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.”

 *** *** ***

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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Perhaps This Will Help You Understand the Plight of Patrick McLaw

(For A.H., whose belief in my courageousness gave me the courage to write what follows, with my apologies to all for how long it took me to write it.)

THE STRANGE STORY of Patrick McLaw, the novelist and language-arts teacher who was seized by the police  and at this writing is involuntarily confined in a Maryland mental institution, warrants our continued attention – and not only because of its frightening suggestion the authorities may now be using mental-health facilities as extra-constitutional prisons. While the Gestapo-reeking circumstances of McLaw's detention remain unclear,  the one absolute certainty is the state's claim he is mentally ill has ruined his life beyond any rational hope of repair. The fact he is African-American in a nation that is again becoming infamous for its bigotry  merely underscores the finality of his doom.

McLaw's case is significant because brings together the issues of class warfare, racism, the expansion of police authority, the theft of our constitutional rights – and adds to them a topic I know by heart but seldom have the opportunity to explore: the hatefulness and brutality that characterize U.S. attitudes toward people who are mentally ill or mentally disabled. As the authorities' treatment of McLaw demonstrates, and as innumerable studies confirm, mental illness in the United States of America is the penultimate nadir of pariahdom. Only child-molesters are more publicly hated and feared. It makes no difference at least 26.2 percent  of the U.S. adult population is mentally ill in any given year. Only the Ruling Class rich – those who are wealthy and powerful enough to stay out of the social-service system entirely or to bribe its bureaucrats to secrecy – escape the stigma.

Meanwhile, locked away as he is, McLaw's captors have successfully reduced him to a non-entity. His personhood is hidden from us, which means we can only guess what he might be thinking and feeling. But given how my own talents were forever nullified by the odium of mental illness – the clinical depression inflicted by the fire that destroyed my life's work – perhaps by retelling my own story I can at least portray the magnitude of troubles with which McLaw is likely to be afflicted if and when he is ever released.

McLaw's education and chosen occupation suggests he invested a great deal of time and effort in becoming who and what he was. So did I. Though my own journey differed from his – for example, poverty kept me from a bachelor of arts degree until I was 36 years old – I suspect the passions we brought to our arts were very similar. Our greatest differences – the fact I am a Caucasian male, with all of the presumptive socioeconomic advantages, and the fact I have never been institutionalized – are eliminated by our common plight. Neither race nor gender provides any defense against how an official diagnoses of mental illness or disability destroys everything you were and might have been. Nor does it matter, in the eyes of the public, whether you were institutionalized or not. In-patient or out-patient, you're now damned as a “crazy”– and so you will be for rest of your life.

Some of you already know my story. In the spring of 1983 I returned to New York City, assuming my birthplace and the home of my early childhood would again be the permanent home of my adulthood. I was traveling light. At the invitation of the late Helen Farias, a dear friend who had inherited a two-storey pioneer farmhouse near Alger, Washington, I had boxed up my files and other possessions and stored them in one of her unused second-floor bedrooms. When I found a suitable apartment in Manhattan, I would send her the money to ship these pre-packed items to my new address. But instead there was the fire, and now there was nothing left. The house and even its adjacent outbuildings were reduced to heaps of smoldering ash. My friend's work – Helen too was a writer and editor – escaped the flames only because her office was elsewhere. Her cats were not so fortunate; they died in the fire.

The loss of my work was the most wrenching shock I have ever known. My grief was overwhelming. It was profoundly intensified by the fact the fire's casualties included abook of photographs and text that had begun as an entry in my 1959 journal and was at long last seemingly on the brink of major publication. Titled “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer,” it argued that the Counterculture which had grown out of the 1950s Beat Movement and crested during the 1960s was exactly what it claimed to be, a “revolution in consciousness” – and that its rebelliousness, the true nature of which was obvious in its music and art,  was amongst the first waves of a global revolution against patriarchy.

I knew my hypothesis was radical and perhaps even inflammatory, no pun intended. It had generated substantial controversy when I presented it for academic scrutiny during the final year of my bachelor of arts program at Fairhaven College. Despite the decades of research I put into its text – the quest to name what I was photographing was as important as the photography itself – I never imagined “Dancer” would be more than a volume of pictures accompanied by the photographer's reflections on his odyssey toward understanding. But the late Cicely Nichols, longtime friend and former editor-in-chief at Grove Press, convinced me “Dancer” could be shaped into one of the most important books of the 20th Century.

The fire's devastation was thus all the more intense because of my newly heightened expectations. I am not an optimist; raised as the unwanted child in a painfully dysfunctional family, I have never been given to unrealistic expectations, but after Nichols' enthusiastic response to my photographic portfolio and a few samples of my writing, for once in my life I actually dared be hopeful about my future. But now, as if in cosmic retribution for my folly, I had no future at all. The flames took not just the rough draft of “Dancer” but all its 24 years of research notes and pictures; all my other photography including hundreds of prints and thousands of negatives and color transparencies; two other books in progress that existed only as photos, notes and outlines; nearly all my other unpublished writing; clippings and tear-sheets of all my published work; all my journalistic award certificates and letters of commendation; paintings and drawings – literally all the creative efforts of my life dating back to my 12th birthday and my first camera, a used Kodak Brownie Reflex given me by my father.

Worse still was the eerie timing of the fire, which occurred on 1 September 1983. It started at the exact moment Nichols and I were meeting to finalize the agreement that would presumably bring “Dancer” to print. The time of ignition was revealed by the heat-welded hands of a clock at the fire's point of origin. First attributed to arson, then mysteriously changed to fire “of undetermined origin,” the blaze began at 4:30 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time, which three time-zones to the east is 7:30 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time – exactly when Nichols and I began our work-and-dinner session. Regardless of the fire's cause, its timing – which turned what might have been the best day of my life into what was indisputably the worst – was too exact to be coincidence.

Though I had been targeted as a suspected subversive by the U.S. government on three occasions that I know of – once in the Army, twice in civilian life (USian fascism is nothing new) – I never imagined my personal politics might result in the destruction of my life's work. But the fire's timing is typical of the “plausibly deniable” acts with which undercover operatives – especially those skilled in psychological warfare – torment their victims. Because of this – note again the waffling of some (perhaps easily bullied) rural fire-marshal – I cannot doubt the fire was arson, most likely government arson at that. Who but some telephone-tapping agent of the national secret-police apparatus could have known when to light the flames with such hurtful precision?   And the message itself was unmistakable: I was opposed by forces so relentlessly powerful, it was futile to resist. Thus I learned what is obviously the central lesson of my life: that hope, at least for me, is not audacity but imbecility.

It took the resultant depression almost exactly three years to drive me out of my beloved Manhattan. For most of my adult life I had recognized the City as the place for those who have something to offer the world. But now after the fire I had nothing to offer anyone, not even myself – and given the malevolence of my enemies, it was obvious I would never be allowed to develop such offerings again. Thus in late 1986 I returned to Washington state, a place I disliked for the notoriously xenophobic small-mindedness of so many of its people but where I had paradoxically fallen in love with its light and its water and how its mountains plunge directly into the sea. Believing periodic contact with nature would be healing, I had been putting some of my New York City earnings into a tiny piece of rural Washington real estate – probably, in retrospect, an act that was itself symptomatic of how befuddled I had become – though for nearly a year after my return that place would be my only sanctuary.

I already knew there were few journalistic opportunities in Washington state. A decade earlier the local mainstream-media editors had shown themselves to be as xenophobic their as readers. The late Henry MacLeod, then managing editor of The Seattle Times, told meEast Coast experience “doesn't count out here,” and suggested I hasten back from whence I came. A managing editor named Fowler at The Bellingham Herald was more blunt: “we don't like your kind here,” he said. “Do yourself a favor: catch the next flight back to New York City.”

No matter. I could no longer dependably write or photograph; the associations with the lost work were too painful. Hence I would fall back on my secondary skills, work as a commercial fisherman or a laborer or maybe a commercial printer and perhaps eventually freelance a bit on the side. But unemployment remained high due to the Reagan recession. I was unable to find any job at all, and my mood worsened until some days I could hardly muster the energy to get out of bed. At last recognizing the nature of my affliction, I went into therapy, but it was too little too late; my economic circumstances were already becoming desperate. My therapist, Dr. Arthur Budke PhD, formally diagnosed my condition as post-traumatic depression. He said it was severe enough to qualify me for welfare and began insisting I apply for it. Finally, in the late spring of 1987, so impoverished the only alternative was homelessness, I did as he demanded. Like McLaw, I was now trapped in the system – and so began the process that destroyed my life.

Citing my therapist's findings, the welfare bureaucrats categorized me as “mentally disabled” and enrolled me to receive a state check for $314 per month plus about $75 in food stamps. The stipend was labeled “GA/U,” which stands for “general assistance/unemployable.” It is colloquially known as “nut money”; its recipients are officially called “clients” but are colloquially known as “welfare crazies” and “nut cases.”

GA/U was supposed to be paid on the first of each month but was often late, sometimes as much as a week and frequently with catastrophic results, invariably because welfare funds were arbitrarily withheld to maximize the interest earned by state deposits – a prime example of the official attitude toward welfare recipients in general. As for GA/U, its bureaucratic overseers were the most condescending and vindictive officials I have ever encountered. They made no secret of the fact they regarded us as subhuman. And they behaved as if their sole purpose was to punish us for our poverty, which they did at every opportunity.

I was on welfare through the winter of 1989, a reality in which the mundane disguises horrors that are incomprehensible if you have not experienced them firsthand. I was too distraught in those awful years to trifle with metaphor and simile, but now in retrospect it comes to me I was like some shell-shocked refugee captured by a flood and swept away by its irresistible current. Its water was brown and treacherous and toxic and alligator-infested and it raged through kudzu jungles and cottonmouth-moccasin swamps and it allowed me only two choices: I could yield to to its undertow and drown or I could grab onto some piece of flotsam and fight to keep my head above the torrent. Obviously I chose the latter. I had not even the faintest hope I might be washed up onto some shoal or sandbar, but eventually I discovered – perhaps a gift of my Celtic ancestry – I possessed a seemingly congenital inability to surrender. Since this is probably the sort of choice that's now confronting Patrick McLaw, I can only hope he chooses wisely.

***

 

Innumerable studies document the U.S. attitude toward mental illness as the harshest and most unforgiving in the developed world. Indeed mental illness in the United States is feared as if it were a fatal contagion, something you might catch from mere proximity to a mentally ill person on a bus or – horrors – use of a toilet-seat upon which a mentally ill individual has recently sat. Yes, the prejudice is that extreme. But why? The sociologists with whom I have discussed it say they suspect that in the de facto theocracy that underlies the cult of U.S. “exceptionalism,” mental illness is subconsciously viewed as divine retribution. I agree; the Abrahamic god, the death-dealing deity of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, is undoubtedly the most sadistic god in human experience, and the hostility directed at people with mental troubles is “exceptional” indeed. Mentally ill persons are shunned as if they are accursed – fingered by god as hate-objects – and in extreme cases they become the human equivalents of sacrificial scapegoats. But the influence of religion on U.S. society is woefully underestimated. Hence even in the secular realm of journalism, no career-minded editor will dare hire you if you have ever been officially labeled “mentally ill” or “mentally disabled” – never mind your diagnosis or the brevity of your affliction. Even beneath the gloss of enlightenment, the conditioned fear of the divine lightning bolt often remains tyrannically compelling. 

The oppressive commonality of such prejudice is why I feared life as I had known it would end forever the moment I was labeled “mentally disabled” – an apprehension soon confirmed in every dreadful detail. Hence at the same time I applied for nut money, I applied to the state's Division of Vocational Rehabilitation for help finding some new career – work that would be insulated against the climate of loathing but would utilize at least some of my visual, verbal and analytical skills. Here though I encountered a succession of mysterious obstacles: DVR psychologists declared me a top-notch candidate for vocational retraining, yet I was repeatedly denied access to all DVR programs.

Initially, the DVR bureaucrats contented themselves with “losing” my paperwork. After the third such loss, Dr. Budke, who was still my therapist, intervened to get my application processed. But the bureaucrats rejected it again, claiming my entire work history was a lie or a delusion or both. They demanded I provide them names to attest its reality. I did; the bureaucrats obtained confirmation of my achievements, but the questions they asked my former supervisors and colleagues made it obvious I was on nut money. Now there was no question my journalism career was dead. Yet once again the bureaucrats found a litany of reasons – so many I cannot remember them all – to deny me rehabilitative services.

I will never know the true source of these obstructions. One possibility is they were inflicted by the same nameless, faceless but obviously malign sorts of individuals who destroyed my life's work and so annulled all my lifetime efforts. Another possibility, perhaps underscored by the bureaucrats' efforts to confirm my resumé, is the obstructions were vengeance for the anti-DSHS investigative reports I had written during the late 1970s and early 1980s. A third possibility – the one I still think is the most likely – is that I had run afoul of the legislatively prohibited (and therefore secret) gender-quotas for which the Department of Social and Health Services was then becoming infamous.

Angered by the endless delays, bolstered by yet another evaluation that found me “exceptionally well qualified” for vocational rehabilitation, I contacted a pro-bono lawyer and threatened legal action against DSHS. I had hoped this would force DVR to admit me to a job-training program; I knew DVR endorsement was now the only way I could neutralize the mental-patient odium enough to get myself back into the workplace. And for once the bureaucrats responded quickly: they changed my diagnosis, branded me “permanently unemployable” and forced me onto Social Security/Disability, thereby destroying forever my ability to earn any sort of living at all.

Note here the disturbingly Orwellian parallel to the McLaw case: first the Maryland authorities publicly announced he was detained because of alleged threats they claim are implicit in his fiction. Then, when McLaw's extra-constitutional detention raised a national storm of protest,  the authorities quickly changed their story. His novel and his use of pen names were no longer the cause of his incarceration. Now they are claiming he was involuntarily committed because of “mental health issues.” Obviously, whether on the East Coast or the West Coast, the government officials will say whatever is necessary – truth be damned – to justify their egregiousness and protect themselves from lawsuits.

As I noted before, I have never been institutionalized. Though I did not realize it until years later, during my struggle with the welfare bureaucrats I was obviously protected by Washington state's admirably strict laws against retaliatory commitment – a fact for which I remain ever thankful. Had the bureaucrats been able, they would probably have tried to bury me forever in some piss-reeking DSHS Bedlam. But being forced onto Social Security Disability Insurance was bad enough, and from the bureaucrats' perspective it was no doubt a triumph: the “M” they had metaphorically branded on my forehead ensured no employer would ever again take me or talents seriously.

Theoretically, you can return to work while receiving SSDI stipends, but the ubiquitous animosity toward mental patients makes continued employment highly unlikely once your disability is revealed as mental.  And such disclosure is unavoidable because your employer is an essential participant in the review process by which the Social Security Administration evaluates your employability. Nor does the Americans with Disabilities Act offer any real protection – note again the above-linked report. From the perspective of the truly needy, ADA is like all other U.S. social-welfare legislation, intended mostly as propaganda and therefore more about deliberate deception than actual amelioration – yet another example of how the so-called American Dream was never more than a Big Lie.

Yes, the fire and its ruinous aftermath was a long time ago. I was 43 years old when it occurred, 49 in 1989 when the bureaucrats forced me onto SSDI and slew whatever might have remained of my socioeconomic prospects. I am now 74. Though my depression ended long ago, my existence has seldom risen above a desperate and often humiliating struggle against poverty, isolation and loneliness. Again we see the relentlessly unforgiving nature of capitalism, which teaches that those felled by misfortune are victims of their own folly and are therefore to be brutalized accordingly, whether by deliberately murderous cutbacks in the social safety-net, wildly increasing attacks on homeless people  or egregious denial of our constitutional rights. That's why, if I believed in a just and loving god – perhaps the most absurd notion of all time – Patrick McLaw would be at the top of my prayer list.

***

Strangely enough – or perhaps, in terms of Jungian synchronicity, not strangely at all – on Saturday night, 6 September 2014, I was confronted by a new and painful realization of all that was taken from me. And much as it had been 31 years and five days before – though without any of the original crippling intensity – it was an occasion of happiness turned to sadness. But this time the resultant anguish had a positive effect: it solidified my sense of situational kinship with Patrick McLaw. And a moving compliment from a stranger gave me the courage and determination to write of the circumstances that once bedeviled me and now bedevil McLaw – and anyone else caught in the treacherous clutches of the U.S. mental “health” and “welfare” bureaucracies.

The source of this interplay of Yin and Yang was a reunion of people who had been associated with The Seattle Sun, an alternative weekly founded by professional journalists and therefore equal in quality to the original Village Voice and in some aspects – especially visually – no doubt its superior. The Sun, of which I was the founding photographer, was published from July 1974 through January 1982; it was driven out of business by a longstanding advertising boycott organized by the local Ruling Class, which was implacably hostile to the truth-telling reportage that was the paper's award-winning forté. Its former writers, photographers, artists, advertising and circulation staffers and its many friends and financial supporters gathered in Seattle at an attractive facility on the Lake Union waterfront to celebrate the 40th anniversary of The Sun's first year of publication. (It is an aside, but part of Seattle's unique physical beauty is its combination of salt-water and fresh-water port facilities; Lake Union is part of the latter.)

For me the reunion was a pleasant opportunity to briefly reconnect with former colleagues and to view my own work as it is preserved in bound volumes of The Sun's entire production, an invaluable collection assembled by Carl Thorgerson, who was the paper's indomitable advertising manager. Here were not just the best of my Sun pictures – the covers and section fronts – but all the other images I had made for it, and suddenly I remembered just how many there were and how joyfully proud I had been to make these pictures of histories whether personal or political and large or small. And now for an instant it seemed I knew again the solid feel of an M Leica and the quiet but decisive snick of its shutter and the sharply alchemical scent of my darkroom and the wizardly submarine quality of its amber light and the oddly comforting odor of the Pekasol as I hung the film and how the tonal brilliance of prints made on DuPont Varilure emerge in the Dektol with an ever-so-subtle hiss and I thought of the countless times I said to rightfully impatient editors as I was washing and drying the day's take, “you can't rush the chemicals; you'll have the pictures as soon as they're done,” and I smiled at the recollection.

It was as if I were seeing ghosts or was perhaps myself a ghost reliving scenes from a former life, and as I paged through Thorgerson's wonderful archive, my body in real-time 2014 yet somehow for a long moment also present amidst the equally real physical and olfactory sensations of 1974 or 1975 or 1976, it came to me these fading images on fragile sheets of yellowed newsprint plus the few archivally processed exhibition prints that had escaped the fire because they were in my portfolio were all that remained of one of the most purposefully productive and aesthetically fulfilling periods in a stolen life I had never missed quite so forcefully as now. I had never seen so much of my forever lost work gathered in one place, and for that reason I had never felt quite so poignantly the actual dimensions of my loss. Suddenly I was crushed by its awful breath-stealing weight, and I could not bear to look anymore. There was nothing left for me to do but walk away, first from the pictures, finally – as quickly as I could politely arrange it – from the party itself.

In deference to my former colleagues, and later in deference to the woman with whom I attended the reunion, I maintained a pleasant countenance. Obviously I have made peace with my circumstances, have somehow even regained a bit of my former joie de vivre, and I channel my emotions into productive outlets such as this blog and the local campaign for a $15 minimum wage and the monthly newsletter I produce for my fellow residents in the senior-housing complex where I live. But there are limits to my endurance. Alone in my tiny apartment, I could no longer avoid the reanimated woe of the fire and its aftermath – the loss of the occupation that was my selfhood and the pictures that were my identity and then my credibility and finally all my societal worth as a human being and thus my ability to ever again build any other identity or hope for any reality beyond used cameras and worn-out coats and ragged blankets and the inescapable wretchedness of food-stamp poverty. 

For a moment I floundered in self-pity, again overwhelmed by old and bitter truths: that I will have no more second chances, no more lovers, will undertake no more quests, will have no more expectations of yearnings fulfilled or hopes realized, and because I know the viciousness of capitalism, I know the only changes in my material circumstances will be changes for the worse. But then – if I may fall back on my earlier metaphor of a wayfarer trapped in a flood – I began once more to swim. There is a terrible freedom in hopelessness such as mine, a freedom to tell the truth without fear of the consequences, and I realized that perhaps in an odd way – never mind the arthritis in my spine and shoulders that now sorely limits my ability to photograph – I might nevertheless once more carry on the truth-telling tradition that drew me to The Sun and kept me there for as long as I could stay and brought me back to Seattle 40 years later for an evening with my fellow truth-tellers. I would write this story not just to assuage my own hurt but to provide a living, breathing illustration of the plight of Patrick McLaw, who is only 23 but is already suffering the loss of all his hopes and dreams and facing the probability of an entire lifetime of destitution. Perhaps, whether he reads these words or not, he will come to understand, as I did long ago, that in such cruel times as these, survival itself is an act 

of revolutionary defiance.

LB/7-11 September 2014

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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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