Another Inspection Again Wrenches My Life

I CAN'T OBJECT to the idea behind the federally mandated quarterly inspections of the individual dwelling units in any lower-income senior housing complex that was built with even a tiny percentage of public funds. Officially the purpose is to make certain the facilities are fully functional – that the plumbing, exhaust fans, alarm systems and electric ranges are all operational.

(I should note here we seniors are forbidden gas cooking, which means that 10 years after encountering my first electric range, I still can't successfully cook even the most simple meals. Indeed I despise electric ranges, which as far as I am concerned are worthless for anything save boiling water or heating soup. With a gas flame, you can see what you're doing; with electricity, you can only guess, which in my case means everything has to be burned on the outside to make sure it is not raw in the middle. But that is another issue for another time.)

Unofficially, the purpose of the quarterly inspections is to monitor the mental health of the occupants: detection of an unkempt or dirty apartment that might indicate the onset of Alzheimer's, hoarding that might endanger an occupant or create fire hazards for an entire complex, that sort of thing.

 

Nevertheless and in reality I resent these intrusions more than anything that fate and bureaucratic tyranny has ever dealt me. This is not just because of the violation of my privacy; the medical truth is that each inspection literally steals six or seven days from my life. Four of these days are taken by the preparatory cleanup, which for me – because of my arthritic spine, shoulders, left wrist and right knee – is an excruciatingly painful ordeal of dusting, vacuuming, mopping and, finally, on the morning of the inspection, neatening my bed into semi-military, Suzi-homemaker presentableness. This is in fact the most agonizing chore of all, which due to its hurtful extremes of bending and reaching takes me at least 30 minutes and sometimes half again that, the very reason I do it as seldom as possible. The remainder of the stolen time – the post-inspection hours of inspection day plus one or two days afterward – is required for recovery, most of it in my newly made bed.

But I have not verbalized these objections – at least not emphatically – until now, when the combination of the surprise state inspection inflicted on us at the end of last month and the upcoming regular inspection Tuesday is stealing 12 whole days from my life. (The interval between the first inspection and the second was just long enough all the cleaning had to be repeated.) The result – because the time-theft occurs at a peak of volunteer obligations (this blog; the monthly newsletter I produce for my fellow tenants; work for the organizing committee of 15 Now Tacoma; public relations for a friend who is a playwrite and musician) – is I am more frantically jammed up and therefore more jaggedly stressed than I have been at any time in memory, including the many years I worked at two and sometimes three jobs.

Another very big part of the problem is the wrenching time-theft imposed by my dependence on Pierce Transit. PT's bus service was only marginally adequate in 2009, the year my car died, and now after five years of anti-transit-user downsizing, it has been shrunken by least 70 percent. The transit authority bureaucracy will no longer disclose the actual size of the cuts, but the result is unquestionably the worst bus service I have ever seen anywhere in the urban U.S. Indeed there was more frequent bus service – far more frequent – provided by Knoxville Transit Lines in Knoxville, Tennessee during the 1950s. (For example, KTL buses ran until 1 a.m.; most PT buses cease operations at 9 p.m., some as early as 5 p.m. – and Knoxville in 1954 had half the population of Tacoma in 2014.) Bottom line, because of the bus service here – or rather the abysmal lack thereof – an errand that took me maybe 45 minutes when I had an automobile can now take up to an entire day.

 

I was of course prepared for the interruption inflicted by this month's quarterly inspection, but the additional seven days stolen by the surprise state inspection was the proverbial straw that broke the metaphorical camel's back. Such are the punishments capitalism maliciously inflicts on those of us it exploited into inescapable poverty.

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In Case You Missed It: Outside Agitation Elsewhere

Because so much time during these past few weeks has been stolen by inspections, OAN again gets shortchanged; again no real essay, and only five Internet posts during the past seven days:

Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker wrote about the mix of theocratic Christianity and Hard Right populism that enabled a Teabagger to beat House Majority Leader Eric Cantor last week. But “David Brat: Free-Market Purist, Ayn Rand Devotee” said nothing about the campaign's historical precedent, and I responded accordingly:

What we are witnessing in David Brat – and mark my word (because you read it here first) – is the combination of strategy, tactics and rhetoric that will leverage the USian Homeland's final transition to unabashed neo-Nazism.

Doubt me? Read William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (Simon and Schuster: 1959, 1960, 1987, 1988, 1990).

It's by studying Shirer we see what we might aptly dub the "Bratley Method" is precisely how the Nazis sold themselves and their programs to the seemingly ultra-civilized German people as Germany suffered from the devastation inflicted by the Treaty of Versailles and the Great Depression.

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Yes (Rise and Fall) is long, but it's vividly written, and its well worth the effort. For me it was the perfect sea-cruise book, and I had lots of time to read it – on the troopship returning from Korea, the U.S.N.S. Sultan, which in 1962 made the passage from Inchon to Oakland Army Terminal in about three weeks. For me, that was the blessed passage of return to civilian life after the three-year, Regular-Army active-duty portion of a six-year enlistment. (The remainder was in the reserves, but – luck of the draw or blessing of the Goddess – I was not recalled for Vietnam.) And of course I've reviewed Rise and Fall many times, as it's been part of my library ever since.

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Alan Pyke exposed another atrocity of USian governance  in “Impoverished Mother Dies in Jail Cell Over Unpaid Fines for Her Kids Missing School.” I noted how it exemplifies capitalism in action:

What this Dickensian tragedy tells us is that in the merciless new world of the former United States – a realm transmogrified into the de facto Fourth Reich – any one of us who is not part of the Ruling Class could suffer the fate of Eileen DeNino

Indeed the death of Eileen DeNino – and the deaths of so many others like her, always from the denial of basic human needs that now under the savagery of Ayn Rand economics have become privileges of wealth – makes me think perhaps the Hans Christian Anderson story of the “Little Match Girl” is replacing the Horatio Alger tales as the epic that properly symbolizes our present and future. (Indeed, recast in a 21st Century setting by cinematographer Filip Matevski's 12-minute film, it becomes just that.)

Apropos which, perhaps (an anti DeNino poster) would say the Match Girl too "refused to help herself" when, as in Matevski's work, the child chose to spend the night in the freezing cold rather than submit to sexual abuse, or – as in the older versions of the story – refused to go home to be beaten by her father.

Meanwhile let us all mourn Eileen DeNino, a mother dead in debtor's prison, another victim of capitalism's New World Order.

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Trevor Timm of Guardian UK revealed another of the dark and menacing secrets of Obamanoid tyranny in “The US Government Doesn't Want You to Know How the Cops Are Tracking You.” I pointed out an even darker truth:

It is a great irony the wanna-be Nazis of the Confederate-Flag/Swastika-Banner Hard Right – the Christians who claim the U.S. Constitution gives them the right to persecute non-believers; the white racists who believe their god gives them dominion over non-whites; the misogynists who think all women are sluts at heart – were the first to caricature Obama as another Hitler.

Perhaps it was just one of those oddball examples of accidental prophecy from a wildly incongruous source.

More likely it was a case of psychological projection, the mechanism of recognition embodied in a taunt once commonplace on Southern schoolyards: “it takes one to know one.”

However it came about, its terrifying truth becomes more evident every day. Barack Obama is worse than Bush, even worse than Nixon. He is the first genuine tyrant to hold the office of President of the United States, and by his embrace of the modalities of tyranny, he is methodically transforming this nation and its empire into the de facto Fourth Reich.

But the greatest irony of all is how it is his own race – more than any other group of us who, because we are lower-income people, are being scapegoated into equivalents of Nazi Germany's Jews – that is already bearing the brunt of this looming new holocaust in which federalized local police are trained and equipped to function as the new Gestapo.

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Charles E. Cobb Jr. discussed his forthcoming book, which boldly defies the USian Left's rabid, froth-at-the-mouth hatred of firearms and firearms owners, a cultoid malice so hysterically envenomed, its disciples reflexively damn gun-owning progressives as “Nazis.” Reader Supported News titled Cobb's important essay “Guns Made Civil Rights Possible: Breaking Down the Myth of Nonviolent Change,” but some RSN editor (deliberately?) omitted the actual title of the book, perhaps expressing the very hatefulness I just cited. Thus I had to ferret out the title for myself. It's a long one – too long for any competent editor to accidentally overlook: This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible (Basic Books: 2014). Then my comment-thread response got right to the point:

A similar volume, Lance Hill's The Deacons for Defense (University of North Carolina Press: 2004), was marginalized by the same zero-tolerance codas of political correctness with which the U.S. Left fanatically suppresses all positive references to firearms.

Meanwhile, with the Working Class more in jeopardy than ever, the USian Left's signature effort to impose forcible civilian disarmament – i.e., mandatory pacifism and compulsory victimhood – is surely amongst the greatest ironies of human history.

Contrary to its claims, pacifism cannot succeed without the threat of violence. The British surrendered to Gandhi's pacifism only because it was backed by the potential of armed revolution organized by the Soviet Union. The same is true of Rev. King's nonviolence.

Indeed all the humanitarian gains of the 20th Century – unions, labor rights, civil rights, safety-net programs – were wrested from the capitalists only by the Soviet threat. That's why, now the U.S.S.R. is dead, capitalism is methodically abolishing all those concessions.

But with the USian Left embracing pacifism and thus functioning as the chief spokesperson for the One Percent's effort to disarm the 99 Percent, these bitter truths are now also tabooed.

***

It was the armed Anglo-Saxon and Cymru yeomanry with their deadly longbows – the massed repetitive firepower of which was not equaled until the invention of the machine gun – that eventually brought the invading Norman kings (of England) to heel. Nevertheless it took what amounted to 300 years of intermittent civil war, some of which is immortalized in the epic of Robin Hood.

Though it is another truth suppressed by political correctness, the most important historical difference between Britain and the continental nations originated from Roman forcible disarmament of conquered peoples. Universal throughout the imperial mainland, it was for a number of reasons never successful in the province of Britannia. Hence even before the Anglo-Saxon conquest, the British peasantry was always at least minimally armed, which is why the remnants of what we know today as "democracy" were never totally exterminated there, seeds that began thriving in the so-called Age of Enlightenment.

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Juan Cole wrote a piece on the criminality of the Iraq War,  but “Blair-Bush & Iraq: It’s Not Just the Quagmire But the Lawbreaking & Deception” ignored what may be the most important aspects of the story:

(1)-That it was the perfect distraction from the questions about 9/11 that were then gathering momentum;

(2)-That, apart from Turkey (which is now hopelessly lapsing back into Islamic theocracy), Iran was the only genuinely secular society Islamic culture has ever produced. Thus its destruction brought about the immediate re-imposition of zero-tolerance theocracy, whether Sunni or Shiite, with all its misogynistic savagery. This is an obvious victory for the One Percenters whose intent is to make capitalism safe by imposing Abrahamic theocracy – Jewish in Israel, Christian or Islamic everywhere else – on the entire world.

I keep hoping maybe next week won't be so grim, but then I remember we're all residents of a dying planet – a world we ourselves are killing. 

LB/15 June 2014

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Secret Police Operations Refute Big Lie of 'Free Society'

This photograph has no connection to the story below, which mentions President Obama's genocidal efforts against life-sustaining social services only in passing. The image is an accidental sandwich, an inadvertent double exposure with a camera so old it lacks automatic double-exposure prevention. As to whether it might have been a compensatory gift from the Muse, with poetic or subconscious relevance to the reason this posting is so tardy, I leave that for viewers to decide. Rolleicord III, Kodak Tmax 100 in D-76, each of the two exposures 1/100th at f/16; colorization – to intensify the ethereal mood – by Gimp software. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2013.

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AN EMOTIONAL CRISIS precipitated by a medical crisis – discovery I am going blind due to cataracts but may be denied corrective surgery by another medical condition for which there is no cure – delayed this week's posting. It is also the reason I'm filling this space with a commentary I wrote six days ago: anything more recent would be too bitter for public consumption. Hence the following, my pre-threat-of-blindness response to a story in Crosscut, the Seattle on-line daily, in which a local journalist – apparently too afraid of the secret police to tell the truth about what the United States has become – cravenly described our subjugated nation as a “free society.” 

The journalist, Floyd McKay, is a former long-time member of the Pacific Northwest working press and a professor emeritus at Western Washington University. I do not know him personally, but we are nevertheless indirectly connected. WWU is the descendant of Western Washington State College, the last of my own several almae matres, which through its Fairhaven College granted me an interdisciplinary bachelor of arts degree in 1976 – and 34 years later made it unmistakably clear I am one alumnus its officialdom would surely strike from their roster of graduates if they could. Though McKay joined Western's faculty long after I left its student body, I am familiar with his work via Crosscut's coverage of the ongoing Puget Sound coal-port struggle. His reporting of that wrenching conflict seems not only fair but exceptionally well researched – the sort of in-depth writing that was routine on the New York, New Jersey, Michigan and East Tennessee papers for which I worked during my first two decades in journalism but which has since gone the way of Archaeopteryx. (Apropos the coal port, the usual suspects intend to build it just outside Bellingham, a blatant “fuck you” to what is probably the most environmentally conscious city in all USia. Moreover, the obvious vindictiveness of the coal-port scheme has a nasty parallel in the equally assaultive Roman Catholic campaign to abolish female reproductive freedom here in the nation's most officially pro-choice state by buying up all the local hospitals and clinics. Might these developments be part of a multi-pronged effort to turn the entire realm into a West Coast version of Appalachia? Asking such an allegedly “unthinkable” question is well within the purview of the investigative reporter, at least as I learned the craft, but it is the one element McKay has failed to explore. Perhaps he has forgotten – or never knew about – the testimony of Watergate Felon John Ehrlichman that Washington state is the One Percent's favorite proving ground for its strategies and tactics of oppression.) Be that as it may, I was appreciative enough of McKay's reports on the coal-port fight, I turned directly to his analysis of the recently exposed secret police investigations of journalists, part of the (still-unfolding) story of the Obama Administration's unprecedented efforts to nullify the entire First Amendment.  

But I was sorely disappointed; McKay's lead set the (cringing) tone of his entire text: 

“Technology changes, but the basic tenets of journalism and the codes that govern reporting in a free society remain remarkably the same.”

Finally, hours after McKay's essay appeared – I had been busy all day with regular first-of-the-month errands – I wrote a response on the associated comment thread: 

(Note: Crosscut does not allow embedded live-links in comment threads, hence the URLs  below appear as in the original, this to spare me the necessity of revision. My apology for the resultant awkwardness.) 

 

Seems to me there are three points of contention in this story. These are: the nature and motives of the Obama Administration; the nature and role of the nation's informational media; and – pivotally – whether the United States remains “a free society.” 

 

It also seems to me – this from behind my own 50-plus years doing journalism – McKay's understanding of these questions is...well, less than adequate. Indeed, based on the foregoing comments, the one poster with whom I come closest to agreement is dbreneman. Given our total disagreements on public transport – I like most New Yorkers believe it is a civil right, dbreneman seems to share the defining local conviction transit is a form of welfare – our near-consensus over what should be termed the “USian press crisis” is probably an irony of the first order. 

 

The biblical admonition “by their fruits shall we know them” is at least as applicable to politicians, governments and economic systems as it is to matters of metaphysics and morality. Viewed from this perspective, Democrat Barack Obama emerges as the most carefully camouflaged and willfully deceptive Republican tyrant ever elected to the presidency. That he is in fact a latter-day Richard Nixon has been posited by many pundits both Left and Right, but none more convincingly than Jonathan Turley. Here Turley shows us how Nixon – in the persona of Obama – has achieved every imposition of tyranny the Watergate-criminal president ever imagined: http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2013/03/25/nixon-has-won-watergate/2019443/ .
 

“More than any figure in history,” says Turley, “Obama has been a disaster for the U.S. civil liberties movement. By coming out of the Democratic Party and assuming an iconic position, Obama has ripped the movement in half. Many Democrats and progressive activists find themselves unable to oppose Obama for the authoritarian powers he has assumed. It is not simply a case of personality trumping principle; it is a cult of personality.”

At the same time, the nature of USian informational media has also been transformed. In the era McKay and I joined the working press, about 90 percent of the nation's newspapers were locally owned. Now, today, something like 95 percent of the (shrinking number of) print news outlets are owned by monopolies, with lockstep reportorial conformity enforced nearly as rigidly on today's USian papers as it was on Hitler's Voelkischer Beobachter or the Stalin-era Pravda. (Coincidentally, my newest blog post [http://lorenbliss.typepad.com/loren-bliss-outside-agitators-notebook/2013/05/notes-on-life-after-uselessness-the-old-man-with-an-old-rolleicord.html] describes the personnel-office methods the monopolies – which also own or control all the nation's broadcast media – use to ensure the political reliability of their employees.) The result is news coverage and opinion that is almost never more than the approved, quasi-official voice of what the Occupy Movement labeled “the One Percent” – the Big Business/Wall Street aristocracy that, by its financing of both the Democratic and Republican parties, has become a genuine Ruling Class in the ancient and most arrogantly despotic sense.

Meanwhile the cult of personality that now silences Democratic criticism of Obama has again, just as it did under presidents Carter and Clinton, forced the Democratic Party to abandon its own egalitarian New Deal principles. Therefore let us not forget it was cults of personality that enabled the tyrannies of Hitler and Stalin, the former in the name of a prototypical Ayn-Rand-type master race, the latter in the name of the very socialist humanitarianism he so wantonly betrayed. Perhaps the far-Right's odious characterization of Obama as a new Führer is eerily prescient.

In any case we see the United States is clearly no longer the “free society” McKay claims it to be. A growing number of citizens, myself among them, would argue the nation we formerly thought of as “ours” is now but a modern, globally imperial version of pre-Revolutionary France, with the former middle class now permanently reduced to the status of the sans culottes. The politicians no longer represent us – “we the people” – at all. In fact – note the impending cutbacks to Social Security, Medicare and food stamps – “our” elected officials now make no secret their only loyalties are to the bankers and chief executive officers who are their financial masters.

In this context any discussion of “the role of informational media” is a form of denial. USian mass media is, as an institution, no less compromised – that is, no less a wholly owned subsidiary of the One Percent – than the political system or the economy. Hence the only relevant question is not how the (hopelessly corrupt) judicial system might rule on reportorial and photographic rights, or whether the (irremediably compromised) politicians will enact an effective shield law; it is instead whether individual journalists will recognize today's United States gives them only two choices: submission or revolution. Hence too the new relevance of an old Appalachian song of resistance, “Which Side Are You On” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SB0fc9CobQ ).

The problem, of course, is that today's journalists are hired precisely for their conformity and obedience. 

But history shows us even the most hopelessly submissive serfs sometimes rise up angry. History also suggests the brazen, piss-on-our-constitutional-rights intrusions the USian secret police are now tyrannically inflicting on all of us – not just journalists but everyone in the 99 Percent – might finally awaken any number of hitherto suppressed revolutionary instincts. 

Too bad resistance is now futile, exactly as under the (fictional?) Borg. Whether nonviolent or otherwise, the result – as we have already glimpsed in the Obama Regime's suppression of the Occupy Movement and its expansion of Bush Regime surveillance into Orwellian monitoring of all 99 Percenters all the time – would be a bloodbath of Third Reich magnitude and Greasy Grass futility.

Thanks to the very technology that was supposed to save us not enslave us, the One Percent has finally achieved its ultimate divine-right fantasy: re-creation of itself in the merciless and sadistic image of Yahweh/Jesus/Allah, the vengeful and implacably misogynistic god of patriarchy. Now as a result the USian Fourth Reich is truly omnipotent and eternal – that is, until the Mother of All Gods blows the whistle on our entire species. 

LB/7 June 2013

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