt because she was my first lover in this lifetime whose intellect I truly respected, and she was therefore too the first woman whose claim to see me as attractive seemed believable and even trustworthy, never mind the all-pervasive sense of physical and psychological ugliness that is an irremediable part of my psyche. The long-ago blow of her rejection was thus many times multiplied by how it brought back to dagger-sharp focus my own negative sense of self. Such is the oddly enduring nature of love-related trauma, lingering even when the love is subsequently proven to have been wholly unrequited and the illusion of its sharedness thus discredited as nothing more than manipulation bolstered by one's own penchant for fantasy and wishful thinking. How happy I am to have escaped that relationship's ultimate ensnarement. How quickly introspection see-saws me from joy to sadness and back again, mixed reflections viewed – even with restored vision – behind mutually contradictory tears.

(Forgive me if I bathe in bathos or lapse into lugubriousness [the latter noun, by its congested-sinus resonance, perhaps my favorite example of onomatopoeia]. Or don't forgive me. As long as you keep on reading, I really don't care.) 

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THE MOST IMPORTANT point to take away from my brush with blindness is how the obscenity of defining health care as a privilege of wealth combines with the capitalist greed of chief executive officers to eliminate all meaningful distinction between non-profit and for-profit care-providers. That is the real significance of the prohibitive price – nearly $161 per minute for approximately five out-patient minutes of laser surgery – that without the intervention of charity would have damned me to permanent sightlessness.

But it is also important to note how the ability to pay that fee (or any comparable sum) has been put forever beyond my own financial reach by the senior-subsidy cuts imposed by Washington state Democrats.  Charity saved my eyesight (and thus saved me) this time, but what happens if there is another pay-or-die medical crisis? The truth is that I, like so many others, am now imprisoned in a de facto death-cell, locked behind invisible bars and restrained by invisible chains until the Reaper – himself obviously a Ruling Class functionary – calls my name.

These circumstances exemplify the murderous economics of capitalism and of the now unabashedly capitalist (and therefore overtly fascist) economics of the USian Imperial Homeland and afflict untold numbers of us whether old or young also exemplify the diabolical cunning of capitalist governance. We satisfy the partial-truth needs of the imperial propagandists because we (officially) have health insurance. But we also slake the infinite greed of the insurance barons who fatten their assets collecting premiums for insurance deliberately structured to be unusable. Here, of course, is the genocidal purpose behind prohibitively priced co-pays. If we purchase the care that might save our lives, we are left with insufficient money for food or shelter. Ultimately our only choice is how we will die: will it be from untreated illness, or from malnutrition and homelessness or some combination of all three. Or perhaps we will yield to ultimate despair and do an Ernest Hemingway or a Sylvia Plath or a Diane Arbus or exit via some other premature means. Such are the methods by which the capitalists exterminate those of us deemed “surplus workers” – those of us considered no longer exploitable for profit.

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IRONICALLY IT IS the Bible, the world's most viciously patriarchal (and therefore definitively capitalist) doctrinal sourcebook, that contains what is probably the most anti-capitalist proverb ever penned: “Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them” (Matthew 7:15-10, King James Bible).

Thus we witness the toxic fulsomeness of capitalism in all its genocidal savagery and ecocidal malignance. We see how capitalism transforms the (literally) deadly sin of infinite greed and elevates it to the capitalists' ultimate virtue – the one ethos most vital for capitalist function. We recognize how capitalism thereby rejects every humanitarian principle our species has ever evolved. We acknowledge how it replaces all these age-old principles with its might-makes-right (and-mighty-profit-makes-mighty-right) credo of serial-killer moral imbecility.

(“Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.”)

And now at last perhaps we are being forced to admit capitalism threatens the survival of not just our own species but literally of all life as we know it. Which makes capitalism the closest real-world approximation of the Abrahamic concept of Absolute Evil our species has yet spawned.

(“Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.”)

Yet far too many of us remain suicidally blind to what capitalism is doing to us all and how its own depredations point to socialism as our species' only possible means of survival.

Susan Sontag wrote of illness as metaphor, and though I have always understood the notion intellectually, I did not comprehend it emotionally until I understood how the blitzkrieg of looming blindness and my own financial defenselessness was a perfect metaphor for the plight of the entire 99 Percent. Capitalism has smashed all our mechanisms of resistance and now, as if to use us for compost in its next crop of atrocities, it is plowing us all under.

(“Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.”)

As for me, I probably would have been white-cane sightless by the end of next month, just in time for my 76th birthday. Between 3 January, when I first noticed my sight diminishing into milky haze, and 27 January, the date of the surgery, I had already gone nearly blind in my right eye, and the sight in my left eye was in jeopardy. But the laser surgery not only restored my distance vision, returning it to the Fountain-of-Youth clarity achieved by the original cataract surgery;  it also improved my close-up vision, minimizing my need for reading glasses – an affect my ophthalmologist says is commonplace but unpredictable and is therefore not mentioned to patients beforehand lest they by disappointed should it not materialize.
But what of all the other women, children and men who are not so fortunate as I have been? Reflect not just on the skyrocketing numbers of homeless people;  think also of the original Bloody Sunday and Triangle Shirtwaist and Bhopal and Katrina and Bangladesh.  How many more must die before the ravages of the capitalists are ended?

(“Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.”)

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WHY HAD MY vision been saved? What was Fate demanding of me? I had never been granted a favor of such magnitude, nothing even remotely so pivotal, and my dialectical-materialist skepticism was instantly at war with my Pagan intuition. The former dismisses my good fortune as random chance; the latter defines it as a genuine miracle, an event that requires some new vow of gratitude (“thank you Goddess; hence I shall devote the rest of my life to [whatever cause]”), this combined with some ritual of thanksgiving, by rainy-season necessity a private indoor rite though at least accompanied by incense and suitable music, the search for which brought a Muse-poet named S.J.Tucker into this text – she who  dares respond to the challenge Tim Buckley voiced 49 years ago: “if you tell me of all the pain you've had, I'll never smile again.” But that – articulating the pain of her gender and her generation – is only part of her repertoire; she also she grants blessings aplenty of comic relief, and not infrequently the purity of healing laughter as well. Her website tells me S. J. stands for Susan Jane, that her friends call her “Sooj” – and I find myself hoping she might read this and at least recognize me as a distant ally, a elder comrade, though I cannot imagine we would ever meet.

But first before I continue praising Tucker as a True Bard – surely as true as any since the first Taliesin (he who sang mysteriously of “the rulers of Britain, abounding in fleets” perhaps 2400 years before Trafalgar) – there is the matter of that other vision I mentioned in this essay's title: a dark vision, my own troubled vision of our present potential and our probable future (scroll down the comment thread for my two contributions), a haunting mind's-eye vision that in my film-camera past and as shown in the image above, sometimes took form, invariably with a faint warning prelude of alchemical sibilance, on DuPont Varilure in 1:3 Dektol beneath amber-filtered lights, and sometimes too as passages of spontaneous prose seemingly borne of some outside source (“where the fuck did this come from; I can't believe I wrote it”), as if the Muse (whose objective reality my dialectic materialist agnosticism forever forces me to question), were nevertheless once again whispering her double reassurance – that she forgives me even my gravest doubts and that – as Robert Graves put it – she offers “nothing promised that is not performed.”

As I confessed in today's title, I vacillate between faint hope for our species' post-apocalyptic survival and absolute despair at the runaway nuclear train of our self-inflicted extinction. The former is ephemeral at best; the latter, which too often seems impossible to refute, is authenticated by my too-intimate knowledge of the United States as the de facto Fourth Reich, which is (A), hell-bent on conquering the world; (B), ever-more-relentlessly subjugating all its peoples beneath the profiteering tyranny of the Imperial One Percent, whilst (C), being endlessly cheered on by Moron Nation mobs chanting “USA! USA! USA!” at every war crime or homeland atrocity.
Trouble is, most USians – all of our brains at least partially clogged with capitalist propaganda – are carefully conditioned to never dare look at ourselves in any sort of psychologically revealing mirror. Thus we are loathe to acknowledge Moron Nation's Zieg Heil reality is but few footfalls distant from that of Nazi Germany. And we are genuinely terrified to admit we are the most ignorant people in the industrial world – that we reside in the only realm on this planet to embrace Orwell's satiric “Ignorance Is Strength” as biblical writ – and that we have done so with such prideful malevolence it has become the one inviolable shibboleth of our national (un)consciousness.  As Vladimir Ilyich Lenin asked in 1902, “What Is to Be Done?”

Then as now, and precisely as Lenin stated, “'(f)reedom' is a grand word, but under the banner of freedom for industry the most predatory wars were waged, under the banner of freedom of labor, the working people were robbed.” But what is so radically different – and what reduces the ideological quarrels of Lenin's era to apparent meaninglessness – is the unprecedented extent to which the Working Class of today, the 99 Percent, has been robbed not only of the tools of resistance and the knowledge of how to use them, but all too often also gutted of the sense of selfhood and grievance from which effective resistance arises. In Vladimir Ilyich's time, whether in the imperial United States or the Russian Empire, the instruments of oppression were obvious: the bullets and bayonets of the soldiers, the knouts and truncheons of the Cossacks and the cops, the prison and the gallows, the lynchings and pogroms tolerated by (and often encouraged by) the authorities. The means of resistance were therefore also obvious. Now, despite our rising anger at what the capitalists are doing to us, it is for the most part suppressed by modern variants of pānem et circēnsēs, the bread-and-circus opiates by which the Roman Empire controlled its own oppressed masses. The USian forms of these distractions are many. They include the Colosseum-equivalents of violent films and professional sports; the pornographic antics of celebrities; other forms of vacuous entertainment including what passes for “news”; the zomboid numbing induced by alcohol and drugs whether legal or otherwise; and most of all the omnipresent opiate of Abrahamic fundamentalism, its socioeconomically malicious prosperity gospel having now become so malignantly popular its taint is found even in avowedly secular New Age and Pagan conceptualizations. (Yet what else could be expected here in the most moronically Christian-fundamentalist nation in the industrial world?) Hence what a fellow Occupy activist said to me in 2011: “the 99 Percent is terribly broken.” What she dared not add was the probability most of us are broken beyond repair.

What then – if anything – can be done?

In Lenin's day it was customary for revolutionary parties to offer political-education programs – and by all the available evidence, the global Working Class was eager – literally trudge-barefoot-through-the-blizzard eager –  to receive it. But in the USian homeland of today – where the prison-like atmosphere of government schools guarantees the educational process is disliked (if not despised outright) even by those of us who theoretically know better – the mere thought of returning to a classroom or even picking up a book or pamphlet is often prohibitively repugnant. This sort of aversive conditioning – part of a far greater scheme of making certain our every contact with government is unpleasant if not disastrous – is perhaps the most cunning way capitalism defends itself against socialism. Socialism is after all a form of government – the most democratic form our species has yet evolved – and as government it requires organization and personnel. But if government itself is despised, its form becomes irrelevant – and that is precisely the adverse legacy fostered by the inherent malevolence of capitalist governance. The same methodology is even more evident in the state and federal welfare bureaucracies, their obvious purpose not to help us weather the chronic instability of capitalism but rather to deny us the very aid we need for survival – thereby ensuring we are reduced to perpetual victimhood. This not only serves the capitalists by providing a vast supply of unemployed workers whose desperation for work shrinks wages to hitherto-unimaginable minimums; it also intensifies the hatred and suspicion that fuels anti-government sentiment ranging from the Anarchists to the Tea Party.  It is thus the key to understanding how so many Working Class folk are seduced into the economic suicide of supporting Right Wing candidates and parties: their anger and sense of betrayal by (capitalist) government leaves them no apparent alternative. In this context, education thus acquires a triple cloak of repugnance, firstly because of its prison pedagogy, secondly as a microcosm of capitalist governance, lastly as the traditional target of the venomous anti-intellectualism that has always been the prime effluent of Abrahamic fundamentalism.  Here is the root cause of why modern efforts to educate the USian Working Class invariably fail. Here too is the ultimate source of my own political despair, for it is one of the absolute truths of history that without education, revolution is not just impossible, it is also unthinkable.

But there remains one medium of communication (and therefore of education) that transcends all the negative associations the USian Ruling Class has maliciously affixed to education. This is music which – since its stimuli is as sensual as it is intellectual – is perfect for the dissemination of revolutionary or heretical ideas. Indeed it has already served as literatures of rebellion for populations as far removed from one another in time and geography as medieval peasants, antebellum slaves, modern USian minorities and indigenous peoples of the post-colonial Third World. Hence the relevance of the work by S.J. Tucker and her colleagues transcends its personal significance to me and becomes political in the broadest possible sense.

*** *** ***

A FEW DAYS after the surgery that saved my sight I was researching more of Faun's inspiring output and thinking what a tragedy it was my late friend and spiritual sister Helen Farias had not lived long enough to witness this example of the joyously revolutionary aesthetic and spiritual flowering that is taking place within – and in open defiance of – the electronic concentration camp the USian Empire is making of our entire planet.

Helen was the first person to read and comment on the earliest (1971) draft of “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer,” and it was Helen who paid the work what is probably the most significant compliment I will ever receive as a writer – “you have given me the vocabulary to describe what I have always known to be true but never had the words to express.” Eighteen years later she founded the women's spirituality journal Beltane Papers, worked herself to exhaustion advancing the scholarship that was legitimizing the resurrection of the Goddess and died of cancer on the autumnal equinox of 1994. By then, not only had “Dancer” been destroyed by fire, but the loss – 24 years of research notes, photography and text financed by my paychecks from print journalism and therefore accomplished mostly on weekends and during occasional periods of freelancing – had flung me into a clinical depression of such depth and duration it forced me onto welfare which, as all but the newest OAN readers know, branded me with the forever-inescapable odium of having been officially disabled. My formerly award-winning reportorial, photographic and editorial skills were thus rendered effectively worthless by the characteristic USian hatefulness toward anyone who is known to have been afflicted by mental illness. Even when such a condition is definitively temporary, as mine surely was – even though I was never institutionalized – such a diagnosis once officially rendered interacts with Moron Nation bigotry to produce more than enough venom to destroy one's career prospects forever. But despite the associated depths of despair I have never been able to abandon “Dancer's” core hypothesis: that no matter whether the Goddess is symbol or objective reality, it is only through her resurrection we will evolve – or perhaps restore – the sort of consciousness from which we can articulate and organize the politics we need to save our species from extinction. I was thinking about these matters, surfing the Internet and wishing I were necromancer enough to call back Helen to revel in the triumphant implications of Faun and the wild acclaim of its ever-growing audiences when the magic carpet of YouTube somehow bore me into S.J. Tucker's “realm of the sky.”  The accompanying video, one of the most evocatively powerful such pieces I have seen, is itself well worth watching. 

Though I am nearly 76 years old, my journalistic curiosity remains as intense as it was in my youth, and whenever I find myself happenstanced onto new ground, I am thus compelled to explore it. I was vaguely familiar with “Witches Rune,”  one of Tucker's earlier works, a verse from which I quoted to open Part 5 of “Dancer Resurrected,” an OAN essay  that is entirely too long and desperately needful of competent editing but after revision is sure to be a central part of a book I have tentatively titled “Encounters: a Modern Odyssey.” But I when I was researching and writing “Resurrected,” I was working with my usual intensity of focus and neglected to pursue Tucker's repertoire any further – obviously my loss, and an error for which I hereby apologize should she ever read these words. Now though I paid attention and explored her work and was soon rewarded with her variant of “Tam Lin,” a traditional ballad most likely borne of a remnant of what long long long ago in the age of the Goddess had been a lay of invocatory magick. It is a song for Hallowe'en, which in Celtic Paganism is the night the year dies, but the pre-patriarchal ancientness of its origins is suggested by its portrayal of the spirit of the year as female rather than male. Hence the lyrics seem to embody two liturgical purposes, first to mark the annual departure of the goddess of the Old Year, who in response to more recent expressions of Christian love [i.e. witch-burnings] has been disguised as the Queen of Faery; next to welcome the goddess of the New Year disguised as the shameless Janet pregnant by her chosen consort the Once and Future King, her pregnancy the metaphor for a rich harvest the following spring and summer. The earlier variants of “Tam Lin,” all of them collected during the past three centuries, each hinted at the underlying sexual connections, but Tucker's reconstruction implicitly recognizes the sacramental elements that define pagan sexuality. These she spells out in poetic detail (how else might Janet have gotten her “dirty knees”?), which elevates Tucker's “Tam Lin” to the most ritualistically appropriate variant I have yet encountered. It is also – very appropriately, I think – notably reminiscent of what traditional British balladry sounded like after a century in Appalachia (the archetypal example of which is the transformation of “burgundy wine” to “burglar's wine” in the murder-ballad “Willow Garden”). Tucker's revisions make me wonder – and yearn to find out – what she might do with two other surviving lays of sexual magick, “Jack Orion”  and “Willie's Lady,”  a more traditionally Scots variant of which is here. 

But for me the most intriguing element of Tucker's music is her merger of myth and mirth with the politics of resistance, a bonding exemplified by “Baba Yaga,” which repeats in story-form the humanitarian message the patriarchal lore-thieves stole from the Goddess many millennia ago: “as you do unto the also least of these, you likewise do unto me.” It also suggests song as the medium by which pagan steadfastness might yet, to the ultimate benefit of us all, be comfortably mated with Marxist/Leninist/Maoist determination. Which conjures up an image of a Peoples Court, the Red Banner adorning the wall behind the bench, the three judges briefly conferencing in whispers, then the senior judge ordering the defendant to stand for sentencing. “It is the finding of this court,” she says, “that you as a capitalist are guilty of innumerable crimes against the People. Accordingly, you are turned over to Baba Yaga, that she may eat you for her lunch.” Which recalls a graffito that began appearing on Pacific Northwest walls maybe 30 years ago: “Eat the Rich,” though nowhere did I see a corollary “Baba Yaga Lives.”

*** *** ***

WHEN WE EXAMINE the conceptual barriers that now seem to divide Marxists and Goddess-centered pagans into mutually exclusive camps, we see they are mostly derivatives of the same campaigns of Big Lies and disinformation that perpetuate Moron Nation itself.

For example, the notorious malevolence of Abrahamic religion toward Nature, women, minorities whether ethnic or sexual, sexuality itself, any forms of governance that might genuinely empower the 99 Percent, science and ultimately dialectic materialism, has left Marxists instinctively skeptical not just of Judaism, Christianity and Islam but of all religions and even of individual expressions of spirituality. Those who know little or nothing of Goddess-centered paganism thus find it difficult to accept it is in every way imaginable the diametrical opposite of the Abrahamic cults. Unlike Abrahamic religion, which curses the entire realm of physical being and dismisses life as an ordeal engineered by a divine sadist to determine one's fitness for an unlikely paradise of prayers, hymns and the rape of virgins, Goddess-centered paganism is grounded on the implicitly revolutionary premise life is a quest for knowledge and experience that includes every possible input. It thus emphatically embraces the entire spectrum of positive human experience, sensuality and sexuality included. It views us all as siblings in the family of Nature, regards femaleness as Nature's most complete living metaphor, embraces all the tools dialectic materialism has given us for knowing Nature and ourselves, restores to sexuality the ecstasy and freedom from guilt implicit in its original manifest sacredness and looks upon the Goddess as an earthly symbol of a truly humanitarian society. The goal of building a human society based on the core principle of Communism – from each according to ability, to each according to need – is thus already implicit in the concept of Earth as Mother. And the principle of giving voice to those who have been forcibly silenced by the ravages of capitalism – that is, of developing leadership cadres from those who have experienced the most acute forms of oppression firsthand – surely echos in the lyrics of “Baba Yaga”:

She said “I will be here when you're ready.
My fire will still burn when yours starts to go.”
She said “I have always been here,
I with my fearless feet in the snow”
She said “I'll be here just to watch you grow.”

Beyond “Baba Yaga” I found another Tucker song, “Rootless,” that in more ways than I can comfortably disclose seems to speak directly to me:

don't give up ride out be bold 
build the fire bright and strong
speak your truth and sing your song

Somehow, perhaps because despite my English surname my ancestry is 90-something percent Celt (and that seasoned with a trace of Mohawk), these lines remind me of what the Celtic warrior Calgacus said of an earlier plague of empire-builders: ubi sōlitūdinem faciunt pācem appellant – “they make a desert and they call it peace.” I think of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Fukushima, of Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon, but then I realize how Tacitus' story of the Brittani and their fight against Roman subjugation tells us our struggle against capitalism is but the newest form of the struggle against patriarchy and is therefore an old, old war indeed – an epic conflict in which our comrades include not just those of the past three centuries, but a roll-call of heroines and heroes dating at least to the Achaean sack of Knossos 3600 years ago. All at once this music of which I have been writing – Faun's and Tucker's – makes me ashamed of my despair. The lesson here is that revolution takes many forms, some not immediately discernible. But I cannot any longer doubt revolution is on its way. As Marshall McLuhan noted (though if memory serves, it was Carl Jung who said it first), art is often prophecy,  and Tucker's art, like that of Faun, is clearly preparation for a time in which capitalism no longer rules. If indeed there is some cosmic purpose for which my eyesight has been saved, surely it is helping foster that blessed future.

LB/6-13 February 2016

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