The Postmortem Continues: Some Genuine Leftists Awaken; the Identity-Politics Pseudo-Left Remains as Arrogant and Vindictively Counter-Revolutionary as Ever

WE THE PEOPLE can no longer doubt Donald Trump is the new Hitler. Last week – particularly given the conciliatory tone of his victory speech,  I said we should wait and see what sort of a president Trump would be – but his appointment of the notorious white supremacist Steve Bannon as his chief advisor tells us all we need to know.

Thus before the last few remnants of our Bill of Rights  are forever abolished, we who survived the Johnson-Nixon-Ford-Carter-Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama prelude to Trump's Fourth Reich and now find ourselves among this not-so-New Order's publicly declared targets should at least try to understand the psychological cunning by which the capitalists manipulated Moron Nation into crowning their Donald as Führer of our species' deadliest and most relentlessly tyrannical empire.

For only by studying what has been done to us – and indeed what we have thus done to ourselves – might we begin to comprehend the unbearable truth that capitalism is naught but pure Evil, the most relentlessly powerful Evil in our maliciously abused Mother Earth's history, Evil so infinitely huge and overwhelming it has burst the doctrinal bounds of theological conceptualization and become instead the now-probably irreversible mechanism of ecocidal apocalypse, whether by thermonuclear war (as was intended by fascist Hillary), or by patriarchal hatred of Woman and her macrocosm Nature soon to be enshrined as federal policy by Trump and his JesuNazi Vice-President Mike Pence.

Nor should we overlook the increasing probability the election of Trump was the product of the ultimate, climactic (and almost certainly terminal) charade of USian “democracy” – the breathtakingly Evil consequence of an utterly Evil deception in which the One Percenters, the maliciously Evil capitalist overlords of both the Democratic (sic) and Republican parties, suppressed the Sanders candidacy to inflame our disgust with the Hillary candidacy, which they had already mandated to ensure the election of Trump and Pence – the shortest most direct route to the Nazi tyranny the capitalists have been seeking for the past 85 years.

Acknowledging these unbearably bitter truths and probabilities, armed with such excruciatingly painful recognitions, we might then fulfill Sun Tzu's prerequisite, “Know the enemy and know yourself, and in one hundred battles you will never be in peril.” In other words – if our species somehow survives the forthcoming debacle and we the people of the USian Homeland somehow at last banish our obstructive optimism – we might thus begin the long process of helping our species evolve a global path to humanitarian victory.

Such is the reasoning that underlies my belief in Marxism. Despite Marxism's obvious failures – the drowning of the Soviet Union in the dark undertow of Russian history  and the more notorious collapse of the People's Republic of China into zero-tolerance state capitalism – it remains the only ideology on earth with sufficient discipline to successfully resist (and perhaps even topple and permanently eliminate) the bottomless horror of Nazism – the terminal form of capitalism – that once again openly assaults us. But now, thanks to Trump's White House predecessors, it possesses incalculably more powers of subjugation than its Third Reich forefathers might ever have imagined. And there is no longer a Red Army nor anything like it to ensure our victory.

(Note: I have added a few links – indicated as “added link” – to the following reports to exemplify the points they make.)

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It Was the Rise of the Davos Class That Sealed America's Fate (Naomi Klein, Guardian UK): They will blame James Comey and the FBI. They will blame voter suppression and racism. They will blame Bernie or bust and misogyny. They will blame third parties and independent candidates (added link). They will blame the corporate media for giving him the platform, social media for being a bullhorn, and WikiLeaks for airing the laundry. But this leaves out the force most responsible for creating the nightmare in which we now find ourselves wide awake: neoliberalism. That worldview – fully embodied by Hillary Clinton and her machine – is no match for Trump-style extremism. The decision to run one against the other is what sealed our fate...Here is what we need to understand: a hell of a lot of people are in pain. Under neoliberal policies of deregulation, privatisation, austerity and corporate trade, their living standards have declined precipitously. They have lost jobs. They have lost pensions. They have lost much of the safety net that used to make these losses less frightening. They see a future for their kids even worse than their precarious present...For the people who saw security and status as their birthright – and that means white men most of all – these losses are unbearable.

The only point on which I would quibble with Ms. Klein is her either/or assertion about the Democratic (sic) Party.

Given its long history of betraying the 99 Percent – which started the instant a Missouri political hack named Harry S. Truman became president (but which dates to the era in which it was the party of slavery and slave-owners) – it should be obvious to anyone of Ms. Klein's foresighted intelligence the only fate suitable for the Democratic (sic) Party is not just abandonment but methodical destruction.

Otherwise the Democrats' history of wanton betrayals will merely repeat itself again.

But where to start? Moron Nation, proven so by its election of Trump, most assuredly lacks the ability, the will and most importantly the courage to provide the requisite revolutionary leadership.

Asked without a scintilla of facetiousness: where is Vladimir Lenin now that we so desperately need him? Where is the old ComIntern? Where, finally, is the Soviet Union? (Never forget it was the USSR that during the 1930s provided us with a leadership built from our own people so effectively we nearly overthrew capitalism here in its global headquarters.)

Alas, there is nothing like that – no source of the requisite training and discipline -- in the world today. Which means Moron Nation is truly on its own – and when in history did a despotism of dunces ever give birth to anything save chaos, destruction and death?

Truly, only a miracle can save us now.

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My (very strong) suspicion is – apart from an even greater escalation of Democratic (sic) and Republican “austerity” – i.e., genocidal war on elderly, disabled and otherwise chronically impoverished people – there will be very little change in the status quo. (But given the 180-degree difference between Hillary's “public” and “private” policies, no doubt we'd have gotten that anyway, assuredly in a far more euphemistic form.) To make real change, we need a genuine revolution, and that will never happen here in Moron Nation, at least not in the lifetimes of anyone now living, because too much of the citizenry has been moronated into maliciously selfish submission.

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Never forget “the party of evil” is in fact one capitalist party of two deceptive names, Democratic (sic) and Republican.

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Trouble is, identity politics – the capitalist antidote to class consciousness – will abort (anti-capitalist) solidarity before it is even in the embryonic stage. The clitoris-envy misogyny of the anti-abortion Christian jihadist right; the forcible disarmament fanaticism of the pseudo-Left – people who truly believe every firearms owner is “a Nazi” and the mere ownership of a firearm is “an act of violence”; the Ku-Klux minded racists and Nazi-minded ableists of the Right; the tree-spiking environmentalists of the bourgeois Left, whose hatred of corporate depredations is exceed only by their demonstrably murderous hatred of Working Class people who have no other livelihood than logging – these differences and their corollaries, envenomed ad nauseam by hatreds of the same bottomless magnitude that tore apart the Weimar Republic and thus enabled Hitler, make any such (solidarity) hopeless under present circumstances.

The question then is how do we educate people on both sides of the political spectrum – people whose closed-minded zealotry proves them to be utterly ineducable.

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You (addressed to a hostile fellow RSN comment-thread poster) err grievously in equating Stalin with the Koch brothers. Read some history: Stalin was building an industrial nation from the ruins of a feudal nation. The Koch cabal is building a feudal nation from the ruins of an industrial nation.

But the implication of your “expect to learn Russian soon” – unintentionally to be sure (though maybe your subconscious is telling you something you should heed) – is that given present-day politics, Russia could well emerge from the global miasma as the savior of human liberty.

That savior most assuredly won't be Moron Nation, i.e., the United States of America.

Вы говорите по-русски?

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Before we damn Stalin as “a monster,” let us acknowledge the monstrous behavior of the United States, which for the most part went unchallenged by its citizenry until capitalism brought USian sadism home and the white population began to suffer the same depredations as indigenous populations abroad and minority or First Nations populations in the imperial homeland.

Then of course the white population, methodically moronated to self-destructive stupidity, did precisely as it was conditioned to do: note for example the required high school reading of Ayn Rand, a fictionalizer of Hitler's Mein Kampf whose work should never have been published, much less given, like gasoline thrown on a fire, to people capitalism had already raised from birth to be moral imbeciles. Thus in its ignorance-aborted quest for relief, Moron Nation voted in fascism. (Paragraph revised slightly to comply with format differences.)

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Think of the Electoral College as the national equivalent of the Democratic (sic) National Committee's “superdelegates.” Both serve the same class-war function – that is, making sure the will of the One Percent and the Ruling Class prevail over the will of the 99 Percent.

Just as the Democratic (sic) superdelegates parlayed an enormity of election fraud into ousting Sanders and nominating Hillary, so did the Electoral College parlay the candidacy of Hillary into the presidency of Donald Trump.

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Health Care in the Age of Trump (Adam Gaffney): The implications of the election  are widespread and multifaceted, ranging from the catastrophic impact a Trump presidency will have on climate change — and the attendant global health consequences — to the squeeze on reproductive health care access that will likely follow the rise of the Right. At the state level, important health care–related ballot initiatives went down in defeat, including a universal health care referendum in Colorado and an initiative in California...to mildly loosen Big Pharma’s tentacle-like grip on the state’s finances...Big Pharma and the insurance industry (spent) huge sums...Republicans now...(can) remold the nation’s health care system into something both uglier and more lucrative...Pharma stocks soared the day after the election).

Mr. Gaffney – still in denial of Tuesday's results – asks, “And how can we keep the dream for single-payer alive?”

The answer, of course, is that any hope of single-payer is dead, as dead as the so-called “American Dream,” in other words, dead forever with no hope of resurrection.

Apropos the Ayn Rand influence cited by (a fellow-comment-thread contributor), the significant fact about Rand is that she is the fictionalizer of Hitler's Mein Kampf: just as der Führer did, she demands extermination of all untermenschen, which by USian definition – now made policy by the Trumpite electorate – includes racial, ethnic and sexual minorities; those of us who are chronically impoverished, elderly and/or disabled; and most of all anyone who is chronically ill.

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Trump Voters Will Not Like What Happens Next (Garrison Keillor, The Washington Post): ...Raw ego and proud illiteracy have won out,  and a severely learning-disabled man with a real character problem will be president...The Trumpers had a whale of a good time, waving their signs, jeering at the media, beating up protesters, chanting “Lock her up”...The Trumpers never expected their guy to actually win the thing, and that’s their problem now. They wanted only to whoop and yell, boo at the H-word, wear profane T-shirts, maybe grab a crotch or two, jump in the RV with a couple of six-packs and go out and shoot some spotted owls...(but)...The uneducated white males who elected him, they will not like what happens next.

I should thank Keillor for his malevolent arrogance, firstly because it demonstrates exactly why Trump won; secondly because it proves the truth that earned me my all-time RSN down-thumb high, 62 at last count.

What I wrote is that “Prairie Home Companion...was a malicious satire...on those flyover folk...'Wobegon' was pronounced 'Woe-begone,' as in woe-begone peasants...The program was also a devastating parody...on 1950s rural-U.S. midday radio...For that reason, I never cared much for... Keillor nor for his perpetuation of USian class snobbery... I thought it wrong to make a mockery of people who could no more help being what they were than a polio victim in an iron lung could help being deathly ill.”

Obviously – note again the 62 red thumbs – revealing the now Keillor-proven truth about his vindictive elitism was the Hillaryite equivalent of owning a firearm, which the forcible disarmament cult damns as an “act of violence” that irrevocably defines one as “a Nazi.”

Indeed my only criticism of (another of Keillor's comment-thread critics) is the writerly observation that “hissy fit” is redundant. In the South, from whence the term originates, it was merely “hissy”: the ultimate hold-your-breath-until-purple, fall-to-the-floor, kick-shriek-and-shit-your-pants tantrum of a raging two-year-old boy, precisely as demonstrated above by Keillor's hateful invective.

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(To another RSN poster): I up-thumbed both your remarks, but must differ with you on one point. You wrote, “Bernie's revolution needs to find new legs – it'll be a winner in four years time.”

Sorry to disillusion you, but with Trump about to bring back the House UnAmerican Activities Committee (added link), Bernie's so-called “Revolution” and any other public expressions of Left-leaning thought, including this and any kindred websites, are living on borrowed time and will be dead in the foreseeable future.

What happened during the 1960s was our 1905; it is merely that the One Percent and its Ruling Class vassals took much longer to crush us than the Tsar's Okhrana, police, Cossacks and soldiers took to crush the brave revolutionaries of '05.

Our 1917 – if it ever comes – will most assuredly not be led by Bernie Sanders, who betrayed the entire USian Left by his surrender to Hillary.

Indeed, I suspect this (Fourth) Reich, which pre-dates Trump by 53 years, will prove to be the Thousand-Year Reich Hitler imagined and with dreams of which his legions of Nazi war criminals further toxified the already-fascist USian Ruling Class when they were welcomed here after Germany's defeat. There is no power on earth that can beat it – not without destroying the planet – nor will the greedy submissiveness of Moron Nation ever dwindle, not until Mother Earth herself rises in apocalyptic rebellion against capitalist depredation. And by the time that happens, all of us alive today will be well and truly dead. Only a miracle can save us. 

By the one red thumb I've already gotten for this comment, it's clear some of you – probably in fact most of you – have no idea of the terrorism inflicted on this nation by the House UnAmerican Activities Committee.

It literally destroyed, literally forever, the lives of millions of USians – not only those it summoned to public degradation and financial lynching, but the millions more whose careers were destroyed and who were thus forever damned to inescapable poverty by the ripple effect of its indescribably vicious accusations. My father was one of this latter group; as in fact was I, my journalism career forever limited by the lynch-mob-like frenzy into which HUAC's accusations goaded the USian public. Ultimately, it is because of HUAC I will die in ever-more-wretched poverty, in all probability murdered by the poverty itself.

The primary legacy of HUAC's accusations was, firstly, the death, forever, of any ideologically disciplined (and therefore effective) opposition to capitalism, and, secondly, the fascist taint, “austerity” included, that poisons USian politics, culminating in the election of Trump and HUAC's vindictive return – its unprecedented tyranny now made truly omnipotent by all-seeing surveillance technology from which there is no possible escape.

Wake up, idiots. Unless you're my age (76) or older, you cannot begin to imagine the ruinous magnitude of the horrors soon to be unleashed on us.

Such is the ultimate malevolence (added link) of Moron Nation.

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Trans People Are Terrified of What Lies Ahead. We Must Look Out for One Another (Hannah Simpson, Guardian UK): The announcement that Donald Trump won the election was devastating for many people, but transgender people like me were especially frightened...The election of Donald Trump and Mike Pence to our nation’s highest office gives the social conservatives who championed them free reign to overturn decades of progress...A right-shifted supreme court could void all same-sex unions, and perhaps even challenge the fitness of transgender persons to be parents...any chance of the climate improving vanished this week.

I'd say Ms. Simpson is being optimistic: “could void” should be replaced with “will void” and “may well continue” be replaced with “will escalate.”

Here, of course, in the persecution of sexual nonconformists – which, mark my word – will be expanded to include heterosexual couples living together without marriage and communal households in which polyandry and/or bisexuality is common – is the ultimate and absolute proof of the infinitely murderous, infinitely sadistic viciousness of the Abrahamic god and therefore the defining core not just of Christianity, but of Judaism and Islam as well.

(With 60-something percent of the USian population believing the Bible as the literal word of god and therefore definitively fundamentalist whether they admit it or not, no wonder Trump won. And Pence is a theocratic, prosperity-gospel ogre [link added].)

The real winner, of course, is Moron Nation – a constituency now enabled to be as fanatically savage as their Jewish and Muslim counterparts in the Middle East.

Everyone in the targeted communities should waste no time in contacting Pink Pistols and learning the rudiments of effective self-defense.

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Does Trump Have a Mandate? (Marc Ash, Reader Supported News): For the second time in the fledgling 21st century, we are set upon by a right wing radical assuming the power of the US presidency without having won the popular vote.

Sorry, but (the) “50 years of progressive gains” (cited by a fellow comment-thread-contributor) is a Big Lie, an effective weapon in the One Percent's paralysis of USian political consciousness.

The era of “progressive gains” ended when President Roosevelt died on 12 April 1945. The era of revenge fascism now culminating in Trump, Pence and the resurrection of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee began immediately thereafter. The maliciously anti-worker Taft-Hartley Act became law on 23 June 1947. Any hope the U.S. might achieve economic democracy thus died forever, leading to the despair that, as in Weimar Germany, prompted the hopelessly oppressed 99 Percent to embrace fascism.

President Kennedy tried to revive the New Deal but was murdered on 22 November 1963 – the day future historians (if indeed there is a future) will cite as the date USian liberty died forever.

“Peace President” Johnson's so-called Great Society was ultimately nothing more than massive bribery to suppress resistance to his murderous Vietnam War. President Nixon, a fascist felon, began his second term by dropping all pretense of support for the 99 Percent's well-being, and our standard of living has declined steadily ever since.

True, there have been a few identity-politics gains since then, but these are mere Ruling Class giveaways. They have no impact on the increasing savagery of capitalism and capitalist governance, do nothing to alleviate our ever-worsening economic suffering and are therefore not “progressive” at all.

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It's Time for Progressives to Seize Control of the Democratic Party (Scott Galindez, Reader Supported News):  Donald Trump’s victory has left the Democratic Party open to redefining itself.

As I look back, defying Mr. Galindez's repetition of the Obama-ism by which the Betrayer justified his de facto pardon of the Bush Regime war criminals, what I see bolsters the suspicion I voiced on this site several weeks ago – that the One Percenters had concluded Trump was the more direct path to the Nazi Nation they've sought since the Bankers' Plot of 1934 (link added).

Indeed the mysterious failure of the Democratic (sic) Party's election-fraud apparatus seems to eliminate any other conclusion.

Moreover, Trump's appointees, apart from obvious Teabagger consolation prizes like Sarah Palin, are ideological twins of the neo-libs and neo-cons Hillary would have appointed to ensure our neo-subjugation.

Alas, the RSN posts in which I suggested the One Percent was secretly abandoning Hillary have seemingly been disappeared, though (the contributor screen-named) Radscal cited my suspicion:

“But Loren Bliss has gotten me thinking that the One Percent...may actually hope they could install Drumpf...for a more conventional fascist regime.”

Meanwhile let us not forget the support given Hillary by Messrs. Galindez, Ashe, Reich and Krugman fails the “which-side-are-you-on”  (link added) test so vital in times of intensified class-struggle and identifies them all as willing members of the One Percent's Ruling Class vassalage – a fact we dare not forget, particularly now that with the impending resurrection of HUAC we have to be McCarthy-era careful what we say or write in public.

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I frankly don't believe the Democratic (sic) Party CAN be reformed. Not now, not ever. Like the Republican Party, the Democratic (sic) Party is in fact the party of capitalism and capitalist governance, i.e., fascism.

Nor, given the realities of late-stage capitalism, can either party EVER be anything but a betrayer of the 99 Percent. Indeed, if we have not learned that lesson from the 2016 presidential campaign, we are clearly incapable of learning anything at all.

What we need is a genuine Democratic Socialist Labor Party, sworn from the moment of its formation to fight the class war on behalf the entire 99 Percent.

Won't happen, of course – the Moron Nation pseudo-Left is too invested in its self-destructive identity politics, too moronated-stupid to ever give them up, too bourgeois-hateful of blue-collar workers and too damn cowardly to ever embrace the hard and sometimes deadly work of revolution.

But it is nice to think about...

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Think logically. What are we told by the fact the Democratic (sic) Party is submissively silent on the Republicans' genocidal plans to destroy Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security?

What we are told by their silence is that the Democrats' private position is the same as the Republicans' public position.

In other words, had Hillary been elected, the same thing would now be happening.

Which vividly illustrates why the Democratic (sic) Party is infinitely worse than the Republican Party. Both are parties of capitalist governance – i.e., fascism. The Republicans admit it – even boast about it. By contrast, the Democrats hide their fascism behind a smokescreen of Big Lies – again Hillary's “public” versus “private” positions.

Moreover, these deliberately malicious lies totally nullify the principle of free elections. How can the voters make a knowledgeable choice if one of the parties always lies about what it is?

All of which has two points: one is the overwhelming probability that with Trump we are neither worse off nor better off than with Hillary; two is that our ONLY hope is the creation of an independent, truthfully informed, ideologically disciplined Democratic Socialist Labor Party.

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Don't Call Clinton a Weak Candidate: It Took Decades of Scheming to Beat Her (Rebecca Solnit, Guardian UK): Sometimes I think I have never seen anything as strong as Hillary Clinton.  That doesn’t mean that I like and admire everything about her. I’m not here to argue about who she is, just to note what she did. I watched her plow through opposition and attacks the like of which no other candidate has ever faced and still win the popular vote...Or, as my brilliant friend Aruna d’Souza put it Wednesday: “At some point soon we need to discuss whether Sanders would have been able to win, but helpful hint: today, it just sounds like you’re saying: ‘The Democrats should have cut into Trump’s lead in the misogynist vote and the whitelash vote by running a white man.’ Let’s come to terms with the racism and the misogyny first, before analyzing the what-ifs – because otherwise we’re just going to replicate it forever. And if you think that the angry anti-establishment vote won (hence Sanders would have fared better), let me remind you that patriarchy and white supremacy are the cornerstones of the Establishment.”

Rebecca Solnit, a writer for whom I had enormous respect, is correct about Hillary's strength.

Hillary's strength is so great she handed the One Percent the Nazi victory they have sought since 1934, when Russian (Soviet) intelligence operatives helped Gen. Smedley Butler, USMC ret., save President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his New Deal from the Bankers' Plot, whereby the One Percenters' great-grandfathers sought to make the United States the economically dominant partner in the Third Reich and its later Rome/Berlin/Tokyo Axis.

What Hillary has accomplished is the most powerful act of political subversion in the past several centuries – maybe in our species' entire history. Indeed, she deserves a hearty Zieg Heil for putting our neo-Führer in the White House, thereby fulfilling the Aryan promise of the imperial domicile's name. USA! USA! USA!

As to Ms. Solnit, the spiteful gender-identity invective with which she has gifted us tonight permanently reduces her from significant essayist to to maudlin propagandist. The implicit hatred of and contempt for the viciously downtrodden USian 99 Percent evidenced in Ms. Solnit's newest text also casts profound doubt on the (alleged) humanitarianism from which she wrote. It thus reduces all her previous works to “schtick” – merely another extended program of histrionics, a chic and lucrative Big Lie wrapped in pseudo-empathy, one more dismal manifestation of the ultimately deadly charade of USian “democracy.”

Considering the role of the Soviet Union aka Russia in saving us from the pro-Hitler, pro-Mussolini capitalists in 1934, when these banksters plotted to make the U.S. a Nazi nation and turn the American Legion into an USian SS – I cannot but wonder if that's the real reason Goldwater Girl Hillary so despises Russia and all Russians including their unborn children.

Or maybe she just envies the Russians their oh-so-beautiful, oh-so-nuanced language, capable of so much more than the malignantly leering cackle that is Hillary at the apex of her expressiveness, as when she was celebrating the hideously agonizing death of Qaddafi by anal impalement.

How ironic too how Hillary – even as she was enthroning the real neo-Hitler (neo-Duce too) – was damning Vladimir Putin as the new Hitler. It was the most effective sleight-of-hand political action I've ever witnessed – obviously (Ms. Solnit take note), another proof of Hillary's great strength.

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Learning to Walk (Michelle Alexander, Michelle Alexander's Facebook Page):  (W)hat happened  can't be explained simply as a failure of the political establishment...Nor is it simply a problem of racism or sexism — though both are alive and well and flourishing in this moment. Nor is this election simply a matter of economics, though global capitalism and neoliberalism have created a world in which people of all colors are suffering greatly as factories close, work disappears, wages stagnate, and human beings are treated as disposable — like plastic bottles tossed in a landfill — as political and media elites (not just Trump) spew propaganda that encourages us to view “the others” as the enemy...What many of us have been attempting to do...(is) build a thriving multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-faith, egalitarian democracy out of the rubble of slavery and genocide...

It is truly astounding – but simultaneously no surprise – to witness the lengths to which the One Percent and their Ruling Class vassalage will go to preserve Identity Politics, the inherent divisiveness our capitalist overlords chose long ago as their primary antidote to class consciousness and the Marxian epiphany it inevitably evokes.

Now of course in the USian election of a genuinely Nazi regime, we see the ultimate fruition of Identity Politics, now proven even more effective at building a malevolently militant Aryan Right than at ensuring the hopeless division of the Left.

In other words, by its vindictive embrace of Identity Politics, the USian Left first reduced itself to a pseudo-Left and now has slain itself entirely, witness the USian replay of how the Germans discarded their own Weimar-guaranteed liberty in 1933.

But – Identity-Politics propagandists like Garrison Keillor, Rebecca Solnit and the far more subtle Michelle Alexander not withstanding – from beyond the pseudo-Left's remains another Left is arising. It is potentially a Red Banner Left,  acutely aware of the capitalists' seductive cunning and the bottomless evil it maliciously fosters. Thus it freely acknowledges the need for the ideological discipline inherent in Marxism.

The question then is not whether the One Percent will respond to the failure of its Identity Politics deceptions, but rather just how violent it will be in its effort to suppress our awakening.

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No, Everything Is Not Going to Be Alright (Ted Rall):  Given that I’ve been saying The Donald had an excellent chance of winning for many months, maybe you should be scared when I tell you what I think there’s really a 15% chance of: another presidential election in four years...forget impeachment...the chances of Republicans impeaching a Republican president are pretty much zero...forget constitutional checks and balances. Weimar Germany had a lovely constitution, in many ways better than ours, but constitutions are mere paper unless they’re enforced...Guantánamo, immigration prisons, drone assassinations and secret black site CIA prisons are all brazenly unconstitutional. If Trump and his henchmen want to trash legal and political precedent, nothing institutional will stop them...Trumpism is here to stay, for at least four years.

The “right wing smear machine” of which you speak – “you” was not Mr. Rall but a comment-thread-contributor to whom I was replying – was in fact Hillary Clinton's Democratic (sic) Party, and its malevolent effectiveness is proven by the fact that while we were previously oppressed by closet fascists, we are now tyrannized by ever-more-brazenly outspoken Nazis. Thus after 82 years of clandestine efforts the great grandsons of the original 1934 Bankers' Plot conspirators have at last achieved their goal: conversion of the USian Empire into the Fourth Reich.

If I were to be in any way critical of Mr. Rall – which I most assuredly will not – it would only be to suggest he is still extricating himself from the cult of self-deluded optimism that is the opiate that anesthetizes the present-day, identity-politics USian Left to stupefied ineffectiveness.

But at least Mr. Rall – unlike the vast Moronic Majority of his peers – is beginning to awaken to the infinite horror we are facing, which includes not only another Holocaust, but a Holocaust facilitated by technologies of surveillance and genocide the original Nazis could only imagine – literally, all the murderous sadism of the Abrahamic god, the morally imbecilic deity of Judaism, Christianity and Islam – now fully materialized in the tools of capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent and their ever-more-openly Nazi vassalage; total subjugation for all the rest of us.

Indeed that – total subjugation – is precisely what we are facing. But until we acknowledge how utterly alone and powerless we are – until we start reading Marx and Sun Tzu and Che Guevara rather than identity-politics invective, triumphalist jock biographies and Ayn Randish self-help manuals – the only question is not whether we are destined for concentration camps, but how soon we will end up there. In fact I think Mr. Rall's notion there is a 15 percent chance 2016 will not be the last USian election ever is dangerously optimistic.

Nor would Hillary have been any better: the the only difference between the Democratic (sic) Party and the Republican Party is the former lies about the magnitude of their Nazification while the latter boasts about it.

Moreover, now that we are being rationally pessimistic, note the choice our overlords offered us: between two Hitlers, Hillary Hitler (who wanted to be the first-ever conqueror of Russia and was willing to impose biblical Apocalypse – the extinction of our species and the death of our planet – to achieve her goal); versus Donald Hitler, neo-Führer of the neo-Holocaust, who won election by promising white USia to ensure its bigoted hegemony forever. Indeed it was the classic rat-experiment, performed in the rat lab of capitalism with us, we the rat-people of the rat-race, as subjects.

No Virginia, there is no Santa Claus. There is only the Slavic myth of Saint Nicholas, a good-hearted priest – originally pagan, later Russian Orthodox – who ministered to those flung down by misfortune. It was a fine midwinter bedtime story, a parable for the instruction of children in the necessities of sharing and generosity, an excellent prelude to the most profound slogan of our age: “from us according to our ability, to us according to our need.” But it was stolen by the capitalists and twisted into an orgy of obscene profiteering and we of Moron Nation laughed and applauded and let ourselves be Trumped. Hence our Christmas stockings will now and forever contain naught but thorns and cinders.

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I have no doubt the (basic strategic and tactical doctrine that enabled Trump's triumph) was planned long ago, probably during the first meetings between the legion of high-ranking Nazi war criminals to whom the Empire gave sanctuary and their sponsors the grandfathers and great-grandfathers of today's One Percent, i.e the Bankers' Plot perpetraitors (note spelling) who wanted to make the U.S. part of Hitler's Greater Reich. Interesting too the skillful sleight-of-hand by which Hillary distracted us by damning Putin as the “new Hitler” even as she was helping put the real neo-Hitler in the White House.

LB/17 November 2016

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Six Essays: Gratitude for the Restoration of My Eyesight, Pagan Music as an Antidote to the Politics of Despair

 

Emergence Nr. 17 (Click on image to view it full size.) Photograph by Loren Bliss copyrights 1971, 1976, 1985, 2016.

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THOSE WHO WERE appalled by my impending blindness will be delighted to learn an eleventh-hour charity paid Group Health Cooperative the obscenely prohibitive co-payments it charges for the surgery required to save my eyesight. (Group Health's fees, in no way exceptional, exemplify what obtains when health care is a privilege of wealth rather than a human right, and the care-giving organization's primary purpose is therefore to put oodles of boodle in executive pockets rather than treat the sick and heal the wounded.) That said, if there are any of you I have failed to thank for your supportive and/or prayerful good thoughts, please accept this expression of my gratitude as well as my apology for the oversight.

But I would be derelict in my journalistic duty were I to ignore this opportunity to note the likelihood there are also amongst OAN's readers a few who were cheering my blindness and praying it would silence me forever. Since Occupy Tacoma, http://occupytacoma.org/71-year-old-tacoma-veteran-on-why-she-got-involved-with-the-occupy-movement/ interference by the secret police will not allow me to email OAN's Internet address to anyone unless I first disguise it as a TinyURL. And let us not forget my 2010 ouster from Facebook in retaliation for suggesting the so-called “Great Recession” was deliberately engineered to usher in accelerated austerity and thereby speed the imposition of overt fascism.

Thus, in addition to thanking my benefactors, I give my most emphatic middle-finger salute to the vassals and functionaries of the One Percent – the spooks and police agents and soldiers and politicians and bureaucrats and cops and maybe even a welfare official or two – all of them fanatical defenders of capitalism and sworn enemies of the Working Class, each of them a-boil with Heinrich Himmler hatefulness perpetually inflamed by Christofascist or JesuNazi cults whose Yeshua is “der Führer Who Art in Heaven” and whose sadistic intent toward the 99 Percent is to brutalize us into slave-camp submission no matter our race or gender or how we define ourselves politically or spiritually or sexually – and then, when we are too old or crippled or mentally mangled to be exploitable for profit, to cast us off like worn-out machinery and exterminate us by “austerity” and whatever other methodologies of genocide can be hidden beneath cloaks of euphemisms, disinformation and Big Lies. Let us also in this naming of enemies note all those 99 Percenters who yet stupidly believe capitalism will someday let them “hit it big” – that is, to get so rich they can brazenly fuck over everybody else – and now either sit at home opiated by Mainstream Media and awaiting the Rapture or have already joined Moron Nation's roving bands of misogynists and homophobes, banging their Bibles and brandishing their biblical bellicosity to terrify women and lesbian/gay/bisexual/transsexual folk and anyone else who might dare rediscover the holiness of sensuality and everything else stolen from us by patriarchy in the name of “God's divine plan for salvation.”

To all such adversaries I turn the other cheek – that is, the other cheek of my arse, that they may glimpse the defiance implicit in a Full Moon.

Plus in my case there were probably also less fingerworthy, less cheekworthy detractors, a very few hateful kinfolk breathing sighs of malicious relief at the apparent end to my periodic disclosures of familial dysfunction. There's even a faint possibility the personal-adversary list includes the first woman I truly loved, she who at age 17 captured my heart by teaching me Plato's Republic. Though our relationship lasted three years, in her eyes I was never more than a stepladder for escaping the slums. Despite her sociological origins, she was boldly articulate and beautiful and memorably shameless in bed, but she thought my talents inferior and regarded journalism as an insufficiently glorious choice in comparison to the worlds of literature, fine art and academia. As soon as I was bailed out of jail, she demanded to know if I was “getting involved with Communists and stuff.” I answered truthfully – “probably,” I said – and without a moment's hesitation she replied, “then I'm leaving.”

This last event was long long ago and far far away on geography I have not visited since 1969 and will probably never trod again, but I remember it whenever I review my life as I am doing now in rescued-from-blindness introspection, and I am always surprised to discover her rejection still hurts, no doubt because she was my first lover in this lifetime whose intellect I truly respected, and she was therefore too the first woman whose claim to see me as attractive seemed believable and even trustworthy, never mind the all-pervasive sense of physical and psychological ugliness that is an irremediable part of my psyche. The long-ago blow of her rejection was thus many times multiplied by how it brought back to dagger-sharp focus my own negative sense of self. Such is the oddly enduring nature of love-related trauma, lingering even when the love is subsequently proven to have been wholly unrequited and the illusion of its sharedness thus discredited as nothing more than manipulation bolstered by one's own penchant for fantasy and wishful thinking. How happy I am to have escaped that relationship's ultimate ensnarement. How quickly introspection see-saws me from joy to sadness and back again, mixed reflections viewed – even with restored vision – behind mutually contradictory tears.

(Forgive me if I bathe in bathos or lapse into lugubriousness [the latter noun, by its congested-sinus resonance, perhaps my favorite example of onomatopoeia]. Or don't forgive me. As long as you keep on reading, I really don't care.) 

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THE MOST IMPORTANT point to take away from my brush with blindness is how the obscenity of defining health care as a privilege of wealth combines with the capitalist greed of chief executive officers to eliminate all meaningful distinction between non-profit and for-profit care-providers. That is the real significance of the prohibitive price – nearly $161 per minute for approximately five out-patient minutes of laser surgery – that without the intervention of charity would have damned me to permanent sightlessness.

But it is also important to note how the ability to pay that fee (or any comparable sum) has been put forever beyond my own financial reach by the senior-subsidy cuts imposed by Washington state Democrats.  Charity saved my eyesight (and thus saved me) this time, but what happens if there is another pay-or-die medical crisis? The truth is that I, like so many others, am now imprisoned in a de facto death-cell, locked behind invisible bars and restrained by invisible chains until the Reaper – himself obviously a Ruling Class functionary – calls my name.

These circumstances exemplify the murderous economics of capitalism and of the now unabashedly capitalist (and therefore overtly fascist) economics of the USian Imperial Homeland and afflict untold numbers of us whether old or young also exemplify the diabolical cunning of capitalist governance. We satisfy the partial-truth needs of the imperial propagandists because we (officially) have health insurance. But we also slake the infinite greed of the insurance barons who fatten their assets collecting premiums for insurance deliberately structured to be unusable. Here, of course, is the genocidal purpose behind prohibitively priced co-pays. If we purchase the care that might save our lives, we are left with insufficient money for food or shelter. Ultimately our only choice is how we will die: will it be from untreated illness, or from malnutrition and homelessness or some combination of all three. Or perhaps we will yield to ultimate despair and do an Ernest Hemingway or a Sylvia Plath or a Diane Arbus or exit via some other premature means. Such are the methods by which the capitalists exterminate those of us deemed “surplus workers” – those of us considered no longer exploitable for profit.

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IRONICALLY IT IS the Bible, the world's most viciously patriarchal (and therefore definitively capitalist) doctrinal sourcebook, that contains what is probably the most anti-capitalist proverb ever penned: “Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them” (Matthew 7:15-10, King James Bible).

Thus we witness the toxic fulsomeness of capitalism in all its genocidal savagery and ecocidal malignance. We see how capitalism transforms the (literally) deadly sin of infinite greed and elevates it to the capitalists' ultimate virtue – the one ethos most vital for capitalist function. We recognize how capitalism thereby rejects every humanitarian principle our species has ever evolved. We acknowledge how it replaces all these age-old principles with its might-makes-right (and-mighty-profit-makes-mighty-right) credo of serial-killer moral imbecility.

(“Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.”)

And now at last perhaps we are being forced to admit capitalism threatens the survival of not just our own species but literally of all life as we know it. Which makes capitalism the closest real-world approximation of the Abrahamic concept of Absolute Evil our species has yet spawned.

(“Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.”)

Yet far too many of us remain suicidally blind to what capitalism is doing to us all and how its own depredations point to socialism as our species' only possible means of survival.

Susan Sontag wrote of illness as metaphor, and though I have always understood the notion intellectually, I did not comprehend it emotionally until I understood how the blitzkrieg of looming blindness and my own financial defenselessness was a perfect metaphor for the plight of the entire 99 Percent. Capitalism has smashed all our mechanisms of resistance and now, as if to use us for compost in its next crop of atrocities, it is plowing us all under.

(“Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.”)

As for me, I probably would have been white-cane sightless by the end of next month, just in time for my 76th birthday. Between 3 January, when I first noticed my sight diminishing into milky haze, and 27 January, the date of the surgery, I had already gone nearly blind in my right eye, and the sight in my left eye was in jeopardy. But the laser surgery not only restored my distance vision, returning it to the Fountain-of-Youth clarity achieved by the original cataract surgery;  it also improved my close-up vision, minimizing my need for reading glasses – an affect my ophthalmologist says is commonplace but unpredictable and is therefore not mentioned to patients beforehand lest they by disappointed should it not materialize.
But what of all the other women, children and men who are not so fortunate as I have been? Reflect not just on the skyrocketing numbers of homeless people;  think also of the original Bloody Sunday and Triangle Shirtwaist and Bhopal and Katrina and Bangladesh.  How many more must die before the ravages of the capitalists are ended?

(“Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.”)

*** *** ***

WHY HAD MY vision been saved? What was Fate demanding of me? I had never been granted a favor of such magnitude, nothing even remotely so pivotal, and my dialectical-materialist skepticism was instantly at war with my Pagan intuition. The former dismisses my good fortune as random chance; the latter defines it as a genuine miracle, an event that requires some new vow of gratitude (“thank you Goddess; hence I shall devote the rest of my life to [whatever cause]”), this combined with some ritual of thanksgiving, by rainy-season necessity a private indoor rite though at least accompanied by incense and suitable music, the search for which brought a Muse-poet named S.J.Tucker into this text – she who  dares respond to the challenge Tim Buckley voiced 49 years ago: “if you tell me of all the pain you've had, I'll never smile again.” But that – articulating the pain of her gender and her generation – is only part of her repertoire; she also she grants blessings aplenty of comic relief, and not infrequently the purity of healing laughter as well. Her website tells me S. J. stands for Susan Jane, that her friends call her “Sooj” – and I find myself hoping she might read this and at least recognize me as a distant ally, a elder comrade, though I cannot imagine we would ever meet.

But first before I continue praising Tucker as a True Bard – surely as true as any since the first Taliesin (he who sang mysteriously of “the rulers of Britain, abounding in fleets” perhaps 2400 years before Trafalgar) – there is the matter of that other vision I mentioned in this essay's title: a dark vision, my own troubled vision of our present potential and our probable future (scroll down the comment thread for my two contributions), a haunting mind's-eye vision that in my film-camera past and as shown in the image above, sometimes took form, invariably with a faint warning prelude of alchemical sibilance, on DuPont Varilure in 1:3 Dektol beneath amber-filtered lights, and sometimes too as passages of spontaneous prose seemingly borne of some outside source (“where the fuck did this come from; I can't believe I wrote it”), as if the Muse (whose objective reality my dialectic materialist agnosticism forever forces me to question), were nevertheless once again whispering her double reassurance – that she forgives me even my gravest doubts and that – as Robert Graves put it – she offers “nothing promised that is not performed.”

As I confessed in today's title, I vacillate between faint hope for our species' post-apocalyptic survival and absolute despair at the runaway nuclear train of our self-inflicted extinction. The former is ephemeral at best; the latter, which too often seems impossible to refute, is authenticated by my too-intimate knowledge of the United States as the de facto Fourth Reich, which is (A), hell-bent on conquering the world; (B), ever-more-relentlessly subjugating all its peoples beneath the profiteering tyranny of the Imperial One Percent, whilst (C), being endlessly cheered on by Moron Nation mobs chanting “USA! USA! USA!” at every war crime or homeland atrocity.
Trouble is, most USians – all of our brains at least partially clogged with capitalist propaganda – are carefully conditioned to never dare look at ourselves in any sort of psychologically revealing mirror. Thus we are loathe to acknowledge Moron Nation's Zieg Heil reality is but few footfalls distant from that of Nazi Germany. And we are genuinely terrified to admit we are the most ignorant people in the industrial world – that we reside in the only realm on this planet to embrace Orwell's satiric “Ignorance Is Strength” as biblical writ – and that we have done so with such prideful malevolence it has become the one inviolable shibboleth of our national (un)consciousness.  As Vladimir Ilyich Lenin asked in 1902, “What Is to Be Done?”

Then as now, and precisely as Lenin stated, “'(f)reedom' is a grand word, but under the banner of freedom for industry the most predatory wars were waged, under the banner of freedom of labor, the working people were robbed.” But what is so radically different – and what reduces the ideological quarrels of Lenin's era to apparent meaninglessness – is the unprecedented extent to which the Working Class of today, the 99 Percent, has been robbed not only of the tools of resistance and the knowledge of how to use them, but all too often also gutted of the sense of selfhood and grievance from which effective resistance arises. In Vladimir Ilyich's time, whether in the imperial United States or the Russian Empire, the instruments of oppression were obvious: the bullets and bayonets of the soldiers, the knouts and truncheons of the Cossacks and the cops, the prison and the gallows, the lynchings and pogroms tolerated by (and often encouraged by) the authorities. The means of resistance were therefore also obvious. Now, despite our rising anger at what the capitalists are doing to us, it is for the most part suppressed by modern variants of pānem et circēnsēs, the bread-and-circus opiates by which the Roman Empire controlled its own oppressed masses. The USian forms of these distractions are many. They include the Colosseum-equivalents of violent films and professional sports; the pornographic antics of celebrities; other forms of vacuous entertainment including what passes for “news”; the zomboid numbing induced by alcohol and drugs whether legal or otherwise; and most of all the omnipresent opiate of Abrahamic fundamentalism, its socioeconomically malicious prosperity gospel having now become so malignantly popular its taint is found even in avowedly secular New Age and Pagan conceptualizations. (Yet what else could be expected here in the most moronically Christian-fundamentalist nation in the industrial world?) Hence what a fellow Occupy activist said to me in 2011: “the 99 Percent is terribly broken.” What she dared not add was the probability most of us are broken beyond repair.

What then – if anything – can be done?

In Lenin's day it was customary for revolutionary parties to offer political-education programs – and by all the available evidence, the global Working Class was eager – literally trudge-barefoot-through-the-blizzard eager –  to receive it. But in the USian homeland of today – where the prison-like atmosphere of government schools guarantees the educational process is disliked (if not despised outright) even by those of us who theoretically know better – the mere thought of returning to a classroom or even picking up a book or pamphlet is often prohibitively repugnant. This sort of aversive conditioning – part of a far greater scheme of making certain our every contact with government is unpleasant if not disastrous – is perhaps the most cunning way capitalism defends itself against socialism. Socialism is after all a form of government – the most democratic form our species has yet evolved – and as government it requires organization and personnel. But if government itself is despised, its form becomes irrelevant – and that is precisely the adverse legacy fostered by the inherent malevolence of capitalist governance. The same methodology is even more evident in the state and federal welfare bureaucracies, their obvious purpose not to help us weather the chronic instability of capitalism but rather to deny us the very aid we need for survival – thereby ensuring we are reduced to perpetual victimhood. This not only serves the capitalists by providing a vast supply of unemployed workers whose desperation for work shrinks wages to hitherto-unimaginable minimums; it also intensifies the hatred and suspicion that fuels anti-government sentiment ranging from the Anarchists to the Tea Party.  It is thus the key to understanding how so many Working Class folk are seduced into the economic suicide of supporting Right Wing candidates and parties: their anger and sense of betrayal by (capitalist) government leaves them no apparent alternative. In this context, education thus acquires a triple cloak of repugnance, firstly because of its prison pedagogy, secondly as a microcosm of capitalist governance, lastly as the traditional target of the venomous anti-intellectualism that has always been the prime effluent of Abrahamic fundamentalism.  Here is the root cause of why modern efforts to educate the USian Working Class invariably fail. Here too is the ultimate source of my own political despair, for it is one of the absolute truths of history that without education, revolution is not just impossible, it is also unthinkable.

But there remains one medium of communication (and therefore of education) that transcends all the negative associations the USian Ruling Class has maliciously affixed to education. This is music which – since its stimuli is as sensual as it is intellectual – is perfect for the dissemination of revolutionary or heretical ideas. Indeed it has already served as literatures of rebellion for populations as far removed from one another in time and geography as medieval peasants, antebellum slaves, modern USian minorities and indigenous peoples of the post-colonial Third World. Hence the relevance of the work by S.J. Tucker and her colleagues transcends its personal significance to me and becomes political in the broadest possible sense.

*** *** ***

A FEW DAYS after the surgery that saved my sight I was researching more of Faun's inspiring output and thinking what a tragedy it was my late friend and spiritual sister Helen Farias had not lived long enough to witness this example of the joyously revolutionary aesthetic and spiritual flowering that is taking place within – and in open defiance of – the electronic concentration camp the USian Empire is making of our entire planet.

Helen was the first person to read and comment on the earliest (1971) draft of “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer,” and it was Helen who paid the work what is probably the most significant compliment I will ever receive as a writer – “you have given me the vocabulary to describe what I have always known to be true but never had the words to express.” Eighteen years later she founded the women's spirituality journal Beltane Papers, worked herself to exhaustion advancing the scholarship that was legitimizing the resurrection of the Goddess and died of cancer on the autumnal equinox of 1994. By then, not only had “Dancer” been destroyed by fire, but the loss – 24 years of research notes, photography and text financed by my paychecks from print journalism and therefore accomplished mostly on weekends and during occasional periods of freelancing – had flung me into a clinical depression of such depth and duration it forced me onto welfare which, as all but the newest OAN readers know, branded me with the forever-inescapable odium of having been officially disabled. My formerly award-winning reportorial, photographic and editorial skills were thus rendered effectively worthless by the characteristic USian hatefulness toward anyone who is known to have been afflicted by mental illness. Even when such a condition is definitively temporary, as mine surely was – even though I was never institutionalized – such a diagnosis once officially rendered interacts with Moron Nation bigotry to produce more than enough venom to destroy one's career prospects forever. But despite the associated depths of despair I have never been able to abandon “Dancer's” core hypothesis: that no matter whether the Goddess is symbol or objective reality, it is only through her resurrection we will evolve – or perhaps restore – the sort of consciousness from which we can articulate and organize the politics we need to save our species from extinction. I was thinking about these matters, surfing the Internet and wishing I were necromancer enough to call back Helen to revel in the triumphant implications of Faun and the wild acclaim of its ever-growing audiences when the magic carpet of YouTube somehow bore me into S.J. Tucker's “realm of the sky.”  The accompanying video, one of the most evocatively powerful such pieces I have seen, is itself well worth watching. 

Though I am nearly 76 years old, my journalistic curiosity remains as intense as it was in my youth, and whenever I find myself happenstanced onto new ground, I am thus compelled to explore it. I was vaguely familiar with “Witches Rune,”  one of Tucker's earlier works, a verse from which I quoted to open Part 5 of “Dancer Resurrected,” an OAN essay  that is entirely too long and desperately needful of competent editing but after revision is sure to be a central part of a book I have tentatively titled “Encounters: a Modern Odyssey.” But I when I was researching and writing “Resurrected,” I was working with my usual intensity of focus and neglected to pursue Tucker's repertoire any further – obviously my loss, and an error for which I hereby apologize should she ever read these words. Now though I paid attention and explored her work and was soon rewarded with her variant of “Tam Lin,” a traditional ballad most likely borne of a remnant of what long long long ago in the age of the Goddess had been a lay of invocatory magick. It is a song for Hallowe'en, which in Celtic Paganism is the night the year dies, but the pre-patriarchal ancientness of its origins is suggested by its portrayal of the spirit of the year as female rather than male. Hence the lyrics seem to embody two liturgical purposes, first to mark the annual departure of the goddess of the Old Year, who in response to more recent expressions of Christian love [i.e. witch-burnings] has been disguised as the Queen of Faery; next to welcome the goddess of the New Year disguised as the shameless Janet pregnant by her chosen consort the Once and Future King, her pregnancy the metaphor for a rich harvest the following spring and summer. The earlier variants of “Tam Lin,” all of them collected during the past three centuries, each hinted at the underlying sexual connections, but Tucker's reconstruction implicitly recognizes the sacramental elements that define pagan sexuality. These she spells out in poetic detail (how else might Janet have gotten her “dirty knees”?), which elevates Tucker's “Tam Lin” to the most ritualistically appropriate variant I have yet encountered. It is also – very appropriately, I think – notably reminiscent of what traditional British balladry sounded like after a century in Appalachia (the archetypal example of which is the transformation of “burgundy wine” to “burglar's wine” in the murder-ballad “Willow Garden”). Tucker's revisions make me wonder – and yearn to find out – what she might do with two other surviving lays of sexual magick, “Jack Orion”  and “Willie's Lady,”  a more traditionally Scots variant of which is here. 

But for me the most intriguing element of Tucker's music is her merger of myth and mirth with the politics of resistance, a bonding exemplified by “Baba Yaga,” which repeats in story-form the humanitarian message the patriarchal lore-thieves stole from the Goddess many millennia ago: “as you do unto the also least of these, you likewise do unto me.” It also suggests song as the medium by which pagan steadfastness might yet, to the ultimate benefit of us all, be comfortably mated with Marxist/Leninist/Maoist determination. Which conjures up an image of a Peoples Court, the Red Banner adorning the wall behind the bench, the three judges briefly conferencing in whispers, then the senior judge ordering the defendant to stand for sentencing. “It is the finding of this court,” she says, “that you as a capitalist are guilty of innumerable crimes against the People. Accordingly, you are turned over to Baba Yaga, that she may eat you for her lunch.” Which recalls a graffito that began appearing on Pacific Northwest walls maybe 30 years ago: “Eat the Rich,” though nowhere did I see a corollary “Baba Yaga Lives.”

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WHEN WE EXAMINE the conceptual barriers that now seem to divide Marxists and Goddess-centered pagans into mutually exclusive camps, we see they are mostly derivatives of the same campaigns of Big Lies and disinformation that perpetuate Moron Nation itself.

For example, the notorious malevolence of Abrahamic religion toward Nature, women, minorities whether ethnic or sexual, sexuality itself, any forms of governance that might genuinely empower the 99 Percent, science and ultimately dialectic materialism, has left Marxists instinctively skeptical not just of Judaism, Christianity and Islam but of all religions and even of individual expressions of spirituality. Those who know little or nothing of Goddess-centered paganism thus find it difficult to accept it is in every way imaginable the diametrical opposite of the Abrahamic cults. Unlike Abrahamic religion, which curses the entire realm of physical being and dismisses life as an ordeal engineered by a divine sadist to determine one's fitness for an unlikely paradise of prayers, hymns and the rape of virgins, Goddess-centered paganism is grounded on the implicitly revolutionary premise life is a quest for knowledge and experience that includes every possible input. It thus emphatically embraces the entire spectrum of positive human experience, sensuality and sexuality included. It views us all as siblings in the family of Nature, regards femaleness as Nature's most complete living metaphor, embraces all the tools dialectic materialism has given us for knowing Nature and ourselves, restores to sexuality the ecstasy and freedom from guilt implicit in its original manifest sacredness and looks upon the Goddess as an earthly symbol of a truly humanitarian society. The goal of building a human society based on the core principle of Communism – from each according to ability, to each according to need – is thus already implicit in the concept of Earth as Mother. And the principle of giving voice to those who have been forcibly silenced by the ravages of capitalism – that is, of developing leadership cadres from those who have experienced the most acute forms of oppression firsthand – surely echos in the lyrics of “Baba Yaga”:

She said “I will be here when you're ready.
My fire will still burn when yours starts to go.”
She said “I have always been here,
I with my fearless feet in the snow”
She said “I'll be here just to watch you grow.”

Beyond “Baba Yaga” I found another Tucker song, “Rootless,” that in more ways than I can comfortably disclose seems to speak directly to me:

don't give up ride out be bold 
build the fire bright and strong
speak your truth and sing your song

Somehow, perhaps because despite my English surname my ancestry is 90-something percent Celt (and that seasoned with a trace of Mohawk), these lines remind me of what the Celtic warrior Calgacus said of an earlier plague of empire-builders: ubi sōlitūdinem faciunt pācem appellant – “they make a desert and they call it peace.” I think of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Fukushima, of Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon, but then I realize how Tacitus' story of the Brittani and their fight against Roman subjugation tells us our struggle against capitalism is but the newest form of the struggle against patriarchy and is therefore an old, old war indeed – an epic conflict in which our comrades include not just those of the past three centuries, but a roll-call of heroines and heroes dating at least to the Achaean sack of Knossos 3600 years ago. All at once this music of which I have been writing – Faun's and Tucker's – makes me ashamed of my despair. The lesson here is that revolution takes many forms, some not immediately discernible. But I cannot any longer doubt revolution is on its way. As Marshall McLuhan noted (though if memory serves, it was Carl Jung who said it first), art is often prophecy,  and Tucker's art, like that of Faun, is clearly preparation for a time in which capitalism no longer rules. If indeed there is some cosmic purpose for which my eyesight has been saved, surely it is helping foster that blessed future.

LB/6-13 February 2016

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