Nightmare: Government Shutdown Reductio Ad Absurdum

“Premonitions”: a sandwich made of Hare Krishna dancers in Tompkins Square Patk and anti-Vietnam War demonstrators in Central Park c. 1967, the moon added with my editor's punch in Seattle c. 1974. Tri-X, other data lost. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyrights 1976 and 2012. (Click on image to view it full size.)

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RECOGNIZABLY PROPHETIC DREAMS come to me very rarely, no more than a dozen times in all my 73 years, and thus far they have foretold only personal disasters, occurrences of no significance to anyone but myself or maybe a few other members of my relentlessly dysfunctional family. 

A few of these events were relatively minor vexations that at the time of their occurrence seemed bottomlessly horrific, like the vengefully inflicted delays by which my birthmother ensured I missed an end-of-summer passenger train and was fretfully tardy in returning to my academic-year residence in the home of my father and stepmother and even more anxious about my entrance to the bully-dominated jungle of a southern public high school – itself a profoundly disturbing transition after four years in the carefully regulated sanctuary of Roman Catholic parochial education. 

Some episodes in which my nightmares came true were a bit more problematical, like Vietnam-Era G.I. Bill education checks inexplicably delayed so long the resultant poverty nearly flung me into homelessness, which happened three times in 1971 and once in 1972. 

Another incident, of which I dreamed at least twice beforehand, was irremediably injurious: it was a Godzilla-versus-Bambi car crash at 4:30 p.m. on a rainy 23 September 1978, when one of Washington state's obscenely coddled habitually criminal drunken drivers slammed his huge 442 Oldsmobile into my tiny new Honda Civic and inflicted the spinal injuries that now in old age have reduced me to a cripple.

(For the record, “obscenely coddled” contains not one scintilla of hyperbole. The moral imbecile at the wheel of the monster Oldsmobile had been arrested 19 times on charges of driving while intoxicated, but the arrests were all dismissed or reduced to meaninglessness, a fit prelude to his 20th offense, when he crippled me, destroyed my little car and reportedly rang the Breathalyzer bell with a near-record blood-alcohol score of point-32. But the associated charges, which included assaulting an officer, also were thrown out, and this obviously well-connected Chug-a-Lug Charley continued his potentially deadly spree of defiantly dipsomaniacal motoring until only a few years ago, when terminal liver failure rather than a blind [drunk?] judiciary at last took him permanently off our streets and highways.) 

Nor could I have foreseen my encounter with this malicious sociopath clearly enough to avoid it. Unfortunately for my prospects as a professional seer, I never recognize my dreams as prophetic until they are confirmed by subsequent events. There are never any of those Biblical jazz angels whose trumpet riffs are alleged to signify prophecy; neither is there – as would surely be more appropriate in my case – a Celtic or perhaps Scythian priestess with Jecsa Hoop's  astonishingly evocative voice chanting of “Havoc in Heaven” or singing of a woman with “hair of fire and skin of snow” as if to warn me I am about to bear witness to my own future. 

Having duly acknowledged the relevant metaphysical handicaps, I will now try to write coherently of the dream that, five nights ago, scared me into palpitations of such intensity I thought for a moment I was having a heart attack. Then of course I remembered the Yoga by which I had held my deteriorating spinal injuries at bay for nearly three decades – that is, until the exercises themselves became impossibly painful – and there in my bed of post-frightmare cold-sweat nightfullness I soon managed to deep-breathe my pulse back to normal. 

Yet the content of the dream continues to haunt my waking hours, which tells me the only way I can exorcise its chilling grasp is by revealing it. Hence I describe it here as best as I can reconstruct its curious sequence of images, not because I suspect it might be prophetic – in fact I pray it is not – but rather because I hope full disclosure will be fully healing. 

I've also no doubt the dream expresses something of the awful anxiety the now undeniably total corruption of the U.S. political system and both its parties is inflicting on all of us – particularly on those of us who are dependent on the government for survival, as for example are all Social Security and Medicare recipients. We are afraid because we know cutbacks to these programs will literally kill us, and these days – given that the Republican and Democratic party labels are themselves Big Lies and that we are in fact ruled ever more despotically by one party of two names – our fears are rational, constant and mercilessly relentless.

Thus in this dream I am logically as I am now, old and crippled though still as journalistically capable as ever. But in its surrealism I am also again the investigative reporter for The Jersey Journal as I was in 1969 and 1970, when I scooped the world on the heroin-addiction epidemic inflicted on the U.S. by the Vietnam War, only to be robbed of proper credit for my greatest story ever by some back-shop patriot's vindictive removal of my byline and the resultant unrestrained glory-hogging by The New York Times the following morning. 

Jersey Journal Managing Editor August Lockwood has been dead since 1997, yet now in the dream he is again my boss. With his omnipresent corner-of-the-mouth cigar he looks exactly as he did when I was one of his star reporters, and just as he might have done in real life, he has assigned me to track down and interview a Jersey City man who supposedly knows the details of President Richard Nixon's plan to suspend the 1972 elections.

Perhaps significantly, this Nixon aspect is based on an obscure but damning truth. By Christmas 1969, a few Washington D.C. insiders were credibly claiming Nixon had commissioned the Rand Corporation to prepare the rationale for just such a coup, and their allegations were courageously exposed by the Newhouse News Service, another property of The JJ's parent corporation, which gives these parts of the dream even more logical cohesion.

But then as so often happens in dreamtime, the meaning of “now” shifts without warning or advance notice and it is suddenly 1 October 2013. I am still on assignment, still working for the resurrected Gus Lockwood, still at my battered oaken desk, still banging out my copy on a Royal Standard mechanical typewriter in The Journal's smoke-filled newsroom, and my reportorial thought process is still subconsciously punctuated by the suck-bang of the pneumatic tubes that carried copy to the composing room, but the Nixon story has morphed into an elaborate conspiracy by which the Democrats and Republicans and their Wall Street masters are scheming to end all pretense of constitutional governance. 

These politicians have gridlocked Congress behind a charade of controversy and shut down the government, and now they intend to hurl the nation into internationally ruinous default by refusing to raise the debt ceiling. The stock market has plunged to an all-time low and the resultant chaos already includes breathtakingly violent rioting by desperate people who are condemned to death by the end of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps and every other federal socioeconomic-assistance program. 

Meanwhile the same sources who had defied federal secrecy to reveal the Vietnam Era heroin-addiction scandal have returned from their own graves and retirement homes and are restored to the bodies they occupied in 1970, and now in my dream they are telling me the entire shutdown crisis is the deliberately scripted prelude to a military takeover intended to be at least as bloody as the 1973 Chilean murder-and-torture coup that was engineered by the Central Intelligence Agency to protect USian imperial business interests and capitalism in general. The military, these sources say, will impose the fascist dictatorship the One Percent has sought since the failure of the Bankers' Plot in 1934. And one source has finally squirreled away the top secret documents to prove it.

The purloined papers indicate the dreamland junta will immediately transfer power to a national board of directors chosen from the chief executives of the most profitable USian corporations. The formerly elected politicians whose deceptions facilitated the coup will be rewarded with lifetime appointments as local managers who carry out the board's decrees. The board's absolute and unchallengeable authority will be explained to the USian citizenry as vital to the defense of corporate personhood against angry parasites turned domestic terrorists – seniors, disabled people, welfare recipients, all the “takers not makers” officially despised in accordance with Ayn Rand doctrine.

"At last" – or so the nation's most expensive advertising campaign will announce as soon as the coup is complete – “we're running government as a business.” 

Now in the dream I recognize my story is shaping up to be one helluva fine exposé, and in the old days before the news monopolies turned USian journalism into Randite propaganda, I already know it would have earned me a sure Pulitzer. But it is still 2013; even in dreamtime  I must convince the presumably immortal Gus to defy the invisible censors if the scoop is ever to see the light of day. 

But when I gather my notes and unhook my cane from a slightly open desk drawer and lurch up from my swivel chair to go tell Gus what I've unearthed and plead the case for its full disclosure, The JJ's busy East Coast newsroom is suddenly an empty but familiar Pacific Northwest newspaper office with a torn and faded “Tired of the Same Old Shit” poster on its far wall, a defiant bit of Manhattan outrageousness the politically correct staffers of this particular publication would never have tolerated in actuality.  

What has happened is I've been dream-teleported into an abandoned and thoroughly trashed version of the ramshackle space in the faded-brick-and-crumbling-plaster, Klondike gold-rush-era building from which a self-consciously countrified but environmentally competent alternative journal called Northwest Passage was published in Bellingham's Fairhaven District during the height of the Back-to-the-Land Movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

I am utterly alone. There is no one else in this structure save the fearsomely malevolent ghosts I know are lurking in its darker corners and behind its closed doors and at the ends of its oppressively lightless corridors. I have been in this place during other dream odysseys and have learned from experience my magick is not strong enough to protect me from these ectoplasmic predators. 

In self-protective revulsion I hurredly limp outside, but now the entire physical environment has changed. The building is no longer a nightmare variant of the Good Earth Community Center, which was a countercultural meeting hall and a crash-pad for itinerant hippies as well as a food co-op and the editorial home of the Passage. Instead it has become the ominous remnant of a three-storey Georgian mansion amidst a Blair Witch Project forest, toxically gnarly versions of the deciduous trees common to New York and New Jersey and Pennsylvania, oak and ash and sycamore and willow, their branches stripped bare by winter, the overwhelming sense of desolation eerily intensified by occasional white pine or blue spruce grown uncomfortably like exclamation points of silent screams. 

Then beyond the ruin I see a river, thick and murky and steaming with pollution, and amidst the barren willows on its further bank is a squad of soldiers – present-day U.S. soldiers with their Darth Vader assault rifles and camouflage uniforms and Nazi-like helmets – and now the soldiers are shooting at me and their bullets are cracking past my head and smacking into the building and gouging the surrounding trees and I am fleeing, hobbling as fast as I can through damply matted piles of brown leaves and across cold slippery patches of dirty snow ever deeper into the forest and my arthritic knees hurt and now I am too old and too tired and too winded to go any further and my fear gives way to terrible sadness and I wake up gasping for breath and grateful to have been rescued by wakefulness from torture and death.

Thank Goddess or god or fate or karma or randomness or entropy or the divine self or whatever higher power you choose, it was only a nightmare. I hope.

LB/6 October 2014 

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Labor Day Blues: Reflections on the Imbecility of Hope

“Stop The War On Workers”: another hitherto-unpublished Occupy Tacoma picture from a November 2011 demonstration, a perfect image for Labor Day 2013 or any other year, especially since the September holiday is itself a weapon in that very same war, for which see below. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2013.  (Click on image to view it full size.)

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SEPTEMBER'S LABOR DAY is a capitalist weapon against organized labor. Everywhere else on this beleaguered planet, “Labour Day” – International Workers Day – is celebrated on May Day or 1 May. But in the United States, the first Monday in September was chosen for the specific purpose of driving a lethal wedge between the U.S. labor movement and socialism.  Why? Because the One Percent understands that without socialism, there is no clarifying focus on the historical truth of class struggle. And without acknowledgement of class struggle – without recognition that anyone whose survival is dependent on the whims of a boss or a bureaucrat is definitively a member of the Working Class – there is no basis for 99 Percent solidarity. Such is the inconceivably malicious cunning of the USian Ruling Class.

Moreover it is in the disturbing but mostly forgotten anti-labor history of Labor Day we see once again how the greatest most deadly mistake of the modern-day USian (pseudo) Left is its blindly arrogant assumption that “capitalist” and “stupid” are synonymous. But it is history – the vital discipline the (pseudo) Left so vehemently rejects – that shows us the terrifying extent to which the capitalists are diabolically brilliant. Even in the late 1800s, the One Percenters were smart enough to recognize the revolutionary implications of socialism's insistence on Working Class solidarity – without which there is no effective anti-capitalist resistance.

Since then the Ruling Class – the One Percenters and the politicians, bureaucrats, academics, professionals and clergy who serve them with unquestioned and often unconscious obedience – has transformed the U.S. experiment in constitutional governance into its diametrical opposite, the Ayn Rand variant of fascist tyranny, the new paradigm of USian goverenance. Where once the U.S. proclaimed itself a nation of “freedom and justice for all,” now it is a realm of absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation for all the rest of us.

Thus we of the 99 Percent in the United States today are the most savagely oppressed, most hopelessly disempowered Working Class in the industrial world. But until we embrace the solidarity of class identity; until we acknowledge that capitalism is infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue; until we admit capitalism is the total rejection of all humanitarian morality and therefore the closest approximation to absolute Evil that has yet appeared on this Earth; until we recognize the capitalists themselves as true sociopaths; until we know them as the most evil geniuses our species has yet spawned – our resistance will remain futile if not suicidal. 

*****

When Thom Hartmann reported last week the U.S. Internal Revenue Service is being sued for its defiant refusals to revoke the tax-exempt status of churches that are illegally active in partisan politics, it focused me again on the looming but mostly unacknowledged threat of Christian theocracy. Hence I commented accordingly:

Obviously the real issue here has two parts. One is (again and as always), the fact the Democrats and the Republicans are but factions within the One Party of Two Names that rules the United States for the capitalist aristocracy known as the One Percent. The other is the extent to which the entire Ruling Class – the One Percent and the politicians, the bureaucrats, the military officers, the  police commanders, the executives and the professionals who obediently serve these Wall Street aristocrats – is quietly but fanatically committed to the global imposition of Abrahamic theocracy, whether Judaic, Christian or Islamic.

 

This is why, for example, the so-called “liberation of Iraq” was in fact engineered to enable Islamic fundamentalists to take over the one genuinely secular state in the entire Islamic world. It is also why Hillary Clinton clandestinely collaborates with Sam Brownback to abolish women's sexual freedom in the United States. (For documentation of Hillary's commitment to theocracy and how she functions as a traitor both to her gender and to the principles of religious freedom, see pgs. 272-276 of The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power [Jeff Sharlet; Harper: 2008])  In either case, the objective is to employ the core savagery of Abrahamic religion – particularly its hatred of women and Nature and its endorsement of divine-right rule (whether by the kings of yesterday or the executives of today and tomorrow) – to brain-police and opiate all the rest of us as we are herded into capitalism's slave pens. The intent, as always under capitalism, is the total enslavement of all of us who are not part of the Ruling Class. The goal is an electronically enforced, theologically sustained tyranny intended to guarantee the One Percent's wealth and power literally forever.

 

The USian model – I refuse to call it “American” because, at least at present, there are still many nations in the Americas that remain outside the USian imperial boundaries – is of course the post-Reconstruction South, which has been a de facto theocracy since the late 1860s. The Ku Klux Klan is colloquially known as “the Saturday Night Men's Bible Study Class” because of how, in addition to its activities as a racist death squad, it traditionally functions as the Christian equivalent of the breathtakingly sadistic Islamic Morality Police.

 

In this environment, where the Big Lie of “American democracy” is so vividly revealed,  it is absurd to imagine the One Percent has allowed the appointment of any higher-court judges who would dare thwart capitalist governance – that is, absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for all the rest of us – by ruling in opposition to the theocratic onslaught.  Of course I support the Freedom From Religion Foundation's lawsuit, but I have no doubt it will fail.

***** 

 

Thinking more about Hillary's false-flag feminism and her huge but mostly unreported betrayal of women's biological freedom, I remembered something I had written in my 2013 New Year's piece: 

(D)espite its protestations to the contrary, (the Democratic Party) is at its psychological core as anti-Working Class as its Republican counterpart.

 

Nevertheless there is one historical difference between the two parties. The Republican hostility to the 99 Percent is an expression of the fact it is – and always has been – the party of the capitalist aristocracy. But as the late Jack Newfield observed in a number of Village Voice essays now curiously excluded from the Internet, Democratic hostility to the Working Class dates from the conflicts of the Vietnam Era: specifically the fear, hatred and contempt with which the draft-exempt elite belittled those of us whose socioeconomic status left us no choice but military service.

 

Precisely as Newfield foresaw, the party's post-Vietnam antagonism toward the 99 Percent provides a yardstick of the extent to which the Democrats, despite their former New Deal populism, now operate from the Republican psychodynamic paradigm of total identification with the One Percent or the Ruling Class, i.e., the oppressor. (bf as in original)

Hence the emergence of a unique and definitive brand of USian female consciousness that can only be described as Ayn Rand feminism: for example, pretend support within the Democratic Party for “universal” reproductive rights – no matter that for Working Class women, the huge loss of jobs imposed by Democrat-enabled free-trade profiteering is also the loss of health insurance, which means the loss of access to birth control and abortion and therefore the revocation of all sexual freedom formerly so provided.

 

There was personal heartbreak concealed in these angry and denouncing words because – much as my late father had once believed the black activism of the Civil Rights Movement would at last force the United States to live up to its constitutional promise – I had likewise believed for a time Women's Liberation would be our national salvation. But then USian feminists veered away from their original, Marxian-influenced quest for socioeconomic democracy, a sudden right turn authoritatively said to be the result of infiltration by Central Intelligence Agency operatives.  As a consequence, while the world feminist movement remained solidly Leftist and therefore focused on the role of gender in class struggle, its USian counterpart deteriorated into the counter-revolutionary, implicitly fascist toxicity of identity politics. Predictably, much of USian feminism was thus eventually manipulated into nothing more than a genderized argument for capitalism, even unto the casting of Ayn Rand as a feminist heroine.  Curious whether any feminists had dared document the socioeconomic hypocrisy that resulted – especially after second-wave feminism was absorbed and reshaped by the Democratic Party – I spent an entire day researching the topic. What I found was sufficiently exciting I immediately announced it in an email to a few of my closest relatives, friends and colleagues:

Hello all...You have read my references to “Ayn Rand feminism,” which is a semi-intuitive, semi-reasoned construct of my own making. But here, thanks to the New School for Social Research (which alas I could never afford to attend), is a link to a scholarly work entitled “Feminism, Capitalism and the Cunning of History” that confirms my observations and explains how Ayn Rand feminism  came to be. While some of you will find it unattractively turgid, the points it makes are critical to understanding how Ayn Rand feminism is aiding the process by which capitalism's most vicious form yet is being rammed down our throats. The analysis provided in the first two sections is invaluable. The third section, however, is scarcely worth reading. It is reduced to intellectual garbage by the English author's naive belief Barack Obama genuinely represented “change we can believe in,” that is, deliverance from the new (slave state) paradigm of capitalist governance rather than the treacherous imposition of its ever-worsening tyrannies he now so obviously was chosen to facilitate.

As so often do all academics, author Nancy Fraser buried her lead. Here it is on page 17 of the pdf file:  

“In general, then, the fate of feminism in the neoliberal era presents a paradox. On the one hand, the relatively small countercultural movement of the previous period has expanded exponentially, successfully disseminating its ideas across the globe. On the other, feminist ideas have undergone a subtle shift in valence in the altered context. Unambiguously emancipatory in the era of state-organized capitalism, (feminism's) critiques of economism*, androcentrism*, etatism* and Westphalianism* now appear fraught with ambiguity, susceptible to serving the legitimation needs of a new form of capitalism. After all, this capitalism would much prefer to confront claims for recognition over claims for redistribution, as it builds a new regime of accumulation on the cornerstone of women's waged labor and seeks to disembed markets from social regulation in order to operate more freely on the global scale.”   

In other words, the protective recognition of women's identity demanded by feminists (or the protective recognition demanded by racial, ethnic and sexual-identity activists), has been co-opted by  the One Percenters into a breathtakingly deceptive  means of seeming responsive to calls for greater democracy even as the savagery of anything-goes capitalism reduces all of us to slavery. 

 ________
*These terms are European synonyms for, respectively, belief in the supremacy of the marketplace; patriarchy or male supremacy;  statism or the primacy of the state as a regulator;  the modern, absolute sovereignty of nation-states as expressed in the Peace of Westphalia, signed in 1648 to end the 30 Years War.

*****

 

Meanwhile the Ruling Class has already begun the propaganda onslaught by which it seeks to reassure us of the legitimacy of the 2014 and 2016 elections. The Democrat propagandists, because they assume a more intelligent party rank-and-file, at least attempt to be subtle. But re-legitimation of the party of Barack the Betrayer is still Kim Messick's obvious purpose. Hence my comments on the associated thread:

The disappearance of the Republicans would change nothing because the Democrats – the other, more blatantly dishonest half of the One Party of Two Names – would ensure the continuation of the One Percent's ever-worsening despotism.

 

Anyone who doubts this is in clinical dementia, denying irrefutable evidence. This includes the worst-in-U.S.-history treachery of Obama the Orator's permanent shape-shift into Barack the Betrayer, also the unprecedented endorsements of tyranny evident in the unanimous and near-unanimous votes by which “both” parties routinely expand the de facto slavery of so-called “free trade” and eagerly nullify the Constitution to rob us of any residual ability to resist enslavement.

 

In this context, it becomes obvious Mr. Messick's analysis is merely pro-Democrat propaganda – very subtle propaganda indeed, but nevertheless nothing more than tacit restatement of the Big Lie of “American democracy” – that is, the now-utterly disproven claim the U.S. electoral system can ever again represent anything more than the mandates and decrees of the One Percent.

 

The Republicans – xenophobes to the bitter end – recognize the bigotry and conditioned ignorance of their minions and propagandize accordingly. That's no doubt the explanation for Hollywood's resurrection of old-time fascist scare tactics:  Given the density of Moron Nation, who can doubt this cinematic provocateur of yellow-peril hysteria will provide the newest and most compelling rationale yet for the USian policies of genocide by abandonment – the slashing and/or elimination of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, unemployment compensation and all other safety-net stipends. In the past it was the abstract and therefore ambiguous specter of national debt; now it's the imaginary but nevertheless vividly concrete prospect of conquest – actually foreclosure – by the People's Republic of China. I can hear the new Republican arguments now: “we have to kill grandma because her mere existence is providing aid and comfort to the enemy.” 

Somewhere in the Great Beyond – if indeed there is such a thing – Leni Riefenstahl is surely smirking. So is Joseph Goebbels. And both of them are no doubt gleefully zieg-heiling the Fourth Reich, aka the United States of America. 

(Thanks to Brian Weaver for spotting the anti-Chinese, anti-safety-net film and reporting it via his excellent By the Allegro Desk newsletter.)

***** 

 

Waiting to learn whether the United States Government will attack Syria, it came to me the USian method of governance has remained unchanged since the overthrow of British rule. Whether the government's chosen adversaries were First Nations peoples, minorities, organized labor, domestic protest movements or rebels against the imperial will in Asia, Africa and Latin America, the response is and always has been the same: brute force. Thus the USian empire rules its conquered planet exactly as it ruled the banana republics that were among its first overseas conquests. 

But the death toll and the other consequences of such governance are always deftly hidden, all the more so given the easy malleability of electronic media. Thus it is only after one penetrates innumerable layers of deception the United States stands revealed as not just the ultimate conquistador, but also the most murderous nation in human history. 

A small but important part of that deadliness is the sheer terror the USian One Percent knowingly (and therefore with the greatest possible malice) inflicts on those of us who are poor, elderly or disabled citizens. For a person dependent on Social Security, unemployment insurance, food stamps, Medicare supplements or any of the various welfare programs, there's no more frightening prospect than a government shutdown as described eight days ago  in The Washington Post: “The United States is set to run out of borrowing authority in mid-October, leaving the government at a high risk of not being able to pay for Social Security checks, military salaries and other operations, the Obama administration said Monday.” 

Life in the great USian electronic concentration camp  is already difficult enough, especially given the government's increasingly blatant hostility toward lower-income folks – those of us the One Percent wants to exterminate by reducing or ending our pensions and stipends because we are no longer exploitable for profit. Hence all readers of this page should ask themselves how many people – especially elderly people – will die as a result of the escalation in stress inflicted by this newest episode of debt-limit terrorism. Indeed I might be one of the casualties: not long after I read the above-linked WaPo story, the episodic atrial fibrillation that has plagued me for the past three years seemingly became permanent. 

LB/2 September 2013

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