Open Letter to Goddess-Centered Pagans; Important Funding Drive; Long-Overdue Eulogy for My Dead Son

HOMELESS HUMANS have become the new exemplars of capitalist reality, particularly in the United States. (I made these portraits with my digital Canon SLR while on unpaid/volunteer assignment last week, then processed the pictures as if I were once again working with my beloved M Leicas and Tri-X at 800 ASA developed in D-76 and printing the results on DuPont Varilure, which had photographic paper's highest silver content and was therefore the best paper in the world but was discontinued in 1973 due to capitalist manipulations that triggered skyrocketing silver prices.) Photographs by Loren Bliss © 2016. Click on images to view them full size.

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PLEASE CONSIDER THE following as an open letter to the pagan community, the first of the essays on the relevance of socialism to paganism and of paganism to socialism I promised on 18 July I would soon write. Please also forgive the delay; the 18th was the last time my circumstances actually allowed me the time and energy essential to prepare anything genuinely contemplative for this space; my neighbors and I here in the geezer ghetto are still plagued by our heartless landlord's innumerable and invariably disruptive intrusions as he renovates his for-profit properties to comply with federal low-interest loan requirements.

As I wrote in that most recent OAN essay, how “do I resolve the apparent conflict between being a Marxian (and therefore a dialectical materialist) and... also being a Gaian Pagan (and a Pagan not by fad or adaptation or mere inclination but as a direct consequence of two undeniable, inexplicable and unquestionably demanding encounters with its Source)?”

“Preview: in the ultimate sense, I see no conflict at all. In fact I am convinced each is essential to sustain the other.”

But of course I was describing a feeling, emotional reality rather than intellectual reality, right brain rather than left brain, and I as soon as I began applying logic to the question, I initially feared I had stepped into a miasma of contradictions I might never be able to resolve.

Then – as so often occurs in my habitually agnostic/skeptical (if not downright cynical) relationship to all forms of spirituality including my own – synchronicity intervened. As it happens, I am working, again as an unpaid volunteer, on another editorial project which brought me into contact with the mostly unacknowledged truth all philosophies – even our own informal assumptions about life – embody the bias imposed by our socioeconomic class: whether we are part of the 99 Percent or part of the One Percent and its Ruling Class vassalage.  Philosophically speaking, our overlords in the One Percent and its Ruling Class view the world as their rightful “god-given” possession, an exploitable commodity – we the people included – to subjugate as greed, sadistic whim and capitalism's mandatory quest for maximum profit dictate. Meanwhile we of the 99 Percent – all of us capitalism's victims – either (further) shackle ourselves by adopting the philosophies dictated by our oppressors or we (somehow) wake up and evolve our own philosophical view.

Socialism is, of course, one of the (self-protective) results of our awakening; Marxism is merely socialism's purest and most disciplined form. Paganism – especially in its Wiccan or Gaian forms – is another such awakening. The functional twinship of socialism and paganism begins with their common purpose: the preservation of our species from extinction by capitalist depredation, either as World War III or environmental apocalypse.

Indeed I would go so far as to argue that while one may be a socialist without being pagan, one cannot be a pagan without also being a socialist.

Capitalism, remember, is a direct derivative of Protestant Christianity (for which see Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism). The ultimate form of Protestantism is the Prosperity Gospel,  which reasserts the divine right of kings in its modern form as the divine right of corporate executives and of the One Percent in general. It defines wealth as an expression of divine blessing and attributes poverty to sin. (Backtracking for a moment, Christianity is one of the three Abrahamic religions. It and the others, Judaism and Islam, define the universe as the asexual creation of a male deity and thereby reduce female reproductive power to virtual irrelevance. From this reduction results the contempt for Nature, the misogynistic hatred, the clitoris envy and the implicitly violent insistence on hierarchy that define all patriarchal belief systems.) Predictably, the associated malignancy is intensified to its most extreme, ecocidal and genocidal form in capitalism, which is Abrahamic religion's ultimate distillate. (The historical dynamics of patriarchal religion's distillation into an ever-more-murderous philosophy of exploitation is eloquently documented in The Great Cosmic Mother, Barbara Mor's invaluable work in post-Abrahamic, post-capitalist anthropology, a book that should be twinned with Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States in terms of significant revelations of our methodically suppressed past.) A basic pagan library should include a well-read copy of each volume.

Remember too the relationship between capitalism and its Abrahamic-religion father is symbiotic: one reinforces the other – hence Marx's condemnation of religion as the opiate of the masses. Hence too the liberation of scientific inquiry resulting from the Soviet suppression of Abrahamic religion – specifically the widespread Soviet investigation of subjects damned as “Satanic”  in the Christian-dominated U.S. Moreover the Soviet suppression of Abrahamic religion encouraged not only the U.S.S.R.'s indigenous tribal religions but the resurrection of European paganism by Soviet and post-Soviet youth.

Given that the official, dominant and often violently sustained philosophy of our pre-revolutionary, pre-apocalyptic era is capitalism cum Christianity (or vice-versa), what then are socialism and paganism but efforts by ourselves, the 99 Percent, to liberate ourselves from enslavement by capitalism and Christianity? (I presume I need not add our enslavement is indisputably proven by how capitalism – its depredations countenanced if not encouraged by the Prosperity Gospel -- has already reduced half the U.S. population  to low-income destitution  during the past 43 years. As to how this has come about, see Jeff Sharlet's The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power [Harper: 2008].)

Just as socialism is our instrument of economic revolution, so then is paganism our instrument of spiritual revolution – though the class-based nature of modern paganism (another expression of the socialist/pagan twinhood) – has yet to be commonly recognized by either group.

While the revolutionary origins and history of socialism are thoroughly documented,  the modern history of paganism (or neo-paganism as it is sometimes called), is virtually unknown – even to many present-day pagans. Though such a history is beyond the scope of this essay, it can nevertheless be summarized in three sentences. The modern pagan renaissance – and in particular the resurrection of the Great Goddess as its primary deity – began with the 1948 publication of The White Goddess, Robert Graves' definitively revolutionary “Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York: 1966). Its initial collective expression occurred within the Beat Movement of the 1950s. (See for example Diane DiPrima's epic Loba (Penguin Books, London: 1973-1998), which, probably more than any other associated work, exemplifies the spiritual revolution implicit in the Beat ethos.) The resurrection process was accelerated by the the Folk Renaissance of the late 1950s and early 1960s, which popularized traditional British and European balladry, much of it the disguised yet still-psychically potent remnants of pagan liturgy, a connection explored in detail by the late Holger Olaf Nygard, Duke University's resident folklore scholar. (Alas, Nygard's cutting-edge work, A Literary History of the Popular Ballad [Duke University Press: 1963], is long out of print – and my copy, probably one of the last in existence, was destroyed by the 1983 fire.) In any case, the point here is that paganism acquired its present global momentum  as an extension of the Counterculture of Rebellion that reached its apex during the 1960s and 1970s – an expression of the same save-the-world-from-capitalist-depredation instinct that birthed the Gaia Hypothesis,  Second Wave Feminism, Environmentalism and the Back-to-the-Land Movement. And I think it no coincidence paganism is, with feminism and environmentalism, among the only Countercultural remnants surviving today.

But from the socialist perspective is spirituality  – any spirituality – not inevitably yet another “opiate of the masses”? And thus, again from the socialist perspective, should not all spirituality therefore be discarded as expeditiously as possible?

Firstly, history shows spirituality is a characteristic human activity impossible to suppress. It is ultimately an expression of our species' quest for individual and collective meaning, as instinctive as other forms of creative expression, as definitively human as sexuality, though – alas (precisely as Abrahamic religion demonstrates) – equally subject to perversion. Secondly the emergence of Liberation Theology,  a radical variant of Catholicism that presents Jesus as a martyred revolutionary and attempts to sidestep Christianity's inherent Abrahamic misogyny, contempt for Nature and hierarchical despotism, proves even a classic, trickle-down opiate might be made to (deceptively) serve the cause of socialist revolution. Thirdly, while Liberation Theology was ultimately an effort by the Ruling Class (as personified by the church) to retain Ruling Class religious dominance (i.e. philosophical supremacy) in an era of rising revolutionary anger, paganism by contrast is an instinctively revolutionary response by those of us increasingly alienated by the roles of organized religion and capitalist governance in spawning, fostering and intensifying capitalism's threat to human survival.

As if to further confirm paganism's revolutionary nature, there is compelling evidence the One Percent and its Ruling Class consider the resurrection of paganism (and particularly its Great Goddess) to be at least as subversive as socialism. (This evidence includes several premature deaths and the mysterious fire that destroyed “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer,” my meticulously researched collection of the evidence that would have redefined the Counterculture as the first wave of a revolution against patriarchy.) Paganism's danger to the One Percent and its Ruling Class thus lies in its accelerating rebuttal of Abrahamic despotism, which remember is the root of capitalism. The contrast between the Abrahamic god and the modern pagan goddess is literally a clash of diametrical opposites. Whether one accepts the Abrahamic god as real or symbolic, he is in fact the personification of oppression – the limitation, destruction and/or perversion of our quintessential humanity. Just as, whether one accepts the goddess as real or symbolic, she is the personification of nurturing – the recognition, encouragement and fulfillment of our individual and collective potential.

In this context paganism offers genuine liberation – not just from the Abrahamic religions' patriarchy-sustaining misogynistic anti-sex, anti-sensual and anti-Nature taboos, but from the innate Abrahamic hostility to science as well. While the Abrahamic myth of creation by a male deity is a genuinely unnatural act, contradicting physics, astronomy and biology, the Gaia Hypothesis restates in scientific terms paganism's core principle – that our planet (and by extension the entire cosmos) is alive, conscious and self-regulating. Moreover, paganism – unlike so-called Liberation Theology – is not dictated from above; the Ruling Class, which sneeringly denounces paganism as childish superstition or damns it as “Devil worship,” wants nothing to do with it and suppresses it at every opportunity.  Modern paganism is thus born entirely of rebellious intent – a 99 Percent philosophy intended, as I wrote in a long-lost essay, “to fault the (patriarchal) bedrock of (what passes for) civilization” and thereby free us from the psychological component of patriarchal/Abrahamic/capitalist shackles.

Thus too modern paganism is the spiritual and emotional counterpart of what socialism is for economics and politics. If one is truly a dialectical materialist – that is, genuinely committed to understanding “the real conditions of materialist existence” (which include the material of human consciousness) – one must recognize that sociological and psychological realities are equal to economic and political realities in the symbiosis that shapes our circumstances. Moreover, if one is genuinely committed to the pagan ethos of rescuing our human selfhood from beneath the jackboots of patriarchal religion and capitalism  – thereby reconnecting ourselves with Nature and (perhaps) saving ourselves from extinction – the socialist ethos of “from each according to ability; to each according to need” is the only way to expand the pagan principle of “as above, so below” to encompass all human society.

Here ends my open letter, which I hope will achieve the widest possible circulation within the pagan community.

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DONATIONS FOR WARBRIDES of Japan, a documentary, are desperately needed and are 100 percent tax deductible. While I do not normally use OAN for fund-raising, this is an especially worthy cause, as detailed in an e-mail Director Yayoi Winfrey recently sent me:

“Our production team has scheduled interviews with 11 Japanese war brides and/or their adult children in eight cities and three states. However, donations to our crowdfunding campaign, which began two weeks ago, has slowed down considerably, leaving us short on production funds. We desperately need your tax-deductible dollars for two airline tickets, car rental and gas plus hotel accommodations and meals for two weeks while we shoot. Won't you please help us get this documentary onto the screen? we would appreciate your participation no matter what size your donation.  Again, every dollar is tax-deductible if you donate at this site.  And please don't hesitate to ask questions you might have about where your donation dollars will go.”

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I HAVE COME to regard it as a kind of cheating to re-post comments I wrote on threads at other websites, but the following is the first time I have ever been able to bring myself to write publicly of the tragedy that – because it occurred during our society's pre-feminist refusal to acknowledge reproductive trauma – shattered the marriage shared by my second wife and me.

The writing was itself a surprise, my entirely unpremeditated response to an emotionally wrenching report  detailing the birth of a dead child and the creditor-intensified emotional devastation it inflicted on both parents.

What follows is slightly expanded from the original, which was condensed to fit Reader Supported News' 1500-character space restriction:

Albeit without the crushing debt that afflicted the author of the RSN essay after the death of her daughter, my second wife and I were similarly wounded by the death of our son. Hence we share Ms. Blossom's sorrow.

Ironically, we lived in Manhattan, the psychiatric capitol of the world, but it was 1967, and the feminist movement had yet to raise USian emotional consciousness enough for the shrinks to recognize the trauma associated with a still-born child.

We had made our baby deliberately and knowingly, gazing into one another's eyes amidst the exquisite pleasure and infinite joy of love, and like the Blossoms, we were anticipating, with all the characteristic happiness and apprehension, our transformation from a couple into a family. Adrienne, in that singularly female bio-emotional way of knowing  – a mode of perception we men can never truly comprehend  – had decided as a child age seven or eight she wanted a son named Loren, and now she was collecting the requisite baby clothes and related items ancillary to the fulfillment of her desire and intention. I on my part had already decided to give up the uncertain life of an editorial freelancer, take a staff job on one of the many New Jersey dailies that surrounded the City and thus aim for an eventual slot on one of the Manhattan papers, most likely The New York Post, which then before Rupert Murdoch bought it and destroyed it was the most proudly Left-leaning daily in the United States.

But at the end of our sixth month of pregnancy a moral imbecile for whom there are not vile enough pejoratives in any language ran for a train, and in his vicious haste – cursed may he be – he knocked Adrienne down the long flight of iron stairs to the lower level of the Union Square subway station. It was a Sunday; she had gone to visit friends on the Upper East Side, returned home that evening massively bruised and limping from the fall, and three days later our son was born dead.

My wife saw him briefly in the emergency room, an experience she cannot talk about even now, 49 years later. I viewed him for a moment as a nurse carried him in a glass jar through the Beth Israel Hospital emergency waiting room.

“Is that the Bliss baby,” I asked.

“Who are you,” she asked in reply.

“I'm the father,” I said. “May I see?”

Except for his purple color, he seemed perfectly formed, almost a twin of the infant I knew from pictures of myself as a babe-in-arms, his hair as near-black as my own was then.

I cannot yet describe my feelings as the nurse bore him away; even now no words suffice.

In keeping with that era's accepted practice, we stifled our grief. A year later it seemed we despised one another, and by 1974 we were divorced – though now in the final years of our lives we are again emotionally close though we live on opposite coasts.

Thanks to feminist consciousness-raising, trauma such as ours and the Blossoms is at last acknowledged, even unto the fact it is a wound from which full healing is rarely if ever achieved. But its hurt can indeed be ameliorated by therapy – save when capitalist greed prices such relief out of our reach, an atrocity the only cure for which is the abolition of capitalism – another of the many reasons my politics are what they are.

Meanwhile, if reincarnation is real, may that which animated our son live again as someone else's child – and this time thrive.

And yes, we would have named him Loren.

LB/8 August 2016.

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Grabshot of Girl Relishing Cake Foretells Good News

Photographed this young girl while I was on assignment in Tacoma's Wright Park a couple hours before doctors at Group Health Cooperative told me my congestive heart failure is stable and that if it remains so, I should live as long as genetics and Fate would otherwise have allowed. (Photograph copyright Loren Bliss 2016.) 

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MY APOLOGY FOR the unprecedentedly long silence, OAN's longest hiatus since I began its publication in 2009 and – or so I surely hope – a silence never to be repeated.

While the above cutline summarizes the good news, the details are (1) – that while the echo cardiogram my previous post said was forthcoming does indeed confirm I have congestive heart failure, it also indicates the condition is of a magnitude controllable by medication, exercise and weight loss; (2) – that despite an excruciatingly painful right knee (the bone-running-on-bone result of my 1978 radical meniscectomy  now severely inflamed by osteoarthritis), I am again managing to walk a mile almost every day; and (3) – that with my no-more-than-two-slices-of-bread-per-day diet, which I resumed once the devastation of temporary eviction was behind me, I am again losing weight, so much so I am now comfortably wearing belts with which I had not been able to cinch up my trousers since 2007.

The dark side of weight loss – the dark backside of poverty potentially brightened by a sudden full-moon at emotional midnight – is if I keep losing weight, I will eventually have to buy a new wardrobe, which is unaffordable thanks to the $155 per month Dem/GOP capitalist governance has slashed from my 2016 income. Thus like all of us impoverished folk I am being victimized to Baby Jesus nakedness by the weaponized poverty of Prosperity-Gospel Christianity, Thus too the reference to the full moon: an entirely do-able gesture of bare-assed defiance by anyone reduced to nudity by poverty.

Which, if we reflect on it, elevates nude dancing from its capitalist-proclaimed immorality to the very most moral, ¡no pasaran! form of revolutionary defiance – about which more in a moment.

Meanwhile I have – thanks to a beloved friend who is a genuine Witch, and to her patronesse and Muse who was not just a true Witch but a Laughing Witch brimming with love and humor 500 years ago in what is now Peru, I have a new mantra:

I refuse to be defined by victimization and trauma.
Instead I choose a path of healing and creativity.

I never before believed that sort of recitation of aspirations unto one's self was anything more than a human-potentialist variant of mental masturbation, but now I have discovered it does indeed work, and at long last, no doubt due to its self-hypnosis, I seem to be doing just what the cliche says, “putting behind me” the devastating trauma of my childhood and its vast intensification by the 1983 fire.

Thus it is easy to imagine my Witch ancestors Margaret Blisse and Mary Blisse, comely and successful mother and daughter farmers who were tried for witchcraft in 17th Century Connecticut and beat the rap, are laughing and applauding from their resting places in the Summerlands, unless of course they've been reborn in new bodies. (That they triumphed over envy and malice means they most likely were real Witches, knowledgeable in the clandestinely preserved skill to enchant with Truth, much as the legendary Jack Orion possessed similar skill  but as a man – such arts are remnants of the ancient matriarchies – could not do it with presence alone and thus required the aid of an instrument, originally a harp but by the 1600s a fiddle.

Meanwhile my mantra, which keeps changing as I change, has become an eerily appropriate accompaniment to a conversation I had with a young friend and comrade while walking in the park this very morning. She mentioned an Allen Ginsberg poem, Kaddish  (italicized rather than enclosed by quotation marks because it is an epic published as a separate book), and our conversation, which was about her own growth process, was also significant enough to my own psychological and political growth I looked up the Ginsberg work when I returned to my (now almost fully reconstructed ) home. (Yes, I met him several times in the City, and yes, I have all his published material.) There near the beginning of Kaddish, which I had not read in many years, I found a line that surely applies to all of us who are working to save our species from capitalism and its otherwise-inevitable extermination of our species and destruction of our planet, whether it does so by World War III or environmental ruin or some combination of both:

“...Dreaming back through life, Your time -- and mine accelerating
                                                        toward Apocalypse...”

Ginsberg's text thus prompted a response with my own words, first my oft-repeated statement that “in such times as these, when the One Percent has weaponized poverty and is using it in place of Zyklon B for our own genocidal removal, survival is a form of revolutionary defiance,” and then this I wrote on a Reader Supported News comment thread two days ago (for which scroll down):

Let us ask ourselves: why would the One Percenters want to ensure World War III?

Because -- precisely as their now-obviously permanent obstruction of effective climate-change amelioration proves beyond a scintilla of doubt -- they believe our species and our planet are already doomed.

Never mind it is obvious socialism could yet save us -- that it is in fact the only economic system capable of doing so.

It is equally obvious the One Percenters themselves -- who are most assuredly not stupid -- recognize socialism as our species' only possible mechanism of survival.

But fanatical capitalists (and therefore moral imbeciles) that they are, they are also suicidally committed to the doctrine of "better dead than Red."

They fear -- quite reasonably -- that after a socialist revolution, they would be the very first criminals to be arrested, tried and probably executed for their innumerable crimes against humanity.

Hence, like doomed serial killers making a suicidal last stand against certain arrest and execution, they want to ensure all the rest of us die with them.

Indeed, per Occam's Razor, this hypothesis explains all the situation's knowns and unknowns, hence is the only rational explanation for the USian Empire's terrifying renewal of thermonuclear war-mongering.

Which brings me back to my new mantra, revised yet again and now useful for anyone of any age or race or gender who is transcending subjugation:

I refuse to be defined by victimization and trauma.
Instead I choose the path of Revolution, within and without.

Hence the greater significance of the little girl smiling her cake-smeared joy at my camera: may my comrades and I ensure by our solidarity her daughter and her granddaughter and all the daughters and sons to follow will know such small but seismic pleasures.

But how then do I resolve the apparent conflict between being a Marxian (and therefore a dialectical materialist) and the apparent contradiction of also being a Gaian Pagan (and a Pagan not by fad or adaptation or mere inclination but as a direct consequence of two undeniable, inexplicable and unquestionably demanding encounters with its Source)?

Preview: in the ultimate sense, I see no conflict at all. In fact I am convinced each is essential to sustain the other.

Stay tuned.

LB/17 July 2016

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USian Empire Now the Planet's Primary Source of Evil

 

Again this image reveals its iconic nature: originally about the quest for world peace rendered fruitless by the USian Empire's relentless aggression, it now becomes a symbol of afflicted Nature and therefore of oft-thwarted Clotho, Spinner of the threads of life, to whom the late Tim Buckley once sang, “If you tell me of all the pain you've had, I'll never smile again.” Photo by Loren Bliss copyright 1971: Nikon F, 105mm f/2.5 Nikkor, Tri-X in D-76 for 800 ASA. (Permission granted for non-commercial use with photo credit and attribution to Outside Agitator's Notebook.) Click on image to view it full size. 

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(Yes, there is another damnable OAN schedule change implicit in this text. Rather than post once per month, as I had proposed, or once per week, as I did for at least a year, I am now going to post randomly – that is, whenever I have a photograph to show or something to say and the time in which to show or say it. My apology for any inconvenience.)

 

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THE REALITY OF EVIL, nominally a theological question, has again been snatched out of the protective obscurity of that comfortably abstract realm of monasteries and convents and dumped like a steaming, butthole-reeking pile of shit onto our dinner-tables in the real (and really injurious world) of realpolitik, and this time the dumper-in-chief is not some conquest-hungry foreign despot (Kaiser Wilhelm II as in 1914) or even three such despots (Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo as in 1941). The people who are shitting all over us are instead (and far more ominously) a tiny clique of our own fellow citizens – that semi-invisible circle of inconceivably wealthy, obscenely powerful plutocrats who own and/or control the United States and all its governments at all levels and ever-more-openly use its bureaucrats and generals and police chiefs and judges and politicians, whom they also own, to facilitate their own morally imbecilic pursuits.

There is general agreement the consequences are evil – ask for example any of the innumerable homeless youth who five years ago were normal kids part of a normal working family living in a normal and normally mortgaged suburban house until the Great Wall Street Ripoff of 2007-2009 outsourced Dad's job and abolished Mom's job and foreclosed the house and flung Mom and Dad and their two offspring into the streets and destroyed their family. Now the kids are throw-away children thrown away to survive by their own wits because under capitalism (and beyond all the pseudo-romantic bullshit peddled by Madison Avenue), capitalist marriage and therefore capitalist family is merely another profit-seeking, profit-centered capitalist relationship, which means when there is no more profit to be extracted, the relationship naturally disintegrates. But here amidst all this manifest evil, seemingly nobody but the (intellectually shackled and therefore increasingly irrelevant) Abrahamic clergy dares think about what evil is or where it comes from or whether it should be spelled “Evil,” proper-noun cap “E,” or minimized as a lower-case common noun, merely “evil” and therefore of no greater significance than bad weather, the societal equivalent of a hurricane or a tsunami.

That's why, when I describe the consequences of capitalism as “evil” – and especially when I capitalize it as “Evil” (as below in “the U.S. has become the primary source of Evil on this planet”) – a lot of secularists are offended. They (legitimately) fear some Abrahamic subversive is at work, subtly jihading for patriarchy.

But as it says in the Porgy and Bess song, “It ain't necessarily so.”  Yes, I admit the tendency to cite “evil” or “Evil” is often a defining characteristic of obnoxiously crusading Christians, Muslims and Jews. But I am none of the above. I regard evil and Evil as purely human byproducts spawned not by talking serpents but by the genetic flaws in the tyrannosauric bipeds one finds in board rooms and executive offices. Moreover, Webster's third definition of evil – “causing harm” – neatly severs it from religious dogmatism. And if you want to deduce my beliefs, merely read the sidebar to OAN; then reflect on how, over the years, I have repeatedly portrayed myself as an agnostic influenced by Zen, Taoism and First Nations beliefs but mostly leaning toward paganism – specifically Goddess-centered paganism. I outed my spiritual self most recently in a minor dispute with an avowed Christian in a Reader Supported News discussion thread that touched on how USian Empire's methodical destabilization of human society is one if its primary weapons of global conquest.  Deliberately engineering the collapse of human society to suppress our collective ability to oppose enslavement is indeed Evil, and it is Evil in the same sense the term was used to describe the depredations of Hitler. No other label adequately describes the horrors the capitalists – the One Percenters and their Ruling Class vassals – are knowingly and with malice aforethought inflicting on us and our planet.  As I said on the same RSN thread, “capitalism IS corruption – the bribery of the masses with the bright baubles of trinket materialism, all to free the One Percent so they can amass obscene profit by murdering us and raping our planet.” And what is corruption but another of the subsets of Evil?

***

RSN'S MOST RECENT discussions on the empire's global destabilization campaign was probably triggered by an original William Boardman piece that ran a couple of days earlier about the destabilization of Ukraine.

But Boardman, who is by far the best of RSN's staff reporters, neglected to explore the darker aspects of the probable motives for the empire's ongoing provocation of Russia. Hence my response, here somewhat revised from its original published form:

Absent from Boardman's otherwise brilliant analysis of the ever-escalating U.S. provocation of Russia is the probability its ultimate psychological driver is the One Percent's truly bottomless terror not just of Communism but of socialism in any form. While the associated fanaticism is repeatedly demonstrated by the blank-check support the U.S. reflexively grants any tyrant who pledges to exterminate socialists – note again the abysmal human-rights records of the USian satropies – it is nevertheless difficult to quantify, which is probably why Boardman omitted it from his text.

Meanwhile the empire's relentless drive toward war with Russia remains incomprehensible until we recognize the implications of the fact the Russian population has, within its living memory, experienced the differences between capitalism and socialism. And though today the Russian people tolerate capitalism as a necessary evil, there is no question they remain fiercely committed to the humanitarian benefits of socialism. That is why they rejected the “economic genocide” of Wall-Street-ally Yeltsin's disaster capitalism  for Putinism,  which has been as dramatic a change for post-Soviet Russia as the New Deal was for the depression-crippled United States. That is also why the Communist Party – in recognition of its economic doctrine of “from each according to ability, to each according to need” – remains the nation's second largest political organization.

Were the Russian preference for socialism to again become the pivotal element in Russian policy, as it was during the Soviet era, such a development – particularly given the exemplar of capitalist malevolence that is global austerity – could easily expand into an unprecedented drive for international revolution. The ever-worsening misery the capitalists' insatiable greed is deliberately inflicting on workers everywhere is the one truly irrefutable argument for socialism. Were there still a Soviet Union to evoke it, the ultimate global victory of socialism – if not of Marxist-Leninist Communism per se – would be assured.

Hence we can be sure the greatest fear of the USan Empire is the resurrection inside Russia of a state consciousness comparable to that of the Soviet Union, but – especially since capitalist psychological warfare has not yet robbed the Russians of their ability to learn from experience – without the U.S.S.R.'s ideological and administrative handicaps that made it relatively easy prey to Wall Street's economic warriors. Hence too the U.S. response: not only destabilization of the Russian state, but – via a third world war – the extermination of all those Russian people whose lives bear witness to the humanitarian superiority of socialism. Which, surely not coincidentally, is exactly the response proposed by Hitler, whose colleagues, through their One Percent connections, became the paramount influences in shaping postwar USian foreign policy. And the Russians, politically astute as they are, are surely aware of what intentions now obtain in the wholly owned Wall Street subsidiary of Washington D.C.

***

THE EMPIRE'S GLOBAL campaign of deliberate destabilization was also the core topic of a Robert Parry report RSN reprinted from Parry's Consortium News. But Parry – superb reporter that he normally is – nevertheless deftly dismisses this geopolitical “madness” as if it were merely an anomaly rather than the new national norm of world conquest it has become. Hence my reply, this too revised from its original form:

Despite my huge respect for Parry's reportorial and analytical skills, I fear he remains in bondage to his original notions about the (allegedly) benevolent nature of United States, a captivity proven by his failure to recognize the irremediable magnitude of the Nazi-like malevolence that has become its defining quality. Nor does he see the broader truth of U.S. capabilities and intentions as demonstrated by the intentional destabilization first of the Middle East, now of Europe and eventually of all human society.

To arrive at this admittedly horrendous view of USian capabilities and intentions, we must consider five facts, which inevitably lead us to three (obvious and therefore undeniable) conclusions:

The facts are (1)-the breathtakingly manipulative, astoundingly long-range planning capability demonstrated by capitalism in controlling and predicting human behavior; (2)-the obvious application of this capability to global politics; (3)-the ideology of the One Percent, particularly as expressed by Ayn Rand and Adolph Hitler, in which politics and economics are mutually sustaining endeavors; (4)-the exposed intentions of the One Percent, which include the imposition of “disaster capitalism” (Naomi Klein) and the radical reduction of the human population (Paul and Anne Ehrlich; and (5)- the One Percent's total ownership of government and mass media, by which it exercises hitherto unimaginable control over every aspect of USian life and, increasingly, over every aspect of human life everywhere on this planet.

Thus – and here is where Parry seems blinded by the residue of a no-longer-sustainable patriotism – it is only logical to conclude what was formerly considered unthinkable: that (6)-the destabilization inflicted on the Middle East and now on Europe was foreseen (much as the psychological consequences of marketing are foreseen); that (7)-the resultant chaos, especially the resurrection of European fascism, was also foreseen and is itself intentional, and that (8)-its long-range purposes – in compliance with the internationalization of Nazi foreign policy achieved by Ayn Rand economics – are threefold. Reasoning from events already underway, these are (A)-forcible population reduction (whenever possible in a “coincidental” manner intentionally rendered difficult to document as genocide), of which the drowned corpse of little Alan Kurdi is surely an ultimate archetype; (B)-imposition of “disaster capitalism” – that is, the de facto fascism of zero-tolerance One Percent rule – on the entire planet, Europe most assuredly included and, as a result, (3)-the imposition of an Ayn Rand (Neocon) version of Hitler's Thousand Year Reich to ensure the One Percent and its descendants survive the forthcoming environmental apocalypse with sufficient slaves to maintain the obscene comforts to which they have long been accustomed.

When one factors in all the variables – especially the USian repetition of destabilizations – no other hypothesis is plausible. As I said at the beginning, the U.S. has become the primary source of Evil on this planet. And it is still acting out the policy of economic jihad first publicly acknowledged during the Vietnam War: “we had to destroy the village (or the planet) to save it (from socialism).”

LB/8-14 September 2015

-30-

Another Apology, Another Change; Trump Could Be the One Percent's Long-Sought Hitler; BLM Right to Disrupt (Fake) Democracy, Wrong to Silence Genocide Foes; Rejecting the No-Crop Credo of Full-Frame Photo Fanatics; Science Fiction Solves a Cosmic Riddle

Relishing the morning sunlight (second published variant).  Photo by Loren Bliss copyright 2015:  from the work-in-progress, "Lives Apart."  For  data and commentary see “Forsaking Fallacies,” below. 

*

BLOGGING HAS BECOME burdensome, partly because of conflicting obligations arising from other unpaid volunteer editorial work. That is one reason this post is so belated, and why I am again compelled to apologize to readers who had expected more and better. But that is only one part of the story.

Another aspect is a condition characteristic not of this blog alone but of any writing I dare attempt without the protection of a competent editor or at least a reliable proofreader. It is an old problem, often set aside or thrust into the background but impossible to solve, in July hauled once more into painful and discouraging focus by yet another outbreak of familial hostilities  that among other things forced me to again acknowledge – this time as never before – my huge weariness with the always desperate, always fearful struggle against dyslexia, a condition now relentlessly spotlighted by the often-brutal self-honesty that seems to be among the genetic mandates of old age.

For me, that struggle is the defining, inescapably discouraging element in any act of complex verbal expression. I long ago acquired sufficient loquaciousness to hide it – a knowingly dishonest but necessary tactic I had perfected probably no later than my sixth year, unquestionably as a defense against my father's hatefulness. But I have never been able to shield myself from the infinitely embittering fact dyslexia always wins. Worse, it seems my defeat is invariably fated to be revealed publicly, these days by some grotesquely stupid misspelling or glaringly obvious typographical or mathematical error that – like the reading troubles which nearly caused me to fail first and second grade – confirms yet again my father's infinitely repeated denunciation of me as “goon boy.”

What rescued me from the Sargasso Sea of emotional and intellectual problems that are invariably inflicted by reading difficulties was the intervention of a maternal aunt, the one member of my mother's family who did not regard me as a pariah and to whom I therefore remain forever thankful. This blessed woman whose name was Alecia hired a summertime tutor who taught me reading as phonics rather than word-recognition. (The latter, impossible for a dyslexic, reduces written English to Chinese-style ideographs but is nevertheless favored by lazy teachers, including those at Jacksonville, Florida's Norwood Elementary School c. 1946-1948.) As it turned out, Alecia's beneficence was the finest most pivotal gift I would receive in this entire lifetime: by the middle of third grade I was reading at a 12th-grade level.

But the (arguably unfit) parent who was my (officially unfit) birthmother's sperm-source would not stop calling me “goon boy” until 1952 or 1953, when I was 12 or 13. Though he has been dead since 1971, I realize now his hateful curse – which like all such parental damnation is a curse in every possible sense of the word – will follow me into the grave. Meanwhile, exactly as it has always done, it continues to rob the writing-process of even the most minimal emotional reward, reducing it to an endlessly wary slog through a mine-field of potential mortification.

To the long-ago editor of a long-ago periodical who demanded to know why I invariably waited until the last minute to write my stories, I can now change my original answer – “I dunno; I just do” – to a statement of painful truth: that only by approximating the deadline pressures of covering breaking news for a daily newspaper am I able to nullify the paralytic fear of revealing the “goon boy” I will always in my heart-of-hearts believe I am.

Yet, as I said at the beginning, the never-ending battle against dyslexia and the self-hatred it invariably engenders is only part of a larger discouragement.

July's bout with familial hostility underscored by its real-world events the message of a dream I dreamt nearly two years ago: “you can eat with the Blisses this one time,” my eerily resurrected father said in the dream, “but then I want you out of here.” Thus the dream-factory of my subconscious was finally in my 73rd year acknowledging as absolute truth what I had feared since my fifth summer, 1945, when my father tried unsuccessfully to convince the state of Virginia to allow him to abandon me in one of its orphanages. In other words, my presence in the Bliss family after my father discovered the extent of my birthmother's madness at best an intrusion – and more often than not a mightily resented burden.

That 2013 dream's revelations had been profoundly disturbing, more so than I can possibly describe, and now in July 2015 its hurtfulness was renewed by my realization that no matter what I might say or do, in the eyes of all the Blisses except perhaps three – influenced as they remain by my father's oft-expressed contempt and resentment of me – I will always be damned. Thus there was really no point in doing anything other than metaphorically burning the proverbial bridges. Better the jagged-edged truth of out-in-the-open animosity than the soothing charade of bogus closeness that predictably turned to hostility if I ever dared call upon it even to the slightest degree.

What surprised me – and here we return to specific reasons for my absence from the blogosphere – was how emotionally draining this conclusive conflict was. Obviously I am not as resilient as I used to be. In my childhood and youth and through most of my adulthood, I could sidestep such episodes – and there were many – with sufficient alacrity to remain at least professionally functional. Even the most emotionally devastating of familial betrayals, my father's elaborate denunciation of me to my second wife, did not impair my ability to function as a journalist, whether with a typewriter or a camera, especially the latter. At the time (1968) I was 28 years old, and my experience since then has been that as one ages, one (thankfully) becomes ever more hardened to familial trauma. Perhaps though one's increasing proximity to the grave not only imposes that harsh mandate of honesty I mentioned earlier, but also an equally irresistible insistence on emotional openness.

It is a bit of an aside, but no doubt the reason I have always favored photography over writing is the former's blessed freedom from dyslexic taint – and therefore from the invisible but nevertheless reflexive intellectual cringing that is such a huge part of my father's legacy to me. Photography, itself the act of liberation writing could never be, is thus also liberated to become a passionate expression of passion – or so it was before the fire, and now blessed as I am by digital manumission from prohibitive film costs, so it seems to be becoming once again. By contrast, writing – even at its very best – has never gotten beyond mere intellectual exercise and obviously never will.

But it was not just the realm of blood-kin family – not “my family” because after 1945 I had no real family – that my father so diligently worked to poison. Whenever he had the opportunity, he belittled me to my lovers, friends and colleagues, many of whom, often with astonishment, reported his enmity. Characteristically, he seized upon the chance to denounce me to my second wife when she sought to enlist his assistance in saving our marriage from the mutual acting-out that beset us both in the wake of the miscarriage that took our much-wanted son. My father's response was to tell my wife she had been a fool for marrying me. He said I was “just like (my) mother,” adding that I was the genetically defective, certainly neurotic, probably crazy, possibly retarded spawn of a certified madwoman – the same “honesty” (his term) he shared with any of my friends and colleagues whenever he had the opportunity.

He had badmouthed me to my first wife too, but for her I was nothing more than a stepladder out of the Baltimore slums – she had never loved me, a painful truth she would reveal to me in 1961, while I was serving in Korea as part of my U.S. Regular Army enlistment (active duty November 1959-September 1962; reserves until October 1965). Hence she was indifferent to his slanders and untroubled by what they represented. Hence too, I didn't much give a damn what my father told her; I knew whatever he said to her, it would not alter the course of our relationship, which in any case was destined to end in divorce as soon as my wife determined it had fulfilled her stepladder needs.

But the circumstances of the 1968 incident – the episode involving my second wife – made it indescribably painful, not the least because each of us was trying desperately (and in our own often-ham-handed ways) to save our marriage. Despite all these stresses, in the professional sense I remained fully functional, so much so 1968 was a year in which my skill as a picture editor and layout artist helped my employer win significant editorial awards.

Now though in 2015 a far briefer encounter with the lingering residue of my father's beyond-the-grave malevolence shut me down completely. Until now, every attempt I made to write for OAN was stillborn, and it took a harsh regimen of self-imposed discipline for me to even get out the August edition of the monthly newsletter I produce for the senior housing project in which I dwell. Afterward – that is, after the newsletter is printed – I had always been elated, but this time I was as exhausted as if I had done two weeks of hard physical labor. Thus I spent most of the rest of the month either distracting myself by obsessing on old memories or new trivia or lying abed sleeping 10, 12 or 14 hours a day.

Atop all that – and here is the final hindrance to my resumption of OAN – there is my increasingly unshakable conviction we are indeed a doomed species on a dying planet,  which – if true – reduces all our lives to the absolute-zero of meaninglessness.

It means any life no matter its accomplishments or lack thereof is literally of no consequence. It means anything Rebecca Solnit (or anyone else) writes from a lets-organize-and-save-the-world perspective (or any other perspective beyond selfish entertainment) is at best grandiosity and at worst a collective spasm of denial. It means anything Gene Smith (or anyone else) has photographed is nothing more than a visual exclamation point. It means whatever choice one makes – whatever one does or does not do – is meaningless. It also means Ayn Rand is H. sapiens sapiens' ultimate philosopher – that her implicitly Nazifying credo of morally imbecilic self-indulgence is the only doctrine philosophically correct for our species and our planet – and that the One Percenters' limitless, fuck-the-world-we'll-all-be-dead-soon orgy of parasitic consumption is therefore the highest possible expression of human reality and therefore of our species' potential for achievement. It means we humans are no different from the conveyor-belt chickens we sadistically convert to food by dragging them upside-down and squawking to their mechanically tortured deaths – that we and our victims and the random motes of insentient stardust on the solar wind are are literally equal in cosmic insignificance.

Mostly though it means the abyssal nihilism of the post-modernists is utterly justified. If there is no meaning in anything save that which the individual (whether human or fowl) arbitrarily assigns it, the perfect corollary, the sacrament of Confirmation for serial killers and slaughter-house victims alike, is the apocalyptic gospel of Capitalist Saint John Galt. Which in turn means consciousness itself is meaningless, making it at best a cosmic joke, at worst an irrefutable argument Nature's ultimate achievement is not sentient life but its opposite: any object with no emotional or intellectual capacity whatsoever and therefore, beyond its molecular valences, literally both heedless and needless.

If, as Marshal McLuhan  dared posit, all real art contains elements of genuine prophecy, here too is perhaps the message in the zombie metaphor that has become so wildly popular in Moron Nation cinema and all its related marketing campaigns and profiteering. By reductio ad absurdum, that is, by reducing zombification to a comfortably unreal spectacle of comedic violence, the One Percenters – who remember own not just the government but the media by which we the governed are conditioned, commanded and controlled – cunningly ensure we are increasingly insulated from the unspeakable truth we ourselves are already the living dead.

Life then truly is naught but terminal illness – one in which environmental ruin is already evident  as the primary symptomatology. When there is to be no future, why bother to write anything? Why – beyond the personal satisfaction I get from the competent seizure of a telling image – even bother to photograph?

And is it not true that in the personal microcosm of futility imposed by the fire that destroyed my life's work, I have experienced the collective macrocosm of futility that now defines our entire species?

The older I get – the closer to the grave I am dragged by the inescapably terminal tow-chain of time – the more I am inclined to devote my remaining hours to small and meaningless pleasures, just as I did for nearly three hours a couple of days ago, watching a big brown-and-white autumnal spider build a glistening web between the northward-looking picture-window that spans the wall above my desk and the property-line windbreak of junipers that's maybe five yards beyond the glass. The spider is an arachnid prima ballerina on a choreography of web, her accompaniment a concerto of light and shadow. I watch her until she retreats into the vibrantly green foliage. Then for another 30 minutes or so I study the play of light upon her ephemeral geometry, for a time drifting into that blessed Zen state in which I become one with what I am observing and therefore, if I am so inclined, invariably make my best photographs.

There is no price tag on the rewards of such solitary silent mindfulness. Their value is indescribable. But I find such passages indescribably exquisite, and their exquisiteness has become as vital to me as breath itself.

Couple that change-of-attitude dynamic with the real-time obligations imposed by photographing, writing, editing and producing the monthly newsletter – said newsletter has grown to the point the associated work takes nearly two full-time weeks each month – and you've got the reasons OAN has now become (and will probably remain) essentially a monthly publication.

Oh, I'll no doubt post an Extra if events so demand. And – yes – I'm (of course) continuing the photo essay, working title “Lives Apart,” that I began here in the geezer ghetto in 2011, and – again yes – I will continue posting some of its images on OAN, never mind that beyond this blog there is no longer any publisher for such work, nor (as long as capitalism rules) will there ever be again.

Meantime, to all those who had expected I would do better, I once more apologize. Quoth Lao Tzu:

If a sage of the lowest order hears about TAO
He laughs loudly about it.
If he does not laugh loudly
Then it was not yet the true TAO.

*** *** *** *** ***

Trump Could Be the One Percent's Long-Sought USian Hitler

READER SUPPORTED NEWS has been republishing Matt Taibbi's Rolling Stone reports on Donald Trump's quest for the Republican presidential nomination, but for some reason – probably the mandates of writing for a publication that despite its pseudo-radicalism is (and always has been) unequivocally capitalist – Taibbi never dares acknowledge the historical parallels that define Trump's candidacy.

The first of Taibbi's stories, entitled “The Republican Assault on Trump May Only Make Him Stronger,” appeared on 8 August and prompted me to add, via its comment thread, the very analysis Taibbi carefully omitted:

What Trump has done – the sin the Republican inner circle cannot forgive him – is reveal the naked hatefulness that fuels the party's popularity with U.S. voters.

The party is the true voice of the U.S. One Percent. That's why it has been the primary vessel of USian fascism since the party's owners began their pivotal funding of Mussolini and Hitler. What Trump has done – the sin the Republican inner circle cannot forgive him – is reveal the naked, Nazi-intensity hatefulness that fuels the party's (growing) popularity with U.S. voters.

Nevertheless, its rhetorical strategy has been to render lip service to the USian Big Lie of "liberty and justice for all." But Trump, having flung away all such restraints, now expresses the true malevolence of white USian consciousness. Acknowledging the reality of Moron Nation, he offers himself as its leader.

Now at last the civilized peoples of the world – and all the targeted peoples here in the imperial homeland – can no longer deny the moral imbecilic, might-makes-right savagery that has become the core credo of USian governance whether at home or abroad.

***

Will Trump win the nomination? I'd say almost certainly; no other candidate in my lifetime has dared personify so openly the empire's predatory nature. Will he become president? Probably – unless he is opposed by Sanders, in which we will have, at last, an an obvious choice between the capitalist reality of absolute Evil – greed elevated to ultimate virtue (the methodical rejection of every humanitarian precept our species has ever set forth) – versus the socialist hypothetical of collective Good: "from each according to their ability; to each according to their need."

***

Three points in explanation:

(1)-Trump is the true voice of white USia, the Ku Klux, neo-Nazi voice the One Percent likes to keep silenced because – when it is allowed to speak freely – the reality of the USian Empire as the Fourth Reich becomes undeniable;

(2)-Hillary has exactly the same Ayn Rand values, but (A) hides them very deftly and (B) is perfectly positioned as an identity-politics candidate to silence any genuine discussion of class war – the one historical truth that, once brought into proper focus, proves beyond argument the necessity of socialism to human survival.

(3)-Sanders, though running as a Democrat, is by his personally declared socialism providing an antidote to seven and one-half decades of anti-socialist toxins. Thereby he is rehabilitating the entire spectrum of socialist thought.

Hence the unprecedented consequences of Sanders' candidacy, and even more so of a Sanders presidency: first the resurrection of the New Deal as President Roosevelt intended it (and most assuredly not as the Missouri political-machine operative Truman debased it). Then – in the socialist renaissance that inevitably follows – the continuation of the revolution We the People intended when we made FDR our longest-serving president.

The question, of course, is whether the Ruling Class with all its disruptive genius will be able to shatter the united-front majority of oppressed minorities (including Left-leaning whites) that would ensure Sanders' victory.

***

Taibbi's second report, “Donald Trump Just Stopped Being Funny,” republished by RSN on 22 August, got a bit closer to the ugly truth, but still carefully avoided any reference to the historical precedents vital to understanding the significance of Trump's run for office. Again I attempted to fill in the blanks:

Do not be deluded by the apparent opposition to Trump. Capitalism can survive only by morphing into Nazism. That's why the One Percent has (clandestinely) sought a second Hitler since the Red Army saved us from the first. And now, in the person of Trump, our capitalist overlords have precisely what they want.

Remember too the One Percenters own government at every level, the mass media, all Republican candidates and probably all Democratic candidates. They control the national mentality to a degree not even Josef Goebbels could have imagined, and they are using that control to ensure Trump's success.

As to Mr. Taibbi's bewilderment by Trump's skyrocketing popularity, Mr. Taibbi was apparently never a target of schoolyard bullies. Apparently too he never witnessed the relentless sadism with which USian students mercilessly torment a child who is visibly crippled, as by polio.

Otherwise he would understand such atrocities define this nation. They reveal – as do racism, austerity and wars of extermination – the signature hatefulness of the USian people, who with their prosperity-gospel Christianity and their Ayn Rand codas of moral imbecility were primed long ago for Nazification. They have been awaiting the second coming of der Fuehrer ever since.

Trump does indeed bring to mind Mussolini. But the Il Duce posturing...is merely part of the comic-opera facade that hides the unspeakable malevolence of the first true USian Hitler.

***

Yes it is (frightening). What most of us have forgotten is the how the USian One Percenters – who financed the rise of Mussolini in Italy and Hitler in Germany – also (with German and Italian backing) attempted a fascist coup here in 1934.

Their Bankers Plot (for which Google) was stymied by a genuine patriot, Gen. Smedley Butler USMC, (for whom Google), but it was only because of the Communist Party press – and probably Soviet intelligence operatives – the story became enough widely known to embarrass the mainstream press into covering it.

Then of course after World War II the One Percenters got their revenge – the anti-Communist, anti-socialist, anti-intellectual purges to ensure there would never again be a true and truly functional Left in the United States, and the Cold War to avenge the Soviet victory in what the Russians aptly call "the Great Patriotic War against Fascism."

Meanwhile the original Bankers Plot perpetrators and their sons and grandsons have been looking for another Hitler ever since.

They've found local Hitlers – Diem, Pinochet, the colonels of the Greek junta – but until now they've never had anybody positioned to take over the Empire and complete capitalism's conquest of the globe.

And don't for a minute imagine Trump is not the One Percent's candidate. Look at the savagery of the policies their wholly owned politicians are inflicting on us. "Austerity" is a euphemism for genocide.

If they could resurrect Hitler, they surely would.

***

Most of what was written about the Bankers Plot  has been suppressed. Congress investigated, but there were no indictments, and the record was permanently sealed.

I first heard of the plot from my late father, a Communist during the 1930s. I learned more from two Communists I knew as a young man, both of whom had fought Franco's fascists in Spain.

The plotters intended to oust President Roosevelt – presumably by military coup, though this was never clear – then consolidate their victory by turning the American Legion into a domestic SS, which would make up for the U.S. military's post-World-War-I shrunkenness until it was re-expanded to global-conquest size.

The U.S. would have become the (ultimately dominant) partner in a Rome-Berlin-Tokyo-Washington D.C. Axis.

Gen. Butler's role was to have been the Legion/SS leader and perhaps – this too is unclear – the new president. But the plotters did not reckon on his "war-is-a-racket" patriotism, and he refused them.

Here the story becomes even more muddled. The two Spanish Civil War vets said Soviet agents – probably GRU (Red Army intelligence) rather than OGPU (KGB) – already had the plot infiltrated and ensured Butler's ability to expose it via the Communist press.

If true, this would explain one of the mysteries of World War II: why Roosevelt trusted Stalin – not because FDR was naive, but because Soviet agents had saved the New Deal and his presidency.

***

My final contribution to the Taibbi/Trump discussion was in rebuttal to an articulate but sometimes ill-informed poster screen-named bmiluski, who repeatedly expresses an impassioned hatred of Russia and Russians and is a perpetual defender of the U.S. coup in the Ukraine, which on other threads often pits us against one another. On this thread too, bmiluski emerged as an opponent, bristling at my unsparing view of U.S. history: “Loren, I really take umbrage with your describing these actions as USian. WRONG...this is typical human behavior and exists in some degree or another in every single country on this planet. To subscribe it to one country is not only naive but disingenuous.”

Au contraire. bmiluski.

Start with the extermination of First Nations peoples. Add the millions murdered as "collateral damage" in myriad colonial wars and proxy-wars of economic conquest (think Latin America, Indochina, Korea, the Middle East, Greece, the Balkans, Africa, the Ukraine).

Then add the (uncounted) millions slain by USian capitalism's deadly profiteering (slavery, German Nazism, Italian and Spanish fascism, knowingly defective products [e.g., Ford Pinto], knowingly harmful drugs [e.g., thalidomide], workplace deaths [e.g., Bangladesh]). Remember the One Percenters own most of the world's major corporations.

Add also the slow-motion genocide implicit in the industrial world's most savage policies toward lower-income people. (Think death-dealing welfare “reform,” still more fatalities by denial of health care [including by the calculatedly prohibitive co-pays that define the Obamacare scam], the less-obvious deaths from cuts in food stamps, Medicare, Medicaid, cold-weather heating assistance, etc. ad nauseam).

And don't forget the war of extermination against people of color by the federally militarized police.

All those corpses damn us as our species' most murderous empire ever. Not even Nazi Germany came close.

Maybe that's why the U.S. spawns 75 percent of the world's serial killers. Perhaps they are the ultimate personification of the nation that believes itself to be the one true instrument of the (infinitely vengeful) Abrahamic god.

***

RSN's reprint of Taibbi's latest Rolling Stone piece on Trump is here.  Significantly, Taibbi continues to avoid the increasingly terrifying likelihood Trump will become the USian Hitler. Instead, Taibbi remains lost in the 2015 version of the same fog of arrogant optimism that, after der Führer's “impossible” victory, eventually morphed into terminal clouds of Zyklon B.

Meanwhile – as if in direct opposition to Trump's ever-more-undeniable Nazism – Democratic Candidate Bernie Sanders is evoking a socialist renaissance that is already alarming our capitalist overlords. The extent to which this is true is evidenced by Robert Reich's sudden emergence as a defender of capitalism.  The following is a small excerpt from my response:

Wake up, people. What we are witnessing here in Mr. Reich's pro-capitalist testimonial – and this is a very important point – is the sly, subtle and decidedly Machiavellian emergence of a new anti-socialist offensive by the One Percent and its functionaries. The offensive is intended to combat Bernie Sanders' popularization not just of socialism but also of the necessity of revolution. It shows us the extent to which the One Percent and in fact the entire Ruling Class is increasingly terrified by the Sanders campaign – not just the campaign itself, but the impetus it provides for the exploration of all forms of socialism, including Marxism, its most revolutionary form.

*** *** *** *** ***

BLM Right to Disrupt (Fake) Democracy, Wrong to Silence Genocide Foes

MUCH AS CHARGES of racism have been used to silence the critics of the promise-breaking president who conned us all with the most brazen Big Lie in USian political history and thus should be immortalized as Barack the Betrayer, so has Black Lives Matter used charges of racism to silence those who would tell the ugly truth about its suppression, at Westlake Park in Seattle on 8 August, of a rally against genocide.

That's what the four BLM activists – Marissa Johnson, Mara Jacqueline Willaford, a third woman and a man whose names were not reported by any source I read – shut down. And – yes – the rally they broke up was in fact a rally against genocide.

That's because “austerity” is nothing more than a cunning modern euphemism for the slow-motion, blame-the-victim version of what used to be done in death camps or by soldiers in the field but now is accomplished by the methodical termination of life-preserving stipends and services -– Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, food stamps, winter heating assistance, welfare, unemployment insurance, even the dependable telephone service so desperately needed by those who are critically ill.

With the entire safety net under ever-escalating attack by the austerity-minded Republican/Democrat coalition that rules the empire on behalf its One Percent owners, any rally in defense of Social Security and Medicare is therefore by definition a rally against genocide.

And that is precisely what the Westlake Park event was – a rally in defense of Social Security and Medicaid and therefore in opposition to genocide.

Moreover, anyone who claims the mantle of political activism should at the very least be sophisticated enough to distinguish between that sort of event (at which Presidential Candidate Bernie Sanders was merely one of a day-long slate of speakers) and an actual Sanders-for-President campaign rally as occurred at a somewhat less public University of Washington venue that same evening.

But the main point obscured by the BLM-orchestrated chorus and its charges of “racism” is that the idiocy of BLM's Seattle action, whether its enormous service to the Ruling Class was misguided or deliberate, has nothing whatsoever to do with race. It is instead another very specific manifestation of the anti-intellectualism that defines Moron Nation, the land of un-think in which nearly all the USian 99 Percent has been methodically imprisoned.

For those of us who witnessed firsthand how the (mostly white) Occupy Movement destroyed itself from within even as it was being crushed by government forces from without, the Westlake Park incident was a horrible moment of deja vu.

Its true racism was our (honky) hope and expectation blacks would somehow save us from ourselves, that BLM would be smarter and more savvy and therefore more effective than Occupy.

But the egotism and fuck-you selfishness that are among the most malignant manifestations of USian anti-intellectualism once again triumphed over rationality and purposefulness, and once again, as is always the case when there is neither ideological discipline nor even thoughtfulness (characteristics the increasingly self-obsessed USian youth are carefully conditioned to despise), we the people, all of us regardless of race, got slapped in the face by the invasive termination of a rally in which we were all of us to have been the beneficiaries.

That said, I heartily applaud the BLM practice of disrupting presidential-campaign events. Given the realities of capitalist governance, all such events are Big Lies. I say that not as a condemnation of Sanders, but in acceptance of the probability the Ruling Class will never allow him to be president even if he wins. In this context, the fate of President-in-Absentia Albert Gore Jr. is instructive. Gore won both the popular vote and the electoral vote, but the Ruling Class was already in the year 2000 so committed to fascism, they would not allow even a traditional albeit mildly conservative liberal to occupy the White House. For Gore, the fix was clearly in. But the real fix occurred on 22 November 1963, and it has been reinforced by every election since then, most recently by Barack the Betrayer's breathtaking Big Lie of “change we can believe in,” and probably next yearby Trump's unabashed Nazism – even if Sanders actually wins. Hence I hope BLM continues its disruptions throughout this year and next.

What follows, from the Popular Resistance website, is the partial text of my part in a long and very thoughtful discussion about the Westlake Park incident:

Speaking as the professional editor I sometimes am even in my 75th year, the fatal omission in (Jamie Utt's reporting for the website changefromwithin.org) is that the Seattle event disrupted by Black Lives Matter was most assuredly not a "Bernie rally."

Given the unusual depth to which the incident has been covered, Mr. Utt cannot possibly be unaware the event was instead a commemoration of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. It was organized by the AFL/CIO and the Washington State Labor Council to mark Social Security's 80th anniversary.

For Mr. Utt to tag the event a "Bernie rally" is therefore deliberate deception. Not only does it purposefully obscure the inappropriateness of BLM's targeting. It also conceals the fact much of the booing was an expression of legitimate anger at BLM's implicit alignment with two of the most reactionary forces in the United States: those who despise organized labor, and those who are (genocidally) destroying the programs upon which we seniors and disabled people – many of us black – depend for survival.

In this context, BLM's silencing of Sanders becomes yet another intensification of the ultimate (and ultimately unbridgeable) schism in U.S. politics – not race, but the boiling hatred envious youth are being conditioned to feel for those of us who are still (somewhat) protected by unions and by Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. The incident thus exemplifies divide et impera, and its sole beneficiary is of course the Ruling Class.

***

I later added the following in response to Kevin Zeese, one of the founders and editors of Popular Resistance:

Obviously and just as you say, the distinction between a rally for Social Security and Medicare versus a rally for Sanders is unimportant to the people who terminated the event. Where we differ is in our understanding of the significance of their action.

You say shutting down the event had "a good impact." I don't know your age, but an obsessively self-centered indifference to geriatric, disability and economic issues so expressed is surely typical of younger USians regardless of their race or socioeconomic status. I on the other hand am both physically disabled and old – and therefore, because I am no longer exploitable for profit, I am a prime target of the slow-motion genocide implicit in all the Obamanoid/Republican/Democrat austerity programs. Hence I regard the forcible termination of the Seattle event as yet another wound maliciously inflicted by the vast majority of USians who – again regardless of race – are (increasingly) hostile to the (increasingly) desperate needs of elderly and disabled people and lower-income people in general.

From this perspective, the forcible suppression of Sanders' protests against the empire's forthcoming Social Security cuts and its already imposed (and already deliberately deadly) cuts in Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, low-income energy assistance and other such programs is no less oppressive than the forcible suppression of BLM's protests against the empire's ongoing war of extermination against people of color. Both forms of protest are protests against the empire's diabolically clever methodologies of genocide. Murder is murder, whether by the active measures of the One Percenters' militarized police or by the passive measures imposed by the One Percenters' wholly-owned politicians. But apparently BLM is too self-centered (or perhaps too ignorant of realpolitik) to grasp the all-important point.its termination of the Social Security event was thus a huge (and hugely deplorable) service to the Ruling Class.

On the other hand, if, as you say, it was appropriate to shut down the save-Social-Security/save-Medicare event, then why is it not appropriate to shut down or at least disrupt every political event in the USian homeland? The political truth is the Bernie Sanders candidacy and the protest politics of Sen. Elizabeth Warren or U.S. representatives Alan Grayson or Jim McDermott are not only rendered meaningless by their minority status, but are in fact part of the Machiavellian methodology by which the One Percent maintains the Big Lie of USian representative "democracy." Thus the real function – indeed the only real function of Sanders, Warren, Grayson, McDermott and their very few like-minded colleagues – is to perpetuate not one Big Lie but two: firstly that the Democratic Party is (by some particularly deluded mode of magical thinking), somehow separate from the de facto one-party apparatus that tyrannizes the USian Empire on behalf its One Percent overlords; secondly that there are still functional vestiges of the empire's former (albeit racially limited) pseudo-democratic process.

But acquisition of this sort of political wisdom would require the Left's wholesale rejection of Moron Nation anti-intellectualism (the very affliction that destroyed Occupy from within even as the empire was destroying it from without), and then the thoughtful evolution of a disciplined ideology of class-struggle that fully accommodates the realities of racism and sexism. Alas, this will obviously never happen. The nation's anti-intellectualism is the by-product of a cradle-to-grave conditioning so relentless it is now effectively part of USian DNA – and that (the resultant impossibility of achieving ideological solidarity) – is why all USian efforts at forcing genuine humanitarian progress are either now and forever doomed or at the very least delayed until successive environmental cataclysms (perhaps) shatter the power of the capitalist Ruling Class.

Nevertheless, the statement by one of the BLM event-terminators that the USian political system has "never" represented black interests "and never will" is absolutely true not just for her immediate racial-identity constituency but, regardless of race, for every member of the USian empire's 99 Percent. From this perspective – here I repeat myself – all USian political events should be disrupted as the Big Lies they are.

But that too will never happen. The pivotal, Ayn-Rand-minded, morally imbecilic (un)consciousness that as a by-product of anti-intellectualism now shackles the vast USian majority – again regardless of race – is a carefully inflamed, bitterly envious, increasingly murderous hatred for anyone – especially union members and/or elderly and/or disabled people – who has thus far managed to cling to some tiny vestige of economic security. Moreover, anyone who doubts this grotesque aspect of USian realpolitik is in clinical denial of the extent to which the associated hatefulness is fueling the ever-more-victorious Republican blitzkrieg that is methodically sweeping the nation toward unabashed fascism and even a uniquely USian form of Nazism.

Like it or not, it is this (reflexively selective) denial – specifically denial that genocide by austerity is ultimately no different from genocide by bullet or truncheon – that is the ultimate message conveyed by BLM's termination of the Seattle rally. And so it will remain – at least until the Left acknowledges all such celebrations of USian history and/or present-day politics as tacit expressions either in brazen support of capitalist savagery or of the Big Lies that enable it – and therefore musters in sufficient numbers and with sufficient discipline to disrupt every such event.

(Disclosure, I am one of the millions of victims of the genocide-by-austerity budget cuts in question. The Great Wall Street Ripoff of 2007-2010 took nearly 70 percent of my annual income, permanently obliterated the market for my [award-winning] photographic and editorial skills and bankrupted me as well. Since then my only income is a Social Security pension, and so it will be for however much longer I survive. My pension is so small that since 2009 it has qualified me for welfare. Last year this included $137 per month in food-stamps, an $18 per month stipend paid to the local land-line telephone-service provider plus various Medicaid supplements to the health care I purchase via Medicare. But this year, thanks to the aforementioned, slow-motion genocide imposed by Republican/Democrat austerity policies, my food stamps have been slashed $37 per month, and the $18-per-month telephone assistance has been permanently eliminated. Meanwhile my Medicare co-pays for the life-sustaining specialist services of cardiology and physical therapy have skyrocketed 400 percent, and I am now forced to pay 20 percent for life-sustaining laboratory tests that until this year cost me nothing.)

The Medicare cost-increases and the Medicaid and food-stamp cuts are all the work of the federal government – specifically Obama's back-room coalition of Democrats and Republicans – the de facto one-party apparatus that rules the nation despite the refusal by the mass-media propaganda machine to acknowledge or expose it.

Termination of the telephone stipend was inflicted by Washington state's Democrats, who (again) hurled lower-income people under the proverbial bus to save the state's breathtakingly huge tax exemptions for Big Business – billions of dollars that add up to the largest sum of state tax exemptions in the U.S. This means that as Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and the state's other parasitically wealthy resident executives siphon off ever-more-malignant profits, the state's lowest-income elderly and disabled people are suddenly and permanently denied the reliable telephone service essential to staying alive. (Yes, there is still the federal free-cell-phone service, but cell phones are notoriously unreliable, particularly given the destructive weather inflicted by terminal climate change.) Which in turn means – just as the One Percenters and their political vassals intend – these seniors and disabled people are forever cut off from 911 emergency services and are therefore soon to be dead – precisely the circumstances and outcome implicitly endorsed by BLM's selective disruption of the anti-austerity, save-Social-Security, save-Medicare event in Seattle – no matter whether BLM's endorsement was calculatedly malicious or merely thoughtless.

Update: BLM now says it will stop its exclusive targeting of Sanders and disrupt Republican presidential campaign events also.

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Forsaking Fallacies Fostered by Full-Frame Photo Fanatics

ART IS OFTEN turned sour by its reduction to meaningless ornamentation or its exploitation for mercantile messaging.

Hypothetical examples of the latter – at least I dearly hope they are hypothetical – would include the grotesquely offensive use of fine art to sell big-ticket ego-supplements. Picture, for example, a Modigliani nude appropriated for a Hummer commercial, or consider the perversion of the best, most revolutionary music of the 1960s into themes of trinket materialism and impulse-buying. Imagine Jimmy Hendrix  amidst the health-and-beauty-aids or Janis Joplin  as we browse the meat counter, “Are You Experienced” as we choose deodorants or “Piece of My Heart” as we decide whether dinner will be chicken, beef or pork, the background music co-opted (and probably stolen) to not-so-subtly underscore USian capitalism's new, increasingly exclusive definition of “democracy”: the alleged “freedom” to choose one product over another.

These are, as I said (and to the best of my knowledge), merely horrid hypotheticals; I have not (yet) heard Grace Slick's unforgettable “Crown of Creation” used to sooth impatient customers in a long checkout line nor – bite your tongue – seen a Modigliani conscripted to peddle cars.

But a real though far less obvious example of art soured by ornamentation is the curious cult of the full-frame photograph: the crippling principle that cropping is forbidden, the accompanying notion a photograph – any photograph no matter its content – has no artistic significance unless it is printed full-frame and proven so by (ornamental) inclusion of the black borders of its negative. By this deliberately, perhaps even maliciously restrictive taboo, much of the world's greatest photojournalism, including some of W. Eugene Smith's  seminal work, is theoretically marginalized to meaninglessness.

While I do not know the origin of this calculatedly censoring shibboleth, I do know where and when I first encountered it: in Seattle c. 1974, then (and probably even now amongst those dilettantes wealthy enough to afford the prohibitive expense of working in film), the home of an Ansel Adams  cult the zero-tolerance credo of which rejects photography of the human condition as sacrilegious, even heretical abuse of equipment and squandering of pixels and/or emulsion. The cult's corollary principle is that any image not “previsualized” – that is, its negative not exposed in strict submission to Zone System  standards – is to be discarded as garbage.

For a journalist, these are genuinely odious restraints, perhaps to be studied both for useful technical information and meaningful sociological data, but to be forcefully set aside whenever the content of a picture so demands, such as the difficulty of analytically previsualizing the skin-tones of a writhing, screaming protester as she is beaten by the police or getting an accurate Zone-System reading off a rapidly dissipating cloud of pepper gas.

Hence a basic technique of old-time, pre-digital photojournalism: meter the palm of your hand in the light wherein you're working and open up one stop if the subjects are Caucasian, two if the images include people of color. Point being that in reportage you try to go in prepared because you usually don't have time to be more selective about exposure or exact composition. The contemplative, either-or stuff you do in the darkroom, or as it's done today, on the computer.

The Zoned-out Adams disciples will of course respond that reportage and art are antitheticals, to which I would reply (and have) that what passes for art in the post-modern world – for example the photographic studies of de-electrified light-bulb filaments undertaken as “fine art photography” by one of the Seattle Zoners – is so removed from real-world aesthetics to be not just hopelessly sterile but utterly meaningless. But that of course is the core doctrine of post-modernism: that everything is so meaningless even the concept of meaninglessness has no meaning. Which, ironically, would seem to reduce “fine art” to a contradiction in terms.

All of which is prefatory to a much more brief commentary on the above photograph, one of the very last I made with my beloved M Leicas. The sun was behind the April clouds that morning in 2011, and I was shooting in a large room lit through a bank of industrially sized eastern-facing windows. Just as I raised my M4 to photograph the woman, the sun burst out, she grinned, and my cloudy-day, available indoor-light exposure with my 135mm f/4 Elmar, probably wide open at with the shutter at 1/125, over-exposed the Fujicolor 800 film by at least three stops. Whatever artfulness it achieves is therefore entirely coincidental. The image here today – a carefully cropped, more heavily dodged (the eyes) and burned in (the background and surroundings) variant of the full-frame picture I published here on 30 July – is part of an ongoing process to take maximum advantage of the accident and turn it into something better.

Yes, while I am entirely satisfied with the image desensitized to black-and-white, I am still indecisive about its most effective cropping and tonal manipulation.

The point, though, is rejection of the bullshit no-cropping shibboleths and the simultaneous refusal to be intimidated by one's material, a necessity I often stressed to my students while I was teaching photography part-time at a couple of colleges during the late 1970s and early 1980s. It is a lesson re-validated now – as a Canon T5 digital single-lens reflex overcomes the hitherto prohibitive limitations imposed by poverty – by the fact I am finally, at age 75, transcending the irremediable and infinitely painful losses inflicted on me at age 43 by the 1983 fire. Had I been hamstrung by the full-frame shibboleth and all the other taboos against manipulating an image ever closer to its apparent truth, I probably would never have again considered these matters.

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How Science Fiction Might Solve the Mystery of Cosmic Radio Silence

(Literary etiquette requires I preface the following with three disclosures. The first expresses my gratitude to the late Henry Miller for the term  “cosmodemonic,” which I borrowed from his [formerly illegal] trilogy, Sexus, Nexus and Plexus. The next conveys my thanks to the woman who first perceived the connection between the Koch Brothers and cockroaches and so coined the perfect term “Kochroach.” The last disclosure is my apology to the creator of “Kochroaches” for the fact her name was forever erased from my files in the January-March debacle of my Happy-New-Year-from-Jesus computer-crash.)

*

IF I WERE a real writer instead of a posturing dyslexic, and if I wrote science-fiction, I'd cite the diverse elements of our impending extinction  as indisputable proof the fiery wheels, burning bushes and “divinely” inscribed tablets that infected our species with patriarchy were t the intergalactic equivalent of the smallpox-inflicted blankets by which Christian Europeans destroyed the First Nations of the Americas.

Indeed, such a hypothesis is merely a proper application of Occam's Razor: it explains our impending apocalypse without excluding any of its contextual evidence – including, by the way, the repeated sighting of Unidentified Flying Objects in a universe rendered ominously silent by its absence of any intelligently originated radio signals save our own.

Now, some 5,000 years after patriarchy's introduction to this planet, it and its predatory offspring Judaism, Christianity, Islam and capitalism have totally and eternally exterminated the ancient and formerly universal community of the Great Mother of All Being, which correctly envisioned humans and all the rest of Nature's children – animate or inanimate – as members of a single matrifocal, matrilineal and probably matriarchal family. That human society – proto-communistic, definitively egalitarian, necessarily democratic – guided our species' through the tragedies and triumphs of its first 195,000 years. But patriarchy and its philosophical descendants, like some immeasurably slow but relentlessly deadly virus, have methodically downgraded women from leadership to chattel, thereby extinguishing all but the faintest most etherial memories of our former self-sustaining ways. Meanwhile patriarchy's master-slave hierarchy has evolved into capitalism – infinite greed elevated to ultimate virtue – which in turn has spawned the final, terminal and terminally destructive capitalist forms of fascism and Nazism. Now the One Percent openly regards the concentration camp as its ultimate model of governance and views “community” as a synonym for “rebellion.” We the people – the 99 Percent – are doomed accordingly.

In our science-fiction novel, perhaps titled “The Swarming of Planet Earth,” the alien invaders wait until the 20th Century to make themselves known to the Ruling Class, first to the Nazis, next – when it becomes obvious the Third Reich lacks the resource-base to achieve global conquest – to the USian One Percenters. The aliens appeal to the moral imbecility and serial-killer compulsions that are the enabling components of capitalism. Disguising themselves in precisely those humanoid forms the One Percenters find most irresistible – think GQ, Elle and Hustler – the aliens assure the One Percenters of eternal survival in special “prosperity enclaves” in return for intensifying the destruction of the planet and hastening the extermination of the rest of humankind and of every other species, mammalian or otherwise, that might present a threat to the invaders. The resultant genocide, obscured by furious but meaningless political debates, is intended to eliminate the last remaining indigenous populations to ensure there is no remnant of the skills and cooperative instincts that formerly enabled our ancient ancestors to prevail even amidst the famines inflicted by a succession of ice ages.

Then in the final chapter, with Earth reduced by capitalism to the planetary equivalent of a reeking Dumpster, comes the invasion itself. The invaders, swarming like maggots in a corpse, drop all humanoid disguise and reveal themselves to be an unfathomably intelligent, inconceivably predatory subspecies of cosmodemonic cockroach that eons ago mastered both the technology of intergalactic flight and the psychological-warfare skill of seducing a dominant species into committing the specific acts of collective suicide that reduce a target planet into the most favorably roach-sustaining environment. As for the Kochroaches, the cosmodemonic roaches' One Percent collaborators, theirs is akin to the fate of Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, their living flesh slowly eaten from within by roach larvae, themselves fully conscious until the end.

And here, in our species' final pages, is the answer to the riddle of the ominous lack of intelligently originated radio signals that defines the universe. Here as everywhere in the cosmos, the Cosmoroaches (who are and always have been nature's closest approximations to god), keep everlasting watch, lest some mammalian species evolve enough to potentially threaten their eternal insectoid dominance. Then the Cosmoroaches inject patriarchy or some other equally potent psycho-toxin that not only ensures the mammalian species will self-destruct, but in the course of self-destruction will render their planet a perfect breeding-dump for Roachperpetuation. There is never more than one source of intelligent radio signals in the universe at any given moment because that's all the Cosmoroaches, whose exoskeletal bodies allow them to survive the rigors of warp-speed travel, will ever allow in their de facto hive.

And now, in recognition of the fact the Abrahamic god is probably nothing more than a giant, super-intelligent, super-predatory intergalactic cockroach, let us close with a new, more appropriate variant of the Protestant Christian Doxology:

Curse god from whom all misery flows
Curse him ye victims here below
Curse him above ye suffering host
Curse Father, Son and Holy Ghost.

(Not to worry: I promise my subsequent posts will be shorter.)

LB/30 July-7 September 2015

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