Warren, Norma Miedema and the Return of the Goddess

ENOUGH PARTISAN POLITICS for a while. Even after the energizing victory of Elizabeth Warren in Massachusetts, I still doubt there is anyone in this nation – or for that matter anywhere on this tragically afflicted planet – who has the power and will to get us off the slide to extinction on which capitalism has launched us by its insatiable greed.

But if there is such a person, and if she is to save us from ourselves, surely her attributes will include not only the socioeconomic and political bravery of Warren but the death-defying courage and Gaian passion that makes Norma Miedema both a modern heroine and the back-to-the-future embodiment of a female consciousness seemingly absent from our species since the age of Celtic myth. It is not far-fetched to suggest Warren and Miedema represent parallel and entirely congruent aspects of a single impulse toward human survival. 

Warren of course is already becoming known throughout the world as a symbol of an electorate's awakening from political torpor. Miedema, who organized and led a  presumably impossible, deadly dangerous and therefore epic horse rescue in Holland, is scarcely known beyond her native land. As to the specifics of what Miedema did and why it is so psychologically and metaphysically important, I suppose these details too could be labeled political, albeit only in the broadest and yet most deeply personal sense of our win-or-become-extinct struggle against capitalism and patriarchy in general. I say this despite the fact most of the information I have about Miedema reached me only late Friday, and much of that was by inference alone – the ability of video-taped imagery to transcend the barriers of language – the entire package handed me by one of those Muse-haunted coincidences Carl Jung labeled synchronicity. Saturday I was still in joyous shock at the absolute correctness of the journalistic intuition that prompted my research and so moved by my discoveries I could not find words to write what I had learned. 

Hence it seemed there was naught to do but strap the ever-more-essential brace on my right knee and go for a long walk. The Internet said the outside temperature was 41 degrees Fahrenheit but it felt colder, maybe in the late 30s. The sun was setting a sickly storm-warning yellow behind the ramparts of the hospitals on the hill above the seasonally emptied expanse of Wright Park. Those who pay attention would have seen a graybeard geezer wearing a black beret and a faded olive canvas coat open to the wind and beneath the coat a bright red-and-yellow plaid wool neck scarf and under that a shirt of dark red coarse heavy wool girthed at the waist by a black belt-purse, all this above baggy black flannel workout pants with elastic cuffs tight over hiking boots: today's variant on my normal winter apparel. To others less attentive – and during the entire 45 minutes afoot I encountered only six humans total (two runners and four dog-walkers) – I was just a bespectacled vaguely foreign-looking old man hobbling with his hickory cane along formal tree-lined paths that had vanished beneath great drifts of brown and yellow leaves, maple and chestnut and birch and poplar, oak and ash too but without the bitter thorn that completes the trio of calendar trees by which one might curse an enemy, as Jack Orion, the Celtic Star Lord, had fatally cursed the interloping plagiarist who dared try usurp the bed he shared with the Goddess.

Now the pale sun was hospitalized and gone; now it was dusk, the lingering blue-shifted twilight of the Pacific Northwest, and I could not but see in Nature's temporary imposition of autumnal anarchy another harbinger of the apocalypse we now fear to be inevitable: this is how the park will look in the first fall of its abandonment, a mile of bare-branched silence, its summer children banished and surely dead and all our music lost forever. It was a terrible realization, lump-in-the-throat painful. 

Instinctively then I sought the ancient reassurance denied us by the we're-damned-forever sadism of the religions that still vainly seek to rule us, the Abrahamic cults of Christianity and Judaism and Islam and all the imperialistic science so derived, and I committed precisely the sort of reflexive heresy that surely would have gotten me arrested were the Christian fanatics yet as theocratically empowered as they were in the 1600s when two of my female ancestors were persecuted as witches in Connecticut. I ungloved my right hand, reached out and touched the giant sequoia that soars near the middle of the park, then a few hundred yards later caressed the first of the smooth-trunked beeches that border its southern end. As I did so I realized I was mentally reciting, seemingly by instinct, the opening stanza from Robert Graves' reconstruction of “Cad Goddeu” or “The Battle of the Trees,” a mysterious and perplexing work by the ancient British poet Taliesin: 

The tops of the beech-tree have sprouted of late
Are changed and renewed from their withered state...

 

Graves believed the verses to be a poetically charged description of a historical event, but to me, the first lines have always had an aura of prophecy as well. The beech in European mythology is a tree of life, of restoration and regeneration. It is therefore a symbol of the Great Goddess – which makes it arguable Taliesin was prophesying her resurrection. So were the Ghost Dancers, 1500 years later and a continent away: 

The white man's god has foresaken him
Let us go and look for our Mother
We shall live again!

 

And poignantly forlorn as the park was in its dwindling light with the dark exclamation points of its few tall conifers and the fading mid-November ghosts of  October's bright deciduous color, the power I sensed beneath my fingers in that living wood, even in its dormancy, was so compelling it left me whispering fervent thanks to a deity who at the very least (and even if she has no objective existence) is the consummate symbol of our environmental salvation and whom I'm sometimes certain is real as life itself but nevertheless, more often than not, agnostically deny. 

All of which, as we shall soon see, has everything to do with Norma Miedema. 

*****

On the rare occasions I manage to suppress my cynicism enough to believe in the Goddess as I did for those moments during my walk in the park, to imagine her as objective reality and not just an essential symbol, I am invariably smitten, sometimes to tears, by joyful gratitude for the good fortune granted me by the women who inspired and clarified my words and pictures and blest me with sweet love and patient friendship sufficient to ease the wounds inflicted by a murder-minded mother. The essay entitled “Dancer Resurrected” expresses this gratefulness in detail, though it is entirely too long and desperately needful of a competent editor. In this context the historical events it references – the 1965 Blackout and the 1967 Easter Be-In – are prerequisites to the personal confirmation described in its penultimate section. The episodes related separately in “Abutments”  and “Doorways,” each of which remains personally compelling in its own right, are themselves assertions of faith and thankfulness. 

But always there is the relentless thrust of the counter-reasoning I describe in “Outlanders,” a memoir-chapter I wrote two years ago but have yet to publish because I am torn between the (seemingly impossible) task of writing plausible fiction sufficiently adept to hide the identities of the three women who are responsible for the most metaphysically pivotal, profoundly revealing, undeniably magical and yes shamelessly sensual weekend of my life. The alternative is to include essential details that would make their names unmistakable even behind the cover of aliases. Though one of the three has read the work and says “Do it; use my name. I'd love to see it in print,” she is a professional musician who yet smiles on cutting-edge outrageousness while the other two are seemingly beyond contact range and, I suspect, have in their elder years become far more private persons. All of which is irrelevant here; the relevant part of “Outlanders” is not subject to writerly angst, probably because it flatly contradicts the very evidence the rest of the chapter dares reveal: 

A big part of me rejects as patently absurd not just the idea of reincarnation but any other conception of life-after-death: at best a terrified byproduct of belief in the divine (itself the adult variant of the Santa Claus myth), at worst clinical dementia. By the same logic I likewise dismiss religious visions, past-life memories, ghosts and all the rest of the allegedly supportive evidence of a deity or a “hereafter” as genuine insanity – even when the phenomena in question is my own personal experience. In this frame of mind I regard all such episodes as but preliminary symptoms of the terminal madness that accompanies the unbearable moment-of-death realization that for each of us our death is truly the end of everything forever, the recognition of which destroys the human mind in the same way rot more gradually obliterates the body, the mind mercifully disintegrating into a chaos of hallucination much as the body deteriorates into an entropy of maggots; that death is not just the demise of one's physical body but the termination of one's consciousness and therefore a microcosm of apocalypse – the end of the world, indeed not just the end of all being but the end of all potential; that death proves the unspeakable meaninglessness of selfhood; that the nonsensical nature of life in general is thus established beyond dispute by the final destination of the passage from the Big Bang of conception through its siren-song aftermath of expanding possibilities that all lead nowhere save to ultimate betrayal, the hitherto-denied but now inescapable darkness of the Black Hole; infinite silence, an ultimate deafness never again to be relieved by the exquisiteness of music; every vestige of our own personal reality consigned to a grave thus the graveyard of reality itself – all such assertions condensed in one question that like everything else at the instant of death-as-oblivion is reduced to irrelevance. If such is death – and this mode of thinking allows me no alternative – then life is but a non sequitur, the dread knowledge with which irony-minded U.S. soldiers in Vietnam so often comforted their dying comrades: “it ain't nothing, bro; let it go; it ain't nothin.” 

 

And now, as if some presumably imaginary being had become so vexed at agnosticism and disbelief she materialized in emphatic rebuttal, there is that videotape I first saw on the Internet in 2006, Norma Miedema and five equestrian sisters rescuing a terrified and fractious herd of at least 100 horses marooned by a fatal storm – a rescue men with machines had thrice attempted and thrice failed. 

As is promised (or perhaps threatened) by a very old ballad: 

Cunning and art he did not lack
But aye her whistle it will fetch him back.

*****

True to form, by the time I got home from my walk, my cynicism had resumed its snarling negativity, but the video was there waiting. The previous night while watching a poorly subtitled cable-TV movie about Asian horse-herders, I had suddenly remembered the rescue I had viewed in 2006 and the atavistic echoes it evoked, and I spent whatever time it took to find it on the Internet and several more hours researching the event itself. It is an episode so powerful it suggests not just the reality or at least the psychological validity of the concept of a goddess but provides us a vivid and not-at-all-mystical portrait of Epona or a woman who is surely her priestess whether consciously or not.

For those unfamiliar with mythology, Epona is one of the innumerable representations of the Cosmic Mother – the womb that gives birth to all that ever was and ever will be – in this instance portrayed as the Bountiful Mare or a woman and mare together, the Goddess as she was (quite rationally) pictured by the ancient People of the Steppe, the Scythians and their genetically confirmed descendants the Celts. 

Such metaphysical constructs are always more instinctively familiar and comforting to me than those of the Abrahamic cults, and they have been so for as long as I can remember, which is probably no coincidence since DNA analysis has proven the equestrian tribes of Eastern Europe and Western Asia to have been amongst my earliest and most genetically dominant ancestors. Though my family name is English, probably originally German, far enough back maybe Jewish, my genetic heritage is almost pure Celt. Perhaps that's why the video in question invariably evokes delicious chills and affirmative gooseflesh and tears of recognition: Epona again, scarcely changed from when she was immortalized on England's White Horse Hill, some molecular part of me wordlessly remembering the age and truth so gracefully symbolized and – yes – mourning its loss and yearning for its restoration. 

The resurrection of the Goddess, which remains our species' most important yet most unreported story, was begun by (mostly male) scholars more than a century ago. But it's present-day impetus comes from a uniquely potent, utterly spontaneous combination of increasingly female artistic vision and breakthrough science. The former – precisely as Graves himself recognized – is always the realm of the Muse. The latter, though patriarchal in hierarchy and method, nevertheless shattered the patriarchy's biological and conceptual cornerstones, first by inventing the birth-control pill, which restored to women the control of their bodies men stole from them thousands of years ago, secondly by restating via the Gaia Hypothes the core principle of our species' first and oldest religion: that the Earth (and by extension the entire universe) is our Mother – alive, conscious and self-regulating. In this context, the misogynistic hatred and terror that motivates today's theocrats and their wars against women and nature are entirely predictable reactions. 

If Edward Whitmont (The Return of the Goddess, Crossroads, 1982) is right about the re-emergence of Goddess-archetypes as survival mechanisms – and I cannot doubt his findings – it is to be expected that in this era of backlash and terminal climate change and the death and despair so inflicted, we would meet again an archetype approximating Epona, who let us not forget is also a warrior-goddess. Which I believe explains why – six years after her dramatic leadership of that epic horse rescue – the coverage the Dutch press is giving Norma Miedema suggests she is finally becoming one of our modern heroines, a role-model of the sort we have not seen in many lifetimes, as if she rode in from the plains of Scythia or materialized from the pages of Herodotus' Histories or Tacitus' Agricola.

Now that you've seen Norma Miedema's portrait, here is the video of what she organized and led. It's unfortunate the accompanying music is so distractingly modern; Faun's “OynengYar,” which I first heard only yesterday but seem to remember from forever, would be an infinitely better anthem. Too bad I have neither the Nurdish knowledge or skill to make it so: its “Dance My Love” is an invocation  not only of the Steppe but in the Kazakh tongue and almost certainly of pre-patriarchal traditions as well. But at least this Dutch version of the video is infinitely better and more detailed than the variant that first appeared in the United States six years ago, monitored as it is today by a maliciously Christian censor who – as I can personally attest – blocks any attempted reference to the pagan echoes the imagery so undeniably evokes. Note too this USian version is accompanied by an intrusively masculine and therefore obnoxiously inappropriate Vangelis piece, “Conquest of Paradise,” which some nyekulturniy malcontent has dubbed onto the tape no doubt in an attempt to assuage his threatened masculinity, his own small contribution to the war against women and nature. 
 

In resistance we have the brave precedent set by Elizabeth Warren, who alas may yet be betrayed by the opportunistic cowards and moral imbeciles with whom she must of political necessity interact. But in our time of need we are also given that which is beyond betrayal, the courage and sensitivity and wisdom shown us by Norma Miedema and the blessed memories of bonfires and moonlight sung us by Faun and most of all the quickening splendor of our species' oldest wellspring of mindfulness.

Let the roses and rosebuds bloom
Dance my love, dance my love.

LB/10-12 November 2012

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Election 2012: Local Hatefulness Kills State, National Joy

THOUGH THERE WAS was much to celebrate in the results of the 6 November balloting – especially the senatorial triumph of a woman who genuinely terrifies the One Percent – it was nevertheless the worst election night of my life: dread and circuses, with dread winning by a landslide. 

That's because the voters of this Ayn Rand backwater to which I was long ago exiled by the gentrification of Manhattan are again using their ballots to sneer “Fuck You” at anyone who's dependent on public transport.

Not that I am surprised. Those of us who are transit riders, pedestrians and bicyclists have long been openly despised by a substantial majority of the wealthier suburbanites here, and now possibly we are being targeted by a majority even within the city limits of Tacoma.

It would not be incorrect to label this bigotry a movement – the Anti-Transit-User-Movement. Its well-financed hatefulness has coalesced into cultoid deification of automobiles and pickup trucks as ultimate symbols of “Americanism” and “the Pacific Northwest Lifestyle”: it is literally a car cult, as unique to the Puget Sound region as the cargo cults were to remote South Pacific islands.

Its disciples fume against bicycles, trains and buses as proofs of conspiracy against their imaginary “right to drive” – in ugly reality their self-obsessed, morally imbecilic compulsion to isolate themselves in mechanized armor and mercilessly bully anyone who is not similarly equipped. 

The car cultists are road rage personified. They demonstrate their autocentric hatred by refusing to slow their vehicles for bicyclists or yield the right-of-way to obviously disabled people in crosswalks; they spew invective – “get a job, you lazy bum” – at those of us waiting at bus stops; most of all they flock to the polls at every opportunity to vote against transit and thereby continue their relentless assault against transit-users. 

And yes it is that personal – as personal as a fist in the face. The insurmountable hardships these anti-bus-rider voters will gleefully inflict on me if they're successful – the lethal misery they will happily impose on anyone whose circumstances are similar to my own – robbed the election of all the joy it would otherwise have evoked. 

Make no mistake: I applaud the victory of President Barack Obama, which – or so I desperately hope – has slowed the Ruling Class effort to impose a new form of Nazism on the United States. I am delighted the voters of Washington have apparently elected Jay Inslee governor – and have thereby beaten back the One Percent's attempt to turn this state into another Wisconsin. 

I am pleased these same voters have endorsed marriage equality and legalized possession of marijuana, the latter a defiant protest against the federal government's sadistically punitive, implicitly racist War on Drug Users. 

Above all else I cheer the election of Elizabeth Warren, the new senator from Massachusetts whose victory pledge – “I won't just be your senator, I'll be your champion” – promises a potentially revolutionary revitalization of the entire Democratic Party. (Perhaps that explains why slightly more than half her speech, including the pledge itself, is now being suppressed by the corporate news monopolies.) 

Warren's apparent fragility paradoxically emphasizes her indomitable strength, a purely female manifestation of the emotionally compelling leadership traits that prompt soldiers to follow a commander through a harrowing of hell. Her proven courage and brilliance combine with her unapologetic womanliness to demonstrate a kind of magnetism and power that has remained relatively unknown in the adamantly patriarchal United States. But in truth it is ageless – witness the examples of Maeve in Celtic mythology and Boudicca in classical history. 

Not only do I cheer the senator-elect. Verily, I salute her as well. 

Indeed there is a quality of trustworthiness about Warren the like of which I have not sensed in a politician since the halcyon days of John Fitzgerald Kennedy and his brother Robert. That's why I believe she could become not just the new voice of a Democratic renaissance but the leader and conscience of an all-woman congressional insurgency that might actually free the party from its Wall Street captivity and restore the principles of the New Deal.

Admittedly that may be no more than the oft-disappointed yearning of a man who even in old age has never quite abandoned his conviction the Women's Movement would at last force this nation to be true to its stated principles of liberty and justice for all, much as my late father believed of the African-American Civil Rights Movement. 

Though it may be a lot more than that. Ultimately it feels like another reliable prompting of journalistic intuition – the first real, instinctive, from-the-bottom-of-my-heart political hopefulness I have felt in years. 

But on election night Warren's bright and blessed promise was ultimately meaningless – a phenomenon far away on the homeland coast from which I was long ago economically banished. 

Here in real-time Tacoma the Anti-Transit-User Movement was proving the town and its surrounding Pierce County to be perfect examples of Moron Nation – my name for the USian worst, the most pridefully ignorant, venomously conformist, vindictively anti-intellectual, maliciously bigoted citizenry in the industrial world.

It was a realization all the more painful because I used to love Tacoma. There was a time, 34 years ago, when Tacoma was genuinely more cosmopolitan than Seattle, particularly in the welcome its people extended to “outlanders” like myself. But now the probable outcome of the transit fight was legitimately resurrecting the question once asked by a brazenly snooty Seattle tee shirt: “If God is on our side, why is there a Tacoma?” 

Tacoma's vote is part of the Pierce County vote, and Pierce Countians were not only voting 51-49 to destroy the local transit system they had already ravaged at the polls in March 2011. Now in 2012 with Inslee headed for apparent victory, Pierce County was voting 52-48 for Rob McKenna, the homophobic, anti-health-reform, anti-Medicaid Republican attorney general who real Democrats feared was scheming to be another Scott Walker. And now, though marriage equality had won statewide, the locals were voting against it, 53-74 to withhold full citizenship from gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people. 

Because of Washington's absolutely reliable but painfully slow method of counting votes, the tabulations will continue for nearly another week.

If McKenna wins, Pierce County's closet-fascist voters can congratulate themselves. They will have made the difference between Washington remaining an officially progressive state or threatening – via gubernatorial powers of decree and paralysis-by-veto – to become another anti-labor, anti-woman, anti-gay Wisconsin. Likewise, had gay marriage lost, Pierce County could have lauded itself as the locale that swung the knockout punch of religious fanaticism against the LGBT community's yearnings for equality. 

As a Tacoma-born colleague of mine pointed out in the context of a gay-bashing incident several years ago, what else can you expect from the town that has more churches and church-going zealots than any other municipality in the state? 

But Tacoma and Pierce County also have the largest per-capita labor union membership in the state, which makes their citizens' calculated brutality toward transit-users all the more astonishing. It is a malevolence so intense the ballots have become like bullets – volleys to savage anyone who can't afford an automobile. 

Once again, brandishing as they did in 2011 the Moron Nation shibboleth that “transit is welfare” (the corollary of which is “let's kill the bums by shutting down their transportation”), the Anti-Transit-User Movement was vetoing a last-ditch, save-our-system measure proposed by the agency that operates the local bus service. 

Pierce Transit, as it's called, had asked voters to choose between two alternatives.

One is a tiny, three-tenths-of-one-percent sales-tax increase – that's three pennies on a $10 purchase – a sum even a pauper could afford. 

The other is a 53 percent cutback in bus service: no service on weekends; no service after seven p.m. on weekdays; service on the few surviving routes reduced mostly to one bus per hour – utter devastation dealt those of us who depend on public transport.

Because the vote counts continue, it's logical to wonder if there's any chance for a last-minute reversal in the results. I asked two well-positioned sources that very question. Neither answered. 

In other words, the Anti-Transit-User Movement of Tacoma and Pierce County has almost certainly won again – not really a surprise since its voters have rejected every other such proposal, whether from Pierce Transit or its Seattle-based regional counterpart Sound Transit, at least as far back as the middle '90s. 

Even if by some miracle we pro-transit people manage to eke out a winning margin, our enemies – and enemies is precisely what they are – already threaten a Florida-type recount fiasco that could delay the decision for weeks if not months. Clearly their hatred knows no limit; seemingly, neither do the bank accounts of their financiers. 

Nor is this unusual. The entire Puget Sound region has a uniquely anti-transit history that dates to 1968, when Seattle's first effort to build a regional light-rail system was easily defeated by a breathtakingly nasty campaign built around the assertion, never publicly proclaimed but often whispered, that “we don' wanna be like 'Jew' York.” Impossible to trace, it was apparently spawned by a faction of the One Percent that regarded adequate mass transit as a threat to its hegemony – an invitation to “undesirables” who might challenge local sweatshops and question the exclusionary privileges that make much of Western Washington a private country club for the super-rich. 

Three more decades of xenophobic no-transit votes reduced the population's smugly arrogant claims of environmental superiority to undeniable proof of a hypocrisy so huge its only counterpart in U.S. political history is the fossil-fuel industry's Big Lie efforts to persuade us it's not Mother Nature's deadliest adversary.

Only in recent years has a huge influx of high-tech “outlanders” nullified Seattle's indigenous hostility to public-transport users. Compared to transit systems in other Pacific Northwest coastal cities, Portland to the south and Vancouver in Canada, Seattle mass transit runs at least four decades behind – deliberately kept so backward it cannot possibly catch up – an urban-area outrage even in the notoriously autocentric United States. 

Now, as if in a race toward a new bottom, the Anti-Transit-User Movement of Tacoma and Pierce County is bidding to make its own bailiwick many times worse. What nobody in authority wants to admit is that downsizing of the magnitude being inflicted by ATUM voters will almost certainly mean the death of Pierce Transit. Nearly a fifth of its operating revenues come from the fare box. A service reduction of 53 percent will slash fare-box income to the proverbial bone, most likely enough to bankrupt the agency and shut it down permanently.

One knowledgeable transport-industry source says Tacoma/Pierce County thus will have brought upon itself the odium of being the largest urban area in the industrial world without public transportation. Thus too will it become a monument to greed, bigotry and miserliness, a nadir of anti-transit-user malice. Endorsed as the ATUM is by the Tacoma-Pierce County Chamber of Commerce and a deep-pocket coalition of local automobile dealers, it is already attracting the most negative sorts of international attention. 

Clearly, its alliance with the rabidly Teabaggerish ATUM severely limits the chamber's ability to fulfill one of its primary responsibilities – promoting Tacoma/Pierce County as a forward-looking place in which to headquarter, expand or build business and industry. 

Presumably the chamber represents all local business interests, but its emergence as a leader in the war against mass transit users suggests a much narrower (hidden) agenda. Has the chamber deliberately made itself an instrument in the One Percent's lethal subjugation of lower-income people? Is there some secret cabal of obscenely wealthy speculators eagerly awaiting the last run of the last Pierce Transit bus? Do they intend – once the transit agency is slain – to launch a for-profit bus company? 

No doubt such service would be priced to exclude all save the richest commuters – the aggressively Caucasian autocentrics who loudly decry the area's ever-more-gridlocked highways even as their votes against transit make the traffic that much worse. 

Why then do they vote as they do? 

Only a boundless aversion to the implicit democracy of public transport – a bottomless loathing and contempt for racial and ethnic minorities and the urban poor in general – could prompt such self-contradictory voting. With Pierce Transit slain and a for-profit bus company operating on the commuter routes, the wealthy suburbanites – and let us not forget Tacoma's growing number of penthouse urbanites – would finally have their own de facto limousine service. 

Plausible? You be the judge. But as we all know, privatization is almost always the ugly motive behind the deliberate downsizing and destruction of government services.

Perhaps some securely employed investigative reporter – if indeed any remain – will wrangle an assignment to explore these questions in depth. 

Meanwhile there's no doubt the attack on Tacoma/Pierce County bus riders is class war of the most vicious sort. Those of us who are elderly, disabled, chronically impoverished and therefore dependent on public transport for medical appointments, grocery shopping and other life-sustaining errands are being handed the Ayn Rand version of a termination notice: "we don't want you here; hurry up and die." 

LB/7-8 November 2012

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Microcosm: War on Women and Constitutional Rights

To view the graphic associated with this report, go to my blog on TypePad. Blogger's software will not allow it to be uploaded. My apology for the inconvenience. 

*

THE BATTLE FOR a seat in the bicameral Washington state legislature provides a unique and troubling picture – a portrait relevant to readers everywhere – of the lengths to which religious conservatives will go to wage war against women, homosexuals and progressive modes of governance.

 

Superficially, the fight is a heated clash between between six-term-incumbent Rep. Jeannie Darneille and political upstart John Connelly over who will be Tacoma's next state senator. But most of the heat comes from Connelly, who is attacking Darneille with a campaign that is notable both for its million-dollar budget and its use of smear tactics so outrageous they are condemned even by some of Connelly's former colleagues.

 

What is at stake is whether the (mostly) Republican forces of misogyny and sexual oppression can hide behind a Democratic label to capture or paralyze the Legislature in a state that has long been considered progressive – so much so a Roosevelt Administration official once sarcastically labeled it “the Soviet of Washington.” 

Darneille, a Democrat who typifies the state's progressive element, has proven herself a fierce defender of female reproductive freedom and women's rights in general. A modern personification of the traditional New Deal humanitarian, she is a dependable protector of the social safety net and an impassioned proponent of universal health care. She also advocates granting marriage equality and all other forms of anti-discrimination protection to lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transsexuals. 

Connelly, who goes by the Kennedy-esque nickname “Jack,” is a successful trial lawyer who lacks legislative experience. Though he claims the Democratic Party label,  he has publicly acknowledged he's against abortion even in cases of rape or incest, that he opposes granting LGBT people the right to marry and that he's “undecided” on whether sexual minorities deserve any other civil rights protections. Connelly also boasts of leadership roles in two arch-conservative Catholic organization, the Knights of Columbus and a notoriously anti-LGBT Tacoma parish. 

His law firm, Connelly Law Offices, is listed as an “ultrasonic champion” of 4US, an anti-abortion organization that describes itself as a primary donor of ultrasound machines to so-called “crisis pregnancy centers.” Reproductive-rights advocates condemn these clinics for disseminating false or deceptive information intended to bully abortion-seekers into carrying their fetuses to term no matter how unwanted the birth or ruinous its consequences. But 4US defends deliberate deception – a tactic curiously parallel to Connelly's claim of Democratic Party values – as essential to its mission.  “A pregnant woman in crisis sees her baby for the first time on an ultrasound machine,” the 4US website explains, and 96 percent of those mothers “will bring a baby into the world.”

Significantly, the Knights of Columbus is another 4US “ultrasonic champion.”

And Wal-Mart – perhaps the most relentlessly anti-union corporation on the planet – is listed as a 4US “sonic champion.”

Connelly thus has demonstrable ties – each one revealed by credible material readily available on the Internet – not only to the forces of the Christian Right and its wars against women and homosexuals but to Ayn Rand capitalism and its war against American workers.

Each of these associations is equally damning. But the Knights connection is clearly the more threatening for women and LGBT people. Through his local Knights trusteeship,  Connelly has significant connections to the outspoken homophobe Rick Santorum, and through Santorum to the mysterious Opus Dei organization.  Also via the Knights, Connelly is associated with the ecumenically homophobic National Organization for Marriage;  with the vindictively fundamentalist Focus on the Family; likewise with the notably homophobic Church of Latter Day Saints; and – once again – with Opus Dei.

Any notion Knights opinion in Washington state might be less intolerant than elsewhere is refuted by the website material linked above: note how it commands members to “avoid supporting evil acts...reject Referendum 74.”

Despite the fact Connelly shares the zero-tolerance position of Republican Vice Presidential Candidate Paul Ryan on abortion; despite Connelly's use of Republican campaign tactics; despite the undeniable role of the above-listed organizations in converting the Republicans into fundamentalist storm troops – despite all these  facts, definitive evidence Connelly is a deep-cover agent of the Republican Party itself remained elusive.

 

Nevertheless Connelly's anti-woman, anti-LGBT positions transform his oft-brandished history of anti-government lawsuits into a powerful appeal to the district's conservative minority. So does the subtly Teabagger-tainted rhetoric sometimes encountered on his website, as in the “Final Thoughts” section of his “Issues” page.  “The District needs more than a straight line party voter who has very little real experience in the private sector.”

Connelly is attacking on so broad a front he is now attempting to discredit even Darneille's professional background. (Washington's Legislature, though always a full-time occupation when in session, is ultimately a part-time job, which means its members necessarily pursue non-legislative careers.) Contrary to Connelly's innuendo, Darneille's career is indeed in “the private sector,” specifically in the successful management of nonprofit human-service agencies.

Though Darneille trounced Connelly in the Democratic primary by 59-40 percent, he refused to concede. Allowed by quirky Washington state law to again oppose Darneille in the general election (6 November 2012), he soon began deluging 27th District voters with anti-Darneille attack ads, their negative content quickly emerging as a campaign issue in its own right.

The advertisements and flyers with which Connelly is flooding the district's airwaves and mailboxes denounce Darneille as “against public safety,” a tactic that prompted immediate condemnation from Democrat Bill Baarsma, a former Tacoma mayor. In a letter published by The News Tribune, the McClatchy-owned local daily, Baarsma implicitly called Connelly a liar:

“I thought I had seen it all during my many years involved in local politics, but trial lawyer Jack Connelly’s desperate, over-the-top, self-funded...campaign for state Senate sets a new standard. He is now running televised attack ads against his opponent, state Rep. Jeannie Darneille, suggesting she was in some way complicit in two horrific criminal acts committed years before she was elected to the Legislature.”

“In point of fact,” Baarsma continued, “Darneille has the sole endorsement of those people who have to fight crime each and every day – local police (Tacoma Police Union 6 and the Washington Council of Police and Sheriffs) and the state patrol (Washington State Troopers Association).”

Sen. Debbie Regala, who has endorsed Darneille as her replacement, joins Baarsma in decrying Connelly's smear tactics. “He has resorted to...innuendo, distortions and manipulations of the facts to imply Darneille is not concerned about public safety. Nothing could be farther from the truth.”

Many local Democrats wonder why Connelly is waging such a desperate fight for a state senate seat. More to the point, they are perplexed by the record-breaking sums of money – Connelly claims it is all his own – he is lavishing on his campaign. 
 

To put Connelly's unprecedented outlay in perspective, a Washington State Public Disclosure Commission spokesperson says each Democratic legislative candidate spent an average of $124,170 in 2010. According to Connelly's own reports to PDC, to date he has already spent $783,634.34 – 6.1 times that 2010 statewide norm.

What could motivate such extravagance?

“I've wracked my brain trying to figure out what his game is,” said one longtime Democratic activist. “The only thing I can think of is he hopes the campaign will benefit his law practice.”

Connelly's connections with conservative Christianity and his unapologetic use of classic Republican smear tactics may therefore be the most indicative evidence of his intentions. Perhaps a broader explanation may be found within the warning published three years ago in several progressive media outlets, that Christian fundamentalists – having successfully infiltrated the Republican party, purged it of liberals and turned it into an army of religious fanatics – are attempting to take over the Democratic Party the same way they captured the GOP.

And “fanatical” is an accurate description of Connelly's astounding campaign expenditures, which – backed by a PDC-reported $1.07 million war chest – provide a grim picture of his capabilities. 

“Once upon a time, though it may seem strange to think of it...the Republican Party was moderately progressive,” wrote Bruce Wilson of the Talk to Action website. “So there's no reason Democrats can't become populist theocrats, especially if they are willing to jettison core principles such as support for secular government and minority rights...Along a wide range of fronts, the American religious right has been infiltrating, influencing, befuddling, and neutralizing the Democratic Party and the American left.”

Similar disclosures, all relevant given Connelly's opposition to homosexuality and female reproductive freedom, are the subject of several recent books by widely recognized authors. These works include American Fascists: the Christian Right and the War on America (Chris Hedges; Simon & Schuster: 2006); American Theocracy (Kevin Phillips; Viking Press: 2006); and The Family subtitled The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (Jeff Sharlet; Harper Collins 2008). Each warns of an extended campaign by Protestant and Catholic zealots, all lavishly financed by Big Business, to replace constitutional governance with zero-tolerance biblical law, the Christian counterpart of Islam's Sharia.

The campaign to impose Christian theocracy on the United States is thus proven to be terrifyingly real.  The present-day war against women – in truth a war against human sexuality in every form – is merely its most visible manifestation, whether in Tacoma or elsewhere.

Another index to the theocratic threat is a 2005 Rasmussen poll that reveals 63 percent of the U.S. population believes the Bible “is literally true,” that it is the incontestable word of god. The core belief of Christian fundamentalism whether Catholic or Protestant, this is the doctrine that fuels the burgeoning threat of theocracy.

The Manhattan Declaration,  effectively a fatwa of Christian jihad against secular society, confirms the magnitude of the theocratic threat, both by its number of signatories and by its text:

“We, as Orthodox, Catholic and Evangelical Christians...act together in obedience to the one true —God...especially troubled that in our nation today the lives of the unborn...are severely threatened; that the institution of marriage, already buffeted by promiscuity, infidelity and divorce, is in jeopardy of being redefined to accommodate fashionable ideologies; that freedom of religion and the rights of conscience are gravely jeopardized by those who would use the instruments of coercion to compel persons of faith to compromise their deepest convictions.”

Its concluding lines are especially revealing:

“(W)e will not comply with any edict that purports to compel our institutions to participate in abortions, embryo-destructive research, assisted suicide and euthanasia, or any other anti-life act; nor will we bend to any rule purporting to force us to bless immoral sexual partnerships, treat them as marriages or the equivalent, or refrain from proclaiming the truth, as we know it, about morality and immorality and marriage and the family.”

Many civil libertarians fear the only way the Manhattan Declaration's signers can achieve their ends is by abolishing constitutional democracy, imposing biblical law, disempowering women and outlawing sexual minorities.

In its most extreme form, the U.S. theocracy movement “is well known for its proposals that alleged sinners, including homosexuals and rebellious teenagers, be put to death by stoning,” notes Talk to Action's Wilson.

Connelly, like his Christian conservative associates, is already redefining religious liberty in accordance with Manhattan Declaration principles. No longer is freedom of religion the separation of church and state or the freedom from persecution guaranteed by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Now it is the Ryan/Santorum definition: the alleged freedom of religious extremists to discriminate against those with whom they disagree.

In this context, Connelly's “Issues” statement, linked above, is especially revealing. It describes contraception as “an area where increasing respect for differences of opinion and beliefs is necessary and desirable.” Which begs the question whether Connelly believes an anti-contraception pharmacist has the right to nullify women's reproductive freedom by withholding birth control – even if that pharmacy is the only accessible source.

His conservative stance on other matters of women's rights, LGBT equality and human sexuality in general proves him to be radically out-of-step with much of the state's progressive history.

Meanwhile the Republicans – here (as everywhere else in the U.S.), the party of Ayn Rand economics mated with the Christian drive toward biblical theocracy – say they believe the Legislature is theirs for the taking.  And if they win the governor's mansion as well – at this writing Democrat Jay Inslee has only a narrow lead over Republican Rob McKenna –  Washington would almost certainly go the way of Wisconsin, where Scott Walker's anti-labor victories in 2010 and in this year's failed recall vote also imposed a maliciously anti-woman, anti-homosexual coup.  

It's the Wisconsin example that makes the possibility of a Connelly victory so frightening to so many real Democrats. Given Connelly's anti-woman, anti-LGBT views and his membership in misogynistic and homophobic organizations, Darneille supporters rationally fear he would vote with the Republicans in any legislative assault against reproductive freedom or any attack against the other hard-won liberties of women and sexual minorities.

Connelly tries to give the impression he would respect all such rights: “Jack does not believe that anybody should be discriminated agains,” the “Issues” section of his website states. “No one wants to see a teenage girl drop out of school and face a lifetime of poverty because she became pregnant. Nor should she feel compelled to suffer the pain and anguish of a termination where this can be prevented.”

An unknown factor in the senatorial election is Referendum 74, which seeks voter endorsement of a gay marriage bill passed by the Legislature and signed by the Democratic governor earlier this year. The referendum's presence on the ballot promises an unprecedented turnout from progressives and religious conservatives alike. The former clearly dominate the 27th District. But the latter are under unprecedented pulpit-pressure to vote against the measure. What this might mean in terms of Connelly's election prospects remains unknown.

There's also the fact Darneille has only slightly more than $233 thousand in her total campaign budget, small change compared to Connelly's million plus. Darneille has not made an issue of it, but the inequality between the two candidates is a perfect microcosm of the socioeconomic chasm that defines the present-day United States.

Though such a lopsided fight usually ends in victory for the wealthier contender, a poll conducted in June by a Seattle-based political consulting firm indicated the 27th District's voters are a solid 64.6 percent in favor of women's reproductive rights. With the general election already underway – these days Washington casts its ballots by mail – Darneille and her supporters are counting on pro-choice voters for the numbers they need to triumph over Connelly's lies, distortions and money. 

*

(My thanks to Pat Fletcher for her graphics skills and for helping edit this text.)

 

LB/10-21 October 2012

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EXTRA: Forceful Obama Bests Romney in Debate

BITTERLY CONSCIOUS OF the narrow range of political options allowed the U.S. by its capitalist masters, I twice noted that President Barack Obama's unspeakably wretched performance in the first presidential debate two weeks ago might indicate he has been ordered to throw the election.

But after witnessing Obama's eloquent, Tai-Chi-like mastery of the verbal bullying attempted by Republican Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney last night, I am delighted to report I have been cleansed of all such suspicions.

For those who were unable to watch the fireworks of the debate live, here thanks to Politico is a transcript and video. 

Despite my cheers and applause for this seemingly re-energized Obama, I remain acutely conscious of the fact he and Romney are each candidates of the Ruling Class. Save on the familial and socioeconomic issues of women's rights and marriage equality – where Romney/Ryan misogyny and homophobia demonstrate the Republicans' enthusiastic collaboration in the Christofascist effort to replace constitutional governance with biblical law – the two candidates' policies differ mainly by degree. 

Neither dares admit the driving ethos of capitalism – elevation of infinite greed to maximum virtue – demands the overthrow of every humanitarian principle our species has ever formulated. 

And each plans to slash Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and food stamps, thereby producing gargantuan windfalls for the One Percent while forcing the rest of us, the 99 Percent, the (formerly) Working Class, ever deeper into hopeless poverty. 

But the Republicans would abolish the entire social safety net almost overnight, while the Democrats will do it more gradually – or so they say. 

Hence another part of my 13 October essay remains undeniably true: “With terminal climate change accelerating beyond all projections, the One Percent is racing to protect itself by converting the United States into the de facto Fourth Reich: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation and genocidal poverty (including mass poisoning by genetically modified foods) for all the rest of us, the entire system increasingly sustained by Ayn Rand indoctrination, Christian prosperity gospel and the Big Business variant of rule by divine right.” 

What this means is that regardless of who wins the election, those of us who live below the salt, as I do, will be allowed nothing more than crumbs from the capitalist table. 

But I have no doubt we'll get many more of those crumbs if we vote to retain Obama in the White House for another four years. 

Which leaves me, at age 72, with the one last realistic hope of my lifetime: that an Obama victory will allow me to die of natural causes before I am murdered by the Ruling Class policy of genocidal abandonment – extermination of elderly, disabled and chronically poor people by the termination of the stipends and services that now keep us alive.

LB/16 October 2012

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Veep Debate Exposes Religion's Role in War on Women

MSNBC'S LAWRENCE O'DONNELL and the many others who condemn Vice Presidential Debate Moderator Martha Raddatz for daring ask the candidates how their religious beliefs shape their views on abortion are clearly loathe to acknowledge the depth to which the United States has already been thrust into zero-tolerance Christian theocracy.

 

That such acknowledgement has become one of the paramount taboos of U.S. politics makes the critics' objections – whether spawned by pathological denial or deliberate deception – all the more indefensible. Three unimpeachably credible books on the subject, their revealing subtitles shown here in parentheses, have documented in terrifying detail this unprecedented threat to U.S. liberty. Chris Hedges' American Fascists (The Christian Right and the War on America) and Kevin Phillips' American Theocracy (The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century) were released in 2006, while Jeff Sharlet's The Family (The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power) appeared in 2008, each the product of a major publisher. A 2005 Rasmussen poll  had already revealed 63 percent of the U.S. population believes the Bible is literally true – the core litmus test for whether one is a fundamentalist and thus presumably favorable to overthrowing constitutional governance and replacing it with biblical law, the Christian version of Sharia. And no one can deny the Republican Party has become the scimitar with which Christian fanatics are hacking away women's rights, their success measured by the fact women in 87 percent of the nation's counties now lack access to abortion. 

 

In this ever-more-reactionary context, the answers to Raddatz's question undoubtedly produced the most revealing moment of the entire presidential campaign, its relevance reaching far beyond the debate between Vice-President Joe Biden and Vice-Presidential Candidate Paul Ryan.

 

The candidates' views on women's rights – Obama/Biden generally supportive, Romney/Ryan fanatically opposed – have thereby emerged as the one defining issue in an election that, beneath its rhetorical histrionics, is otherwise scarcely more than a clash over the tactics and strategies of how capitalism is to complete its (inevitable) transition to fascism. The Democrats reflexively conceal their tyrannical agenda behind lip service to once-genuinely progressive values; the Republicans make no secret of their bigoted intent to abolish the rights of women and minorities and their genocidal plan to immediately destroy all remaining socioeconomic safety nets, thereby revealing themselves to be the modern-day equivalent of the Nazis. And like the Nazi Ruling Class, the Republican One Percent regards Christianity as a primary mechanism of social control. Meanwhile – their cooperation deftly concealed by corporate-controlled mass media – both parties quietly collaborate to end forever the American experiment in constitutional democracy: note the near-unanimous Congressional votes to abolish constitutional rights and grant the president the unlimited powers of a führer or a tsar.

 

Thus Biden's performance against Ryan – no question it was superb – does not diminish my deeper, more cynical suspicion President Barack Obama has been ordered to lose the election. With terminal climate change accelerating beyond all projections, the One Percent is racing to protect itself by converting the United States into the de facto Fourth Reich: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation and genocidal poverty (including mass poisoning by genetically modified foods) for all the rest of us, the entire system increasingly sustained by Ayn Rand indoctrination, Christian prosperity gospel and the Big Business variant of rule by divine right.

 

Though it is a bit of an aside, I cannot but wonder how long it will take the Ruling Class to expunge Rand's atheism from her (numbingly tedious) writing as it is elevated into the U.S. equivalent of Mein Kampf.

 

In any case Obama's behavior in the next two debates will demonstrate whether his abysmal showing in the first bout was accidental or deliberate. If the latter, and if Romney therefore wins, those of us who are elderly, disabled and/or chronically impoverished – I am all three – have nothing to look forward to save the various forms of misery and death inflicted by deliberate abandonment. And those of us who are critics of capitalism will no doubt end our lives in prison or concentration camp.

 

Hence, given our only electoral choice is between the more gradual boiled-frog fascism of the Democrats and the blitzkrieg JesuNazism of the Republicans, I'm obviously voting for Obama/Biden.

*****

Elsewhere: Reflections on Capitalism, Theocracy and the Imbecility of Hope

 

When Reader Supported News ran a detailed indictment of Wall Street thievery (“...the same austerity philosophy that has been forced on Greece and Spain - and the same that is prompting President Obama and Mitt Romney to urge scaling back Social Security and Medicare”), I responded accordingly. As the negative numbers show – at least once going as high as -9 – many RSN readers were infuriated by my condemnation of the anti-intellectuality that renders the U.S. Left powerless in the face of capitalist savagery, a classic example of the proudly ignorant closed-mindedness that too often characterizes today's USians regardless of their ideology.

As I have said more times than I can count, such is capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation and genocidal poverty for all the rest of us.

 

The questions – the only questions really – are (1) how to fight back and (2) whether the U.S. population has enough residual courage to mount an effective resistance.

Unfortunately, answering the first question requires the very intellectual processes the self-proclaimed Left despises and rejects: note for example the hateful anti-intellectuality characteristic of the Occupy Movement.

 

As to the second question, the answer is self-evident. Just as the Anti-Vietnam War Movement collapsed in the wake of the Kent State Massacre, so has Occupy – denied ideological solidarity by its frenzied anti-intellectuality – collapsed in the face of police brutality.

Thus – unless we are saved at the last minute by some miraculous awakening – have we doomed ourselves to inescapable slavery.

 

***

A former Arkansas Department of Human Services lawyer, an avowed Christian theocrat running as a Republican for a seat in the state's Legislature, is urging the death penalty for rebellious children, calling it “a tremendous incentive for children to give proper respect to their parents.” 

Alas, far too many of those who commented on this terrifying report obviously dismiss its significance as a harbinger of horrors to come:

We jeer this JesuNazi at our own peril.

He is the quintessence of Republicanism, the ultimate, Ruling-Class-financed purpose of which is imposing zero-tolerance Christian theocracy on the United States.

Charlie Fuqua makes no secret of this intent because he lives in the South, which is already a de facto theocracy.

 

Yes, murdering children for disobedience is in fact part of the Biblical Law the corporate-funded theocrats intend to impose. So is stripping women of all rights (including the right to vote). Likewise the public burning of unbelievers.

 

But surely, you say, the people who run corporations can't be that savage.

 

Guess again: consider Bhopal, Exxon Valdez, Deepwater Horizon. Remember Karen Silkwood.

 

Never forget the core truth of capitalism: infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue.

 

Then recognize that under theocracy, CEO's rule by divine right. Work orders are holy writ. As in the Parable of the Talents, the person who has least is punished with the most harshness. 

 

Unless we awaken, such is the future that awaits us. 

 

***

Meanwhile, in a detailed report on the surveillance devices by which the nation's school children are increasingly monitored, we learn the technology to enforce zero-tolerance theocracy is already being installed.

 

Which leaves me profoundly grateful I was born 72 years ago and lived the first decades of my life in a United States that truly was – at least for most Caucasians – a “sweet land of liberty.” But that realm no longer exists, nor – thanks to (self-inflicted) terminal climate change – will our species ever again know anything so wondrously comfortable and comforting:

 

When I view the future imposed on us by Ruling Class technology – a slave world overseen by zero-tolerance electronics – I am glad I am old. Surely I will be dead before consciousness becomes naught but horror.

 

LB/13 October 2012

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