Does the 1% Think We're a Doomed Species on a Dying Planet? (Why Else Would They Behave as They Do?)

(My apology for the tardiness of this week's column. As does the second week of every month, this past week belonged to the editing, writing and production of the eight-page monthly newsletter I prepare for the 51-unit senior housing facility in which I reside. Due to technical challenges, this month's issue required a much more extended effort than usual, which radically diminished the time I could devote to OAN.)

 

***

COULD IT BE our capitalist overlords have secretly acquired incontrovertible proof the struggle against global warming  is already lost? Is that the terrible secret underlying the One Percent's unprecedented orgy of greed ? Is that why their political vassals refuse to unite in a common front against what increasingly looms as the greatest threat to human survival  in our species' 200,000-year  history? 

To understand what prompts me to ask such forbidden questions, it is essential we look with brutal honesty at present-day realpolitik. To do so we must set aside our habits of denial and fantasy and wishful thinking and fear and neediness and despair long enough to acknowledge what actually obtains.

 

Our entire planet has fallen under capitalist control. It is rule so absolute, the capitalists sooner or later always get what they demand, most recently the environmentally suicidal right to drill for oil in the Arctic.

Nor does capitalism tolerate any alternatives to its morally imbecilic ideology of infinite greed as the ultimate human virtue. Capitalism defeated and destroyed the Soviet Union by deluging its people with propaganda intended to inflame their greed and selfishness. The Russian successor state is so weakened, President Obama could in effect spit in the faces of all its people  – maliciously dishonoring the epic heroism of their grandfathers and grandmothers who, at the cost of as many as 43.3 million dead, literally saved the world from Nazi Germany. Capitalism also co-opted the People's Republic of China. And unless its rulers are employing a long-range Sun Tzu strategy, China too is but another satrapy of Wall Street. As a result there is no longer any force on this planet strong enough to compel the capitalists to restrain their limitless savagery.

   

All this happened because the Wall Street One Percent commands the military and economic might of the United States and uses it to seize unprecedented global hegemony. The resultant empire subjugates all the inhabitants of Earth beneath the zero-tolerance mandates of the One Percenters and their political vassals – moral imbeciles whose sole purpose is the fulfillment of their own greed. They are reducing the entire planet to the high-tech version of an antebellum slave plantation. Already they rule the world as their own electronic concentration camp.  They tyrannize every nation on earth. 

In the context of these events, the claim by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice” is proven to be the biggest Big Lie of all time. Indeed history – at least history since the advent of patriarchy about 5,000 years ago – teaches us the opposite is true. Interludes of justice are but rare and fleeting sparks in a vast and seemingly endless darkness. Clearly, what “the arc of the moral universe” bends toward is not the collective good of economic democracy and “liberty and justice for all” but the absolute evil of Ayn Rand totalitarianism and its agenda of enslavement for all save the most ruthlessly greedy despots. 

That's why, of all humanity's ever-more-wantonly discarded virtues, justice remains the most elusive. It is routinely betrayed even by those societies which proclaimed the quest for justice as their reason for being. Note the ultimate hypocrisy that underlies both the Preamble to the United States Constitution  (“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice...”) and Article 156 of the Constitution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics  (“Justice is administered in the USSR on the principle of the equality of citizens before the law and the court.”) Note how political developments in both nations rendered “justice” not only meaningless, but reduced it to a convenient euphemism for its antithesis.

Though the governments of some nations still try to placate their own populations with gestures of resistance, the horrible truth is that governance itself – governance with all its implicit democratic potential whether realized or not – has been obsoleted by capitalism's mastery of electronic technology. The age of nations and national governance – the age of real or potential human liberty – has ended. The age of corporations  – the age of tyranny beyond our conception  – has begun. Increasingly we are enslaved by the corporate One Percent  – an imperial cabal that has taken the place of old-time despots and to whom technology has given both omnipotence and hitherto-divine powers of surveillance and retaliation. It is so powerful it is now attempting to cast off its political vassals and impose its will directly through its corporate managers – a primary purpose of the Trans-Pacific Partnership  trade agreement.

Moreover, the One Percent's tyranny is quite possibly forever – that is, fated to prevail until our species is extinct. Because it is based entirely on infinite greed, capitalism cannot be reformed: note its destruction of the New Deal  in the U.S. and its imposition of austerity  on Europe. And now – with capitalism protected as it is by impregnable electronic and thermonuclear defenses – it cannot be overthrown. It will prevail until thermonuclear war and/or environmental disaster renders its enabling technologies inoperable and thus reduces its tyrants to impotence. 

Then and only then might humanity throw off the yoke of patriarchy and once again rationally aspire toward the liberty of justice and the justice of liberation.

But now and for all the foreseeable future there is only capitalism and  the intensifying apocalypse  of what is connivingly called “global warming” – a label obviously chosen to maximize confusion, conflict and misunderstanding.

Let us therefore call it by a properly descriptive compound noun. Let us call it what it is: “terminal climate change.” And let us finally and unequivocally recognize that we have brought down the wrath of Mother Nature on ourselves. Now as a result we are cursed to live in the darkest most hopeless epoch of our species' experience and thereby challenged to prove our selves and our species worthy of survival. 

Why then, given that the Wall Street One Percent now controls (or at least leverages) all the leading politicians and therefore lords it over all the governments on this planet, is there not unified action to minimize the terrible impact of the already ruinous climate debacle?

Given how our species has united to combat other global threats, the only logical answer – almost too horrible to contemplate – is that the One Percent knows the battle against terminal climate change is already lost. That here is the real explanation for the global-warming squabbles between the One Percent's Democrat and Republican political vassals at home and among the One Percent's vassal governments abroad. That these quarrels are pseudo-conflicts; that they are part of a diabolically well-crafted charade intended to keep the global population from panicking. That the One Percent fears the reduction of profits that might result from the vengefully suicidal insurrection the kamikaze warfare of World War II suggests might become the last recourse of a doomed species on a dying planet. That sure knowledge of our impending extinction is the real reason the One Percent no longer makes even a pretense of restraining the Manifest Evil of its infinite (and infinitely obscene) greed. 

Perhaps, in the serial-killer mentalities of the capitalist aristocrats, the fulfillment of their greed has become their final competition. That all the One Percenters care about now is who will amass the greatest hoards of gold and pile the highest mounds of corpses, who will die smirking, “fuck you all I am the biggest winner.” 

Could this be true? I hope with every cell of my being it is not. Yet what else could explain all the variables of our circumstances? 

*** *** ***

CONTRAST HOW THE present-day Ruling Class dithers in the face of terminal climate change with how it reacted to the Nazi threat in 1941:

 

This is no time to moralize on the follies of countries and Governments which have allowed themselves to be struck down one by one, when by united action they could have saved themselves and saved the world from this catastrophe...Let us learn the lessons already taught by such cruel experience. Let is redouble our exertions, and strike with united strength while life and power remains.

The speaker was British Prime Minister Winston Churchill; the excerpt is from his speech to Parliament just after the Germans had begun their invasion of the Soviet Union. The source is Churchill's six-volume history of The Second World War, volume three, The Grand Alliance, pages 372-373 (Houghton-Mifflin Company, Boston: 1950).

 

I ask again: why – given the far greater magnitude of the terminal-climate-change threat – does the Ruling Class do naught but dither? 

*** *** ***

ASKING THE ABOVE question in slightly different terms, why – if the One Percent did not already regard us as a doomed species on a dying planet – is it not commanding its political vassals to repair the increasingly broken, crumbling and abandoned U.S. infrastructure? 

Just as our overlords routinely spend fortunes to maintain the value, decor and comforts of their palatial mansions, so it would seem they'd also maintain the value and functionality of what is now effectively their own nation – unless of course they regard such expenditures as money squandered on a doomed realm.

Which in turn explains perfectly their breathtaking generosity toward the ever-more-aggressive U.S. military and militarized police apparatus. Not surprisingly, it is already practicing for the proverbial Last Roundup – the mass arrest (and probable extermination) of unthinkably vast numbers of U.S. citizens.

*** *** ***

AGAIN ASKING THE question, why else – if the purpose were not deliberate obfuscation – would our formerly informative mass media behave as it does? Not only has it been reduced to a uniquely privatized version of the propaganda machine that defines any despotism. Far more ominously, it now functions as a psychological warfare apparatus. It's apparent mission is inflicting the intellectual paralyses of maximum confusion on even the most well-informed segments of the population. 

This is a point I had not previously considered – probably because, as a former member of the working press (though I was ousted before it was fully corporatized into its present-day Josef Goebbels form), I was too close to the metaphorical trees to see the proverbial forest. 

But Truthout's Joseph Natoli pulls it into sharp focus.  Here's his most telling passage:

Carrying on such balanced discussion of anything in a society already seriously bent in one direction is just a mockery, and at worse, a front behind which the biases of that society can go on as if they were guided by a rational discourse. This front of a media conducting relentless, penetrating interpretation set on revealing lies and bullshit, set on deconstructing edifices of truth, can only always and only be the truth by which the status quo, bent as it is, perseveres. Our mainstream media coverage is either a chaos of mindless venting, a deluge of "information" whose only gatekeeper is Google's PageRank, the insulated "de-friending" domains of Facebook communication, or the disingenuousness of both balanced and biased reporting. In this way, our communication is in one way or another serving to maintain our inequitable order of things. Our media stand like the Baltimore police as servants of that order, protecting it from exposure, which is what the media are now doing, and from collapse, as what the police are paid to do as they protect and serve.

 

*** *** ***

THE DETERIORATION OF the U.S. infrastructure is not just due to neglect but – in the case of public transport – the result of a deliberate assault on facilities and service.  It is as if the One Percenters were hastening to withdraw their money from an industry they have decided is on the brink of collapse and is therefore no longer worthy of investment.

 

Long-term investment, of course, is precisely what mass transit requires. The One Percent's refusal to invest therein thus suggests the One Percenters believe we have no long-term future for which to prepare.

But a few days ago I set aside this issue as a bit too extreme for a Reader Supported News comment threat. Instead I took it as an opportunity to vent my endless bitterness at being stranded in the city with the worst most miserable mass transit I have ever encountered anywhere in the urban United States.

 

(No, that's not hyperbole. Even in the 1950s, Knoxville, Tennessee, with a population of only about 100,000, had significantly better bus service than Tacoma, a major seaport of 200,000 people, has today.) 

What follows is revised for re-publication here, hence is not italicized: 

There will never be a renaissance of public transport in the United States – and the dismal fate of Pierce Transit, which serves Tacoma and surrounding Pierce County, shows why.

By any measure, the United States has by far the worst public transport in the industrial world. We the people have been so damned ever since the politicians were bought off by the automobile industry. 

The resultant war against Working Class mobility  began in the 1920s, with the closure or downsizing of mass transit to force us into the debt slavery of total dependence on privately owned automobiles. 

While this variant of the class war is commanded from board rooms and legislative chambers, its present-day storm troopers are the majority whites, whose carefully conditioned hatred and contempt of transit-dependent lower-income people perpetuates anti-transit policies whether federal, state or local. The downsizing of Pierce Transit – a 2008-2012 service-reduction approaching 90 percent – is a textbook case. 

The Tacoma/Pierce County Chamber of Commerce is anti-transit, as is the Pierce County Council. So, albeit less obviously, are majorities on the Tacoma City Council and the other municipal governments within the PT service area.

 

Thus all it took to defeat the 2011 and 2012 ballot measures that would have restored and maintained PT service was “transit-is-welfare” hate-mongering by opponents. In other words, it was the voters themselves who sneeringly proclaimed the PT service area the home of the most vindictively anti-transit-user electorate in the nation. 

***

To put Tacoma's transit crisis in somewhat sharper focus:

(1)-Slightly more than half the population of Tacoma is officially lower-income; 18 percent of its households are officially impoverished. Nearly half of PT's regular riders have no other means of transport. 

(2)-The “transit-is-welfare” meme is far too sophisticated to have originated locally. Given the testimony of Watergate Felon John Ehrlichman that Washington state is a favorite Ruling Class rat-lab for perfecting methods of oppression, the meme's initial use, in 2011, was obviously a test run. Its success then and in 2012 means it will be used wherever the One Percent wants to convince an appropriately bigoted white majority to destroy a local mass transit system.

(3)-Though Washington state is allegedly “progressive,” its policies reveal its fascist heart. It has the most regressive state tax structure in the U.S.; it is the only state in which renters have no tenant-right protections whatsoever; and its electorate is relentlessly edging ever further to the Right. With its government already controlled by a Republican senate, next year's election will in all probability turn it into another Wisconsin. 

(4)-For more detail, see “Exclusive: How a Local Transit Crisis Exemplifies the Global Class War,” here.

(5)-The state has become so inhospitable to lower-income people, I would gladly move elsewhere if I could. Given the food-stamp cuts imposed by our Democrat president  and the absolute certainty both the Republican state senate and the Republican Congress will side with Obama to impose additional, deliberately genocidal cuts in all the programs upon which I am dependent, remaining here may indeed prove fatal. Yet where is there to go? In any case there is no way I can afford to leave. I am simply too impoverished – and probably too physically crippled – to ever move again. I am 75 years old, and (apart from Social Security), all my other income sources – and any potential I might ever again have such earnings – were slain by the capitalist downsizing known as the Great Recession.

 

***

As the fate of Pierce Transit reveals, it not just the lack of political will that is destroying public transportation in the United States. 

Even more than that, it's the morally imbecilic lack of empathy that has become a defining part of the U.S. national character. The U.S. has been thoroughly Ayn Randified – a uniquely USian form of Nazification – which means the harder times get, the more vicious the people become, not toward their oppressors, but toward one another.

 

Save in tiny (and therefore statistically insignificant) demographic enclaves, the cooperative spirit that helped U.S. communities survive the Great Depression has been methodically eradicated. 

The result is Moron Nation, the realm where moronation has eliminated class consciousness – or any other sort of social conscience or consciousness – and where the attitude of the people toward one another is increasingly that of Ted Bundy toward his victims.

 

Which is why the Republicans – who are actually neo-Nazis – are taking over, not just here in Washington state, but everywhere else as well. It's called "meanness," and it's why (precisely as exemplified by transit policy), the U.S. is becoming notorious as the meanest nation in the industrial world.

Alas, history proves that once a population sinks to that reptilian level, humanitarian reform is impossible...unless it is imposed from without by force, as it was on Nazi Germany. 

Once more I ask: what is the purpose of this deliberately induced Ayn Rand malevolence? Do the One Percenters already know terminal climate change means there is nothing left in the U.S. – or anywhere else on this planet – that can be preserved? Are they already chuckling with sadistic glee at how we the people fighting over whatever miserly tokens they let trickle down upon us from their inconceivably fat hoards of money and resources?

 

Whatever the answers to these questions, it is obvious the One Percent is deliberately thrusting our nation – and indeed our entire world – into a maelstrom of insanity. 

Quoth Longfellow's Prometheus:  “Whom the Gods would destroy, they first make mad.” 

LB/11-17 May 2015

-30-

As in Ferguson, So Throughout the USian Empire

THE ATROCITIES COMMITTED by federally militarized local police in Ferguson, Missouri  and in a Wal-Mart store  near Dayton, Ohio tell us the operational truth about today's Imperial United States. That's because – in terms of the causative factors – there is no difference between the wanton murders of two men of color by trigger-happy white cops and George Bush's wanton invasion of Iraq or Barack Obama's equally wonton war-making in Ukraine.  Might now officially makes right, the charade of democracy be damned, and woe be unto those who – even accidentally – neglect all the demeaning protocols of submission.

In the overseas regions of the USian Empire, in places like South Vietnam or Pinochet's Chile or the USian conquests in the Middle East, nonconformity or disobedience has always meant imprisonment and torture and death. In these relatively distant realms, capitalism's credo of infinite greed as ultimate virtue has always demanded the moral imbecility of capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation for everyone else. Meanwhile we here in the USian homeland were inadvertently protected by Soviet and Chinese Marxism, which forced capitalism to conceal its greedy malevolence behind the humanitarian facade of representative democracy. But now capitalism has no rivals. It no longer bothers to hide its relentless savagery. Even here at home, it is maturing into its inevitable final form, which is a new and infinitely more diabolical form of fascism. And We the People – capitalism's newest colonial victims – are becoming ever more angry and rebellious.

In response, the local police are ever more federalized and militarized. In the eyes of our masters, We the People are nobodies, üntermenschen, non-persons, no different from the people of Radda'  or Odessa.  Now, as it always was in the overseas USian colonies, so it is here at home – no matter how stubbornly some of us may deny what is being done to us and why.

Because African Americans have a proud history of rebelliousness  that predates the Civil Rights Movement by 429 years, they are invariably the authorities' first targets,  the first demographic group from within which the Ruling Class extracts its most brutal examples: Michael Brown gunned down in Ferguson and his body obscenely displayed for the next four hours; John Crawford III slain in the Dayton suburb of Beavercreek, Ohio merely because he was a black man who decided to buy a BB-gun. And who knows how many others have been unjustifiably shot  by police? A bitter truth: such statistics aren't kept because the Ruling Class doesn't care – or doesn't want us to know. Just as, for example, the atrocities at Baghdad were covered up until they were leaked by Chelsea Manning.  And let us not forget her fate: guilty of embarrassing the imperial military machine, she was sentenced to 35 years in prison.

As I have noted before, any one of us – especially those of us who have darker skins – could be Michael Brown or John Crawford III. And any one of us who dares expose the reality of capitalist governance could be another Chelsea Manning. In which context note again the fate of Gary Webb.

******

The connection between white Christianity and Caucasian racism has long been evident in the southern colloquial name for the Ku Klux Klan: “the Saturday Night Men's Bible Study Class.” Now a carefully researched report by historian Randall Balmer in Politico reveals how the rise of the so-called Religious Right was fueled not by abortion but by a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that denied tax-exempt status to racially segregated Christian schools.  As Amanda Marcotte puts it in a more recent commentary in Slate, “Anger about forced desegregation of private schools galvanized conservative Christians.” And their leaders were so eager to ally themselves with the Republicans, they “blamed the Democratic president for the IRS actions against segregated schools—even though the policy was mandated by Nixon.” Men of god perpetrating a Big Lie? You betcha; it happens all the time. Read Jeff Sharlet's The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (Harper: 2008).

******

I cannot conclude these observations about the broader significance of the deaths of Michael Brown and John Crawford III without pointing out the apparent hypocrisy of the USian (pseudo) Left as demonstrated by how it is  ignoring the latter atrocity.  Thus far, only a socialist publication has covered Crawford's murder and its aftermath in any real depth. (Another account, focused on Ohio's post-shooting activism, is here.)  Note too how the text of a newly circulated petition to the Obama administration, Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense makes no mention of the Ohio incident: “In the wake of Ferguson, we must secure a positive transformation in nationwide policing. Join us in calling on the executive branch of the federal government to take definitive steps to protect civil and human rights in every community by setting a higher standard of policing, strengthening accountability mechanisms, investing in strengthening economic infrastructure (employment, education, healthcare), and securing critical reforms to end abusive, militarized, and biased policing targeting Black and brown communities.”

The Nation magazine, which is one of the petition's sponsors, emailed please-sign requests a week ago, the point here being the timing: the document obviously post-dates by nearly two months the clarification of the initially distorted circumstances of the Ohio shooing. The petition's other sponsors are: Advancement Project, Center for Popular Democracy, ColorofChange.org, Daily Kos, Democracy for America, Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment, RH Reality Check, RootsAction and Working Families.

While I am not familiar with the views of all these groups, I know most of them are fanatical opponents of the Second Amendment  and equally fanatical supporters of forcible civilian disarmament. I have experienced firsthand the hateful hysteria of such people. They claim mere legal possession of a firearm is “an act of violence,” and they damn all gun owners as “Nazis” and “wanna-be killers.” Hence it is not difficult for me to imagine the anti-gun frenzy of a debate that might have banished from the petition any citation of the Beavercreek outrage – never mind its circumstances are far more egregious than those of the Ferguson incident. Therefore I am forced to ask: is the fact Crawford apparently wanted to buy a BB gun the reason the petition ignores his tragic slaying? Obviously I don't know – but I think the absence of Beavercreek from the text is significant, and if I were a gambling man, I'd bet the BB gun is the reason.

******

Which reminds me: apropos the claim that civilians with small arms are powerless against modern weapons, note how tragically under-equipped Kurdish women are said to be defeating the rabid minions of the newest caliphate.  (Historical reference: the last aggressive caliphate was the creation of the Mahdi in Khartoum. Though most of my comrades on the Left will denounce as heresy what I am about to say next, I'll say it anyway: where is Lord Kitchener now that we need him?)

******

The Washington Post, as reliable a propaganda outlet for the USian Ruling Class as der Voelkischer Beobachter was for the ruling elite of Nazi Germany, nevertheless sometimes publishes enlightening material. Such is “Wages should be growing faster, but they're not. Here's why.” The head is self-explanatory.  The money quote – no pun – tells the whole story. “Raising pay is simply not part of the business model of American employers. They will not do so until they’re absolutely forced to by a labor market that’s much tighter than what we’ve got today.” In Marxian terms, this means the proletariat – We the People – will be imprisoned in wretchedness by the One Percent until we unite, rise up and cast off our chains. Two other news reports provide variations on the same theme: “Scott Walker says $7.25 an hour is a living wage,” here,  and “Amid Soaring Profits, Walmart to Cut Off 30,000 Workers From Health Insurance,” here.  Lastly, since USian colleges and universities are ever more subservient to capitalism, it's no surprise they also reflect capitalism's incipient racism, as revealed in “Applying to College With a Criminal Record.” Such is our lot in a system governed by the credo of infinite greed as ultimate virtue – the conscious rejection of every humanitarian principle our species ever set forth.

******

Two of this week's reports on the USian approach to policing are unusually informative, which is why I list them here as recommended reading. “FBI and Shattering of Students for a Democratic Society” describes how the USian secret police destroy dissent – an important disclosure for any present-day dissident, particularly those who chronically underestimate the cunning of the capitalist authorities. In the Imperial United States of today as in pre-revolutionary Imperial Russia, Leon Trotsky's dictum remains an absolute truth: “In every gathering of three revolutionaries, there is at least one agent of the Okhrana.” Then there's “Asset Seizures Fuel Police Spending,” a Washington Post investigative report that is probably intended to distract us  from the inconceivable sums of money by which the Defense Department and the Department of Homeland Security are training, equipping and federalizing the local police as a surrogate army of occupation in the homeland colonies. But the WaPo piece contains vital information: it tells us why the cops love the so-called war on drugs, and another reason the fascists love municipal budget-cuts, which guarantee local-police insistence on (obscenely profitable) drug prohibition will intensify rather than diminish.

******

Outside Agitation Elsewhere: I posted on only three comment threads last week. “Secretly Buying Access to a Governor,” a New York Times editorial reprinted by Reader Supported News, prompted me to hope it “is the opening volley in a no-quarter war by the (few) humanitarian-minded members of the Ruling Class against its now-dominant faction, the morally imbecilic disciples of Ayn Rand who are maliciously reducing all the rest of us to slaves.” I agreed with “Obama Hates the Press,” pointing out the president is “so shamelessly obvious in his transformation from Obama the ('change we can believe in') Orator to Barack the ('worse than Richard Nixon') Betrayer, even the stenographic Ruling Class media cannot avoid reporting his lies and deceptions.” My remark triggered a predictable flury of thumbs down  from Democratic Party operatives. They are out in force during these last weeks before what – largely because of public anger over presidential betrayals – looms to be their worst mid-term election loss in years. And “Scientists Discover World's Oceans Warming Faster Than Predicted” prompted a bitter eulogy to our planet and our species: 

We're doomed – and because we've been in denial so long, it's now far too late to do anything about it.

Given the fact the inertial momentum of all matter is toward consciousness, our failure is unequivocal proof of the lack thereof – which is precisely why our extinction as a species is now guaranteed.

The great irony is the source of our extinction – fossil fuel – is the putrefied remains of other failed species. This is especially true of petroleum, which is literally the liquid putrescence of dinosaurs.

Thus the carrion of one age of failed species ensures the failure of another age and species, an equation in which there is surely a lesson, though perhaps only in karma, specifically the now obviously irremediable curse we have inflicted on ourselves by basing an entire economy on a form of grave-robbing.

 ******

Another major element in our impending extinction is no doubt our species' astounding propensity for hatred. It is an inclination so venomously dominant, it suggests that instead of Homo Sapiens Sapiens, we should be renamed Homo Sapiens Odibilis – “human, thinking and hateful.”

Yes, very rarely we seem to beat the hate mongers, as in Jacksonville, Florida's Duval County, where a nationwide petition campaign has forced a local board of education to rename the Nathan Bedford Forrest High School, which die-hard segregationists had defiantly named to honor the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. 

But these victories over hatred are always more apparent than real. A name change is just that – it does nothing to alter internal psychological reality. 

Meanwhile, racism, sexism, ageism – indeed every form of hate-mongering imaginable – is given new and unprecedented malevolence by the unfettered anonymity provided by the Internet.  And given the abusive realities of global patriarchy, it is not surprising “The Unsafety Net: How Social Media Turned Against Women” shows a preponderance of the Internet's victims are females.  (Thanks to my friend Katelyn Driskill for bringing this profoundly disturbing report to my attention.)

But it seems to me the real issue transcends – without diminishing – the focused victimization of any single group of people. What is evident here is synergistic hatred of a hitherto-unimaginable magnitude, the expression of a formerly suppressed hatefulness that seizes upon new technology to intensify and metastasize its malice, seemingly to infinity. But why now, when – ironically and paradoxically – we need cooperative solidarity more desperately than at any other time in our species' history? Is patriarchy and its ultimate expression as capitalism that self-destructive? Could it be that hatred of our fellow humans – especially the hatred of the life-bearing gender who mothers us into being and without whom we would all perish – is but a subset of our now-undeniable (and now undeniably suicidal) hatred of the environment? Is this the real, hitherto unacknowledged barrier that fatally obstructs all our efforts to cope with terminal climate change? Perhaps the New Agers were right after all – that there could be no healing of our environment until our psychological selves were healed. But who – or what – could have accomplished such a feat? And what does that tell us about our species' fitness for survival?

LB/6-12 October 2014

-30-

I'm Fine – Kept from Posting by an Unexpectedly Time-Consuming Project – and Thank You for Asking!

Nikki Weatherhead with her thought-provoking Occupy Tacoma sign. Photograph and posterization by Loren Bliss copyright 2011.

*

ESPECIALLY IN THE WAKE of the deadly and ruinous ice-storm that swept through the southern Puget Sound region earlier this week, several of you have questioned why I haven't posted here for nearly two weeks.

Actually the answer is quite simple: I'm at work on a piece of writing that is taking much longer than I anticipated. Hence the relevance of the image above: that's precisely what I'm doing – occupying my mind.

Presumably then – a stipulation always essential when one is nearly 72 years old and not in the best of health – I'll be back in a few more days.

Meanwhile I'm fine, though the storm destroyed the beautiful stand of cedars that shielded my windows from predatory eyes and protected my apartment from the scorching glare off the adjacent concrete parking lot and its mass of heat-reflector vehicles, which means that summers here will henceforth be hellish indeed. Apartments so exposed become ovens, with interior temperatures exceeding 100F even with outside temperatures seldom above the mid-80s.

Not only will there be this intolerable and potentially deadly oppression by reflected heat; the fact I'll now have to keep my venetian blinds closed 24/7 to project against the ever-searching eyes of street criminals means my window fan will be useless for cooling this apartment after dark; venetian blinds block airflow as effectively as solid walls – and the cost of air conditioning equipment plus a prohibitively expensive surcharge for the additional electricity denies me that option forever.

Such is the “terminal” in what in scientific truth should be labeled “terminal climate change,” but which – in a typical act of Orwellian malice – the Ruling Class renamed “global warming,” no doubt both to obscure the impending horror of its extreme weather and impose maximum conceptual paralysis on the associated debate.

LB/21 January 2012

-30-