Downed by Wellness: I Felt Too Good to Work This Week

The Wright Park Sprayground: a cooling image, especially appropriate now since we're in the midst of the Puget Sound area's first summer heat wave. I snuck this picture on a rare hot day several weeks ago, my promised gesture of defiance to the hatefully fearful parents who seemingly wanted to lynch me  for trying to photograph a similar scene in the same place. Old-time journalism by an old-time guy: Rolleicord III, zone-focused and framed in the sports viewfinder (how else?); Kodak Tmax 100, f/16 at 1/250th. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2013.

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WHAT IF – instead of calling in sick – we lived in a society that allowed us to call in well? "Sorry, boss, I feel much too good to work today." 

In my case it was a too-rare opportunity for some real outdoor recreation, the sort of pasttime the United States, with its institutional hatred of public transport, routinely denies those of us who can't afford automobiles. 

Contrast this nation's uniquely (and therefore defining) anti-transit-user policies with the transit-is-a-civil-right principles that define the civilized world. Then we bring into sharp focus another of the innumerable ways Ayn Rand savagery characterizes USian governance whether at home or throughout its global empire. 

Yes, I'll be back next week – Goddess willing and the creek don't rise. Meanwhile I hope you enjoy the photo – and think about how the USian refusal to build adequate transit is deliberately crafted to inflict maximum punishment on anyone who is poor – how it leaves lower-income people stranded even as it inflicts on everyone else it the de facto tax of buying and maintaining a privately-owned automobile.

LB/28 June 2013

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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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The Provocateur in the Park: a Lament for USian Freedom

Kids playing on East 5th Street, Manhattan, 1967. Speculative work – unassigned random pictures such as this image, made for potential sale or inclusion in a portfolio – is a big part of photojournalism. I've photographed in New York, New Jersey, Michigan, Minnesota, Illinois, Ohio, Tennessee, North Carolina, Virginia, Georgia, Montana, Oregon, Washington state, Canada, parts of South Korea and probably some other locales I don't remember, but the only hostile reactions to my spec-photo efforts came from Seattleites, who in their well-documented xenophobia seem to regard “photographer” as synonymous with “interloper” if not “intruder.” Yet even in Seattle, where the sorts of street photography I had routinely done in Manhattan provoked so much anger I gave it up entirely, I was never hassled for photographing in public parks, even when the subject was children at play – pictures that often, though not always, were later published in The Seattle Sun. But earlier this week, when I attempted to shoot a mere three frames of spec work I thought might interest the Tacoma Metropolitan Parks District, I discovered that if you're an elderly, crippled male, merely pointing a camera at kids on a playground can put you in real danger of being lynched. Data: I used Bic Wite-Out and a red Marks-A-Lot, the only suitable paint-like materials I had on hand, to deface the print. The film is Tri-X; its grain structure says it was processed in Microdol-X at 400 ASA, but the rest of the information was lost in the 1983 fire. Because I snapped only one frame on East 5th Street before these attentive kids spotted me and started mugging for the camera, I was obviously not using one of the VT Canons on which I then normally relied, which means I was shooting with a Pentax H1A and probably its 55mm f/2 Super-Takumar – the choice of lenses indicating it may well have been that camera's maiden voyage. Photograph copyright Loren Bliss 1967, 2013. (Click on image to view it full size.)

 

 

 

*

THE POST-TRAUMATIC atrial fibrillation that made this piece so tardy has finally stopped, and now I can tell the story as it deserves to be told rather than as a narrative disjointed by bitterness and anticipation of death, but to put everything in sharp focus, I should preface all that follows by the mundane admission I cling to film cameras because I cannot afford the approximately $1000 it costs to convert to a digital single-lens reflex. The realities of Social Security, Medicare and the post-American-Dream economy make it clear I will never have that sort of money in whatever remains of this lifetime. Thus to any onlooker even the least bit camera-savvy it is obvious I remain the technological equivalent of an ignoramus or a bum or a weirdo and possibly all three. True, M Leicas were the best and therefore most prestigious 35mm cameras on this planet, but the retirement of the last factory-trained Leica repairman in the United States mandated their return to Germany even for routine cleaning and lubrication, which I was authoritatively told would take a year or more, not to mention the prohibitive costs of shipping plus the near certainty of huge hassles with our ever-more-tyrannical customs officials. Hence last year I sadly realized I had no choice but to to sell these beloved machines while they were still operational, and with funereal sadness I did just that. Since then my only 35mm cameras are relatively low-end SLRs, specifically Pentax MXs and K-1000s, which I formerly employed only as bodies for long lenses. They are certainly durable, and the associated optics are superb, but they are not Leicas, they are at least 30 years old, and I fear they'll die before I do. 

Because I am also fond of the 120 format, I've likewise kept a 1953-vintage Rolleicord III. For those unfamiliar with the wonderful machines formerly made by Franke & Heidecke, Rolleicord is to Rolleflex as Volkswagen is to Porsche. This means the 'Cord is mechanically simple enough it need not be returned to Deutschland for repairs – that even given the notorious ineptitude characteristic of too many USian camera mechanics, with careful shopping I can (probably) find someone stateside to clean, lubricate, adjust and – assuming the continued availability of spare parts – even fix it if it goes Tango Uniform. And I love what can be done with medium-format negatives. There is also the fact I am inordinately fond of twin-lens reflexes. My first camera, which my father gave me for my 12th birthday, was a TLR, a Kodak Brownie Reflex that used 127 film, and I learned my first (self-taught) grab-shooting lessons with its eye-level sports viewfinder. The first newspaper-issue camera with which I worked – this at age 16 for The Grand Rapids Herald in Michigan – was a Zeiss Ikoflex, a Rolleflex competitor. The second, during my 18th year, was a Rolleiflex itself; it was issued by The Fountain Citizen, for which (if memory serves), my first picture assignment produced a rather pedestrian but nevertheless Page-One-worthy image of U.S. Sen. Estes Kefauver braving a torrential East Tennessee summer thunderstorm as he campaigned for re-election in 1958. Then maybe four decades later I realized the tacit bowing of one's head to the subject – the gesture mandated by the waist-level finder that defines all TLRs – evokes a response that is entirely different from the what obtains during eye-level photographic encounters, especially amidst the Cyclopean intrusiveness of SLRs. At about the same time it dawned on me one of the great but mostly unacknowledged attributes of M Leicas, VT Canons and I guess all other 35mm rangefinder cameras is how they enhance photographer-subject intimacy because the machine never completely masks the photographer's face. Hence I concluded a TLR operated at waist-level appears safe, compliant, respectful, even reassuring, to the person or persons on the other end of the lens, which makes it a very useful tool indeed – except of course in the Land of Omnipresent Hatefulness the U.S. has become since 9/11 – or more accurately since 11/22/1963. 

*** 

The senior housing project in which I reside is not far from Wright Park, one of Tacoma's better recreational facilities. The park's 27 acres is especially convenient for walkers and joggers because a single circuit of its perimeter path measures exactly one mile. It was also a primary beneficiary of the $84.3 million improvement bond the Tacoma Metropolitan Park District convinced the voters to approve in 2005 – fortuitous timing indeed, as two years later the One Percenters began their deliberate downsizing of the USian economy and thereby ended forever any electoral willingness to invest in expanded government services. But the park is in a high crime area, and its interior was ruled by criminals even in daylight until it was reclaimed about four years ago through the cooperative efforts of the local neighborhood association and the Tacoma Police Department. The park is now not only attractive and well maintained, it is also notably safe, and it has become a favorite spot for mothers with children. But when I walked there Wednesday, children were not on my agenda. I was intent on photographing only a huge paper-birch – a tree so big it probably predates the park's 1886 founding by as much as a century. Though I soon realized my Gossen Luna-Pro SBC had finally died of old age – had I followed its reading I would have over-exposed my negatives by five stops – the light meter in my head seemed as good as ever, and nine frames later I had what I wanted – textural studies I intend to use in some new sandwiches. 

As I walked back toward my apartment I passed one of the more notable improvements the bond issue had funded: a water-playground for children. Called the Sprayground, it was built to replace a conventional wading pool. It features a number of fountains, shower-head devices, stationary hoops and exercise bars, many of them distinctly sculptural and therefore visually interesting, all designed to allow kids plenty of room to run and play while granting them the pleasure of a thorough soaking on a hot summer's day. And now watching the girls and boys joyfully dart around and through the gleaming columns of sun-bright water, I understood why some of my neighbors here in geezer manor had been urging me to visit the Sprayground with a camera. I also saw immediately how much safer it is for children than playing in streets doused by sprinkler-headed fire hydrants, a summertime sight so common in the urban neighborhoods of New York City, it long ago became a journalistic cliché – one to which I surely contributed my own share of hackneyed images during those halcyon years before gentrification exiled me forever from my home. Now, knowing I had three frames left on the Rolleicord's 12-exposure roll of Kodak T-Max 100, I wondered if I might get a non-cliché image I could peddle to the park district. What better than the Sprayground to illustrate the reclamation of the park from its former criminal masters? The pictures would be all the more telling because the kids I was now watching – a dozen children ages five through 10 – were of such obvious ethnic diversity.

 

It is relevant at this point to note I was casually but reasonably well dressed – blue-gray flower-patterned shirt, khaki bush jacket, navy blue slacks, tan straw hat. My shirt collar was neatly folded over the collar of the bush jacket. The Van Dyke that in 2005 or so replaced the full beard I had worn since the 1980s was freshly trimmed, and I was wearing new dark brown leather sandals over black wool socks. I bore a tan canvas shoulder bag with a medium-sized matte-gray aluminum tripod collapsed and hooked to its top, the strap slung diagonally over my right shoulder. As always – thanks to a knee injury from junior high school football and the spinal injuries inflicted on me by a habitual drunken driver in 1978 – I walked with a cane. In other words, I looked exactly like what I am – an elderly, obviously crippled but nevertheless dedicated photographer, most likely a resident of one of the multi-storey apartment complexes that abound near the park. 

As I usually do before I start exposing film – unless of course it is a riot or a fire or some other such emergency – I stood and watched, absorbing the possibilities of the scene, framing and otherwise previsualizing pictures. The visual geometry of the interactions between the romping children and the water and the hard bright circular and linear forms of the facility itself were fascinating, and the potential for transcending cliché – particularly since I was shooting black-and-white film – seemed uniquely promising. But the two-stop difference between sunlight and shadow was tricky, especially with all the added glare. My old Luna-Pro was now garbage, I no longer have a darkroom in which to manipulate an image, the burn-and-dodge capabilities of my Gimp photo software are minimal at best, and I learned long ago the over-priced local labs are less than adept at remedial custom printing. Hence it took me a couple of minutes to decide an exposure – f/11 at 1/500th, and to get the shadow detail just right I would bracket one stop each way, f/16 and f/8. But after I had shot only one carefully composed frame, a young white woman approached me – a pretty woman scarcely more than five feet tall, golden-brown hair to her shoulders, a seemingly intelligent face. Curiously enough I don't remember the color of her eyes, but she may have been wearing sunglasses; I know she was a few minutes later. I wasn't paying that much attention; I merely assumed she was going to do as so many other parents have done on nearly all the (relatively rare) occasions I've photographed children – that she would ask who I was and how she might get a print “if the pictures come out.” Instead she quietly asked if I had any children there in the Sprayground. 

“No,” I answered, instantly concerned yet another economically ruined parent had abandoned yet another hungry and heartbroken child and had chosen the park as the place of abandonment. “Why, is there some kid here missing a par...” 

Her response interrupted my question: “you're creeping us out. What are you doing photographing these children?” 

“I'm a professional photographer,” I said. I reached into my bush jacket for my black leather business card wallet, extracted a card, held it out for her. “I'm just...” 

She interrupted me again. She ignored my offering. Now her voice rose several decibels: “Who do you work for?” 

“I work for myself, anymore. I'm retired. Before that I worked for newspapers and magazines. But I still...” 

Her third interruption, and now she was yelling: “why are you here? Why are you even looking at these children?”

“Because...” 

Interruption number four: “we don't don't want you here. You don't have any right to be here.” 

“Ma'am, look, I'm trying to explain but you keep interrupting. Take my card...” 

“I don't want your damn card.” Her voice became a loud belligerent screech. “We don't care who you are or what you are. You're creeping us out. We” – her sweeping gesture indicated everyone within the Sprayground or just beyond its circular concrete perimeter – “want you out of here now, creep. Now! NOW!” 

The vehemence of her words bespoke an enmity I had not encountered since confrontations decades ago with segregationists in the Jim Crow South. Now she looked a “why-aren't-you-here-yet” look toward a group of white males who stood maybe 30 yards away at the perimeter's far side, four or five young shirtless men staring in my direction though not yet really glowering. And now I felt the first twinges of fright. The woman's facial expression and body language suggested the “sugarpie-that-man-just-insulted-me” combination of lust and sadistic yearning you see on southern belles and other female bloodhawks when they're trying to goad their beaux into making them wet by beating someone senseless or dead, and I realized the woman's tantrum – never mind it was utterly unjustified and unprovoked – might be putting me in real jeopardy. 

My muddle of emotions – vexation at how easily she had ambushed me, anger at her consummate unfairness, astonishment at the Ku Klux caliber of her hatred, growing fear of her now-obvious effort to instigate violence, profound shock at how such a fine productive day had been so suddenly and totally ruined – now coalesced into pure outrage, and I finally answered her as I should have answered her from the very beginning, as I would have answered her had I not been deceived by the deliberate lie of her falsely pleasant initial approach. 

“Look, lady,” I snarled in my most defiant basso, “I've been Working Press more'n 50 years, long before you were even born, so don't you imagine for a minute you and your band of thugs over there can tell me what I can and can't photograph. You're in a public place, you're fair game. You got a complaint, go call the cops.”

“I already have,” she shrilled, turning away, tossing her hair, literally stomping back around the concrete perimeter toward the men she obviously still hoped she could draw into the confrontation. 

“Good,” I growled. “You people ever hear of the First Amendment? Maybe the cops'll teach you what it really means.” 

By then of course the woman's malicious braying had metastasized her hatefulness throughout the Sprayground. It was clear she had intended to provoke the selfsame hysteria that spawns lynchings and pogroms and witch hunts, and now it seemed as if all the parents were glaring at me and herding their children out of the water. Recognizing I was potentially in harm's way, realizing the severe penalties by which Washington state punishes assault on the working press might no longer protect me in retirement, knowing I would have no allies here until the cops arrived, remembering all the lynch-mob horrors vindictive southern white women have sadistically inflicted on southern black men, wondering if now in Tacoma I would be the first white male in the United States to be lynched by an interracial mob, I closed up the Rolleicord and hobbled away. Yet somewhere amidst all this madness I was also blessed with a single quick sympathetic glance from a young African-American woman. She was a mother seemingly no different from all the others, but her liquid-brown eyes surreptitiously met mine and seemed to grow huge with deep concern, as if she were saying “yes I've seen all this before and I pray you don't get hurt.” It was just a fleeting instant, an impression so ephemeral I later wondered if I had imagined it, but at the moment it assured me I was not totally alone after all – never mind this woman (very wisely, I thought afterward), dared not publicly defend me.

 

And now my own blood was up, boiling with an intensity I have not experienced since my years in the Civil Rights and Anti-Vietnam-War and Back-to-the-Land and alternative press movements and my last long-ago encounter with violently Christian vigilantes, and though within hours I would be paying the geriatric price of such increased adrenalin – a night and a day and another night of scary cardiac arrhythmia – I now openly glared my own contempt and hatred in return. Meanwhile the hair-trigger white woman and her companions and the other parents she had provoked to tripwire hostility continued to regard me as a hate-object. Too bad I had never suspected my presence might evoke such a hostile response; otherwise I'd have had the proper equipment to photograph the provocateur in full rant, and we would get to see her nominally attractive features in all their hate-distorted ugliness, but the old Rolleicord with its baroque film-advance knob and its independently cocked shutter and its relatively shallow depth of field is entirely too genteel a machine for such high-intensity reportage. At least though my rising anger prompted me to hobble far more slowly in the defiant hope prolonging my departure would give the cops time to show up. I am known to the Tacoma Police Department not only as a retired journalist but as an outspoken member of the neighborhood association that helped liberate the park from its former gang-banger masters, and I relished the likelihood the cops would inform the provocateur – in terms she could understand even amidst her convulsions of paranoid loathing – that I had every right to be in the park and every right to photograph as I had intended. 

Once I was beyond the Sprayground, I paused on the adjacent hillside to shoot my last two frames of film, another act of defiance that wasted good emulsion on prosaic silhouette-images of a young couple talking under a big maple but nevertheless made the point I would not be driven from the park. By then I was probably 100 yards from the provocateur, but behind her sunglasses she continued to glare at me as if I had not moved a foot since her initial assault. Her malice remained palpable. For just a moment she seemed to scowl with obvious disgust at the bare backs of her male companions, who were now oblivious to my presence; again I sensed her fury she had not been able to provoke them into lynch-mob action. Then she resumed her glaring. I glared in return. I considered giving her the finger but dismissed that as too predictable, too likely to re-provoke her coterie of males and in any case insufficiently insulting to be worth the risk. Finally she averted her gaze. Maybe five minutes later I had hobbled out of the park. The cops never showed up. 

*** 

In all my years in journalism, whether as a photographer or reporter or both, I have never encountered anything quite like what happened in last Wednesday in Wright Park. Certainly I have been attacked, but always only by the usual suspects – Klansmen, Nazis, crooks whose scams I have exposed, perpetrators of police brutality, sundry other fascists, goons and thugs. But not since the horrors of my (involuntary) years in southern public schools have I been assaulted merely for being who I am. Though perhaps I should not be surprised; I have long noted the xenophobia, the conformity, the anti-intellectuality and all the other depressing qualities the present-day population of the Puget Sound area shares with the reflexively hostile public school students I encountered in Florida and East Tennessee as the Yankee son of a Yankee carpetbagger in the 1940s and 1950s. Swap the racism of the South for the socioeconomic bigotry of Pugetopolis, and you've a near-perfect match. But I never imagined I might someday again be confronted by a 21st Century version of the schoolyard psychodynamics that several times got me mauled by jocks – this to “put (me) in (my) place” for saying hello to somebody's prom-queen girlfriend and thereby crossing some forbidden caste line. Hence immediately after I returned to my dwelling from the park, I initially assumed what had happened there was merely another ugly dimension of the so-called Seattle Freeze, the defining element of Puget Sound regional culture that – especially since the death of the American Dream – has escalated into a war against lower-income people of all ages and ethnicities. But then I opened my email as I always do following a day afield whether good or bad, and the first item I read told me what a federal jury had just done to the Oak Ridge Three. 

Suddenly, realizing the news from Knoxville was of a kind with what happened to me in Wright Park, I was more frightened of my own nation than I have ever been. I realized the long-feared termination of USian pretend-democracy is upon us, its death signaled not just by the fate of the Oak Ridge Three but by the fatal persecution of Aaron Swartz and the de facto martial law imposed on Boston in the wake of the terrorist bombings. Indeed the house-to-house searches conducted by militarized police  in Watertown, where cell-phone and video footage clearly shows that to be a civilian was to be the enemy, reminded me of nothing so much as the documentary footage I have seen of the Nazis' rounding up the Jews of Poland and savaging all the diverse peoples of the western Soviet Union. Obviously the nominally mindless Right was eerily prescient when it characterized Obama as a new Hitler. But what neither Right nor Left dare acknowledge is the extent to which Obama's Hitlerishness is the true expression of this entire nation's malevolent will. As in Wright Park, as in Knoxville, as all across the land from coast to coast, from border to border – precisely as it was demonstrated to me personally by the Sprayground provocateur and the would-be goon-squad she nearly recruited to bolster her persecutorial zeal, exactly as if she were an official jeerleader at an Orwellian Five Minute Hate.

I cannot imagine any other rational explanation for her vindictively provocative tantrum. Did she think I was a terrorist? Did she imagine I was a Russian spy? (It is true many people say I look Eastern European, probably because of my tiny fraction of Mohawk blood or maybe because, as familial genetic studies have revealed, my most distant pre-Celtic ancestors were indeed people of the Steppe.) Perhaps she feared I was a private detective out to catch a parent in adulterous company or a child with a forbidden relative. Possibly she thought I was a Jew, as even now with my formerly coal-black beard and darkest brown hair gone mostly gray, I am occasionally assumed to be – and therefore automatically despised by a surprising number of allegedly “progressive” Puget Sounders, some of whom years ago in Bellingham and Seattle actually challenged my right to reside in Western Washington. Or maybe she felt her children weren't prettied up enough to be photographed. Perhaps she assumed because I did not have a shiny new digital camera, I was nothing more than a bum. Maybe she herself is on the lam and is running from an Amber Alert or fears her picture might show up on Most Wanted. Possibly – especially considering how she damned me as a “creep” – her private litany of bigotries convinced her my gender and age and disability and lack of digital equipment identified me as some sort of pervert. But that makes no sense either. If she believed me to be a sex criminal, why did she reject my effort to prove my identity? Besides, a real pervo would have been lurking in the bushes, clandestinely shooting from afar with a long telephoto lens, not obviously photographing in the open as I had been attempting to do.

All that said, it seems to me the most indicative elements of the confrontation are how the provocateur repeatedly interrupted my attempts to identify myself as a legitimate photojournalist and refused to allow me to explain my purpose. This suggests my photographic effort was hardly the issue, a probability further substantiated by the wording of some of her assaultive questions – especially “why are you here” and “why are you looking at these children.” Therefore my best guess is I was targeted because (a) I am elderly, (b) I am visibly disabled and (c) I am a male who conforms to no approved USian stereotype. I wear a fedora rather than the ubiquitous baseball cap that identifies the “American” jock-worshiper whether male or female as a conforming and therefore reliable citizen of the One Percent's de facto Fourth Reich. I wear Nike sandals, not Nike athletic shoes. Instead of a team jersey, I like nearly all photographers of my generation wear a bush jacket to compensate for the lack of pocket-space in modern shirts and trousers. But Puget Sounders do not wear bush jackets. Neither do they wear their shirt collars turned out over their jacket collars, nor do they wear fedoras. Though I never gave it much thought until now, my sartorial choices, shaped as they were by work and mostly in Manhattan, would probably say “outlander” nearly anywhere in the United States, bespeaking origins in (despised) realms like New York City or Europe. Mostly I suspect my lack of digital equipment plus my obvious age and disability suggested to the provocateur I am impoverished and – in the malevolent irrationality of present-day USian public opinion – therefore to blame for all the savagery that afflicts capitalist society, just as the Jews were allegedly to blame for all the afflictions of Weimar Germany. In any case I was clearly someone from Elsewhere, at the very least a Nonconformist, and given my age, disability and antique camera, obviously one of the hated poor – the 21st Century USian equivalent of the Weimar Jews. In the ever-more-Nazi-like atmosphere of today's zieg-heiled USA! USA! USA! with all its imperial self-righteousness and witch-hunt fervor, I might well have been similarly attacked had I merely lingered too long while walking through the Sprayground area, camera or not.

In this context, the fearsome magnitude of the provocateur's hatred is the predictable byproduct of a carefully structured process – another example of how ideas have consequences. The entire episode is therefore a teachable moment. It is bitter proof of the core toxicity that now characterizes not just the population of Puget Sound but the vast USian majority whether Democrat or Republican; its universality is confirmed by public acceptance (and therefore at least tacit support) of previously intolerable atrocities that range from assaults on the working press to the death-dealing consequences  of the Sequester and the pending cutbacks  in Social Security and Medicare. It is as common amongst so-called “progressives” as it is amongst alleged “conservatives,” its poison immediately recognizable by any of us who have witnessed the idiotic fanaticism of the Ku Klux Klan or the equally ignorant anti-gunowner frenzies of the forcible-disarmament cult or the rabidly moronic furies of the Nazis whether old or new. It exemplifies the mindset that facilitated the original Holocaust and now facilitates a new USian Holocaust based not on ethnicity or race but on age and health and socioeconomic status. Its earlier manifestation gave Hitler control of Germany; without 35 million human sacrifices by the soldiers of the Red Army and the men, women and children of the Soviet Union, it would have given him the world. Now 68 years later it is the reason a jury condemned three prisoners of conscience to potential 20-year prison sentences on the same day a provocateur tried to muster a lynch mob against me at the Sprayground in Wright Park. It also explains why there is not now (nor ever will be again) a viable USian resistance to capitalism – why resistance is pointless and ultimately suicidal and above all else simply not worth the effort to squander one's life however long or short in rebellion that will always suffer betrayal at the hands of provocateurs and their submissively lockstep followers. It is the hybrid venom of greed, ignorance and moral imbecility and – precisely because of how deftly its festering is concealed beneath new pathologies of celebrity and trinket materialism and the old Nazi pathology of the Big Lie – it has become the closest approximation to Absolute Evil our species has yet unleashed. And now it transforms this nation from the birthplace of constitutional democracy to the death house in which Liberty herself is being murdered and the grave in which she will soon be buried forever. 

LB/8-12 May 2013
 

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