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| Relishing the morning sunlight (second published variant). Photo by Loren Bliss copyright 2015: from the work-in-progress, "Lives Apart." For data and commentary see “Forsaking Fallacies,” below. |
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BLOGGING
HAS BECOME burdensome, partly because of conflicting obligations
arising from other unpaid volunteer editorial work. That is one reason
this post is so belated, and why I am again compelled to apologize to
readers who had expected more and better. But that is only one part of
the story.
Another
aspect is a condition characteristic not of this blog alone but of any
writing I dare attempt without the protection of a competent editor or
at least a reliable proofreader. It is an old problem, often set aside
or thrust into the background but impossible to solve, in July hauled
once more into painful and discouraging focus by yet another outbreak of familial hostilities
that among other things forced me to again acknowledge – this time as
never before – my huge weariness with the always desperate, always
fearful struggle against dyslexia, a condition now relentlessly
spotlighted by the often-brutal self-honesty that seems to be among the
genetic mandates of old age.
For
me, that struggle is the defining, inescapably discouraging element in
any act of complex verbal expression. I long ago acquired sufficient
loquaciousness to hide it – a knowingly dishonest but necessary tactic I
had perfected probably no later than my sixth year, unquestionably as a
defense against my father's hatefulness. But I have never been able to
shield myself from the infinitely embittering fact dyslexia always wins.
Worse, it seems my defeat is invariably fated to be revealed publicly,
these days by some grotesquely stupid misspelling or glaringly obvious
typographical or mathematical error that – like the reading troubles
which nearly caused me to fail first and second grade – confirms yet
again my father's infinitely repeated denunciation of me as “goon boy.”
What
rescued me from the Sargasso Sea of emotional and intellectual problems
that are invariably inflicted by reading difficulties was the
intervention of a maternal aunt, the one member of my mother's family
who did not regard me as a pariah and to whom I therefore remain forever
thankful. This blessed woman whose name was Alecia hired a summertime
tutor who taught me reading as phonics rather than word-recognition.
(The latter, impossible for a dyslexic, reduces written English to
Chinese-style ideographs but is nevertheless favored by lazy teachers,
including those at Jacksonville, Florida's Norwood Elementary School c.
1946-1948.) As it turned out, Alecia's beneficence was the finest most
pivotal gift I would receive in this entire lifetime: by the middle of
third grade I was reading at a 12th-grade level.
But
the (arguably unfit) parent who was my (officially unfit) birthmother's
sperm-source would not stop calling me “goon boy” until 1952 or 1953,
when I was 12 or 13. Though he has been dead since 1971, I realize now
his hateful curse – which like all such parental damnation is a curse in
every possible sense of the word – will follow me into the grave.
Meanwhile, exactly as it has always done, it continues to rob the
writing-process of even the most minimal emotional reward, reducing it
to an endlessly wary slog through a mine-field of potential
mortification.
To
the long-ago editor of a long-ago periodical who demanded to know why I
invariably waited until the last minute to write my stories, I can now
change my original answer – “I dunno; I just do” – to a statement of
painful truth: that only by approximating the deadline pressures of
covering breaking news for a daily newspaper am I able to nullify the
paralytic fear of revealing the “goon boy” I will always in my
heart-of-hearts believe I am.
Yet,
as I said at the beginning, the never-ending battle against dyslexia
and the self-hatred it invariably engenders is only part of a larger
discouragement.
July's
bout with familial hostility underscored by its real-world events the
message of a dream I dreamt nearly two years ago: “you can eat with the
Blisses this one time,” my eerily resurrected father said in the dream,
“but then I want you out of here.” Thus the dream-factory of my
subconscious was finally in my 73rd year acknowledging as absolute truth
what I had feared since my fifth summer, 1945, when my father tried
unsuccessfully to convince the state of Virginia to allow him to abandon
me in one of its orphanages. In other words, my presence in the Bliss
family after my father discovered the extent of my birthmother's madness
at best an intrusion – and more often than not a mightily resented
burden.
That
2013 dream's revelations had been profoundly disturbing, more so than I
can possibly describe, and now in July 2015 its hurtfulness was renewed
by my realization that no matter what I might say or do, in the eyes of
all the Blisses except perhaps three – influenced as they remain by my
father's oft-expressed contempt and resentment of me – I will always be
damned. Thus there was really no point in doing anything other than
metaphorically burning the proverbial bridges. Better the jagged-edged
truth of out-in-the-open animosity than the soothing charade of bogus
closeness that predictably turned to hostility if I ever dared call upon
it even to the slightest degree.
What
surprised me – and here we return to specific reasons for my absence
from the blogosphere – was how emotionally draining this conclusive
conflict was. Obviously I am not as resilient as I used to be. In my
childhood and youth and through most of my adulthood, I could sidestep
such episodes – and there were many – with sufficient alacrity to remain
at least professionally functional. Even the most emotionally
devastating of familial betrayals, my father's elaborate denunciation of
me to my second wife, did not impair my ability to function as a
journalist, whether with a typewriter or a camera, especially the
latter. At the time (1968) I was 28 years old, and my experience since
then has been that as one ages, one (thankfully) becomes ever more
hardened to familial trauma. Perhaps though one's increasing proximity
to the grave not only imposes that harsh mandate of honesty I mentioned
earlier, but also an equally irresistible insistence on emotional
openness.
It
is a bit of an aside, but no doubt the reason I have always favored
photography over writing is the former's blessed freedom from dyslexic
taint – and therefore from the invisible but nevertheless reflexive
intellectual cringing that is such a huge part of my father's legacy to
me. Photography, itself the act of liberation writing could never be, is
thus also liberated to become a passionate expression of passion – or
so it was before the fire, and now blessed as I am by digital
manumission from prohibitive film costs, so it seems to be becoming once
again. By contrast, writing – even at its very best – has never gotten
beyond mere intellectual exercise and obviously never will.
But
it was not just the realm of blood-kin family – not “my family” because
after 1945 I had no real family – that my father so diligently worked
to poison. Whenever he had the opportunity, he belittled me to my
lovers, friends and colleagues, many of whom, often with astonishment,
reported his enmity. Characteristically, he seized upon the chance to
denounce me to my second wife when she sought to enlist his assistance
in saving our marriage from the mutual acting-out that beset us both in
the wake of the miscarriage that took our much-wanted son. My father's
response was to tell my wife she had been a fool for marrying me. He
said I was “just like (my) mother,” adding that I was the genetically
defective, certainly neurotic, probably crazy, possibly retarded spawn
of a certified madwoman – the same “honesty” (his term) he shared with
any of my friends and colleagues whenever he had the opportunity.
He
had badmouthed me to my first wife too, but for her I was nothing more
than a stepladder out of the Baltimore slums – she had never loved me, a
painful truth she would reveal to me in 1961, while I was serving in
Korea as part of my U.S. Regular Army enlistment (active duty November
1959-September 1962; reserves until October 1965). Hence she was
indifferent to his slanders and untroubled by what they represented.
Hence too, I didn't much give a damn what my father told her; I knew
whatever he said to her, it would not alter the course of our
relationship, which in any case was destined to end in divorce as soon
as my wife determined it had fulfilled her stepladder needs.
But
the circumstances of the 1968 incident – the episode involving my
second wife – made it indescribably painful, not the least because each
of us was trying desperately (and in our own often-ham-handed ways) to
save our marriage. Despite all these stresses, in the professional sense
I remained fully functional, so much so 1968 was a year in which my
skill as a picture editor and layout artist helped my employer win
significant editorial awards.
Now
though in 2015 a far briefer encounter with the lingering residue of my
father's beyond-the-grave malevolence shut me down completely. Until
now, every attempt I made to write for OAN was stillborn, and
it took a harsh regimen of self-imposed discipline for me to even get
out the August edition of the monthly newsletter I produce for the
senior housing project in which I dwell. Afterward – that is, after the
newsletter is printed – I had always been elated, but this time I was as
exhausted as if I had done two weeks of hard physical labor. Thus I
spent most of the rest of the month either distracting myself by
obsessing on old memories or new trivia or lying abed sleeping 10, 12 or
14 hours a day.
Atop all that – and here is the final hindrance to my resumption of OAN – there is my increasingly unshakable conviction we are indeed a doomed species on a dying planet, which – if true – reduces all our lives to the absolute-zero of meaninglessness.
It
means any life no matter its accomplishments or lack thereof is
literally of no consequence. It means anything Rebecca Solnit (or anyone
else) writes from a lets-organize-and-save-the-world perspective (or
any other perspective beyond selfish entertainment) is at best
grandiosity and at worst a collective spasm of denial. It means anything
Gene Smith (or anyone else) has photographed is nothing more than a
visual exclamation point. It means whatever choice one makes – whatever
one does or does not do – is meaningless. It also means Ayn Rand is H. sapiens sapiens'
ultimate philosopher – that her implicitly Nazifying credo of morally
imbecilic self-indulgence is the only doctrine philosophically correct
for our species and our planet – and that the One Percenters' limitless,
fuck-the-world-we'll-all-be-dead-soon orgy of parasitic consumption is
therefore the highest possible expression of human reality and therefore
of our species' potential for achievement. It means we humans are no
different from the conveyor-belt chickens we sadistically convert to
food by dragging them upside-down and squawking to their mechanically
tortured deaths – that we and our victims and the random motes of
insentient stardust on the solar wind are are literally equal in cosmic
insignificance.
Mostly
though it means the abyssal nihilism of the post-modernists is utterly
justified. If there is no meaning in anything save that which the
individual (whether human or fowl) arbitrarily assigns it, the perfect
corollary, the sacrament of Confirmation for serial killers and
slaughter-house victims alike, is the apocalyptic gospel of Capitalist
Saint John Galt. Which in turn means consciousness itself is
meaningless, making it at best a cosmic joke, at worst an irrefutable
argument Nature's ultimate achievement is not sentient life but its
opposite: any object with no emotional or intellectual capacity
whatsoever and therefore, beyond its molecular valences, literally both
heedless and needless.
If, as Marshal McLuhan
dared posit, all real art contains elements of genuine prophecy, here
too is perhaps the message in the zombie metaphor that has become so
wildly popular in Moron Nation cinema and all its related marketing
campaigns and profiteering. By reductio ad absurdum, that is,
by reducing zombification to a comfortably unreal spectacle of comedic
violence, the One Percenters – who remember own not just the government
but the media by which we the governed are conditioned, commanded and
controlled – cunningly ensure we are increasingly insulated from the
unspeakable truth we ourselves are already the living dead.
Life then truly is naught but terminal illness – one in which environmental ruin is already evident
as the primary symptomatology. When there is to be no future, why
bother to write anything? Why – beyond the personal satisfaction I get
from the competent seizure of a telling image – even bother to
photograph?
And
is it not true that in the personal microcosm of futility imposed by
the fire that destroyed my life's work, I have experienced the
collective macrocosm of futility that now defines our entire species?
The
older I get – the closer to the grave I am dragged by the inescapably
terminal tow-chain of time – the more I am inclined to devote my
remaining hours to small and meaningless pleasures, just as I did for
nearly three hours a couple of days ago, watching a big brown-and-white
autumnal spider build a glistening web between the northward-looking
picture-window that spans the wall above my desk and the property-line
windbreak of junipers that's maybe five yards beyond the glass. The
spider is an arachnid prima ballerina on a choreography of web, her
accompaniment a concerto of light and shadow. I watch her until she
retreats into the vibrantly green foliage. Then for another 30 minutes
or so I study the play of light upon her ephemeral geometry, for a time
drifting into that blessed Zen state in which I become one with what I
am observing and therefore, if I am so inclined, invariably make my best
photographs.
There
is no price tag on the rewards of such solitary silent mindfulness.
Their value is indescribable. But I find such passages indescribably
exquisite, and their exquisiteness has become as vital to me as breath
itself.
Couple
that change-of-attitude dynamic with the real-time obligations imposed
by photographing, writing, editing and producing the monthly newsletter –
said newsletter has grown to the point the associated work takes nearly
two full-time weeks each month – and you've got the reasons OAN has now become (and will probably remain) essentially a monthly publication.
Oh,
I'll no doubt post an Extra if events so demand. And – yes – I'm (of
course) continuing the photo essay, working title “Lives Apart,” that I
began here in the geezer ghetto in 2011, and – again yes – I will
continue posting some of its images on OAN, never mind that
beyond this blog there is no longer any publisher for such work, nor (as
long as capitalism rules) will there ever be again.
Meantime, to all those who had expected I would do better, I once more apologize. Quoth Lao Tzu:
If a sage of the lowest order hears about TAO
He laughs loudly about it.
If he does not laugh loudly
Then it was not yet the true TAO.
He laughs loudly about it.
If he does not laugh loudly
Then it was not yet the true TAO.
*** *** *** *** ***
Trump Could Be the One Percent's Long-Sought USian Hitler
READER SUPPORTED NEWS has been republishing Matt Taibbi's Rolling Stone
reports on Donald Trump's quest for the Republican presidential
nomination, but for some reason – probably the mandates of writing for a
publication that despite its pseudo-radicalism is (and always has been)
unequivocally capitalist – Taibbi never dares acknowledge the
historical parallels that define Trump's candidacy.
The first of Taibbi's stories,
entitled “The Republican Assault on Trump May Only Make Him Stronger,”
appeared on 8 August and prompted me to add, via its comment thread, the
very analysis Taibbi carefully omitted:
What
Trump has done – the sin the Republican inner circle cannot forgive him
– is reveal the naked hatefulness that fuels the party's popularity
with U.S. voters.
The
party is the true voice of the U.S. One Percent. That's why it has been
the primary vessel of USian fascism since the party's owners began
their pivotal funding of Mussolini and Hitler. What Trump has done – the
sin the Republican inner circle cannot forgive him – is reveal the
naked, Nazi-intensity hatefulness that fuels the party's (growing)
popularity with U.S. voters.
Nevertheless,
its rhetorical strategy has been to render lip service to the USian Big
Lie of "liberty and justice for all." But Trump, having flung away all
such restraints, now expresses the true malevolence of white USian
consciousness. Acknowledging the reality of Moron Nation, he offers
himself as its leader.
Now
at last the civilized peoples of the world – and all the targeted
peoples here in the imperial homeland – can no longer deny the moral
imbecilic, might-makes-right savagery that has become the core credo of
USian governance whether at home or abroad.
***
Will
Trump win the nomination? I'd say almost certainly; no other candidate
in my lifetime has dared personify so openly the empire's predatory
nature. Will he become president? Probably – unless he is opposed by
Sanders, in which we will have, at last, an an obvious choice between
the capitalist reality of absolute Evil – greed elevated to ultimate
virtue (the methodical rejection of every humanitarian precept our
species has ever set forth) – versus the socialist hypothetical of
collective Good: "from each according to their ability; to each
according to their need."
***
Three points in explanation:
(1)-Trump
is the true voice of white USia, the Ku Klux, neo-Nazi voice the One
Percent likes to keep silenced because – when it is allowed to speak
freely – the reality of the USian Empire as the Fourth Reich becomes
undeniable;
(2)-Hillary
has exactly the same Ayn Rand values, but (A) hides them very deftly
and (B) is perfectly positioned as an identity-politics candidate to
silence any genuine discussion of class war – the one historical truth
that, once brought into proper focus, proves beyond argument the
necessity of socialism to human survival.
(3)-Sanders,
though running as a Democrat, is by his personally declared socialism
providing an antidote to seven and one-half decades of anti-socialist
toxins. Thereby he is rehabilitating the entire spectrum of socialist
thought.
Hence
the unprecedented consequences of Sanders' candidacy, and even more so
of a Sanders presidency: first the resurrection of the New Deal as
President Roosevelt intended it (and most assuredly not as the Missouri
political-machine operative Truman debased it). Then – in the socialist
renaissance that inevitably follows – the continuation of the revolution
We the People intended when we made FDR our longest-serving president.
The
question, of course, is whether the Ruling Class with all its
disruptive genius will be able to shatter the united-front majority of
oppressed minorities (including Left-leaning whites) that would ensure
Sanders' victory.
***
Taibbi's second report,
“Donald Trump Just Stopped Being Funny,” republished by RSN on 22
August, got a bit closer to the ugly truth, but still carefully avoided
any reference to the historical precedents vital to understanding the
significance of Trump's run for office. Again I attempted to fill in the
blanks:
Do
not be deluded by the apparent opposition to Trump. Capitalism can
survive only by morphing into Nazism. That's why the One Percent has
(clandestinely) sought a second Hitler since the Red Army saved us from
the first. And now, in the person of Trump, our capitalist overlords
have precisely what they want.
Remember
too the One Percenters own government at every level, the mass media,
all Republican candidates and probably all Democratic candidates. They
control the national mentality to a degree not even Josef Goebbels could
have imagined, and they are using that control to ensure Trump's
success.
As
to Mr. Taibbi's bewilderment by Trump's skyrocketing popularity, Mr.
Taibbi was apparently never a target of schoolyard bullies. Apparently
too he never witnessed the relentless sadism with which USian students
mercilessly torment a child who is visibly crippled, as by polio.
Otherwise
he would understand such atrocities define this nation. They reveal –
as do racism, austerity and wars of extermination – the signature
hatefulness of the USian people, who with their prosperity-gospel
Christianity and their Ayn Rand codas of moral imbecility were primed
long ago for Nazification. They have been awaiting the second coming of
der Fuehrer ever since.
Trump does indeed bring to mind Mussolini. But the Il Duce posturing...is merely part of the comic-opera facade that hides the unspeakable malevolence of the first true USian Hitler.
***
Yes
it is (frightening). What most of us have forgotten is the how the
USian One Percenters – who financed the rise of Mussolini in Italy and
Hitler in Germany – also (with German and Italian backing) attempted a
fascist coup here in 1934.
Their
Bankers Plot (for which Google) was stymied by a genuine patriot, Gen.
Smedley Butler USMC, (for whom Google), but it was only because of the
Communist Party press – and probably Soviet intelligence operatives –
the story became enough widely known to embarrass the mainstream press
into covering it.
Then
of course after World War II the One Percenters got their revenge – the
anti-Communist, anti-socialist, anti-intellectual purges to ensure
there would never again be a true and truly functional Left in the
United States, and the Cold War to avenge the Soviet victory in what the
Russians aptly call "the Great Patriotic War against Fascism."
Meanwhile the original Bankers Plot perpetrators and their sons and grandsons have been looking for another Hitler ever since.
They've
found local Hitlers – Diem, Pinochet, the colonels of the Greek junta –
but until now they've never had anybody positioned to take over the
Empire and complete capitalism's conquest of the globe.
And
don't for a minute imagine Trump is not the One Percent's candidate.
Look at the savagery of the policies their wholly owned politicians are
inflicting on us. "Austerity" is a euphemism for genocide.
If they could resurrect Hitler, they surely would.
***
Most of what was written about the Bankers Plot has been suppressed. Congress investigated, but there were no indictments, and the record was permanently sealed.
I
first heard of the plot from my late father, a Communist during the
1930s. I learned more from two Communists I knew as a young man, both of
whom had fought Franco's fascists in Spain.
The
plotters intended to oust President Roosevelt – presumably by military
coup, though this was never clear – then consolidate their victory by
turning the American Legion into a domestic SS, which would make up for
the U.S. military's post-World-War-I shrunkenness until it was
re-expanded to global-conquest size.
The U.S. would have become the (ultimately dominant) partner in a Rome-Berlin-Tokyo-Washington D.C. Axis.
Gen.
Butler's role was to have been the Legion/SS leader and perhaps – this too
is unclear – the new president. But the plotters did not reckon on his
"war-is-a-racket" patriotism, and he refused them.
Here
the story becomes even more muddled. The two Spanish Civil War vets
said Soviet agents – probably GRU (Red Army intelligence) rather than
OGPU (KGB) – already had the plot infiltrated and ensured Butler's
ability to expose it via the Communist press.
If
true, this would explain one of the mysteries of World War II: why
Roosevelt trusted Stalin – not because FDR was naive, but because Soviet
agents had saved the New Deal and his presidency.
***
My
final contribution to the Taibbi/Trump discussion was in rebuttal to an
articulate but sometimes ill-informed poster screen-named bmiluski,
who repeatedly expresses an impassioned hatred of Russia and Russians
and is a perpetual defender of the U.S. coup in the Ukraine, which on
other threads often pits us against one another. On this thread too,
bmiluski emerged as an opponent, bristling at my unsparing view of U.S.
history: “Loren, I really take umbrage with your describing these
actions as USian. WRONG...this is typical human behavior and exists in
some degree or another in every single country on this planet. To
subscribe it to one country is not only naive but disingenuous.”
Au contraire. bmiluski.
Start
with the extermination of First Nations peoples. Add the millions
murdered as "collateral damage" in myriad colonial wars and proxy-wars
of economic conquest (think Latin America, Indochina, Korea, the Middle
East, Greece, the Balkans, Africa, the Ukraine).
Then
add the (uncounted) millions slain by USian capitalism's deadly
profiteering (slavery, German Nazism, Italian and Spanish fascism,
knowingly defective products [e.g., Ford Pinto], knowingly harmful drugs
[e.g., thalidomide], workplace deaths [e.g., Bangladesh]). Remember the
One Percenters own most of the world's major corporations.
Add
also the slow-motion genocide implicit in the industrial world's most
savage policies toward lower-income people. (Think death-dealing welfare
“reform,” still more fatalities by denial of health care [including by
the calculatedly prohibitive co-pays that define the Obamacare scam],
the less-obvious deaths from cuts in food stamps, Medicare, Medicaid,
cold-weather heating assistance, etc. ad nauseam).
And don't forget the war of extermination against people of color by the federally militarized police.
All those corpses damn us as our species' most murderous empire ever. Not even Nazi Germany came close.
Maybe
that's why the U.S. spawns 75 percent of the world's serial killers.
Perhaps they are the ultimate personification of the nation that
believes itself to be the one true instrument of the (infinitely
vengeful) Abrahamic god.
***
RSN's reprint of Taibbi's latest Rolling Stone piece on Trump is here. Significantly, Taibbi continues to avoid the increasingly terrifying likelihood Trump will become the USian Hitler. Instead, Taibbi remains lost in the 2015 version of the same fog of arrogant optimism that, after der Führer's “impossible” victory, eventually morphed into terminal clouds of Zyklon B.
Meanwhile
– as if in direct opposition to Trump's ever-more-undeniable Nazism –
Democratic Candidate Bernie Sanders is evoking a socialist renaissance
that is already alarming our capitalist overlords. The extent to which
this is true is evidenced by Robert Reich's sudden emergence as a defender of capitalism. The following is a small excerpt from my response:
Wake
up, people. What we are witnessing here in Mr. Reich's pro-capitalist
testimonial – and this is a very important point – is the sly, subtle
and decidedly Machiavellian emergence of a new anti-socialist offensive
by the One Percent and its functionaries. The offensive is intended to
combat Bernie Sanders' popularization not just of socialism but also of
the necessity of revolution. It shows us the extent to which the One
Percent and in fact the entire Ruling Class is increasingly terrified by
the Sanders campaign – not just the campaign itself, but the impetus it
provides for the exploration of all forms of socialism, including
Marxism, its most revolutionary form.
*** *** *** *** ***
BLM Right to Disrupt (Fake) Democracy, Wrong to Silence Genocide Foes
MUCH
AS CHARGES of racism have been used to silence the critics of the
promise-breaking president who conned us all with the most brazen Big
Lie in USian political history and thus should be immortalized as Barack
the Betrayer, so has Black Lives Matter used charges of racism to
silence those who would tell the ugly truth about its suppression, at
Westlake Park in Seattle on 8 August, of a rally against genocide.
That's what the four BLM activists – Marissa Johnson, Mara Jacqueline Willaford, a third woman and a man whose names were not reported by any source I read – shut down. And – yes – the rally they broke up was in fact a rally against genocide.
That's
because “austerity” is nothing more than a cunning modern euphemism for
the slow-motion, blame-the-victim version of what used to be done in
death camps or by soldiers in the field but now is accomplished by the
methodical termination of life-preserving stipends and services -–
Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, food stamps, winter heating
assistance, welfare, unemployment insurance, even the dependable
telephone service so desperately needed by those who are critically ill.
With
the entire safety net under ever-escalating attack by the
austerity-minded Republican/Democrat coalition that rules the empire on
behalf its One Percent owners, any rally in defense of Social Security
and Medicare is therefore by definition a rally against genocide.
And
that is precisely what the Westlake Park event was – a rally in defense
of Social Security and Medicaid and therefore in opposition to
genocide.
Moreover,
anyone who claims the mantle of political activism should at the very
least be sophisticated enough to distinguish between that sort of event
(at which Presidential Candidate Bernie Sanders was merely one of a
day-long slate of speakers) and an actual Sanders-for-President campaign
rally as occurred at a somewhat less public University of Washington
venue that same evening.
But
the main point obscured by the BLM-orchestrated chorus and its charges
of “racism” is that the idiocy of BLM's Seattle action, whether its
enormous service to the Ruling Class was misguided or deliberate, has
nothing whatsoever to do with race. It is instead another very specific
manifestation of the anti-intellectualism that defines Moron Nation, the
land of un-think in which nearly all the USian 99 Percent has been
methodically imprisoned.
For
those of us who witnessed firsthand how the (mostly white) Occupy
Movement destroyed itself from within even as it was being crushed by
government forces from without, the Westlake Park incident was a
horrible moment of deja vu.
Its
true racism was our (honky) hope and expectation blacks would somehow
save us from ourselves, that BLM would be smarter and more savvy and
therefore more effective than Occupy.
But
the egotism and fuck-you selfishness that are among the most malignant
manifestations of USian anti-intellectualism once again triumphed over
rationality and purposefulness, and once again, as is always the case
when there is neither ideological discipline nor even thoughtfulness
(characteristics the increasingly self-obsessed USian youth are
carefully conditioned to despise), we the people, all of us regardless
of race, got slapped in the face by the invasive termination of a rally
in which we were all of us to have been the beneficiaries.
That
said, I heartily applaud the BLM practice of disrupting
presidential-campaign events. Given the realities of capitalist
governance, all such events are Big Lies. I say that not as a
condemnation of Sanders, but in acceptance of the probability the Ruling
Class will never allow him to be president even if he wins. In this
context, the fate of President-in-Absentia Albert Gore Jr. is
instructive. Gore won both the popular vote and the electoral vote, but
the Ruling Class was already in the year 2000 so committed to fascism,
they would not allow even a traditional albeit mildly conservative
liberal to occupy the White House. For Gore, the fix was clearly in. But
the real fix occurred on 22 November 1963, and it has been reinforced
by every election since then, most recently by Barack the Betrayer's
breathtaking Big Lie of “change we can believe in,” and probably next
yearby Trump's unabashed Nazism – even if Sanders actually wins. Hence I
hope BLM continues its disruptions throughout this year and next.
What follows, from the Popular Resistance website, is the partial text of my part in a long and very thoughtful discussion about the Westlake Park incident:
Speaking
as the professional editor I sometimes am even in my 75th year, the
fatal omission in (Jamie Utt's reporting for the website
changefromwithin.org) is that the Seattle event disrupted by Black Lives
Matter was most assuredly not a "Bernie rally."
Given
the unusual depth to which the incident has been covered, Mr. Utt
cannot possibly be unaware the event was instead a commemoration of
Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. It was organized by the AFL/CIO
and the Washington State Labor Council to mark Social Security's 80th
anniversary.
For
Mr. Utt to tag the event a "Bernie rally" is therefore deliberate
deception. Not only does it purposefully obscure the inappropriateness
of BLM's targeting. It also conceals the fact much of the booing was an
expression of legitimate anger at BLM's implicit alignment with two of
the most reactionary forces in the United States: those who despise
organized labor, and those who are (genocidally) destroying the programs
upon which we seniors and disabled people – many of us black – depend
for survival.
In
this context, BLM's silencing of Sanders becomes yet another
intensification of the ultimate (and ultimately unbridgeable) schism in
U.S. politics – not race, but the boiling hatred envious youth are being
conditioned to feel for those of us who are still (somewhat) protected
by unions and by Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. The incident
thus exemplifies divide et impera, and its sole beneficiary is of course the Ruling Class.
***
I later added the following in response to Kevin Zeese, one of the founders and editors of Popular Resistance:
Obviously
and just as you say, the distinction between a rally for Social
Security and Medicare versus a rally for Sanders is unimportant to the
people who terminated the event. Where we differ is in our understanding
of the significance of their action.
You
say shutting down the event had "a good impact." I don't know your age,
but an obsessively self-centered indifference to geriatric, disability
and economic issues so expressed is surely typical of younger USians
regardless of their race or socioeconomic status. I on the other hand am
both physically disabled and old – and therefore, because I am no
longer exploitable for profit, I am a prime target of the slow-motion
genocide implicit in all the Obamanoid/Republican/Democrat austerity
programs. Hence I regard the forcible termination of the Seattle event
as yet another wound maliciously inflicted by the vast majority of
USians who – again regardless of race – are (increasingly) hostile to
the (increasingly) desperate needs of elderly and disabled people and
lower-income people in general.
From
this perspective, the forcible suppression of Sanders' protests against
the empire's forthcoming Social Security cuts and its already imposed
(and already deliberately deadly) cuts in Medicare, Medicaid, food
stamps, low-income energy assistance and other such programs is no less
oppressive than the forcible suppression of BLM's protests against the
empire's ongoing war of extermination against people of color. Both
forms of protest are protests against the empire's diabolically clever
methodologies of genocide. Murder is murder, whether by the active
measures of the One Percenters' militarized police or by the passive
measures imposed by the One Percenters' wholly-owned politicians. But
apparently BLM is too self-centered (or perhaps too ignorant of realpolitik)
to grasp the all-important point.its termination of the Social Security
event was thus a huge (and hugely deplorable) service to the Ruling
Class.
On
the other hand, if, as you say, it was appropriate to shut down the
save-Social-Security/save-Medicare event, then why is it not appropriate
to shut down or at least disrupt every political event in the USian
homeland? The political truth is the Bernie Sanders candidacy and the
protest politics of Sen. Elizabeth Warren or U.S. representatives Alan
Grayson or Jim McDermott are not only rendered meaningless by their
minority status, but are in fact part of the Machiavellian methodology
by which the One Percent maintains the Big Lie of USian representative
"democracy." Thus the real function – indeed the only real
function of Sanders, Warren, Grayson, McDermott and their very few
like-minded colleagues – is to perpetuate not one Big Lie but two:
firstly that the Democratic Party is (by some particularly deluded mode
of magical thinking), somehow separate from the de facto
one-party apparatus that tyrannizes the USian Empire on behalf its One
Percent overlords; secondly that there are still functional vestiges of
the empire's former (albeit racially limited) pseudo-democratic process.
But
acquisition of this sort of political wisdom would require the Left's
wholesale rejection of Moron Nation anti-intellectualism (the very
affliction that destroyed Occupy from within even as the empire was
destroying it from without), and then the thoughtful evolution of a
disciplined ideology of class-struggle that fully accommodates the
realities of racism and sexism. Alas, this will obviously never happen.
The nation's anti-intellectualism is the by-product of a cradle-to-grave
conditioning so relentless it is now effectively part of USian DNA –
and that (the resultant impossibility of achieving ideological
solidarity) – is why all USian efforts at forcing genuine humanitarian
progress are either now and forever doomed or at the very least delayed
until successive environmental cataclysms (perhaps) shatter the power of
the capitalist Ruling Class.
Nevertheless,
the statement by one of the BLM event-terminators that the USian
political system has "never" represented black interests "and never
will" is absolutely true not just for her immediate racial-identity
constituency but, regardless of race, for every member of the USian
empire's 99 Percent. From this perspective – here I repeat myself – all
USian political events should be disrupted as the Big Lies they are.
But
that too will never happen. The pivotal, Ayn-Rand-minded, morally
imbecilic (un)consciousness that as a by-product of anti-intellectualism
now shackles the vast USian majority – again regardless of race – is a
carefully inflamed, bitterly envious, increasingly murderous hatred for
anyone – especially union members and/or elderly and/or disabled people –
who has thus far managed to cling to some tiny vestige of economic
security. Moreover, anyone who doubts this grotesque aspect of USian realpolitik
is in clinical denial of the extent to which the associated hatefulness
is fueling the ever-more-victorious Republican blitzkrieg that is
methodically sweeping the nation toward unabashed fascism and even a
uniquely USian form of Nazism.
Like
it or not, it is this (reflexively selective) denial – specifically
denial that genocide by austerity is ultimately no different from
genocide by bullet or truncheon – that is the ultimate message conveyed
by BLM's termination of the Seattle rally. And so it will remain – at
least until the Left acknowledges all such celebrations of USian history
and/or present-day politics as tacit expressions either in brazen
support of capitalist savagery or of the Big Lies that enable it – and
therefore musters in sufficient numbers and with sufficient discipline
to disrupt every such event.
(Disclosure,
I am one of the millions of victims of the genocide-by-austerity budget
cuts in question. The Great Wall Street Ripoff of 2007-2010 took nearly
70 percent of my annual income, permanently obliterated the market for
my [award-winning] photographic and editorial skills and bankrupted me
as well. Since then my only income is a Social Security pension, and so
it will be for however much longer I survive. My pension is so small
that since 2009 it has qualified me for welfare. Last year this included
$137 per month in food-stamps, an $18 per month stipend paid to the
local land-line telephone-service provider plus various Medicaid
supplements to the health care I purchase via Medicare. But this year,
thanks to the aforementioned, slow-motion genocide imposed by
Republican/Democrat austerity policies, my food stamps have been slashed
$37 per month, and the $18-per-month telephone assistance has been
permanently eliminated. Meanwhile my Medicare co-pays for the
life-sustaining specialist services of cardiology and physical therapy
have skyrocketed 400 percent, and I am now forced to pay 20 percent for
life-sustaining laboratory tests that until this year cost me nothing.)
The
Medicare cost-increases and the Medicaid and food-stamp cuts are all
the work of the federal government – specifically Obama's back-room
coalition of Democrats and Republicans – the de facto one-party
apparatus that rules the nation despite the refusal by the mass-media
propaganda machine to acknowledge or expose it.
Termination
of the telephone stipend was inflicted by Washington state's Democrats,
who (again) hurled lower-income people under the proverbial bus to save
the state's breathtakingly huge tax exemptions for Big Business –
billions of dollars that add up to the largest sum of state tax
exemptions in the U.S. This means that as Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and the
state's other parasitically wealthy resident executives siphon off
ever-more-malignant profits, the state's lowest-income elderly and
disabled people are suddenly and permanently denied the reliable
telephone service essential to staying alive. (Yes, there is still the
federal free-cell-phone service, but cell phones are notoriously
unreliable, particularly given the destructive weather inflicted by
terminal climate change.) Which in turn means – just as the One
Percenters and their political vassals intend – these seniors and
disabled people are forever cut off from 911 emergency services and are
therefore soon to be dead – precisely the circumstances and outcome
implicitly endorsed by BLM's selective disruption of the anti-austerity,
save-Social-Security, save-Medicare event in Seattle – no matter
whether BLM's endorsement was calculatedly malicious or merely
thoughtless.
Update: BLM now says it will stop its exclusive targeting of Sanders and disrupt Republican presidential campaign events also.
*** *** *** *** ***
Forsaking Fallacies Fostered by Full-Frame Photo Fanatics
ART IS OFTEN turned sour by its reduction to meaningless ornamentation or its exploitation for mercantile messaging.
Hypothetical
examples of the latter – at least I dearly hope they are hypothetical –
would include the grotesquely offensive use of fine art to sell
big-ticket ego-supplements. Picture, for example, a Modigliani
nude appropriated for a Hummer commercial, or consider the perversion
of the best, most revolutionary music of the 1960s into themes of
trinket materialism and impulse-buying. Imagine Jimmy Hendrix amidst the health-and-beauty-aids or Janis Joplin
as we browse the meat counter, “Are You Experienced” as we choose
deodorants or “Piece of My Heart” as we decide whether dinner will be
chicken, beef or pork, the background music co-opted (and probably
stolen) to not-so-subtly underscore USian capitalism's new, increasingly
exclusive definition of “democracy”: the alleged “freedom” to choose
one product over another.
These are, as I said (and to the best of my knowledge), merely horrid hypotheticals; I have not (yet) heard Grace Slick's
unforgettable “Crown of Creation” used to sooth impatient customers in a
long checkout line nor – bite your tongue – seen a Modigliani
conscripted to peddle cars.
But
a real though far less obvious example of art soured by ornamentation
is the curious cult of the full-frame photograph: the crippling
principle that cropping is forbidden, the accompanying notion a
photograph – any photograph no matter its content – has no artistic
significance unless it is printed full-frame and proven so by
(ornamental) inclusion of the black borders of its negative. By this
deliberately, perhaps even maliciously restrictive taboo, much of the
world's greatest photojournalism, including some of W. Eugene Smith's seminal work, is theoretically marginalized to meaninglessness.
While
I do not know the origin of this calculatedly censoring shibboleth, I
do know where and when I first encountered it: in Seattle c. 1974, then
(and probably even now amongst those dilettantes wealthy enough to
afford the prohibitive expense of working in film), the home of an Ansel Adams
cult the zero-tolerance credo of which rejects photography of the human
condition as sacrilegious, even heretical abuse of equipment and
squandering of pixels and/or emulsion. The cult's corollary principle is
that any image not “previsualized” – that is, its negative not exposed
in strict submission to Zone System standards – is to be discarded as garbage.
For
a journalist, these are genuinely odious restraints, perhaps to be
studied both for useful technical information and meaningful
sociological data, but to be forcefully set aside whenever the content
of a picture so demands, such as the difficulty of analytically
previsualizing the skin-tones of a writhing, screaming protester as she
is beaten by the police or getting an accurate Zone-System reading off a
rapidly dissipating cloud of pepper gas.
Hence
a basic technique of old-time, pre-digital photojournalism: meter the
palm of your hand in the light wherein you're working and open up one
stop if the subjects are Caucasian, two if the images include people of
color. Point being that in reportage you try to go in prepared because
you usually don't have time to be more selective about exposure or exact
composition. The contemplative, either-or stuff you do in the darkroom,
or as it's done today, on the computer.
The
Zoned-out Adams disciples will of course respond that reportage and art
are antitheticals, to which I would reply (and have) that what passes
for art in the post-modern world – for example the photographic studies
of de-electrified light-bulb filaments undertaken as “fine art
photography” by one of the Seattle Zoners – is so removed from
real-world aesthetics to be not just hopelessly sterile but utterly
meaningless. But that of course is the core doctrine of post-modernism:
that everything is so meaningless even the concept of meaninglessness
has no meaning. Which, ironically, would seem to reduce “fine art” to a
contradiction in terms.
All
of which is prefatory to a much more brief commentary on the above
photograph, one of the very last I made with my beloved M Leicas. The
sun was behind the April clouds that morning in 2011, and I was shooting
in a large room lit through a bank of industrially sized eastern-facing
windows. Just as I raised my M4 to photograph the woman, the sun burst
out, she grinned, and my cloudy-day, available indoor-light exposure
with my 135mm f/4 Elmar, probably wide open at with the shutter at
1/125, over-exposed the Fujicolor 800 film by at least three stops.
Whatever artfulness it achieves is therefore entirely coincidental. The
image here today – a carefully cropped, more heavily dodged (the eyes)
and burned in (the background and surroundings) variant of the
full-frame picture I published here on 30 July – is part of an ongoing
process to take maximum advantage of the accident and turn it into
something better.
Yes, while I am entirely satisfied with the image desensitized to black-and-white, I am still indecisive about its most effective cropping and tonal manipulation.
The
point, though, is rejection of the bullshit no-cropping shibboleths and
the simultaneous refusal to be intimidated by one's material, a
necessity I often stressed to my students while I was teaching
photography part-time at a couple of colleges during the late 1970s and
early 1980s. It is a lesson re-validated now – as a Canon T5 digital
single-lens reflex overcomes the hitherto prohibitive limitations
imposed by poverty – by the fact I am finally, at age 75, transcending
the irremediable and infinitely painful losses inflicted on me at age 43
by the 1983 fire. Had I been hamstrung by the full-frame shibboleth and
all the other taboos against manipulating an image ever closer to its
apparent truth, I probably would never have again considered these
matters.
*** *** *** *** ***
How Science Fiction Might Solve the Mystery of Cosmic Radio Silence
(Literary
etiquette requires I preface the following with three disclosures. The
first expresses my gratitude to the late Henry Miller for the
term “cosmodemonic,” which I borrowed from his [formerly illegal]
trilogy, Sexus, Nexus and Plexus. The next
conveys my thanks to the woman who first perceived the connection
between the Koch Brothers and cockroaches and so coined the perfect term
“Kochroach.” The last disclosure is my apology to the creator of
“Kochroaches” for the fact her name was forever erased from my files in
the January-March debacle of my Happy-New-Year-from-Jesus
computer-crash.)
*
IF I WERE a real writer instead of a posturing dyslexic, and if I wrote science-fiction, I'd cite the diverse elements of our impending extinction
as indisputable proof the fiery wheels, burning bushes and “divinely”
inscribed tablets that infected our species with patriarchy were t the
intergalactic equivalent of the smallpox-inflicted blankets by which
Christian Europeans destroyed the First Nations of the Americas.
Indeed,
such a hypothesis is merely a proper application of Occam's Razor: it
explains our impending apocalypse without excluding any of its
contextual evidence – including, by the way, the repeated sighting of
Unidentified Flying Objects in a universe rendered ominously silent by
its absence of any intelligently originated radio signals save our own.
Now,
some 5,000 years after patriarchy's introduction to this planet, it and
its predatory offspring Judaism, Christianity, Islam and capitalism
have totally and eternally exterminated the ancient and formerly
universal community of the Great Mother of All Being, which correctly
envisioned humans and all the rest of Nature's children – animate or
inanimate – as members of a single matrifocal, matrilineal and probably
matriarchal family. That human society – proto-communistic, definitively
egalitarian, necessarily democratic – guided our species' through the
tragedies and triumphs of its first 195,000 years. But patriarchy and
its philosophical descendants, like some immeasurably slow but
relentlessly deadly virus, have methodically downgraded women from
leadership to chattel, thereby extinguishing all but the faintest most
etherial memories of our former self-sustaining ways. Meanwhile
patriarchy's master-slave hierarchy has evolved into capitalism –
infinite greed elevated to ultimate virtue – which in turn has spawned
the final, terminal and terminally destructive capitalist forms of
fascism and Nazism. Now the One Percent openly regards the concentration
camp as its ultimate model of governance and views “community” as a
synonym for “rebellion.” We the people – the 99 Percent – are doomed
accordingly.
In
our science-fiction novel, perhaps titled “The Swarming of Planet
Earth,” the alien invaders wait until the 20th Century to make
themselves known to the Ruling Class, first to the Nazis, next – when it
becomes obvious the Third Reich lacks the resource-base to achieve
global conquest – to the USian One Percenters. The aliens appeal to the
moral imbecility and serial-killer compulsions that are the enabling
components of capitalism. Disguising themselves in precisely those
humanoid forms the One Percenters find most irresistible – think GQ, Elle and Hustler
– the aliens assure the One Percenters of eternal survival in special
“prosperity enclaves” in return for intensifying the destruction of the
planet and hastening the extermination of the rest of humankind and of
every other species, mammalian or otherwise, that might present a threat
to the invaders. The resultant genocide, obscured by furious but
meaningless political debates, is intended to eliminate the last
remaining indigenous populations to ensure there is no remnant of the
skills and cooperative instincts that formerly enabled our ancient
ancestors to prevail even amidst the famines inflicted by a succession
of ice ages.
Then
in the final chapter, with Earth reduced by capitalism to the planetary
equivalent of a reeking Dumpster, comes the invasion itself. The
invaders, swarming like maggots in a corpse, drop all humanoid disguise
and reveal themselves to be an unfathomably intelligent, inconceivably
predatory subspecies of cosmodemonic cockroach that eons ago mastered
both the technology of intergalactic flight and the
psychological-warfare skill of seducing a dominant species into
committing the specific acts of collective suicide that reduce a target
planet into the most favorably roach-sustaining environment. As for the
Kochroaches, the cosmodemonic roaches' One Percent collaborators, theirs
is akin to the fate of Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, their living flesh slowly eaten from within by roach larvae, themselves fully conscious until the end.
And
here, in our species' final pages, is the answer to the riddle of the
ominous lack of intelligently originated radio signals that defines the
universe. Here as everywhere in the cosmos, the Cosmoroaches (who are
and always have been nature's closest approximations to god), keep
everlasting watch, lest some mammalian species evolve enough to
potentially threaten their eternal insectoid dominance. Then the
Cosmoroaches inject patriarchy or some other equally potent psycho-toxin
that not only ensures the mammalian species will self-destruct, but in
the course of self-destruction will render their planet a perfect
breeding-dump for Roachperpetuation. There is never more than one source
of intelligent radio signals in the universe at any given moment
because that's all the Cosmoroaches, whose exoskeletal bodies allow them
to survive the rigors of warp-speed travel, will ever allow in their de facto hive.
And
now, in recognition of the fact the Abrahamic god is probably nothing
more than a giant, super-intelligent, super-predatory intergalactic
cockroach, let us close with a new, more appropriate variant of the
Protestant Christian Doxology:
Curse god from whom all misery flows
Curse him ye victims here below
Curse him above ye suffering host
Curse Father, Son and Holy Ghost.
Curse him ye victims here below
Curse him above ye suffering host
Curse Father, Son and Holy Ghost.
(Not to worry: I promise my subsequent posts will be shorter.)
LB/30 July-7 September 2015
-30-
