Occupy Tacoma: Portraits of a Non-Violent Revolution (1)

Two Tacoma women in the Pacific Northwest autumnal rain, their home-made placard proclaiming the strength  and solidarity of a movement that now spans the globe.

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Photographs by Loren Bliss copyright 2011. Click on each image to view it full-size. 

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Three views of Occupation Park -- officially Pugnetti Park -- the downtown Tacoma tract that has been home to Occupy Tacoma since 15 October. Center: the park fronts on Pacific Avenue, Tacoma's equivalent of Main Street. Informational picketing there continues from dawn to dusk, with motorists and passers-by overwhelmingly supportive.  Bottom: a General Assembly meeting, the mode of participatory democracy pioneered by Occupy Wall Street.         

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Demonstrators gathered in a drizzle and marched in rain that became a deluge, weather typical of autumn on the Pacific Northwest coast. This was the first of Occupy Tacoma's neighborhood-information marches, part of the group's ongoing effort to bypass a near-total news embargo imposed by Ruling Class media. The demonstration, on 21 October, focused on the dominantly African-American Hilltop neighborhood, which runs the length of a high ridge overlooking Commencement Bay, Tacoma's busy seaport. 

     

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Visual Thinking: Gratitude, Reflections and Tech Data

Thanks entirely to a woman whose screen-name is the new Katney and who has become my teacher on the Blogger discussion boards, I am finally able to post the remainder of the best images from the three takes (72 exposures) I shot of the Occupy Tacoma story between 19 and 22 October. (This same work is circulated internationally via Reader Supported News, for which see “Select Your Occupation” and scroll down to “Tacoma, Washington.”) 

Beyond that, I find I have surprisingly little to say.  Now that I am actually working again (never mind the fact the capitalist economy dictates I may never be paid for my efforts) – now that I am again running film through cameras, am again embracing the infinite sensuality of light, am (albeit in my shambling and geezerly way), once more dancing the photographer's dance – I suppose my verbal acumen is again reduced to what I prefer it to be, something shared mostly with a lover or with intimate friends, above all else in an environment where I need not fear the mortification of dyslexic error.

Though perhaps I am simply so filled with gratitude for this opportunity – this rebirth of revolutionary spirit I thought forever dead, this chance to do once more the sort of photojournalism I never in my wildest dreams imagined I would do again – that I am truly speechless. Hence, given my history – given the great loss I suffered in the 1983 fire (nearly all my photographs and writing and, worse, the almost-finished book of pictures and text "Glimpses of a Pale Dancer"), given the ruinous depression that followed, and now given this astounding gift yes late in life but nevertheless so compelling – I cannot but also pay tribute to the Muse, for which purpose there is no poet on this Earth better than Robert Graves:

Her brow was creamy as the crested wave,

Her sea-blue eyes were wild
But nothing promised that is not performed.

The camera – I only carried one – was a Pentax MX, with SMCP f/2.8 lenses of 28mm and 100mm. The night photo, the 28mm lens wide open, was hand-held at 1/4 second; the result surprised and delighted me because I previously believed no SLR could be successfully hand-held at such slow shutter speeds. The medium was FujiFilm 800, which I have come to prefer because it records so faithfully the hauntingly blue-shifted Pacific Northwest light.

It seems I am again a smith, sculpting choreographies in alchemical silver.

Obviously this is a work in progress.

LB/8 November 2011

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Synergy: of Occupy Tacoma, a Group Health Seminar, Fr. William J. Bischel and an Episode of Personal Revolution

Fr. William J. Bischel SJ, center, an often-imprisoned practitioner of non-violent civil disobedience, has been with Occupy Tacoma's quest for socioeconomic justice since its beginning. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2011. (Click on image to see it full size.)

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THANKS TO THE curious synergy of Occupy Tacoma, a Group Health workshop entitled “Living Well with Chronic Conditions” and Fr. William J. Bichsel SJ, on 21 October 2011 I experienced a genuinely life-changing epiphany. But to explain what obtained in the wake of that rainy Friday and how it came about, it's necessary I back into the story, working from society to self and thus from the political to the personal.

Long and painfully aware of the overwhelming negativity with which capitalism teaches us to despise ourselves whenever we become nonprofitable, I assumed my knowledge was the best possible defense against this mind-numbing, soul-killing brand of psychological warfare. But it turned out my awareness was far less effective than I thought it was.

As I discovered, it seems I am as vulnerable as any other low-income person – senior, disabled or chronically unemployed – to the self-destructive messages with which capitalism deluges us when our Ruling Class masters deem us no longer exploitable for profit.

Though the form of these messages varies in accordance with the targets at whom they are aimed, the content is invariably the same: the zero-tolerance mandate to somehow elevate ourselves by our proverbial bootstraps (no matter our economic feet were amputated long ago), or subtle hints we must dutifully end our own lives – in either case sparing ourselves the odium of becoming parasites while relieving society of the burden of our alleged laziness.

That the term “suicide” goes unspoken in such declamations merely proves how effectively the message is reinforced by advertising, the core medium of the most viciously social-Darwinist society in the industrial world. Advertising is the goad that forces us to run the rat maze, its motivational impetus traceable to our first encounters with playground bullies, schoolhouse tyrants and boringly pedantic teachers in classes designed not to stimulate but to subjugate.

Within the resultant (definitively capitalist) context of lockstep conformity, we are all challenged to prove our usefulness – to prove it every minute of every day – but for those of us who have lived long enough to become elderly, there are additional and often increasingly difficult requirements. We must constantly prove our physical and mental abilities, and – more importantly – we must demonstrate our relevance: all this as capitalism tries to drown us in a quagmire of rejection that is equal parts terror and contempt.

The source of the contempt is obvious: it is capitalism's malicious dismissal of anyone who is neither rich nor famous. The terror's origin is more complex: our society's uniquely bottomless fear of death – the unspeakable horror of eternal damnation taught us from birth by infinitely sadistic Christianity – this compounded with capitalism's induced fear of personal failure and its carefully acculturated fear of the Other: specifically anyone whose being or ideology might suggest alternatives to capitalism and capitalist tyranny.

While the Ruling Class has always been hostile to seniors (as it is to all groups it rejects as unprofitable), in recent years it has expanded its definition of Other to include native-born U.S. citizens – any of us much past our 50th year. This is because the United States in which we spent our formative years is so alien to the United States today, our age marks us as potentially dangerous agitators – men and women who remember when liberty, though always definitively White and therefore sorely limited, was nevertheless infinitely more than Bush-Obama political theater and Big Lie slogans.

Surely it is no coincidence – now we can truthfully say of today's United States “this is not the country I was born in” – the label “elderly” is redefined, no longer just synonymous with “useless” but now a condition definitively bad, even shameful, with an accompanying burden of self-doubt (and often self-hatred) that assures our submissive silence as we are segregated into ghettos called “senior centers” and “senior housing.”

And though I knew all this – though it was the core theme of the commissioned book upon which I labored from 2006 through 2008 (the manuscript ironically entitled “Proof of Relevance” but now doomed to eternal obscurity by a bratty estate war between the subject's adopted children) – my knowledge was not sufficient to protect me from absorbing capitalism's core message I had turned not just useless but hopelessly enfeebled the moment I lived past retirement age.

Admittedly I am physically disabled, officially so, crippled by steady deterioration of spinal injuries inflicted on me 33 years ago by one of Washington state's notoriously coddled habitual drunken drivers, crippled too by a no-cartilage knee inflamed by arthritis, with both disabilities radically worsened by the seemingly inescapable obesity that has burdened me since I quit smoking 16 years ago, and those maladies intensified by high blood pressure and heart problems.

But until I began seeing myself as genuinely “old” and (therefore) truly “useless,” my core self-concept remained one of strength not weakness: my internal dialogues were about how I might prevail, not about how I might surrender.

Enter Group Health – the Puget Sound health care cooperative of which I am a voting member – and its “Living Well with Chronic Conditions” workshop, the underlying theme of which duplicates (and therefore resurrects) that of my former internal dialogues, the how-might-I-prevail paradigm that was mine before capitalism taught me to think of myself as “old and useless.”

Also enter, by whatever astounding synchronicity so often seems to govern my life, first Occupy Wall Street and then Occupy Tacoma: each another variant on the how-might-I-prevail paradigm, albeit this time in definitive collectivity: We the People, and How Shall We Prevail and above all else Solidarity.

Partly because I long ago recognized activism as the best analgesic (a point I have made repeatedly in the three Group Health workshop meetings I have had time to attend), though mostly because I see in OWS and OT the revolutionary democracy to which I (and my father before me) were so fervently committed, I gave myself over to OT as best I could, predictably via its Media Work Group.

Thus began my re-education: specifically the process of learning the difference between genuine physical limitations and the imaginary limitations imposed by capitalism.

At first I believed I could not participate in demonstrations. Then, because I somehow overcame my fear of collapsing in exhaustion midway through a three-mile march (or worse the public mortification of falling prey to heart problems and so disrupting the entire event), I marched and chanted, but dared not carry the added weight of even a single camera. Not surprisingly, I was soon filled with bitterness and self-pity at the sight of young photographers doing exactly what I used to do: the ineffably passionate Dance of the Photographers, for which see last week's essay.

A few nights later during a General Assembly meeting at Occupation Park, where OT maintains its 24-hour presence in downtown Tacoma and coexists in genuine harmony with police and passers-by, I encountered Fr. Bischel. 

I knew him of old, from one of those interludes in my life I tried to be a practicing Catholic but concluded, as always, I am far too damaged to find spiritual sustenance in any organized religion. I had no idea he was in the park. I merely suggested him as the best possible local resource on the politics of non-violence, only to hear his laughing voice say “Loren is my campaign manager” and to discover amidst my own surprise (and a great deal of gentle chuckling) he was standing directly behind me.

Fr. Bischel – Bix to his friends and colleagues – had been sleeping in the park each night, lending OT his formidable presence as an internationally renown, often imprisoned practitioner of non-violent civil disobedience. 

Now I wanted to photograph him there or in some other OT environment, not the least because Bix is 86 years old and I recognize him as a true Bodhisattva, embodiment of the wisdom of I Ching, particularly the First Hexagram, Ch'ien (the Creative), Nine in the Fifth Place: “Thus the sage rises, and all creatures follow him with their eyes.”

But to follow him with my own eyes I would have to attend Friday's demonstration. Hence again the vital practice of asking myself how might I prevail. I'd take one camera (a Pentax MX); two lenses (100mm and 28mm SMCPs); a pocket full of Fujicolor 800; a Vietnam-era GI poncho to protect my equipment from the rain; an Ace bandage for my knee; my cane; and – to lighten the load – an 8-ounce flask of water rather than 32 ounces in my 1945-vintage GI canteen.

That image above is Bix with two of his friends as seen through the 100mm lens.

I made a total of 48 pictures of the demonstration – literally a demo in a deluge – of which at least five are worth showing, with one more probably as much a portfolio piece as the portrait of Bix. But the Blogger software for posting portfolios is not just difficult but user-unfriendly, with instructions so vague its operation requires at least the knowledge of a professional Nurd, and – techno-moron that I am – I dread the requisite hours (and quite possibly days) of technological hassle and unavoidable public embarrassment necessary to figure out how to make it work.

Meanwhile though I have indeed prevailed, at least to the extent of learning how to continue working in the medium I love the most.

And hobbling nearly five miles for OT – about two miles last Friday – has clearly exorcised my compulsion to define myself as a cripple.

Such is personal revolution, especially as implied by my oft-repeated statement “in these times, survival itself is an act of revolutionary defiance.”

Hence I offer this picture and text in thanks and gratitude to my colleagues in the Living Well seminar, to my comrades in OT, to Fr. Bischel and of course to the Muse herself.

LB/25 October 2011

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Of Birth and Death: Occupy Tacoma Nearly Triples Nonviolent Turnout, Marches 3 Miles thru Mostly Supportive Bystanders, Takes Over Park; How This Event Painfully Signals the End of My Life as a Photojournalist

Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2011. Explanatory details in “Visual Thinking.” (Click on image to see it full size.)

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(I filed the following report with Reader Supported News to accompany videotape linked from the Occupy Tacoma website, occupytacoma.org. Some of its information is thus duplicated by the “Visual Thinking” piece, which I wrote a few hours earlier.)

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TACOMA – A righteously angry but adamantly peaceful group of Occupy Tacoma demonstrators swelled to an unofficially estimated 700 persons Saturday – nearly three times the number who took to the streets here in a week ago in solidarity with the now-international Occupy Wall Street movement.

Saturday's participants marched three miles past overwhelmingly supportive pedestrians and motorists to rally in the center of this mid-sized industrial seaport city. Declared occupation of a nearby park, with about 20 people staying overnight, soon followed.

As of late Sunday, the authorities had not attempted to evict the occupiers, though a single Tacoma police officer was reportedly monitoring compliance with safety and sanitation measures.

Saturday's demonstrators originally numbered about 400 at their mobilization point, the aptly named People's Park on Martin Luther King Jr. Way, the main thoroughfare of Hilltop, a dominantly African-American neighborhood at the crest of the high ridge to the west of the Puget Sound waterfront.

Including a cross-section of the U.S. “99 Percent” – jobless and employed, young and old, female and male, persons of color, First Nations people, veterans, organized labor – the marchers' ranks swelled as they drummed and chanted their way down Tacoma's Alpine-steep streets.

Picket signs declared the theme of the movement: “Banks Got Bailed Out, We Got Sold Out”; “When Texas Executes a Corporation, I'll Believe It's a Person”; “If You're Not Outraged, You're Not Paying Attention”; “Think Robin Hood”; “Occupy the World”; and the ubiquitous “Tax the Rich.”

Despite an estimated population of about 195,000 people, Tacoma was a relative latecomer as Occupy Wall Street activism spread to Washington state. Bellingham, Olympia and Seattle occupations were already established when Tacoma joined in, but since then the local movement has quickly made up for lost time. As measured by participation, public support in Tacoma has nearly tripled in the past week.

According to The News Tribune, the local daily, the official crowd estimate was “more than 400.” The initial demonstration a week ago turned out an official 200, an unofficial 250.

With Occupy Tacoma and its statewide kindred now endorsed by state and local labor councils, Saturday's demonstration included a strong union presence. Teamsters, Tacoma Education Association, United Food and Commercial Workers and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union were among the organizations visibly represented.

The demonstration was several hundred feet long, but marchers obeyed all traffic signals. Though banks and government buildings are closed on Saturdays, demonstrators chanted at several such locales in symbolic protest. They also chanted in support of UFCW pickets at City Grocery, a new but avowedly anti-union downtown Tacoma supermarket that caters mostly to the immediate area's upscale condo-dwellers.

But the state's elected officials were notably absent from the demonstration, despite the vast majority – governor and legislators alike – are Democrats who claim to serve working-family interests. Likewise Tacoma City Council members, officially non-partisan but mostly Democrat-affiliated, none of whom attended.

One reported exception was State Rep. Laurie Jinkins, whose legislative district includes both upper and lower income neighborhoods in Tacoma proper. Mike Collier of Tacoma's First Methodist Church, one of the event's organizers, said Jinkins “walked briefly” with marchers as they left People's Park.

Three hours later and immediately after the downtown rally, a group of about 200 demonstrators – all chanting the movement's signature slogans of “Banks Got Bailed Out, We Got Sold Out” and “This Is What Democracy Looks Like” – marched along Pacific Avenue, Tacoma's Main Street equivalent, to a small, nameless but formally landscaped park adjacent the Washington State History Museum.

Once there the group declared the tract “Occupation Park,” stated their intention to remain indefinitely and chanted accordingly: “Our Taxes/Our Park.” The land in question is about 100 feet wide by about 200 feet deep, with the shorter dimension fronting on Pacific Avenue and its renovated Alaskan Gold Rush-era buildings.

Then came what were probably the most poignant vocalizations at Saturday's events: impassioned individual statements in support of the Occupation, none about ideology, all about grievances and hope:

“I've got three grandkids,” said Kat Jeter, an OT facilitator, explaining she was there to “create the world we want for all our children.”

“I make less money now than I did before I got my degree...I graduated into a multinational corporate nightmare,” said another Occupier.

And then there was the young woman, her golden-brown hair cut in neat but obviously home-coiffed bangs, who said she is 16 and both her parents have been out of work “the last four or five years,” with the result her entire family has been forced onto welfare.

But now the state of Washington – where Democrats and Republicans alike fervently believe the rich should live forever tax-free – is savagely slashing its welfare spending, just as the plutocrats demand.

“I'm here,” the somber-eyed teenager said, “to make sure everyone in my family is fed.”

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Visual Thinking: the Death by Old Age of the Best Part of Myself

UNFORTUNATELY, THOSE WHO came to OAN anticipating photographs of Saturday's Occupy Tacoma events are to be disappointed.

Oh how I yearned to have a camera in my hands throughout the entire demonstration – and never more than when the young woman declared she joined the Occupation in an effort to ensure her family will be fed.

Instead I am embarrassed to offer only the sort of meaningless greeting-card garbage we see above – early autumn color in Tacoma's Wright Park, a typical Ansel Adams cliché, the visual boredom that passes for “real photography” here in the nyekulturniy Pacific Northwest, where the nature-photo cult rules in zero-tolerance orthodoxy. The above image is thus the very sort of picture I instinctively deplore, especially whenever it is smugly pronounced “art” in opposition to the alleged “pornography” of any pictures that dare portray the human condition.

Of course I shoot nature pictures too – witness the above, a scene adjacent the old-folks housing in which I live – but such photography for me is only a form of mental masturbation, never serious work.

And now, due to physical limitations, it seems to be the only photography of which I am capable.

Though just as the above report implies, I was there for all of Saturday's demonstration – our mobilization in aptly-named People's Park; the three-mile protest march down the painfully Alpine-steep grades of the streets and sidewalks that climb the Cascade Mountain foothills around the Tacoma waterfront; the rally on the vast and forbidding concrete barren of Tollefson Plaza (which is surely the most architecturally unfriendly public space on this planet); finally the subsequent occupation of a nameless but attractively landscaped park adjacent the Washington State History Museum.

But my crippled, legally disabled 71-year-old body – a mass of post-demonstration pain when I went to bed last night and still sorely aching after nearly 12 hours of sleep – could not bear the extra weight of cameras.

Hence I could not shoot even one photograph.

Hence too, as a dark overlay downpressing my bright joy at the demonstration's political and personal success – the political fact we nearly tripled our public turnout in only a week; the personal fact I was able to fully participate in an ongoing event I had deeply feared would prove too physically strenuous (and yes my associated pride at having gone home still afoot and not on a litter) – there is nevertheless the infinite gloom of realizing my work in photojournalism is finished.

Photography was, as I have said before, the one guaranteed passion of my life, my only reliable entry to the Zen ecstasy of what Alan Watts called “at-one-ment”: that seemingly magical loss-of-ego (and thus of all left-brain distractions), the impossible-to-describe state the Japanese label satori, an ineffable unity with the world at large in which all distinctions between self and other momentarily vanish.

We photographers are modern silversmiths in the ancient Druidical sense – vessels of the Muse – and the power of our magic (which is really Muse-magic) is the choreography of light and shadow. When we are at our very best, we are not merely photographers alone but the living union of photographer and subject, union with camera and light and shadow and the air through which the light and shadow dance and with the dance itself, infinity as framed by the viewfinder: human reality, the fierce defiant expression in a woman's eyes and the bewilderment on her daughter's face; the justified anger reflected in a man's clenched hands, one fist clutching a protest-sign, the other fist raised in the international gesture of Working Class solidarity; the tight-lipped contempt of the plutocrats, their subtly nose-high glare identical whether female or male; the concern and yes sometimes fear in the body-language of our Working Class sisters and brothers in the police and military organizations the plutocrats send against us. Such is the substance of the photographs that might arise from such an event as Occupy Wall Street and its rapidly growing global daughter Occupy the Planet.

But I exposed not even one frame of film yesterday. I knew participation in yesterday's three-mile event would push my physical endurance to its limit – that if I were to carry my cane plus the essential high-energy snacks and required medications and a canteen of water and a down vest against this climate's penchant for sudden chills and a poncho against the omnipresent threat of rain, I could not possibly bear the extra weight of even one camera, much less the battery of photographic equipment required to record an event of this magnitude: three bodies with shorter lenses – 28mm, 50mm, 100mm – one body with the 200mm. Which prohibition of course meant I could not photograph at all.

It was an odd feeling, awkward and disturbing, to participate in a demonstration I was not also recording on film. Perhaps, I had told myself at the beginning, I will finish the event reassured that next time I can bring my cameras. But the opposite is what happened.

I watched the women and men with cameras as they danced the Dance of Photographers – climbing atop walls, hanging from lamp-posts, kneeling in the street, lying prone on a sidewalk, capturing a telling instant with preternaturally fast perception, then darting ahead for a classic long-shot of the entire demonstration (its ocean of placards like a froth of waves atop the muscle-straining descent of South 13th Street: “Tax the Rich”; “Think Robin Hood”; “End Corporate Greed”; its sea of faces, mouths shaping the Occupation's signature chant: “Banks got bailed out/we got sold out”). I watched and envied and yes wallowed in self-pity because I knew just what pictures were being made. I could see them in my mind's eye, exactly the pictures I would have made, not just because I have made such pictures so many times before, but because – ultimately – my mind is still the mind of a photographer. And now I must learn to live with the fact my body has betrayed me. As I watched the photographers work, it was as if my every cell wept silently and secretly, mourning the undeniable death of the only encounter this life has ever offered of truly dependable love.

Nor can writing fill the resultant void.

Yes I can string words together in compelling sentences, yes I can sometimes wax genuinely eloquent, yes my keyboard is occasionally blessed (as my camera often was) by the Muse herself. But nothing – neither Muse-power nor medication – can eradicate the mortifying stigma of dyslexia, the fact that no matter how well I might craft a sentence or build a paragraph or structure an entire composition, my defective brain will invariably betray me, nullifying even the most profound thoughts with the discrediting idiocy disclosed by a dropped or doubled word.

Writing for me is thus always underlain by terror – by gut-wrenching fear of revealing I am a moron, the theme of my teenage years bespoken innumerable times by an aristocratic tormentor named Mike Kennedy: “some people say ignorance is bliss; I say Bliss is ignorant,” a bitter truth he sneeringly repeated ad infinitum like a curse. And the echo of his condemnation has lurked beneath my writing ever since, but it was kept in check by nicotine until the middle of my 55th year. Now since 23 September 1995, the date I quit smoking cigarettes, it is fear a thousand times more intense. And now after 16 years it is obvious I will carry its awful intensity to the grave – the fear remaining just as oppressive as it was my first day without nicotine, which as a neurotransmitter is the one sure dependable albeit momentary amelioration for dyslexia.

For me, this fear and its implicit struggle was the primary difference between photography and writing. The former, even thwarted by the fire, was always an act of passion (and often pure love), forever beyond such egotistical considerations as fear. The latter is (and because of dyslexia will forever remain) a kind of fear personified, a doorway to the self-loathing that is mine when I discover I have (again and invariably and despite long hours of careful editing) destroyed my credibility with (yet another) dyslexic fuckup.

Hence even as I celebrate the success of Occupy Tacoma – of Occupy Wall Street and Occupy the Planet – I mourn the death of the one and only part of my creative sensibilities I ever dared trust and therefore truly cherished. And no, I will not apologize for this threnody. As William Faulkner wrote in The Wild Palms – in my judgement Faulkner's all-time best work, an epic of love that embodies from beginning to end Robert Graves' assertion “there is one story and one story only,” Faulkner's closing line amongst the most memorable in all English literature: “Between grief and nothing I will take grief.”

LB/16 October 2011

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Yes First Another Apology; Occupy Wall Street's Revolutionary Resurrection of Activism and Hope; Proposed Hospital Agreement Underscores Just How Powerfully We're Oppressed by Capitalism and Theocracy

Stephanie, spring 1971. Photo by Loren Bliss copyright 2011. Details below in “Visual Thinking.” (Click on image to view it full size.)

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AGAIN MY APOLOGY for being so long away from this space, but this time the reason is wholly positive: I've become involved with Occupy Tacoma, the local manifestation of Occupy Wall Street, and I've been so busy as a member of its media working group I haven't given much thought to anything else.

To be once more so involved is an exhilarating experience, intensity of a degree I have not felt for 41 years – not since the immediate here-comes-the-real-revolution aftermath of the government's campaigns of murder and mayhem at Kent State University on 4 May 1970 and Jackson State College ten days later.

But now – in reassuring contrast to the tyranny of betrayals that followed the martyrdom of Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Scheuer and William Schroeder at Kent, Phillip Lafayette Gibbs and James Earl Green at Jackson (and let us not forget Kent's Dean Kahler, struck in the spine by a round of M2 Ball, permanently crippled and forever robbed of the infinite pleasures of sexuality and sexual love) – today's Occupation Movement may in truth be the rightful bearer of the title so arrogantly claimed by Wall Street: “too big to fail.”

The fact the Movement has gone international, that it is articulating the grievances and anger of our entire planet's Working Class – and most importantly that it is relentlessly militant while remaining implacably nonviolent – would seem to guarantee its sustainment.

Its unprecedented magnitude may even nullify one of the four hitherto-absolute historical prerequisites of revolution: organization, ideology, technological mastery and the support of a major (presumably invincible) foreign power.

The obvious question – a new question for a new time – is whether a movement that is genuinely global needs the support of any government.

No doubt we shall soon know the answer.

Meanwhile the welcome and profoundly healing sense of useful and purposeful commitment I thought I'd never feel again is marred – though only slightly – by what some athlete whose name I don't remember called “deja vu all over again.”

Just as I have seen happen in these parts before, the pacifists here tried to seize the levers of power at the very beginning and now try to censor any words with allegedly “military” connotations – the reason we are not allowed to “mobilize” but must “gather” instead – which guarantees Occupy Tacoma's communiques to the public are so non-confrontational, many of my neighbors assume OT is “just a band of left-over hippies.”

Never mind the hippie phenomenon died when 1967's Summer of Love turned into an Autumn of Death (both of which I covered), Occupy Tacoma astonishingly chose the two-fingered “peace-sign” – an emblem that long ago became a stultifying cliché – as its very own logo and now brandishes it as if it were cutting-edge art.

Exactly as my neighbors' reaction demonstrates, the resultant message is more suggestive of retro-rock than of political confrontation.

I cannot doubt this choice was at least subconsciously motivated by the we-hate-New-York-City xenophobia that is a big part of Puget Sound's cultural undertow. Whatever, there's no denying Tacoma's use of the peace-sign is deliberate defiance of the clenched-fist, militant-workers-of-the-world symbol employed by Occupy Wall Street and seemingly by most other such organizations including Occupy Seattle.

But this is merely my most recent encounter with the struggle that has sundered the U.S. Left ever since the 1960s, when it became more a bourgeois fad than a vessel of Working Class activism. The transformation, which the late Jack Newfield repeatedly decried, began with the devastating clash between the sneeringly draft-exempt elite (the petite bourgeoisie) and those of us who served, whether willingly (as I did) or because Working Class parents could not afford the college tuition that bought exemption from compulsory military service.

The result was a class-schism that lives on today, albeit mostly in more subtle forms. For example Occupy Tacoma's unawareness of labor – this despite endorsements from local unions – was painfully apparent during a recent discussion of potential demonstration sites, when Tacoma's industrial areas were omitted until I rather forcefully spoke out in favor of adding them.

(Tacoma is a seaport town of about 195,000 persons and – yes – there is still a lot of industry here. There is a lot of unflinching unionism too, especially on the waterfront.) 

After my remarks, the group proved its inclusiveness and intent by adding these locales to the list of places for informational marching. And plans were soon underway to invite more union members to participate in Occupy Tacoma's general assembly meetings and to establish direct communication with the unions themselves.

A problem I fear won't be so easily solved is the ongoing confusion about the meaning of the terms “pacifist” and “non-violent.” As a consequence the two are often taken as synonyms when in fact they are polls apart.

Pacifism, at least as manifest in the U.S., is too often an ultimate form of non-confrontational submission to authority and thus functions all-too-easily as camouflage for cowardice. By contrast, non-violence (note the examples of Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela) is implicitly confrontational while very deliberately avoiding any provocation the Ruling Class might use to rationalize unleashing its murderous powers of oppression.

Non-violent confrontation – precisely as Gandhi, King and Mandela have proven – is therefore the boldest tactic available to today's revolutionaries. Indeed – given the high-tech arsenals of death and surveillance the Ruling Class now owns – it is the only tactic.

But that should never excuse downpressing non-violent confrontation into non-confrontational submission. If the revolution fails (and I am 99 percent certain it won't), it will be because its own activists failed to comprehend this distinction.

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Medical Controversy Underscores Dangers of Capitalism, Theocracy

SEATTLE--A coalition of advocacy groups here worries the proposed affiliation of avowedly secular Swedish Health Services and devoutly Catholic Providence Health & Services will force Swedish facilities to adopt Catholic prohibitions against reproductive freedom for women and end-of-life services for terminally ill patients.

In response to this alarming report I wrote my first Internet contribution in more than a week:

Kudos to Crosscut and Harris Meyer for reporting on a pivotal issue Ruling Class Media is often too cowardly (or too controlled by closet theocrats) to adequately cover.

Now as a long-time (voting) member of Group Health, I wonder what reproductive and end-of-life rights might have been surrendered by its own alliances with Catholic organizations -- for example St. Joseph Hospital in Tacoma or St. Peter in Olympia.

Apropos Group Health, I intend to learn – and publicize – the answers to the questions Mr. Harris evokes.

Meanwhile I would be derelict in my duty if I failed to point out that here is yet another example of the horrors of capitalism.

At its core, this issue is a byproduct of capitalism's innate opposition to human rights -- in this instance capitalism's denial of the absolute right to health care recognized by every industrialized nation save the United States.

The profound concern evoked by the pending Swedish/Providence agreement is also a logical reaction not just to Catholic authoritarianism, but to capitalism's traditional albeit woefully underpublicized preference for theocracy.

What used to be called "industrial psychology" -- psychology in service to workplace oppression -- long ago recognized the fact the most devout adherents of Christianity and Islam make the most dependably submissive, reliably anti-union employees. Note for instance the notoriously church-sustained anti-unionism of the Bible-belt South.

Thus we witness once again our worsening subjugation by run-away capitalism and its carefully hidden theocratic agenda.

*****

Visual Thinking: an Enchanting Woman of a Compelling Time

I met Stephanie in the City in 1969. I was hired in 1967 for an extended project photographing the people and neighborhoods served by the free clinic program of Manhattan's Beth Israel Hospital, she came aboard two years later as a member of the public relations staff. Though our roles were very different, each of us answered to the brilliantly competent woman who headed the PR department, which often brought us into the same office space.

Stephanie was formidably intelligent and uniquely articulate, and the more we knew of one another, the closer we became. Discovering just how very much we had in common via extended conversations over after-work drinks, we soon became a typically New York sort of couple, too mutually independent for formal commitment, too fond of one another to long remain apart, the beginning of an on-and-off relationship that lasted ten years.

Originally from Oregon, Stephanie returned to the West Coast a year after my Summer 1970 adventure left me stranded in Bellingham – a tragi-comic story for another time – and there we connected again. Not long after I made this photo, near Samish Bay at the south end of Chuckanut Mountain in April 1971, Stephanie bought two horses and a Model 600 Remington carbine in .308 Winchester and spent that entire Summer riding solo down the Crest Trail all the way from this side of the Canadian border almost to Mexico.

Later she became a Registered Nurse and worked for the United Nations in Latin America. Alas, we somehow lost track of one another in 1979.

The film, another of the negatives dug out from the ashes of the 1983 fire the following Spring, is Tri-X. I remember I exposed it at 400 but pushed it to 800 or maybe even 1200 with D-76 to achieve maximum midrange detail in some work pictures shot a few hours later in available darkness – probably fast breaking news or I'd have taken the time to load a fresh roll first. The camera was a Nikon F, most likely with the 50mm Nikkor f/2.

Wherever you are, Stephanie, whatever you might be doing, I feel profoundly blessed to have known you – the most fearlessly adventuresome woman I have met in this lifetime.

LB/12 October 2011

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Anti-Labor 'Leftists' Rage as Unions Take Wall Street Protest National; Barack the Betrayer or Obama the Orator?; Ceremony Proves U.S. Theocracy Is Real

East Village woman, 1967. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2011. Details in “Visual Thinking,” below. (Click on image to see it full size.)

*****

ONCE AGAIN I find myself apologizing for prolonged but unavoidable absence from this space.

First a computer rebuild that was estimated to take two days required six days instead.

Next was an overnight trip to the hospital for diagnosis of back and chest pains that were (as I suspected) not cardiac in origin but were new symptoms of the steadily deteriorating spinal injuries inflicted on me in 1978 by one of Washington state's obscenely coddled habitual drunks, a man who had been arrested at least 19 times for drunken driving – each charge dismissed -- before he slammed his Godzilla 442 Oldsmobile into the driver's side of my Bambi-sized Honda Civic and condemned me to spend the rest of my life shackled by increasing physical disability. Hence my most recent odyssey from Consulting Nurse to Urgent Care to Emergency Room to hospital bed. 

Finally, back home after this latest encounter with medical reality, there was the simple inertia of depression – that and renewed anger at either being on god's enemies list (if indeed there is a god) or at the very least exceptionally accursed by fate and circumstance.

As it says on the bumper sticker: “Old Age: It's Not for the Faint of Heart.”

While that's true of old age anywhere, it's an especially savage truth here in the Ayn Rand plutocracy of the United States of America, where transit riders are denounced as tax parasites, mass transit itself is condemned as welfare and dismantled accordingly, and the most selfishly malicious people on Planet Earth cheer wildly at the death of anyone – elders included – too impoverished to buy the nation's genocidally expensive health insurance.

*****

We Rise Up Angry, But the (Pseudo) Left Bares  Anti-Union Fangs

Organized Labor's decision to join the definitively anti-capitalist demonstrations that began in New York City and are now breaking out throughout the United States kindled such joy in my heart it literally brought tears to my eyes.

But my delight quickly turned to anger at the Ruling Class response. Despite a mass-arrest total reportedly approaching 1000 persons in New York City alone, Ruling Class Media continued a near-total blackout on news of this rapidly developing story. As of Sunday morning, the one exception was MSNBC, which began reporting on the Occupy Wall Street protest last week, when the participation of the Transport Workers Union and a number of other labor organizations expanded the demonstration into nationwide resistance.

The best source for updates on this new movement – which is growing with unprecedented speed and which I believe could (and should) give birth to our first nationwide general strike – is the website Occupy Together, linked above.

As if to underscore the intrinsic weakness of organizing via Internet, censorship by certain Internet service providers has already killed this link at least twice – your monitor will show “error 404 nothing found” – which means your only alternative might be to Google “Occupy Together,” with or without quotes.

(The server Yahoo has already admitted suppressing demonstrators' cell-phone transmissions, and I have no doubt the censorship will intensify as the movement gains strength and momentum.)

Meanwhile the earliest details of organized labor's official involvement in the Wall Street protest were reported by In These Times in a piece further disseminated by Common Dreams. As I wrote on the associated thread, “Never have I been so proud to be a union member and a New Yorker – even, as I am, a New Yorker long ago forced into permanent exile by gentrification.”

Alas, the majority of posters on that same thread expressed anti-union hatefulness of the breathtaking intensity we normally encounter only from the Right. Seldom have I seen a more vivid portrait of how the self-proclaimed “progressives” on what I call the “Pseudo Left” serve the Ruling Class as diligently as the Teabagger thugs or the diverse klaverns of the Ku Klux Klan.

As I replied to one such poster:

“The nastily bourgeois anti-unionism evidenced in your post – like the white bourgeois anti-unionism that toxified the U.S. feminist movement after its socialists were purged in the early 1970s – is a large measure of what brought us to Moron Nation and its slave economy.”

“But if we are going to save ourselves from capitalism – and now with the resurrected militance of labor I believe it might actually be possible – you are going to have to make the decision mandated by that anthem first sung by the Harlan County mine workers: 'Which Side Are You On?'"

Later on the same thread I elaborated:

“Whether it was the deliberate product of Machiavellian scheming or an accident of hostile fate, the Vietnam Era schism between the Working Class and the draft-exempt elite was the greatest gift ever handed the always-predatory capitalist aristocracy.”

“Indeed – exactly as evidenced in this thread – the division is at least as strong today as it was when George McGovern ran for president in 1972. It is measured not just in the exchanges here, but in the hatred and contempt with which those privileged enough to have been exempt from the Vietnam Era draft yet view those of us who served, a sneering anti-Working-Class malevolence expressed also in the anti-gunowner fanaticism and the anti-worker bigotry – particularly against loggers, miners, commercial fishers – that are litmus tests for membership in so many 'progressive' organizations...”

“But the joke is on those who continue to revile the Working Class. For the truth is in today's world – save for the coddled few who are part of the One Percent Aristocracy that owns and/or controls everything – we are ALL Working Class now.”

*****

Who Is the Real President – Barack the Betrayer or Obama the Orator?

Regardless of the outcome of the Occupy Together movement – even if it births a new political party (as well it might) – Barack Obama remains President, at least through 2012, which means a shift in his mode of governance as substantial as the one we are now witnessing should probably not be dismissed as “just more political bullshit.”

Nevertheless after the past two years I am literally afraid to indulge myself in any more hopefulness about his presidency. Of course I voted for him, but subsequent events have so obliterated my capability for political optimism, it has plunged again to its pre-2008 depth – the emotional chasm in which it had lain since it was sunk by the assassins who murdered John and Robert Kennedy.

Hence I am profoundly skeptical about the President's apparent conversion from Wall Street facilitator to populist firebrand.

Indeed I am once more convinced of what I said to my newsroom colleagues on the dreadful evening of 5 April 1968 – that “Robert Kennedy was the last politician in America who could have saved us from ourselves.”

Of course I applaud Obama's transformation. Better late than never – though I cannot but wonder if the President's new combativeness is yet another example of his genuinely Machiavellian flair for deceptive eloquence: in this case the utterance of compelling words albeit with the sure knowledge Republican obstructionism guarantees their message – and thus any threat to the Wall Street aristocrats who gave Obama nearly $16 million in 2008 – will come to nothing.

If this analysis is correct – if Obama seems to have turned against his original Ruling Class backers merely because it is politically expedient theater, if he and his financiers know his apparent about-face threatens no one save those of us it might dupe into voting for him in 2012 – we're once again being set up to be victimized by the Big Lies of “hope” and “change we can believe in.”

Nevertheless I hope – in fact I hope desperately, even prayerfully – my skepticism is mistaken, not the least because Obama the Orator is the Obama for whom I voted.

But after Barack the Betrayer's Wall Street-serving treachery in the critical matters of health care reform, Employee Free Choice and constitutional restoration, only a dullard would fail to ask “which Obama is the real President?”

And if the Obama we see today is indeed the real President, where the hell was he from 2009 until now?

The aforementioned financial data not withstanding, an African-American with whom I happened to converse recently astutely suspects the president was not only obstructed by his obvious foes – the racist Republicans and their Teabagger storm troopers (whose slogan might as well be “Keep the White House White”) – but was also sandbagged by closet racists in his own party and even in his own cabinet.

When I consider my acquaintance's hypothesis in the context of my own experience in the Civil Rights Movement – when I reflect on the inexplicable (but often carefully closeted) intensity of anti-black hatred not just in the South but throughout the United States – I begin to think he might be onto something.

And then I remember what another black man said to me a few weeks ago: that the average white's reaction to Obama is “see we gave them a chance and look how they fucked it up” – the N-word implicit in the subtle but telling twist of emphasis given the third-person pronouns.

Admittedly I have no idea how representative of African-American opinion my acquaintances' comments might be. But I have heard (way too many) whites uttering the “see we gave them a chance” syllogism, and I have also noted – with considerable trepidation – the looming backlash it implicitly threatens.

As to which is the real President – the Betrayer or the Orator – I can only speculate: a twenty-dollar word for guess.

Meanwhile George Packer of The New Yorker sums up the resultant political situation as succinctly as anything I've seen, this in a 9 September commentary equally valuable for its internal links.

“...Obama’s best hope will lie with the public. Do Americans still have enough faith in him, and in government, to give the President a second shot at reviving the economy? I’m not at all sure.”

In other words it's anybody's guess what's happening.

Though all Obama need do to clear up the confusion is openly side with the Occupy Together movement – which would also make amends for his failure to back labor in the Midwestern collective-bargaining fight.

*****

Notes on the Undeniable Reality of American Theocracy

Having too many times experienced the characteristic malice of religious fanatics, I am admittedly terrified by our creeping (and sometimes galloping) theocracy – the meticulously engineered, carefully imposed, insidiously clever thrust toward the ultimate tyranny of “one nation under God.”

Just as the Republicans openly cheer the extermination of people who are unemployed or otherwise chronically impoverished (though in the United States we murder by abandonment and neglect rather than in death camps of the sort that characterized Nazi Germany), the GOP also passionately embraces violent religious fanatics.

Because I am often mistaken for Jewish – especially when my native New York City accent was more evident than it is at present and my hair and beard, now mostly gray, were their original coal-black – I have witnessed firsthand the death's-head visage of Moron Nation's hatred of Jews.

Born in 1940, when circumcision was standard medical procedure regardless of one's ethnicity, I and a substantial number of my age-group peers were left uncircumcised in response to widespread terror the Republicans would win that year's elections and turn the nation officially fascist.

In 1943, when I was three-and-a-half, the war effort moved my family from the City to Jacksonville, Florida, where a gang of Southern boys a couple of years older than I but too ignorant to pull down my pants mistook me for a Jew and demonstrated their prowess as little Nazis and future Ku Klux Klansmen by holding me upside-down and burying my head in a playground sandbox.

A five-year-old girl named Mary Alice Shotwell – to whom my eternal thanks – stormed boldly to my rescue. Shrieking in fury, she pounded my would-be executioners with her fists until they fled.

I'm not sure what prompted her action or gave her the requisite courage – she was outnumbered at least four to one – but there's no doubt she saved my life. Perhaps she was motivated by the fact her parents were my father's friends – it seems to me Mary Alice's dad was a naval officer who worked with my father on matters of supply and logistics – or perhaps she had merely chosen me as a favored companion. I simply don't recall. In any case she quickly became my first true friend, though we were too-soon parted by the era's characteristic sudden changes of address for our friendship to stand any real test of time.

Now as I write this I wonder what became of her. I remember Mary Alice as slightly taller than I, a slender green-eyed blonde with long sun-bleached hair and softly tanned skin, a girl who always seemed to smell of Floridian summer: honeysuckle and salt air. I suspect in adulthood she was heartbreakingly beautiful – not the plastic tit-heavy Barbie Doll look so beloved of Moron Nation but real-woman beauty: a tall and slender danseuse, a young Veruschka as she might have been painted by Botticelli, proud of her femaleness and utterly confident of her relevance.

But I digress: friendship and – yes – a child's first love is so much more comfortable (and comforting) to write about than the anti-Jewish bigotry I've encountered nearly everywhere in the United States, even amongst my own maternal relatives, their prejudice especially evident in my mother's predictably venomous reaction to my several Jewish girlfriends.

Surprisingly, the same intensity of hatefulness seemed most common – even by comparison to the South – in Washington state, where the managing editors of daily newspapers in widely separate coastal cities rejected my job applications with nearly identical words: “we don't like your kind here...go back to New York City where you belong.” It is especially toxic in Seattle, the first and only place I have ever heard my birthplace openly referred to as “Jew York.”

But I have encountered many other expressions of religious bigotry too. I was in several fist-fights with the Protestants who attacked me – typically on Knoxville Transit Lines buses – merely because I attended a parochial school during the first half of the not-so-nifty '50s and was thus assumed to be Catholic. I was repeatedly harassed as a “pagan” and/or “devil worshiper” in the Everson/Nooksack area of rural Washington state c. 1987-1992 because I planted pumpkins and squash in with my corn, lived with two very large black dogs and never attended church. And I truly cannot count the number of such incidents that came to my attention during my years in the working press.

Hence we are dangerously foolish when we fail to list religious hatreds amongst the defining characteristics of the United States. Though such hatreds are now kept in check, they obviously await the opportunity to explode here just as long-checked ethnic hatreds exploded to destroy the former Yugoslavia.

Which is precisely why our national thrust toward theocracy is so terrifying: it institutionalizes religious hatred in exactly the same way Nazi Germany institutionalized hatred of Jews and Islamic governance institutionalizes hatred of all non-Islamic religions.

The frightening evidence our society is already imprisoned by theocracy goes far beyond the renewed legislative warfare against women and sexuality. Indeed the most glaring example I've yet encountered is the god-is-on-our-side preachment by Rear Admiral Margaret G. Kibben, the U.S. Navy chaplain who intoned it as part of an awkwardly long prayer to open and close President Obama's recent Medal of Honor presentation to Marine Sergeant Dakota L. Meyer:

“Almighty God...in accordance with your divine guidance, our founders established a nation rooted in the ideals of courage and virtue...we now yield to your direction for this country...”

Note not just the singularly Christian label for the deity, but the thinly disguised assertion the United States and its leaders are god's representatives on Earth.

As if to eliminate any lingering doubts about theocratic intent, Kibben closed the ceremony 18 minutes later by proclaiming it too of divine origin:

“God made this ceremony serve as a reminder of the responsibility that comes with receiving the grace gift of freedom.”

If, as it seems, the so-called War on Terror has already reshaped the United States into a garrison of born-again Crusaders, the rebirth of the Inquisition cannot be far behind. And that is exactly what the Christian fanatics intend.

*****

Visual Thinking: Poignant Hope in a Perilous Time

Long ago and far away amidst a Revolution in Consciousness that now takes place only in memory, during a pre-terminal-climate-change April with the chilly remnants of winter still resisting the warming gestures of spring, some of the youth of Manhattan's Lower East Side decided to clean up their local environment.

It was 1967. The clean-up's organizational work done by the Jade Companions of the Flower Dance – the local equivalent of a neighborhood association – and it soon led to a scheduled event called a Sweep-In: hundreds of young men and women hauling away tons of trash in a gesture they hoped would lead to solidarity between the bohemian community (which was already calling itself “the East Village”) and the traditional residents of Alphabet City – Avenues A,B,C,D – the 19th Century tenements of which then housed people who were mostly either Puerto Rican or immigrants from Eastern Europe.

The woman in this portrait was taking a break after spending most of the day helping clear a vacant lot of litter. I no longer have her name – those notes (like so much else in my life) were destroyed in the 1983 fire – but I see her now as an icon of the blessed hope that was once ours, a hope that may again be aborning in the Occupy Together movement.

I don't remember the camera – probably a VT Canon, maybe a Pentax H1A, whether the rangefinder or the SLR obviously (by the slight distortion of her facial features) mounted with a wide-angle lens – but there's no question the film is Tri-X, and the approximate date tells me it was developed in Diafine at 1200.

May we again have cause for such optimism as shows in this young woman's gentle smile.

LB/2 October 2011

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