Persistent White Racism Defines U.S. as Fascist Nation

Manhattan, Lower East Side, 1983, the slogan calling to mind 1979's Greensboro Massacre.  Tech data: Nikon FM, 24mm Nikkor, Tri-X, probably at 800 for D-76. Photo by Loren Bliss copyrights 1983, 2015. (Click image to view it full size.)  

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YES, THE SOUTH is every bit as malevolently Nazified as suggested by the jailing of a young black woman and her white assistant for pulling down a white supremacist banner in Charleston, South Carolina.

But it's not just the South. It's the whole damn United States.

The brutality of its racism and its kindred toxins of xenophobia, ethnic hatred and class prejudice was the one enduring lesson of the 177 (mostly miserable) months I involuntarily spent in the South during the post-New York City years of my childhood and early manhood. It's why I have not set foot in the South since 1969, and it's why I have no intention of ever going back.

However it was my subsequent years elsewhere that taught me the bigoted hatefulness of USian whites is truly ubiquitous. Though its expression may vary from region to region, its underlying malice is the same whether one is in Michigan, in New Jersey, in the Pacific Northwest or even in some parts of Manhattan.

Nor does it surprise me the Confederate battle flag  – the same icon of oppression the breathtakingly courageous Bree Newsome  yanked from one of the region's commonplace and officially defiant memorials to slavery and genocide – has become an international symbol of der übermenschen – the self-proclaimed “Aryan master race.”

After all, the Confederacy was our benighted species' first attempt to formally establish a system of government based exclusively on white supremacy. It predated the Nazis' Third Reich by 72 years. That's why. contrary to the Southern apologists' claims, any Confederate banner is unabashedly malignant, its public display the visual equivalent of shouting “nigger” in the face of any black who passes by. That's why the battle flag is now Hitler-saluted and zieg heiled by Nazis everywhere including Ukraine. 

And that's why Newsome and James Ian Tyson could no longer abide it flying – as if in smirking triumph – over the city made infamous by the most recent U.S. racial atrocity.

***

ASTUTE READERS WILL note I have linked to two mainstream-media reports describing the laudable deed done by Newsome and her protest-comrade Tyson. That's because the reports are written from differing perspectives – one from South Carolina, the other from New York City – and because each therefore contains details the other lacks.

The same is true of the alternative media report linked here,  which unfortunately spells Newsome's companion's name as “Dyson” despite the fact it is spelled “Tyson” in every other dispatch I have read.

Normally that would cause me to reject the “Dyson” piece for reportorial incompetence. But apart from the apparent misspelling, it provides additional, very interesting information about Newsome herself. And knowing the South, I can rationalize the spelling conflict as likely the result of how so many Southerners often confuse the pronunciations of D and T.

Alas, without a means of contacting Newsome's colleague directly, there is no way I can confirm which spelling is correct. So I'll follow the lead of the Associated Press, which I know to be generally trustworthy on such matters, and I'll continue to spell his name “Tyson,” with profuse apologies if I am wrong.

Meanwhile Newsome and Tyson are each facing up to three years in prison on misdemeanor changes of defacing a monument, which means they were fortunate to have been allowed to make bail so quickly.

Because of the rampant racism in Southern jails, anyone arrested on civil rights charges is in potentially deadly danger, not just from the guards but from racist inmates also. Given the violation of law with which Newsome and Tyson are charged, had either of the two spent much time behind bars, they'd have been prime targets.

Particularly during the Civil Rights Movement era, white jail guards routinely bribed white racist inmates with cigarettes, food and additional privileges to beat and rape men and women who had been arrested in civil rights protests. The persistence of racist violence throughout the nation, especially as perpetrated by federally militarized local police departments, strongly suggests such jailhouse practices continue unabated.

That's essentially what happened to a white Congress of Racial Equality activist named Phil Bacon in 1962 at Knoxville, Tennessee's Knox County Jail. Bacon was beaten into a near-coma, and the resultant injuries hospitalized him for some time – if I remember correctly, for three or four weeks. A white woman whose name I have since forgotten, herself a civil rights activist, was similarly savaged by white inmates in the jail's women's section.

The Knox County Jail was part of my Southern experience too. Arrested in the newsroom of The Knoxville Journal and charged with disorderly conduct for refusing to write a racist lie,  I spent most of the night of 3-4 June 1963 in one of its filthy, piss-reeking cell blocks before being allowed to post bail.

***

MY MOST REVEALING encounter with Southern hospitality occurred not during the overt antagonisms of the Civil Rights Movement but nearly two decades earlier, in the spring of 1944, when the entire nation was supposedly united in an all-out effort to defeat the Rome/Berlin/Tokyo Axis of Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo.

During most of 1943 my father was the acting vice-president for operations of a New York-based corporation called American Houses, the global pioneer in the manufacture of prefabricated housing. Before Pearl Harbor it had been building prefab single-family dwellings throughout the United States, and now it was erecting barracks on the nation's newly expanded military bases. Because of the grueling intensity of the war effort, my father was often working 16-hour days.

But my birthmother, a pampered and self-obsessed daughter of the Republican/isolationist bourgeoisie, refused to believe there was any (legitimate) reason for a “gentleman” to spend so much time on the job.

Fully cognizant of the damage her behavior would do his career, she stormed into my father's office atop the General Electric Building in Midtown Manhattan, interrupted a vital meeting with War Production Board officials and staged a wildly disruptive, utterly mortifying tantrum – toppling chairs, overturning water pitchers, hurling stacks of documents and shrieking out the spittle-punctuated venom of a (false and ludicrous) accusation he was working such long hours not to help fight fascism but to cover up a love affair with his personal secretary.

Just as my mother intended, the American Houses board of directors immediately canceled my father's pending formal appointment to the vice-presidential post in which he had been serving. Because the corporate world of that era regarded one's choice of a wife as a demonstration of one's personnel management skills, it would not promote men who were wedded to women who later proved themselves to be publicly vengeful harridans.

But the consequences of my mother's vindictiveness were far worse than she had anticipated. Not only was my father booted from the executive suite; he – and therefore his wife and I his son – were also exiled from New York City. He was sent to manage a plant in Jacksonville, Florida – the USian capitalist equivalent of exile to a Siberian hydroelectric power station, actually worse than Siberia because of the jungle-humid subtropical heat and the relentlessly predatory reptiles and insects.

Our new home was an upscale Jacksonville apartment complex called Catherine's Court, a cluster of recently erected red brick buildings in an attractively landscaped yard that fronted on the Saint John's River. Fenced, gated and locked, the tenants-only yard included an unsupervised playground with a large sandbox, probably 12 feet by 12 feet, filled with the white sand found on Floridian beaches.

It was there in that sandbox I learned what the South is really about, though now years later I would have to say the lesson exemplifies the attitudes that define not just one region of the United States but nearly the entire nation – particularly now that hard times permanently imposed by capitalist austerity provide a convenient excuse for any expressions of malevolence the Ruling Class cannot readily dismiss as “lone gunman” incidents.

As to the Catherine's Court sandbox, I think I had played in it several times before, but I had always been alone, and in any case my recollections are typical of those from early childhood in their frequent and often frustrating lack of contextual details.

However on this particular morning three other boys were there. They had a child-sized set of garden tools, a rake, shovel and hoe with light brown wooden handles and red-painted metal heads plus a smaller all-metal shovel, also red. I don't remember our conversation, though it's my impression they were building something, maybe a sand-castle like you'd build at the beach.

The day was cloudy, which diminished the usual sun-glare off the river, but it was also hot, and the fact I was out playing in the locked yard by myself suggests we had been living at Catherine's Court for several months, at least long enough to have become comfortable with our surroundings, which means it was probably the spring of 1944, and I with my Aries birthday was probably four years old.

As children do, I'm sure the other boys and I quickly established a hierarchy of age and size: they were older, five and six and maybe seven, and they were physically much bigger. I was small for my years, slender, dark haired, dark eyed, urban pale and vaguely Semitic-looking in contrast to their deeply tanned Aryan blue-eyed blondness. But I had that assertiveness New York City kids learn in earliest infancy, and I suppose I made it obvious I would not be intimidated by the presumptive superiority of their ages and statures.

Much of this contextual detail is, as noted above, the product of logical conjecture rather than specific recollection. The memory of what happened in the sandbox does not come into sharp focus until the three boys wanted to pull down my blue cotton overalls to see if I had a “Jew pee-pee.”

I did not. Though circumcision had been a medical commonplace in the United States of that era, I am one of those many males born c. 1939-1943 who were left uncircumcised in response to the widespread fear either the U.S. would turn officially fascist or the Nazis would win the war. Hence I would have easily passed the “Jew pee-pee” test.

But I had been raised in a dominantly progressive environment – my father had been a Communist during the 1930s and remained staunchly Marxian beneath his corporate disguise – and even as a child my sensibilities were outraged by the prospect of being forcibly disrobed. Somehow I convinced the trio – for by now I recognized them as unequivocal enemies – that de-panting me would get them in terrible trouble with their parents.

For a few blessed moments I thought I had escaped what to me was their inexplicable belligerence. Perhaps if I was motionless and quiet I could slip away from the sandbox without again provoking them.

But then these three native white Southern kids – these children of parents who apart from their Southern heritage were presumably the socioeconomic equals of my father – decided to bury my head in the sand because I “talked funny.”

I tried to run but never had a chance. Two of these Future Klansmen of America held me down while the third dug a hole in the sandbox with the red shovel. I remember realizing I would not be able to breathe once my head was in that hole. I remember watching with wordless, stomach-falling-into-a-bottomless-pit terror as the digger deepened the hole. The sand, beach-white and dry on the surface, was dark and damp in the hole's bottom.

When the hole was big enough to bury my entire head, the digger set aside the red shovel and the biggest boy grabbed my feet and stood me on my head while the other two held my arms. I kicked and fought and bit and screamed and pleaded and cried but they were too strong and they forced me face-first into the hole and began kicking in the sand and then my eyes and mouth and nose were full of sand and I couldn't see or breathe.

And then suddenly I was free again and spitting sand out of my mouth and snorting it out my nose and crying sand tears and trying to blink them out of my eyes and the three boys were fleeing in terror from the five-year-old next-door-neighbor girl who had descended on them like some relentlessly vengeful elf and snatched up their hoe and beat them with it and bloodied the scalp of at least one of them and in a wild flurry of ash-blonde hair chased them all away bawling like babies.

After that she came back to the sandbox and though I don't remember how or from where, she got some fresh water and a washcloth or a handkerchief and helped me clean myself up so my mother wouldn't have another of her frightfully hysterical tantrums as she would have surely had if I gone home obviously a victim.

The girl's name was Mary Alice Shotwell and I'm no longer sure about the color of her eyes because when I close my own eyes and try to picture them I sometimes see them as robins'-egg blue but usually as green as fire. If I remember correctly she was the daughter of a U.S. Navy officer.

We never did tell any adults what happened that day. Obviously Mary Alice sensed I was bitterly ashamed of the entire incident – after all, I had been defeated in what but for her intervention would have been mortal combat – and to my recollection we never spoke of it again, though we remained close, as near to lovers as children that age can be, until in 1946 we were permanently parted by the end of the war and her father's assignment to some far-off naval base or ship at sea.

I have often wondered what became of her, not the least because I owe her a huge debt of gratitude.

Thank you, Mary Alice, should you ever happen to read this. You no doubt saved my life.

***

REALLY, THOUGH, AS I noted at the beginning and have implied throughout, it is dead wrong to blame only the South. Outside of certain genuinely civilized parts of Manhattan – which just as the late James Baldwin called it is indeed Another Country – xenophobia, white racism and Nazified attitudes in general are as “American” as the proverbial apple pie.

In fact the only difference between white-supremacist Southerners and white supremacists elsewhere in the United States is the former have remained pridefully ignorant of the methods by which the latter routinely conceal their venom until they can safely display it in secret, as via the ballot.  (Scroll down to “In the Seattle Area, Racism Means Wretched Mass Transit.”)

Though the denizens of Washington state like to hide their racism, anti-Semitism and xenophobia behind a “progressive” facade, the ugly truth is revealed both by the so-called “Seattle Freeze”  and by the state electorate's relentless march toward a Wisconsin-type Republican majority. 

My own experience of the Seattle Freeze includes two managing editors of major Puget Sound daily newspapers who bluntly told me “(my) kind” (I was often mistakenly assumed to be Jewish) was not welcome in the area and that I should “do (myself) a favor and catch the next plane back to New York City.” Seattle – where I first heard my birthplace labeled “Jew York” and where I had the misfortune to live for nearly four years (1972-1976) – had by far the most bigoted and deliberately exclusive social climate I have ever encountered, infinitely worse than any place I ever dwelt in the South.

Bellingham, even on the Western Washington University campus, was nearly as bad as Seattle. By contrast, Tacoma, the working-class seaport town where I lived c. 1978-1982 and where I now have resided since 2004, is notably friendly.

Nor was my own family immune to the cancer of bigotry. As I would learn after puberty, my birthmother lived with constant horror I might become involved with a girl who was Jewish or of another race.

No doubt her paranoia was exacerbated by my father's antithetical values, one of the many reasons their marriage ended in 1945.

As an official of the War Production Board and later of the War Assets Administration (1945-1948), my father several times intervened to save African-Americans who had been seized without charges by Southern cops and shipped off to prison camps to fill vacancies on chain gangs.

After my father became a mortgage banker in 1950, he was the one such white man in Tennessee – more likely in the entire South – who would lend money to creditworthy African-Americans to buy houses in previously all-white neighborhoods.

Whenever and to whatever degree was possible, he lived his politics. His Marxism as much an expression of his heart as of his mind.

But in the final years of his life, white vengeance made him pay dearly for his earlier efforts toward integration and racial equality – another story for another time. For now, suffice it to say that when he died in 1971, this Boston-born former upper-echelon executive and federal official was running a gas station and automotive repair shop on the outskirts of Knoxville.

In this context, the passage from Richard Wright's 1945 non-fiction memoir Black Boy cited in a recent Guardian report is pointedly relevant.

The white population of the United States, wrote Wright, insists upon seeing the world in terms of good and bad, the holy and the evil, the high and the low, the white and the black; our America is frightened of fact, of history, of processes, of necessity. It hugs the easy way of damning those whom it cannot understand, of excluding those who look different, and it salves its conscience with a self-draped cloak of righteousness.

The conclusion of Guardian reporters Joanne Braxton and Michael Sainato – the epicentral grafs of their analysis – is equally damning:

That cloak of righteousness shields white America from having to face its contemporary prejudices and the historical biases from which they are a result. This cloak of invisibility also inhibits white America’s moral and psychological capacity to acknowledge and understand the magnitude of those historical and contemporary prejudices, and the effects they have on our society.

The Charleston shooting was not an anomaly, but a manifestation of the violence cultivated in America towards black communities. The shooter, Roof, is a product of a system that has been breeding hatred and bigotry in America since the first Africans were kidnapped and forcibly transported here in the 15th century as slaves under deplorable, inhumane conditions.

As to the breadth and depth of white racism in the United States, the history of New Orleans  is notably instructive. But the most irrefutable evidence is in post-Katrina polls that show four-fifths of the Caucasian population refused to recognize the bigotry  manifest in the deliberate withholding of rescue and relief. This data provides  an ultimate measurement of USian racism's real-world extent.

Relevant to these poll results is the legal concept of “countenancing” criminality – that is, of recognizing the commission of a crime while refusing to call the cops or otherwise act to stop or prevent it. By application of this principle of English law, we see that those who refuse to acknowledge racism are in fact “countenancing” it – which reveals them to be as racist as the perpetrators of overtly racist acts.

As if to underscore the post-Katrina results, the Southern Poverty Law Center's constantly updated “Hate Map” shows that each of the 50 states is the homeland of its own coterie of white supremacists, Ku Klux Klan klaverns and Nazi bruderbands.

One of the cornerstones of their solidarity is the U.S. doctrine of “exceptionalism” – the 21st Century equivalent of Hitler's Master Race, a malignant combination of white supremacy, Ayn Rand imperialism, divine-right rule and the Christian Prosperity Gospel merged into a hoo-yah ethos of global conquest.

A notorious white supremacist is already hailing the Charleston atrocities as “a preview of coming attractions.”

Meanwhile the self-proclaimed “Progressive Left” – our nation's sole (alleged) defender of all the precious freedoms We the People so desperately require if we are ever again to thrive and prosper – is demonstrating its ideological bankruptcy by collaborating with the Ruling Class to forcibly disarm us all, leaving us ever more  defenseless against the escalating fascist threat. 

LB/28 June 2015

-30-

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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