First the Bad News, Then the Amusements

THIS WEEK'S COLUMN is mostly a collection of confessions, observations, quotes and memos originally written on scrap paper or in my wallet-sized index-card notebook, the latter a thoughtful gift from my second wife Adrienne, to whom again thanks.

But before I share these always random, occasionally lewd and sometimes humorous jottings, here as stark reminders of the time and place in which we live (and therefore in fulfillment of OAN's journalistic obligation) are links to a few stories that typify the deteriorating human condition and the sorry state of our nation and our world.

As always in these darkest of years of our species' 200,000-year history, the applicable acronym is SNAFU. A linguistic relic of World War Twice, it stands for “Situation Normal, All Fucked Up.”

The week's most unsurprising but nevertheless vital news was another study that has confirmed the U.S. experiment in representative democracy is dead – that we 99 Percenters are now the ever-more-enslaved subjects of an increasingly tyrannical capitalist oligarchy. Meanwhile a separate poll confirms we the people are moving ever closer to the flash-point of rising up angry. Both reports were covered by Thom Hartmann in a single story. 

I did not have time to comment on Hartmann's work because my entire week was consumed by first-of-the-month chores. With an automobile I'd have accomplished these tasks in less than a single day. But because I no longer have a car and am thereby dependent on the “welfare” provided by mass transit,  what formerly took me about five hours by automobile now takes five days by bus.

The methodical reduction of mass transit  in the Puget Sound region and elsewhere throughout the United States exemplifies the increasingly obvious refusal of the One Percent to attempt even minimal amelioration  of terminal climate change – another factor in the 99 Percent's increasing rebelliousness.

Meanwhile the climate disasters described by Amy Goodman's too-cautious academic guests give us additional glimpses of the death-dealing future  our species will probably not survive. Such is capitalism's deadly curse upon ourselves, our descendants and our planet.

How the Ruling Class will respond if we dare foment effective resistance is already well known, exemplified not just by the crushing of the Occupy Movement,  but by the extermination-and-disruption campaign with which local cops and federal secret police destroyed the Black Panthers  during the 1960s and 1970s.

Obviously the de facto Fourth Reich is nothing new.

As Bill Quigley reports for Reader Supported News, already “2.2 million people are in our nation’s jails and prisons and another 4.5 million people are on probation or parole in the US, totaling 6.8 million people, one in every 35 adults. We are far and away the world leader in putting our own people in jail. Most of the people inside are poor and black. Here are 40 reasons why.” 

Lastly, there's One Percent's Final Solution, “we had to destroy the village to save it.” First applied in Vietnam, the destruction-is-salvation approach now jeopardizing us globally, as events in Ukraine take another step toward World War III: “we had to destroy the planet to save it.”

(Yes, dear readers, just as you might have surmised, the doctrine of destruction as salvation is derived from the dogmas of Abrahamic religion. Note the Biblical flood, the fates of Sodom and Gomorrah, and most especially the nauseating rationale for burning heretics  at the stake.)

The only remaining question is when will SNAFU become FUBAR, the Vietnam War's acronym for “Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition.”

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NOW THE PROMISED randomness:

Assuming reasonably long lives, it seems that as we age toward the grave, we become ever more brutally honest with ourselves. That's when we discover savoring our memories of love is a helluva lot more rewarding than remembering our professional triumphs. (Scribbled on the back of a grocery list while waiting in a Fred Meyer checkout line, probably in 2010.)

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FiboNazi numbers: mathematical data the Nazis (whether followers of Hitler, Ayn Rand or both), publish to support the Big Lies that conceal the ruinous and often deadly consequences of their policies. (Sometime in 2014, with apologies to Leonardo Fibonacci.)

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The greatest barrier to combating the U.S. plague of moral imbecility is the lack of a suitably magnetic role model. (Jotted on an index-card sometime in 2009, no doubt prompted by my dawning realization Barack Obama was the most calculatedly malicious liar ever to hold the presidency.)

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Tacoma – a place where people pick their noses in public. (Undated, probably 2012.)

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The lessor of two evils: a man or woman forced by poverty to lease a pair of demon-haunted rooms in a vampire-infested slum. (Undated.)

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Social documentary photography and photojournalism in general is ultimately about expressing human emotion as visual geometry and the choreography of light and darkness. That's probably why those of us who grew up in dysfunctional families so often make the best photojournalists. Normally in patriarchal culture, only women are taught to read and heed the nuances of nonverbal language, but in the hurtful and potentially deadly miasma of familial dysfunction, that skill is vital for survival regardless of one's gender. (Undated, probably 2010.)

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For a girl-child or a woman, any patriarchal family is definitively dysfunctional. (An epiphany while typing the above, 7 June 2015.)

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“You're not allowed to be yourself, so you try to be someone else, even if you gotta go schizo to do it.” (Said by a bus rider as he disembarked at a Pierce County mental hospital, 30 June 2012.)

 

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“Another goddamn public-disclosure document written in the incomprehensibly turgid language Ruling Class academics use to ensure their work remains obscure.” (Undated, probably 2011, the identity of the document in question irrelevant because the judgment is so broadly applicable.)

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Metro Gnome – an invisible creature who lurks on Seattle buses, making its presence known by chronic disruption of schedules. (Undated.)

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We must make peace with Mother Nature lest she make war with us. (Undated).

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Old men who become enchanted by music often do so because it is only way they will ever again hear a beautiful woman murmur in their ears. (24 August 2013.)

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In the old days, before the media monopolies took over, daily newspaper newsrooms were refuges for bright and rebellious people from the Working Class and the declassé, and we who became journalists did so with the proud and certain knowledge our reporting could improve the human condition.

Now though the only people allowed to report the news are the pampered sons and daughters of the Ruling Class – those who feel it their duty to protect the status quo – that is, if they ever pass beyond self-obsession to consider duty at all. (Undated, probably 2011 after reading an especially biased report on the Occupy Movement.)

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“All the adolescent boys of my generation had Circle-J races – sitting in a circle in the woods or a barn or someplace jacking off. The object was to see who could orgasm the fastest, who could shoot their load the furthest and who could produce the most come. Ever since I heard of that, I've wondered if it's why so many men have premature ejaculations.” (Anonymous female elder c. 2014.)

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“Her boyfriend bought her a cell phone. Now he's jealous. He thinks she loves the phone more than she loves him.” (Conversation between two teenage girls on a bus, 28 July 2013.)

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“Apropos brevity, nothing is more minimalist than a blank page.” (Note to another writer, context forgotten, 2012.)

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Transit therapy – riding the bus all day and talking to one's self or to imaginary companions – that's our new national mental-health program. (13 September 2013)

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If we are all how the Deity experiences herself, why are so many of us so metaphysically challenged? (During a bus ride; undated.)

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We each combat sordidness in our own way. (April 2015.)

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I can think of no better conclusion for this column than a heartfelt thank-you note to Thais Smedley, another of the women who so profoundly influenced my life.

In popular fiction one's initiation into manhood typically begins with the loss of one's virginity, often to an older woman. But I had lost my virginity five years earlier to a girl my own age, and the initiation you granted me that unforgettable summer afternoon in 1959 – you with your white blouse and white shorts and your wondrous mane of raven hair – was to intellectual manhood instead.

You invited me into the cool of your light and airy basement apartment there on 12th Street by the University of Tennessee, you graciously opened a can of Campbell's beef vegetable soup, heated it, poured it into a bowl and indicated I should eat it all. Obviously I was hungry. In fact I was too impoverished to afford even the 50-cent lunch in the student center, and somehow you sensed my need but were not offended by it, and we talked as I wolfed down the soup and for a few minutes afterward. Then you gave me a forbidden book, saying you thought its contents might speak to my mind and spirit, and you gently sent me on my way.

The book was Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems, and – just as you suspected – it began a process that changed my life, giving me a glimpse of the true power of language and helping break my writing free of the journalistic constraints I would eventually recognize as an especially insidious form of censorship. (From notes on scrap paper, December 2011, after awakening from a dream about the real-life episode described herein.)

Now in my 75th year, I dearly hope you, Thais, will somehow see this message and know the depth of gratitude with which I have always remembered our brief encounter. Thank you, Thais; for just a moment you embodied the Muse. Thank you indeed. I wish you the very best one's advancing years can offer: sustained health and deepening contentment with the life you lived.

LB/1-7 June 2015

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Life After Uselessness: the Old Man with an Old Rolleicord

Paper birch, Wright Park, May 2013. By its size and probable age, this magnificent tree was here long before the park was founded in 1886. To my eyes – though it's apparent only on maximum enlargement – the image is spoiled by slight camera motion. This was the result of being unable to use my medium-weight tripod, an otherwise-excellent all-metal Bogen from the early 1960s; I couldn't set it up on the steep slope from which I framed the image, hence resorted to hand holding despite considerable arthritic pain imposed by my position. For the re-shoot I'll use my heavy Tiltall, never mind how damn uncomfortable it is to lug around. Rolleicord III, Tmax100 in D-76, exposure  (after my Gossen Luna-Pro SBC went nuts and started reading 10 stops over), as suggested by the light meter in my head:  f/11 at 1/100th.  Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2013. (Click on image to view it full size.)

THE ONE COMPENSATION of being permanently blacklisted and therefore professionally dead is its freedom.

As those of you who regularly read this space already know, the ultimate legacy of the fire that in 1983 destroyed my life's work was a long and ruinous battle with clinical depression. The associated odium – the loathing with which USians view anyone afflicted by any sort of mental illness – effectively ended my journalism career. And even had it not, by the time I was fit to return to work, the nation's daily newspapers had been gobbled up by the media monopolists, whose first official acts invariably included imposing on hitherto independent editorial departments the exclusionary oppressiveness of Big-Business hiring protocols. In my day, to get a job on a newspaper you merely talked to the managing editor and showed samples of your work; most times you got an immediate and definitive answer. Now like any other corporate drone you have to go through a personnel office, which means trying to conceal even the slightest deviation from the Cleaver Family norm in order to lie your way past a succession of hostile, psychologically invasive gatekeepers who are also amongst the world's most skillful interrogators. Now too in newsrooms just as everywhere else in the corporate world, the only successful job supplicants, whether male or female, are modern versions of the archetypal Organization Man. This is how management ensures the lockstep obedience demanded of reporters and photographers who have been reduced to nothing more than stenographers for the One Percent, with even their most commonplace stories  deliberately crafted to reinforce the ideologies of Ayn Rand fascism. Moreover there is now also deliberate socioeconomic news-profiling; where reporters formerly lived by their so-called “noses for news” and stories rose and fell on the basis of the number of people to whom the information was significant, now news is defined only by its economic value, published only if it appeals to the upscale customer base demanded by the advertisers. That's why the opening of a new country club goes Page One, top-of-the-fold even as calculatedly murderous welfare and health-care cutbacks are relegated to the inside pages or, more likely, not covered at all. 

Those few journalists I know who still have jobs have repeatedly told me, always in furtive whispers, the resultant newsroom atmosphere is frightfully oppressive – so much so a Nazi time-machined from the offices of der Voelkischer Beobachter would in all probability assume the Axis had won – that Josef Goebbels and his descendants now rule the USian mass media as reichsführers of information. Given the Fourth Reich nature of the USian Global Empire, it's at least arguable they do. 

The overall Big Business goal, imposition of an entirely new paradigm of USian journalism, also of course demanded a sweeping change in the sociology of the workforce. Thus in an occupation once as famous for the blue-collar and/or déclassé origins of its editorial workers as it was for its iconoclasts and cynics, now the only allowable caste is the college elite, the only permissible attitude is unquestioning optimism and the only acceptable personality is therefore that of the abject conformist. In other words, to be hired on a newspaper today, you've got to pass muster either as a compliant, jock-worshiping frat boy or a Barbie-doll-minded sorority girl, complete with the characteristic bigotry produced by psychological self-conflation with the One Percent – or as we socialists say, “identification with the oppressor.” In this new, zero-tolerance editorial domain, which with its anti-union bias and social-club personality requirements is as cliquish and bully-dominated as any 1950s high school, I might have lied my way past the outermost gatekeepers, but eventually a credit-check or some other invasion of my privacy would have revealed the terminal blemish of post-fire traumatic stress disorder. By then though I'd probably already have been rejected as an unwanted misfit merely because some “human resources” inquisitor would have spotted the permanent scars of my (let us say) “challenging” childhood. Hence from the first time I heard the words “personnel office” in a sentence about journalistic employment, I suspected my days in the Working Press were numbered, and once “clinical depression,” was added to the paragraph, I knew life as I had known it was ended forever, though for a while I was still sometimes able to get part-time work. Now, having publicly declared myself not only a Goddess-worshiping pagan but an eco-socialist (and a Marx/Engels-influenced eco-socialist at that), there is not even the possibility of freelancing – not that my prospects would be much different given the genocidal, starve-all-the-surplus-workers reality of the post-American-Dream economy, particularly its now-endemic exclusion of elders, no doubt because we (dangerously, subversively) remember when “worker” was not necessarily synonymous with “slave.” 

A former colleague of mine told me several years ago one of the big reasons he went into journalism was he loved the camaraderie, the we-don't-take-shit-from-anybody esprit de corps of the old-time newsroom. Though my own primary attraction to journalism was a subset of class-consciousness – recognition it was the only avenue by which a non-aristocrat could sometimes foster genuinely progressive change – I too was drawn by the quality my colleague cited. It was an almost-military solidarity that prevailed even on non-union papers, probably because – whether a paper was Guild or not – the old-time editors were almost always promoted from within the ranks. The result was typically a unique bond uniting reporters and photographers with the editors who supervised us – precisely why the practice is now forbidden under the CEO-as-god style of USian Big Business management and Ayn Rand capitalism – aka fascism – in general. “But I didn't want to work in a place like an insurance office,” my one-time colleague lamented, explaining how, having witnessed his father's executive-level struggles in sales and administration, he desperately wanted to avoid all the back-stabbing and brown-nosing and mutual out-ratting that characterizes the internal dynamics of USian business. But now under the corporations that's exactly what newsrooms have become – “not just any old insurance office, but an insurance office from hell.” The last time we spoke, in the mid-1990s, he had come to despise the job he once loved, and now only hoped he could keep it another decade until retirement. Whether he succeeded or not I cannot say: we have lost touch with one another. And I am enough persona non gratia in today's newsrooms, I dare not inquire, lest it jeopardize the respondent. 

Hence the compensation I referenced in my lead – the good part I celebrate every day – is the blessed freedom that comes from the fact I no longer have to cope with the new but at the same time horribly familiar fear that now permeates todays newsrooms. For me, it was the huge anxiety potential employers might find out who and what, from their unforgiving perspective, I really am: not just repugnant for having been (in their merciless judgment) so weak and worthless as to have “chosen” (according to an aristocratic half-brother's denunciation) to be felled by depression; but also (and under today's corporate protocols at least equally damning), the fact I am (again from the executive vantage point) a genuine deviant, the spawn of a childhood forever warped by truly savage familial dysfunction. The fear that was mine in these recent years was thus, perhaps ironically, the age-extended version of the fear that ruled my childhood, the constant, almost bottomless terror my school-mates would discover my familial circumstances and banish me from their tribe – as they invariably did, a couple of times nearly fatally. But now I am free of all that. And age has liberated me also from the parallel necessity to hide myself from the parents of lovers and wives and friends. Now I can say things I never before dared say in print – witness this blog – and do things I would never have allowed myself the time or guilt-free pleasure to do, as for example experiment with my old Rolleicord, perhaps even reanimate it as my primary camera. Indeed it is a wonderful tool. As long as I limit myself to black-and-white film, I can develop it in my own bathroom, then have the imagery digitized by Robi's Camera in Lakewood, three 12-exposure rolls at a time, for $25.06, tax included. It is a sum I can afford probably only once every two or three months, and then only if I have no unforeseen additional expenses, but it is maybe the most worthwhile expenditure in my entire budget. Meanwhile though I am intensely curious as to how this new discipline might change what I see and how I see it, what the images will be, what I will learn about my environment and myself and above all else what the Muse might deign to show me. 

A couple of weeks ago, when I first acknowledged my fondness for twin-lens reflexes, the need for brevity and the avoidance of distractions from the story's main thread prompted me to omit four relevant facts about my infatuation. The first and most important of these is I regard a TLR with its its 2¼-inch square format as an impoverished person's view camera – not the machine I've (secretly) wanted ever since I realized the Pacific Northwest had become my permanent home, but close enough in terms of 120 roll-film's much bigger negative size, and (particularly given how crippled I'm becoming), a damn sight more portable than even the smallest view cameras, which utilize the 4x5-inch sheet-film format. The second fact explains why despite my photojournalistic bias I'm drawn to larger formats: the truth is I am fascinated by their heightened ability to explore textures, as in the image above, which I will probably eventually use in a sandwich, though it seems to me it could also stand alone, a celebration of the textures I see as yet another dimension of the vast choreography of being that is Nature. The third fact is the xenophobic, sometimes violently enforced taboo on street photography that prevails in these parts often makes the TLR a better carrying camera than even the smallest 35mm or digital machine. This is because a TLR is so baroque, so archaic, there is seldom even a temptation to try for decisive-moment reportage, the recent nastiness in Wright Park not withstanding. (Someday, just as the photographic equivalent of an uplifted social finger, I probably will take pictures of the kids playing in the Sprayground, and if I do, I'll publish them here – if only to vex the censorious parents. But I'd do it fast, in 35mm with glass no shorter than 100mm, and I'd be gone before anyone could react.) Which brings us to my fourth and final TLR fact, a pure act of confession: that I am reluctant to admit the depth of my fondness for TLRs because of my contrary and equally deep loathing for the local Ansel Adams cult, which in unacknowledged but nevertheless archetypal Ayn Rand fascist malevolence damns all human-condition photography as “politicization of art,” hence a waste of film, chemicals and paper. Indeed I have clashed with the cult's sneering Zone System disciples almost since the day of my arrival here in 1970, when one of their number haughtily informed me I should have “pre-visualized” and “carefully metered” a picture I had shot in Washington D.C. during the anti-Nixon, anti-Southeast-Asian-War demonstrations immediately after the massacres at Kent State University and Jackson State College. “Maybe so,” I said to the Adams Zone sycophant, “but it's a bit difficult getting an accurate light reading off a rapidly dissipating cloud of pepper gas.” 

LB/30 May 2013 

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