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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Total Surveillance: Assault on Electronic Media Freedom

Another Tacoma graffito, seemingly a declaration of love, probably drawn by a young woman, and in any case unique, unlike anything of its kind I have seen anywhere including Manhattan. I photographed it in May 2009, forgot about it, then rediscovered it a couple of days ago. Leica M4, Voigtlander f/1.7 35mm Ultron, Kodak 800 color negative film, exposure not recorded. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2013. (Click on picture to view it full size.)

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FORMAL, NAZI-STYLE tyranny remained unnecessary in the United States as long as the One Percent could maintain the Big Lie of “American democracy.” Public opinion was controlled not by a Gestapo – the German acronym for Geheime Staatspolizei (literally, “Secret State Police”) – but by disinformation, misdirection and outright falsehood. The resultant ignorance – the infinitely malleable and thus dependably submissive anti-culture of shrunken consciousness I mercilessly label “Moron Nation” – was maintained by a carefully fostered combination of paranoia, bigotry and xenophobia in which “intellectual,” “subversive” and “traitor” quickly became synonyms. It was perpetuated by an induced ignorance of history – an unabashed contempt for historical knowledge and a vehement hatred of history as a subject – that has no counterpart in human experience. But now, thanks to the quasi-democratic anarchy of electronic media, Moron Nation is ever-so-slowly giving way to something else. What it will be – whether it will be the Internet equivalent of an old-time Ku Klux Klan rally or an USian version of the deservedly legendary Petrograd Soviet  – remains to be seen. But it is the desperate fear of the latter that prompts the Ruling Class to impose what we already recognize as the total surveillance state: the real-world fulfillment of Jewish, Christian and Islamic theology in which a heavenly Führer tracks the lives of every one of us in meticulous, zero-tolerance detail, from the moment we are born until the instant we die. Monitored as we are from cradle to grave, it seems we cannot possibly organize any effective resistance to capitalism and its new paradigm of USian governance, absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation for all the rest of us.

Or is that merely what our masters want us to believe?

The bright side of electronic media is not only that it gives us fingertip access to the libraries of the world. It is also how it brings so many of us the increasingly persuasive arguments of both the libertarian Right  and the mainstream pseudo-Left, the words of fierce, often eloquent critics who credibly decry the entire “war on terror” as an extended variation on the old Reichstag Fire. Side-stepping their economic differences, these sources agree the USian Ruling Class is using the threat of Islamic terror to provide an ongoing rational for wiping out  our constitutional rights. Far more inflammatory material generated by the genuine (i.e., socialist) Left is available too, though access is often deliberately hampered by Google. Included in these worth-the-search offerings from the Real Left are the priceless archives of socialism and anarchism defiantly uploaded by the Soviet Union  during its final days and the regularly updated analytical resources of the World Socialist Web Site.  For the determined searcher – that is, one willing to look well beyond the first few Google pages – there are also any number of supplementary sources, both for reference and for breaking news. Thus a vast quantity of material that is definitively challenging One Percent absolutism is now available to more people than ever.

But electronic media has its dark side too, half of which is the built-in, seemingly permanent barrier that prohibits universal Internet access. This is the staggering cost of Internet service in the United States, its prices by far the highest in the world.  While these fees are nominally explained by the obscene salaries of Internet service-provider executives, an equal factor is no doubt Ruling Class insistence on censorship by price, which is motivated by the corporate and political aristocracy's terror of what might happen were the Internet's wealth of material to regularly reach the most viciously exploited members of the industrial world's most economically oppressed, most relentlessly overworked population. Perhaps it is partly in anticipation of Internet-agitated revolution the United States already imprisons more people, whether proportionally or in raw numbers, than any other nation on the planet. 

Predictably then, Internet access by those of us who are lower-income folks age 60 and over – which includes the 62-and-over demographic now being targeted for extermination by murderous cutbacks in Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and food-stamps – is therefore kept at less than 20 percent by the outrageous monthly rates – as high as $70 or more – charged for USian high-speed Internet. (While the access study linked immediately above was conducted in Texas, nearly identical results – unfortunately not available on-line – were produced by studies in Washington state, which is as allegedly progressive as Texas is demonstrably reactionary.) Thus the common denominator of exclusion from the Internet is poverty – not just amongst the elderly but within all age groups. Obviously, it is no accident those of us who are most savagely victimized by capitalism are those of us who are also most excluded from the Internet's treasure-trove of information.

Nor is it coincidental the USian pseudo-Left stubbornly ignores (and often vehemently denies) the existence of this severely prohibitive class barrier. By so doing, the pseudo-Left not only proves beyond argument its maliciously bourgeois nature, but vividly demonstrates how it serves the One Percent within the broader context of the Ruling Class.

The other dark aspect of electronic media – actually its darkest – arises from the military origin of computers and the Internet itself. From this perspective – the fact the original computers were weapons, and the fact the precursors to the Internet were intended to further the USian agenda of capitalist imperialism and world conquest – we learn all we need to know. The hideous truth is the advent of the total-surveillance state is nothing more than the fulfillment of an implacably tyrannical purpose that existed from the technology's very beginning. To my knowledge, no other writer has dared point this out, nor has anyone mentioned its corollary – that believing mechanisms of death and oppression will ultimately be employed for  human betterment is no less absurd than imagining a nuclear-waste dump can be converted overnight into a vegetable garden. Moreover, the manner in which the instruments of this hitherto-unprecedented tyranny were marketed to the USian public, and the manner in which the public in its consumeroid frenzies of trinket-materialism literally fought to the death over lap-tops, digital cameras and cell-phones, has no parallel in history. Never before have people killed themselves in stampedes for enslavement. But the looming threat of the total-surveillance state has been common knowledge at least since the 1940s – which means Moron Nation knowingly embraced its own degradation, selling itself and its descendants into slavery at every opportunity and by every possible means. That's why, whether from the electronic concentration camp  of today or the grovel-in-filth servitude that is its inevitable tomorrow, only a miracle can rescue us now.

LB/25 August 2013

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