Obama's Ayn Rand Zeal Makes Government Our Enemy

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A plea to us all: an Occupy Tacoma activist rests with his picket sign after a long march in the rain, October 2011. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2013.

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I WAS TRUDGING home in an unseasonably frigid surprise downpour, my mind awash in hot anger and cold fear provoked by President Barack Obama's smirking betrayal of Social Security and Medicare recipients, when I finally understood what is surely the most bitter truth of the post-American-Dream United States: that its governments now serve only the One Percent.

 

This epiphany was so startling I'd normally have stopped whatever I was doing and written of it the little pocket notebook I always carry, a gift from Adrienne that can often grow an initial realization into more detailed exposition. But the April weather made any writing impossible. The hard rain of this unpredicted terminal-climate-change storm was pouring off the broadly protective brim of my brown felt Akubra, the sudden cold north wind had already numbed my wet fingers beyond any ability to legibly use a pen, and in any case the proverbial light of comprehension had flared from my subconscious just as I was hobbling with my hickory cane across a busy street, watchful lest some sadistic Tacoma motorist use the gloomy afternoon as an excuse to play vehicular dodge-em with a crippled old man.

 

By the time I got home and was exchanging my drenched jeans and sweater and jacket for the sensual pleasure of a warm and dry sweat-suit, I had recognized that perhaps the most self-constraining intellectual error of my adult life was my chronic failure to recognize that government – all government (precisely because what used to be at least presumably our government has been captured and turned against us by the One Percent) – is now ironically the enemy the Right always claimed it to be.

The underlying truth of this new U.S. paradigm is that government whether federal, state or local no longer fulfills its original constitutional purpose. It no longer enables us to do collectively what we cannot do individually. Instead – exactly as it did to the Occupy Movement and is doing now to Social Security and Medicare recipients – it aggressively obstructs us. Thus what was once notable as government by, for and of ourselves (even given its socioeconomically limited definition of “we the people”), has become indistinguishable in purpose from the governments of pre-revolutionary France or pre-revolutionary Russia. Antoinette France, Tsarist Russia or the present-day United States, such government exists only to protect the Ruling Class, to perpetuate its wealth and power and to subjugate all the rest of us.

Coincidentally – or perhaps not coincidentally at all if you believe in Jungian synchronicity or telepathy – an old friend on the opposite side of the continent was having similar thoughts and emailed me a long but stunningly relevant quote by the 19th Century French revolutionary Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: 

“To be governed is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is it's justice; that is it's morality.”

Reduced to sound-bite simplicity and translated into modern terms, what Proudhon is telling us is that beyond the smokescreens of rhetoric, there's no real difference between the government of North Korea and the government of the United States.

The North Korean rulers claim to be Communists but are in fact an (allegedly nonexistent) Ruling Class that governs by old-fashioned despotism. Anyone who dares criticize the dominant Kim Il Sung/Kim Jong Il/Kim Jong U personality cult is denounced as an ultimate political criminal and liquidated in the traditional manner: killed by a bullet to the back of the head or worked to death in a slave-labor camp.

 

United States leaders are figureheads who enact the clandestine decrees of an (allegedly nonexistent) capitalist Ruling Class. These leaders whether Democratic or Republican claim to be defenders of constitutional liberty but are, like their Ruling Class masters, fanatical Ayn Rand fascists. The ultimate USian political criminal is therefore not one who has broken any written law but rather one who is no longer exploitable for capitalist profit and/or whose poverty embarrasses the Ruling Class by revealing the underlying savagery of its Ayn Rand dogmas.

Because death camps are still considered unfashionable in today's United States – “O what would the (international) neighbors think?” – capitalism's undesirables are eliminated by more subtle means than are used in North Korea. Our jobs are abolished, our unemployment compensation is terminated, we're evicted from our homes, our gardens are bulldozed, our schools are closed, our public transport is shut down, our pensions are looted, our medical insurance is canceled, our welfare is cut off, we're denied disaster relief and we're abandoned in every other way conceivable. Thus we're slain by whatever mechanism fate decrees: starvation, sickness, suicide. In the end we're just as dead as the victims of the North Korean secret police.

Even the reactions of the two (allegedly nonexistent) Ruling Class hierarchies are undoubtedly similar.

The North Korean commissars damn their victims as “enemies of the people,” shrug self-righteously Maoist shoulders and say “otso commen jo so wah,” which is in their native language Hangul and means approximately “what can you do?” Such dismissals are no doubt followed by the exclamation “hiyu” and a Hangul phrase that would translate into English as “these criminals brought their punishments on themselves.”

In the United States, which has the planet's largest numerical and per-capita prison population, the One Percenters who are the masters of the Democrats and Republicans damn their victims as “failures who chose the poverty lifestyle,” shrug their self-righteously Ayn Randite shoulders and say, “the poor will always be with us; better to let them all die.”

Perhaps if we were to see all this as clearly as I saw it that afternoon in the rain, we could purge ourselves of our traditional (and obsolete) belief in government as a servant of the people and replace it with recognition that today's USian government has become the goon squad of the One Percent and will never again be anything else. Then maybe Left and Right could together build a solidarity based on common grievances and open ourselves to evolving an ideology that might enable us to effectively resist what is being done to us.

But that's not likely. The directional momentum of the USian population, controlled as it is by the One Percent, is toward ever-deepening ignorance, which means ever-intensifying subjugation.

Never in human history has the creation of a dark-age mentality been so methodical, so sustained, so perpetuated by zero-tolerance methods and technologies of oppression. After a half century, our ignorance is already an inescapable prison. Note again the example of Occupy: how the toxins of induced ignorance – anti-intellectuality, selfishness, distrust, class hatred, bigotry – destroyed the movement from within even as government storm troopers were crushing it from without.

To understand what looms – to know why I am ever more thankful my one child did not survive outside his mother's womb – you need only look at the horrors of the post-Minoan and post-Roman dark ages, each of which lasted at least a thousand years and by some estimates continue into the present. But no matter your view of history, this darkness that approaches now is undeniably forever – that is, until the United States is torn asunder by the baronial feuds of the One Percent and the fallout whether literally or figuratively renders our species extinct.

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Real Obama (I): New Deal Rhetoric Hides Ayn Rand Economics

To strip away the Big Lies by which Barack the Betrayer disguised himself as Obama the Orator and twice scammed us into electing him president, it's necessary to apply only two principles. One is that deeds reveal what words conceal, or as the Bible puts it in the book of Saint Matthew, “By their fruits shall ye know them.” The other is Occam's Razor, which tells us the simplest, most straightforward explanation of a mystery is usually the closest to the truth.

In 2008, presented as the antidote to eight years of despotic misrule by George W. Bush, Obama ran as the personification of “change we can believe in.” A compelling orator, he promised restoration of the constitutional rights nullified by Bush, promised single-payer/public-option health care and promised to revitalize the union movement via the Employee Free Choice Act.

But Obama's key promises, like “change” itself, were soon proven to have been Big Lies. 

Once in office, Obama refused to reverse Bush's nullification of our constitutional rights. In fact he escalated it.  Now, given the resultant omnipotence of the U.S. surveillance-and-murder apparatus, we are far closer to serfdom than we were in pre-revolutionary 1774 as subjects of King George III. Our closest political and economic counterparts are the officially powerless proletarians and peasants that characterized Tsarist Russia.

Meanwhile, even before Obama took office in 2009, he had engineered health-care reform into what may be the greatest financial betrayal in U.S. history.  Making secret deals with top executives of the pharmaceutical and health insurance cartels, he deliberately eliminated the possibility of competition between for-profit insurance and any non-profit single-payer/public-option health-care system like Medicare for All.

Obama also used his (Republican) brand of health insurance to further abolish the remnants of our liberty. Via the so-called individual mandate – the requirement we all buy insurance – Obama reduced the entire U.S. population to chattel.  We are now – each and every one of us – de facto serfs required to labor for the trillion-dollar enrichment of our masters, the prescription drug lords and the for-profit insurance-industry's sultans of sickness.

By the beginning of the 2012 presidential election campaign season, Obama's serial betrayals raised grave questions as to whether he could win a second term. But the One Percent arranged for him to be opposed by George Romney and Paul Ryan – a terrifying ticket of avowed Ayn Rand fascists even the more rational Republicans found repugnant. Barack the Betrayer then obscured the ugly realities of his presidency by once more donning his Obama the Orator persona. And once again he deceived the forgetful, frightened and hopelessly ignorant electorate with a new set of promises, among which was the protection of Social Security and Medicare – the biggest of his 2012 Big Lies.

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Real Obama (II): the Most Effectively Anti-Labor President Ever

If we apply Saint Matthew's deeds test, we discover Obama is the U.S. One Percent's most effective class warrior ever. His signature triumph is his methodical destruction – almost entirely by stealth – of the nation's labor movement. He has thus arguably done more to imprison the 99 Percent in permanent poverty than any other politician in U.S. history.

In 2009, Obama killed the Employee Free Choice Act, thereby terminating any possibility of a union comeback. In 2011, despite his earlier promise to walk picket lines,  Obama ruinously back-stabbed all unionized workers in Wisconsin and Michigan. In 2012 – no doubt to ensure the labor movement will never arise from its grave – he neutralized the National Labor Relations Board by the most maliciously cunning political sleight-of-hand I have ever witnessed.  He filled NLRB vacancies by the legally questionable tactic of recess appointments, thereby ensuring the support of organized labor in the 2012 election even as he invited the post-election judicial challenge that not only overturned the appointments but shut down the NLRB. 

Given political reality – the near certainty Republican control of Congress will continue indefinitely – the closing of the NLRB is effectively permanent. This means there is no longer any federal mechanism for enforcing union contracts  or otherwise protecting workers from the ever-intensifying malevolence of capitalism.

Thus Obama again revealed himself as Barack the Betrayer. He stripped organized labor of its last remnants of power, giving lethal credence to the anti-labor stooges who now argue it's a waste of money to continue paying union dues when – thanks to Obama – unions are no longer defended by the government. And tragically, there is truth in the stooges' claims. Though unions were gravely diminished by the vicious realities of the post-American-Dream economy, they nevertheless retained their legal role as the (only remaining) defender of USian workers' rights. But now with the de facto death of the NLRB so cleverly arranged by the president, the entire concept of legally recognized workers' rights is in jeopardy.

Verily, it is as if Congress has repealed the Wagner Act,  as if our (African-American) president has (ironically) reversed the nation's departure from slavery and indentured servitude by signing the Wagner Act's repeal, and as if the Supreme Court has ruled this disempowerment of the entire 99 Percent to be precisely what the Founders intended.

What unites all of Obama's betrayals,  whether of our constitutional rights, of our pleas for adequate health care, of our right to Social Security or of our need for jobs and unions – what proves each betrayal to be no more than a separate outrage in a single unprecedented economic atrocity – is the manner in which the total package strengthens the paradigm of capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation for all the rest of us.

Obviously here is the real Obama: a man who has nothing but hatred for unions and contempt for the entire 99 Percent.

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Shaving Away Deception (I): Questions about Obama's Education

While the Right's “birther” arguments are beyond absurd, another of the Right's questions – how Obama was able to overcome the prohibitive barriers of racism, caste and economics to attend Columbia and Harvard and teach at the University of Chicago – is well worthy of investigation.

Because I was an exceptionally bright child whose academic ambitions were blocked by economic obstructions that by the late 1950s were again becoming as insurmountable as they had been before World War II, I know from painful experience that even when you're a male Caucasian of acknowledged talents, no combination of drive and intelligence is by itself sufficient to unlock the gates of academe. No matter I had my first daily newspaper reporting-and-writing job at age 16, no matter my verbal skills and reasoning ability tested in the topmost percentiles; where I dwelt with my father and stepmother in Tennessee, either your parents were rich enough to pay your tuition, or you somehow raised the money yourself. Otherwise you were locked out; you either enlisted in the military or waited to be seized by the draft.

By 1979, when Obama reached college age, the draft had ended, and the Ayn Rand, admission-only-by-ability-to-pay standard that defined higher education in the South had been imposed on the entire nation. But beyond the obvious economic segregation, the requirements for admission to such aristocratic realms as Columbia or Harvard were much the same as they had been in the 1950s or are now: you must either be to the manor born or you must somehow acquire influential sponsorship by a member of the One Percent. To achieve the latter, as Obama did, you must repeatedly prove yourself to be unquestionably politically reliable – never left of center if you seek a career in public service or journalism, avowedly apolitical if your aspirations are in the arts and/or literature.

The same system functions at the lower levels of the United States – that is, at the financial gateways to state universities and even community colleges. At this level, the unofficial guardians are the ministers, priests, rabbis and local business executives required as references or endorsements on applications for scholarships and most other forms of student aid. Given my political history – perhaps more importantly given my father's political history and my mother's psychological history of spectacular and therefore scandalous matrimonial dysfunction – no such testimonials or endorsements were ever forthcoming. Thus even when I was on a dean's list for academic excellence, I was never able to obtain more than the most minimal work-study supplements to the already miserly Vietnam Era G.I. Bill. Indeed, without the G.I. Bill, I would not have finished college at all, not even at the small, inexpensive, relatively obscure state school that (reluctantly) granted me a bachelor of arts degree in 1976.

At the higher levels, Columbia and its ilk, the required endorsers are far more exalted: Big Business chief executive officers, major newspaper publishers, senators, bishops, cardinals, distinguished alumni and the like, people so far above me I would scarcely be allowed to collect their garbage, much less set foot inside their clubs and mansions.

How a person of Barack Obama's socioeconomic status managed to pass such impregnable barriers thus remains a legitimate mystery even considering his mother's subsequent rise in academic and governmental circles. Where did the money for her education come from? Was her long employment by the U.S. Agency for International Development a cover for a clandestine Central Intelligence Agency career? Is this – and USAID's notorious association with far-Right politicians abroad – perhaps the back-story to Obama's own ascent?

The Obama example is all the more mysterious given the huge number of equally promising USian youth of all races and genders who are marginalized merely because of their socioeconomic status and thus cast forever into the cesspools of poverty, welfare and prison.

In this context it would be especially enlightening to know when – and by whom – the plebeian Barack Obama was first singled out for his future service to the One Percent. Clearly it was long before he matriculated at Harvard. Who paid his prohibitively expensive tuition at Punahou? Who arranged for his admission to what is authoritatively said to be the most selectively elitist private school in the state of Hawaii and amongst the top ten such institutions in the entire U.S.?

Clearly, the choice of the young Obama to eventually be the perfect facilitator of all Ruling Class intentions suggests a level of long-range psychoanalytical skill and human probabilities-analysis available only in the CIA.

Moreover, as his post-2008 conduct demonstrates beyond argument, a core part of the conditioning that elevated him first to Columbia, then to Harvard and finally to the White House reduced Obama to a moral imbecile – the perfect One Percent operative – a man unable to empathize with anyone other than the obscenely privileged aristocrats he now so obediently serves.

Which leads us to the pivotal question: is Obama the ultimate creation of the shadow government that has ruled the U.S. since the coup of 22 November 1963?

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Shaving Away Deception (II): Questions about Obama's Intentions

Whatever else Obama might be, there is no doubt that behind his Afro/Democrat camouflage, he serves the One Percent as the perfect restoration of Richard Nixon, the man who (before the still relatively free press exposed his tyrannies),  was probably 

slated by the One Percent to have been the nation's first true dictator.

But how was Obama, an African-American man of apparently modest background – a person one would assume would have great empathy for the 99 Percent – trained to become such a startlingly Machiavellian tyrant?

Was Obama's initial conditioning gradual and subtle? Was there then a point at which his lily-white proctors sat him down and described to him the devil's-bargain he (or more likely his mother) had made with those who now effectively owned him for life? Was he told the ugly truth that his color would forever bar him from the arrogantly white-supremacist Caucasian aristocracy? Was he then informed he could earn for himself, his family and their descendants the privilege to live as aristocrats, complete with limitless wealth and impenetrable defenses, if he faithfully served the One Percent's schemes?

Was he taught that as an African-American, his color was the perfect cover behind which to impose the One Percent's tyrannical agenda – that even after the most glaring betrayals he could still use race to silence or marginalize his opponents and discredit even his most legitimate critics as closet racists?

Was he made to understand how as a Democrat he is a symbol of all Democrats, and that his lies and betrayals will thus besmirch the Democratic Party for decades to come? Is this indeed one of his clandestine purposes?

Was he cautioned that as an African-American in a white-racist nation, he is a symbol of his own entire race? Was he warned the blame for his betrayals will thus unjustly fall on all African-Americans – that the resultant re-inflammation of racial antagonisms will set back the cause of black civil rights for as much as a century? Is this another of his clandestine purposes?

Was his childhood rejection by blacks and his parallel rejection by whites manipulated by his proctors into his adulthood's haughty disregard for the 99  Percent – the deftly concealed malice that so obviously defines his policies? Is this the emotional basis of his indifference to lower income peoples, of his obscene favoritism toward the One Percent?

Did his tenure at the University of Chicago – which because of its economics department should be renamed Ayn Rand Memorial University – include his training in the Ayn Rand ideology he falsely denies even as he imposes it on the nation and the world?

Did the aristocrats of the One Percent thus anoint Obama as their perfect tool, the man who behind his Afro/Democrat cover would at last complete their 80-year effort  to turn the United States into a one-party fascist state? Did they hire him as the one man who would at last build their USian empire into the global equivalent of a Fourth Reich, thereby fulfilling the dreams of countless Nazi war criminals? Do the caricatures of Obama as Hitler  thus ironically and unwittingly point to a terrible truth?

Occam's Razor suggests the answers to most if not all of these questions are an ominous yes, confirmed by Obama's betrayals, underscored again by his declaration of genocidal war against elderly and disabled Social Security and Medicare recipients like myself.

But why would Obama target us now, when our prepaid pensions have no part in the deficit he and his masters so loudly decry?

I think it is more than the money. I think it is because the One Percent regards us as dangerous, even subversive. We remember when this nation, in spite of its flaws, was truly the hope of the world, with a representative government and a healthy economy and all the promise and potential implicit in real constitutional democracy. We tell stories of better times; we inspire grandchildren and great-grandchildren with the possibility they could bring such good times back again. Because of what we remember, the Ruling Class wants us dead.

And when we are gone the true story of Obama's ascent and his eradication of the last vestiges of USian freedom will no doubt be suppressed. It will become the most terrible story never told – an unchanted lamentation, an unsung dirge, an unspoken epic of the brief flame of liberty that o-so-rarely brightens the endless centuries of patriarchal darkness and how methodically that flame was extinguished forever.

LB/6-11 April 2013

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From My Memoirs: 'The Woman on the Hill'

Moonlight in the Meadow. Photographic collage by Loren Bliss copyright 2013.

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IT WAS LATE fall, maybe two weeks before Hallowe'en, and the wind was full of leaves and the prophecy of winter. I was still living in Whatcom County on the Sumas River at the foot of Sumas Mountain, and I had driven into Bellingham to listen to some people I knew play live music -- mostly original stoner blues with acid-rock undertones -- at a place called Cal's: an improbable tavern peopled equally by gnarly commercial fishers of both genders and the more genuinely adventuresome younger bohemians -- nearly all of them female -- from Western Washington University and Fairhaven College. An interesting mix, both intellectually and visually: older men with heavy beards and pirate ear-rings and the weather-beaten faces of years at sea and somewhere decades back abandoned degrees in literature and philosophy, older women with the kind of untamed Rhiannon-long hair that has all but vanished since the '70s and the easy loose-limbed joy-in-their-bodies grace that comes from the delicious and uninterrupted flourishing of pagan shamelessness -- most of the men and women people who came here as back-to-the-landers and after their individual communes fell apart took up salmon fishing -- some as couples working gill-netters, others as crew members on seiners, one of the women ranked among the best boat engineers in the entire fleet, in any case everyone enjoying a permanent divorce from the bourgeois ratrace, and the young women from the college watching the men with distant and mostly unrequited lust and watching the older women with unabashed envy ("I wish I was free enough to arch my back and fling my arms and swirl my hair like that") and sometimes one of the younger women asking, and the older women actually saying to the younger women, “okay, honey, here let me show you how to do it,” and everybody despite the age differences united and snug in contented noise and smoky amber beerlight and most of all bound together in a vaguely coital mass of dancing bodies joined by throbbing chords and outrageously apt lyrics:

“Gotta find me a womin
with a chain saw
Cause winter is a-comin on...” 

My dogs Sadie and LeeRoy always enjoyed nighttime trips to town -- even if they had to spend three or four hours locked in my pickup or car -- partly because they loved the ride, partly because they knew it meant a two-mile run down the bay and back after the tavern closed, or maybe a walk of nearly the same distance on one of the paths that traversed the nearby wooded ridges: in either instance the means by which I regained pass-the-tests sobriety before the 25-mile drive home. So Sadie and LeeRoy were there in the cab of my yellow Datsun truck when last call moved the party from Cal's to various private residences -- I had been invited to one such gathering but was in a strangely hollow mood and chose to be alone with my dogs instead -- and because the moon was aging but still swollen and astonishingly gibbous and sailing through broken clouds and undeniably charged with the potential of magic, I chose not to walk along the bay past the tolling gong-buoy at Post Point but rather to climb the path through an abandoned apple orchard to a hilltop meadow that a century ago had held a farmhouse and there amidst the weeds and overgrown foundation rubble listen to the wind roar and bluster in the nearby evergreens and watch the shadows dance in the hide-and-seek light.

 

It felt very secure there, welcoming even. I let the dogs run free knowing they would soon return and after I had been there maybe 15 minutes they came back as expected and took positions to my left and right, darker sentinels invisible in the dappled darkness. Now absolved of any need for watchfulness I sprawled on my back amidst the seasonally crumpled bracken. I was delighted by the unusually large moon and the erratically alternating ice-dark/snow-bright light-show of the clouds, and suddenly I wished I dared undress to be closer to the earth and air and darkness, perhaps even to dance in the curiously wavering light, but I thought about the chill and about all the headline reasons I dast not yield to pagan whim (“old drunken pervo claims religion prompted nakedness on college hill”) and so begrudgingly I submitted to the weather and the tyranny of civilization.

 

I had lain thus for maybe another half hour when Sadie and LeeRoy suddenly stood and LeeRoy grumbled and Sadie muttered and chuffed, not the low infinitely menacing seismic rumble with which they warded off known threats but an almost interrogatory sound: "we are dogs and as you can tell by our voices we are very big dogs and we are here and we don't think you mean us any harm but we're not sure and its our job to find out so please tell us so we don't have to bite you." Mutter; chuff; then again the deeper Rottweilian grumble of LeeRoy; by the focused intensity of their ears and noses something directional, perhaps coming up the slope from the opposite side of the ridge. I now sat up and scanned the unstable darkness with peripheral vision -- the old military night-operations trick -- but saw nothing and could hear no other sound than the dogs and the omnipresent wind: perhaps it was another dog, perhaps I should put them back on their leashes. But -- very uncharacteristically -- I did nothing; I sat motionless waiting to see who or what might come out of the adjacent trees and cross the tangled meadow that had been the long-ago farmhouse lawn, now under this indecisive sky one moment all moon-bright shining autumnal cobwebs and phantom-white clumps of blown thistle and pearly everlasting, the next moment again one with the forest in undifferentiated darkness.

 

A long cloud covered the moon. The woman who came from the woods moved along the path so quietly I never heard her at all, and when the moon was again unveiled she was standing to my left no more than a car's length away, and while Sadie was holding back skeptically, LeeRoy was already stepping forward swinging his strong proud undocked tail, the fresh moonlight flaring gleefully in his eyes, momentary green fire, a normal canine phenomenon some nevertheless regard as Satanic, hence the fundamentalist Christian missionary housewife who rebuked me one evening in my own front yard: "I saw it. I saw it. Your dog showed me his demon eyes. You really are a witch." But of course there was nothing like that from this woman who emerged from the darkness: she saw LeeRoy's eyes and laughed, a warm sensual inviting laugh, and said "your bigger dog's eyes are really heavy they could be very upsetting to some people."

It was a chilly night and the woman wore a long thick shawl, dark, probably wool, over her head and shoulders, and the wind tugged constantly at its fringes. Beneath that was a dark sweater and a heavy dark dress, probably also wool; the dress came nearly to her ankles, which I could see were booted in high soft leather moccasins, the lighter beads in their beadwork reflecting warm little pinpoints of the ambient light: in such footwear a woods-person can cover ground with absolute silence; no wonder I had not heard her approach. She had some kind of shoulder bag too, like a large purse on a diagonal strap, its bulk apparent beneath her shawl. I briefly wondered if maybe she was one of the local homeless.

 

Now she spoke with the dogs, her voice a musical murmur, her words carried away by the wind. After she had at last persuaded Sadie to kiss her outstretched hand she turned her full attention to me. Her face remained in shadow beneath the shawl, though I could see she had dark hair, decades uncut like the older women at Cal's, and I wondered if perhaps she had been among them.

 

"Okay if I hang around?" she asked.

 

"Certainly," I said.

 

She sat perhaps eight feet away on a natural chair I had not noticed, its cushion a slight elevation that might have been an abandoned gopher mound overgrown with bracken already crushed, the chair's back a dark lump, perhaps a section cut from the trunk of a big maple, a round of firewood lost years before when the path was still a road into deeper forests and finally into the mountains themselves.

 

"I usually come here at night to think," she said. "I've been coming here for a couple of years and this is the first time there's been anybody else."

 

"I just came up here to run the dogs and mellow out a little before the long drive home -- I live out in the county but I came in tonight for the live music at Cal's. I hope I didn't frighten you."

 

"No I actually watched you for quite a while before I let you know I was here. But I saw your dogs right away and as soon as I saw them I knew you were fine. Besides I'd seen you earlier at Cal's. We know some of the same people. But I had work to do tonight and you got there just as I was leaving.”

 

LeeRoy was by this time lying beside her, his great black bulk as close to her as he could get, his chin resting on one of her feet.

 

We talked about dogs for a while -- a dog she had raised from puppyhood had recently died of old age, and she was hoping another dog would soon find her. We talked about what we each did for a living -- she said she was a painter and a sometimes college student and she worked freelance for several Bellingham printers doing commercial art, and I knew at least the painter part was true because I was downwind and intermingled with her subtle perfume -- a hint of sandalwood and perhaps some musk I could not name -- I had caught the tell-tale scent of turpentine, and when I asked if she worked in oils, she said yes not many people do anymore, how did you know?, and I told her. A little later she asked me if I had a wife or a lover waiting at home and I said no I had been alone for ten years and she said she had broken up in June with someone she had been with for a long time and thought it would be a long time before she allowed herself such vulnerability again. "It's lonely," she said, "but lonely is less painful than misunderstood and mistrusted." Shielded by the variable night we began sharing parts of ourselves we normally would not have disclosed without the prerequisite of weeks and months of familiarity.

 

Then she said she had brought cookies and wine for herself because the moon was so huge and low and strangely shaped and she wanted to consume the cookies and wine as a kind of offering and would I join her? Yes of course I said and she apologized that she had only one glass and did I mind sharing it and I said not at all that just makes it more sacramental which is how it has felt ever since you got here. You must be pagan she said and I said yes I am and she said "then you will understand what I am doing" and fumbled in her beaded shoulder bag and brought out a dark bottle of wine and a wine glass and a cork-screw. She uncorked the bottle and poured the glass full and re-corked the bottle and set the bottle beside her on the grass and stood and LeeRoy grumbled that he had to move. She switched the glass to her left hand and made an invoking pentagram over it and lifted the glass to the moon and flicked the wine onto the grass around us and turned to me and said "blessed be." Then she said "you'll have to come closer if we're going to share this glass -- here there's actually room for two of us against this log." We sat; it was as she had said and as comfortable as any sofa. Sadie and LeeRoy moved close to us: I pictured stone age people gathered with their canine companions at the edge of some primeval forest, then remembered the ruined foundation nearby and thought of some apocalyptic aftermath: Knossos, Albion, the Death of Electric Man, humankind driven back into the forest and rediscovering the Goddess. Meanwhile she poured the glass full again. She drank and I drank; it was a good wine, probably a valpolicella, seemingly black as ink even in brightest moments of moonlight, and she drank and I drank and we both ate her cookies which were round and thick and tasty and made of oatmeal and raisins and peanut butter and perhaps other more elemental nutrients and she drank and I drank and then drinking and eating we drifted into a long conversation that gradually became more molecular than verbal and then expanded beyond physical limits into a dialogue I am still convinced was pure telepathy: I remember it not as an impassioned sharing of words but rather as a mutually eloquent transmission of images so nakedly honest I was astounded -- and yet it was so dreamlike that the next day I could remember only the vaguest details of its content. In fact I discovered to my profound sadness I could not even remember her name.

 

I never truly saw her face, only the glimpses allowed by the peek-a-boo moon and the ever-changing veil of clouds. Nor, beyond holding hands as we talked, and embracing one another when we parted, did we physically touch -- of this I am absolutely certain -- yet it was as if we had been intimate to a mutual depth few humans ever imagine, much less achieve. I do not even clearly remember our parting: only that it was somehow both fulfilled and empty, as if each of us had passed some pivotal milestone, some turning point, absolutely vital yet forever unattainable without this strange encounter on a windblown October hilltop, an end and a beginning sealed in a passionate hug that is my only vivid recollection of the entire finale: my face briefly buried in her hair, my arms around the rough wool in which she was clad, the combined scents of sandalwood and musk and turpentine and even a trace of wood smoke that told me how she heated her dwelling; and most of all the shawl falling away to reveal the great dark sweet cloud of her hair itself. Yet I remember nothing whatsoever of my farewell words to her, and I have only the vaguest memory of her farewell words to me. I am certain they were powerfully positive, nurturing, strengthening, healing: I can feel their potency even now, 13 years after the fact, and I would love to be able to write them down and add them to this narrative, but they are beyond my reach, seemingly gone forever.

 

The night does not come back into clear focus until I was at the foot of the long hill. I was unlocking my truck and my dogs were waiting for me to open the door and I was again wondering if I was sober enough to dare attempt the lengthy drive home. It was very late. The sky had blown clear and the moon though noticeably more aged was now even larger and more yellow and westering toward the mountains far across the bay. Orion was already high in the southeast. I pulled the door open. Sadie climbed into the cab and claimed the seat under the passenger window. LeeRoy grinned, wagged his tail and flared his daemon eyes like some James Harris in quadruped. In my mind I heard again the hilltop woman’s laughter, and just for the tiniest instant it seemed there was a trace of sandalwood on the pre-dawn wind.

 

LB/ posted 4 April 2013 (Copyright 9 December 2005 reproduction without permission prohibited.)

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On the Conflict between Photography and Writing

One of my innumerable grab-shots of Adrienne in our East 5th Street apartment, summer 1967. The negative, part of the film salvaged from the rubble a year after the 1983 fire, was wormed and pinholed by water damage, but Gimp photo software's combination of spotting, contrast adjustment and sepia toning enabled me to heal most of those wounds. I don't remember the lens-and-camera combination, but it was most likely one of my VT Canons, probably at 1/30th of a second with the 35mm f/2 screw-mount Summicron wide open; the light was late afternoon sun reflected into the windows from the backs of buildings on First Avenue. The film was Tri-X, given the year, no doubt in Diafine at 1200. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2013.

*

THOUGH I WOULD realize it only now, two days before my 73rd birthday – and my epiphany the result of watching a young single mother cuddle her tiny infant daughter on a crowded bus as I cursed myself for not having a camera with which to record this potent visual haiku of universal femaleness – the defining conflict of my adult life has always been a who-am-I struggle between the two hemispheres of my brain.

 

Sometimes my right brain prevails, as in my passion for the poetry-as-a-verb Zen of making photographs, or in how I relish the exquisite sensuality of seeing, or in my fondness for visual art in general and for music of nearly any unhackneyed form, or in my compulsion toward the agnostic but nevertheless faithfully pagan spirituality summarized in the phrase She Who (maybe) Is, and – perhaps most of all – in my powerfully emotional, sometimes desperate need for the sanctity and sanity of true country, for any modern equivalent of northern Lower Michigan's pre-electrification Au Sable region, specifically the South Branch, the river and the adjacent woods east of where, in the time of which I speak, 1944 through 1955, the two-lane M72 blacktop turned abruptly to gravel. Maybe two miles later the road crossed Smith Bridge. North – downstream – was the blessed realm of troutly water and sweet-fern scented air that was the only sanctuary my disjointed childhood ever allowed.

 

At other times my left brain dominates, as in my equally desperate need to live in The City, New York, not so much where I was born, Brooklyn,  but in the borough of Manhattan, the one place my intellect has ever been accepted and honestly critiqued and thus encouraged, nurtured, expanded, not only by the bohemian women who were my friends and/or lovers or by the bohemian men who were my friends and colleagues but even by a few well-placed representatives of the powers that be. It is my left brain from which I write, a mode of expression that never rises above intellectual exercise because it is always dragged down to (mere) rationality by the imperative but nevertheless cripplingly self-conscious battle against dyslexia thrust on me by bad genes. Formerly, during my years as an investigative reporter, it was my left brain at work in the always calculated, often clandestine process of exposing outrage or scandal, or in far more apparently benign reportorial quests that included extensive research into the psychological and psychic wellsprings of the old Counterculture – the forever lost text that supplemented the also-lost thousands of frames of Tri-X and High Speed Ektachrome “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer” – or the never-named book-in-progress about the anomalous archaeological evidence of a prehistoric Minoan/proto-Celtic/North African presence in what is now the United States, data that abounds throughout North America including here in the Pacific Northwest, but is nevertheless aggressively suppressed by USian scholars.

 

Ultimately my struggle had but two focal points. One was whether would I live my life amidst the intellectual safety and comfort of Manhattan (which, exactly as James Baldwin labeled it in 1962, truly was Another Country), or whether, in the name of my spirit quest and its need for wilderness, I would instead endure the manifest cruelties and sometimes-wrenching loneliness that define the intellectual barrens of The Lands Beyond the Hudson. The other was figuring out who I am: photographer or writer.

 

For a long while, it was easier for me to label myself a writer. For one thing it was cheaper to be a writer – I needed no cameras, which were always prohibitively expensive, in fact I required nothing more than a typewriter, this lack of mandatory prerequisite expenditures a major consideration, as there was never a time in my life I was not financially poor, often desperately so. For another, writing was a field in which it was infinitely easier to find work: even in the 1950s, ours was a nation so illiterate, the basic skills of grammar were alien to the vast USian majority; the educational system was already hell-bent on hammering the nation's children into submissive, reflexively conformist drones, which among other atrocities demanded the deliberate suppression of natural human curiosity. But the very wounding inflicted on me by my savagely dysfunctional family bred in me the cynicism and determination that enabled me to escape the wounds of ignorance and apathy that dumbed down the masses. The result – or so it seemed to prospective employers – left me ideally qualified to be a reporter. Hence I had my first daily newspaper job at age 16: half a copy-boy, half a stringer writing stories for the sports department and the Sunday youth section. It was November 1956. I turned 17 the following March. Within two months, May 1957, I had landed a summer job as full-time sportswriter.

 

Meanwhile I instinctively began to downplay my skill with a camera: the linear/logical abstraction required of the writer is the diametrical opposite of the Zen immediacy demanded of the photographer, which as I had already learned is a ruinously crippling conflict when one is trying to adequately cover a story. To succeed as a reporter is to fail as a photographer; to succeed as a photographer is to fail as a reporter; to attempt both simultaneously is usually to fail at both. Nevertheless I had begun to earn a reputation as a competent photographer too. My father had given me my first camera, a Kodak Brownie Reflex, as a 12th birthday present, then a fully adjustable f-stop/shutter-speed Polaroid on my 14th birthday and an Agfa Press Miniature two years after that. It was with the two latter machines I shot most of the unposed pictures for my 1957-58 high school yearbook and made some action pictures that caught the attention of the Knoxville Track Club. But my early searches for jobs in professional photography invariably failed; it had no common standards, no equivalents of grammatical rules, hence was mainly a game of personalities, a contest I always lost. Writing, I convinced myself, was therefore my primary medium, never mind the difficulties – transposed letters, misspelled words, awkward sentences, mis-remembered names – inflicted by dyslexia. When my editors assured me I was a “damn good reporter,” that “everybody makes mistakes on deadline,” my subconscious told me I was nothing but a phony, that my writing ability, crippled as it was (and is) by dyslexia, was nothing more than a sham, perhaps even a scam.

 

That proverbial chicken, actually a vulture, came home to roost in a 1965 conversation with a woman named Roberta Tyson, an editor at Viking Press who was then married to my friend Chris Rawlings. Tyson – a southerner, she had adopted the curious preference of so many southern women for being called by their last names – had been a friend of mine for about a year before I met Chris, and our friendship continued during and after their marriage. In a lengthy discussion with Tyson about the angst suffered by great writers, I thought of my own then-unspoken visual-versus-verbal dilemma and said yes, I understood, but Tyson suddenly bristled and said “no you do not,” adding that I had no basis for understanding such anxieties because I myself was nothing more than a mediocre writer. I was a good reporter, she said, even (given my eye for pivotal facts), an exceptionally skilled reporter, but I was no “great writer” under any circumstances, nor would I ever be. Tyson's words were deeply hurtful, but they were also rewardingly honest and profoundly clarifying, a poignant example of how one of the most important functions of a competent editor is articulation of a writer's – or, yes, a photographer's – subconscious.

 

Reason thus suggested I should content myself with being “just a journalist” and nothing more. My left brain, it seemed, had won.

 

But that is of course a lie, just as my presentation of this entire clash as the triumph of one hemisphere over the other is also a lie, both lies forced upon me by the inability of language to deal with the very ambiguity that is the underlying theme of so many of my photographs. Beyond the confusion and contradictions and disclaimers and acts of denial, even beyond the associated disasters like the ruinous fire of 1983 or the termination of my journalistic career by the odium of the subsequent clinical depression, it was invariably my right brain, paradoxically and by the sublime process of knowing via what we label “gut feelings” or “intuition,” that provided the clues and directional guidance to unriddle whatever riddles I dared take on. In this sense my right brain always manages to win the struggle – though in another far more important sense it is less a victory than a rapprochement, an abandonment of differences in the name of cooperation, yet it took that young mother on the bus to bring this reality into sharp focus. As I emailed a friend after I returned home that day: “Just had, thanks to Pierce Transit and a rather fetching young mother with a truly beautiful infant, a stunning epiphany about the difference between thinking as a photographer (the resurrection of instinct the scene on the bus demanded) and thinking like a writer (as the lack of a camera on the bus forced me to do). Bottom line, the visual is concrete, real, immediate, sensual, impassioned; the verbal is abstract, a (mere) construct, second-hand, devoid of physicality, definitively dispassionate. In that instant I perhaps understood more about myself and my own internal conflicts than in any comparable moment ever.  Let's hope the Muse grants me the clarity to write about it for OAN.”

 

So now two days before my 73rd birthday I think about my writing that won me a dozen local journalistic awards and commendations but ultimately as Tyson implicitly predicted went nowhere and my now-mostly lost-in-the-fire pictures for which the publication credits start with Paris-Match and Newsweek yet were still insufficient to rescue me from poverty. I think of what Tyson said to me in 1965 and what she said to me in 1969 about my photographs – that they were “so far out,” so cutting edge, they were “beyond (her) ability to describe.” I think of the discontents that nagged me as a reporter and the deep almost physical gratification that was mine as the social documentarian for New York's Beth Israel Hospital or as the founding photographer of The Seattle Sun and I think of all the people who helped me learn photography and/or critiqued my pictures and/or were emotionally supportive of my camera work but remained mostly politely silent about my words – my father and my Aunt Alecia and Jim Newby and Karen Rowland and Mary Payne and Chris Rawlings and John Shuttleworth and Emilio Murillo and Joan Condolino and Grace Strub and Cicely Nichols and Stephanie Wilson and Kathryn Habbestad and Dick Clever and Melinda Mohn and Tawna Pickens and Rebecca Valrejean and Jim and Mary Plante and Melanie St. Ours and of course Adrienne and so many more to whom I owe debts of gratitude – and I think of how back trouble and arthritis had finally harried me into abandoning the camera (hence the need for “resurrection of instinct”), but mostly now as I write this I think of the young woman with her baby on the bus who by their presence alone at last forced me to unequivocally answer the lifelong question: yes, damnit, I really am a photographer – that before anything else.

 

I thought I had given up photography nearly a year ago but for some strange reason – fate, astrology, the proximity of the Muse – I saw and continue to see the woman on the bus with her infant as I would have seen them had I been photographing them. I see the visual geometry of their forms in concert with the implicitly softened form of their new perambulator, its bulk too filled with baby-care items to be folded under a bus seat, all this in the context of the hard-edged delineations provided by the bus itself. I see the ancient choreography of mother and child. I who think almost exclusively in images of black and white see the associated colors of this scene with an intensity that is almost breathtaking. Furious with myself for not having a camera – never mind I had forsworn photography, never mind I was grocery shopping and could hardly carry a camera in the ancient olive-drab canvas 1942-issue ski-trooper rucksack I use to lug food from supermarket to apartment – I try to describe the mother and her child in words, but nothing, not then, not now, conveys the iconic and mysteriously comforting power of their presence. The mother is paradoxically compelling but scarcely notable. As many young women do, she wears her hair longish, shoulder-length; she has dyed it a bright color – red, nearly crimson – and she dresses to match: a revealingly low-cut purple blouse, form-fitting red skirt, purple leotard, silver and white tennis shoes with a red and purple motif, all this topped by a red and purple headband. Her eyebrows and eyelashes say she was originally a brunette. Something in her face, perhaps a hint of sullenness and defiance, gives me the sense she might be what my 1950s teen self would have joyfully recognized as a fellow “hood.” She has lost nearly all her pregnancy fat, is attractive, a bit busty but nevertheless well proportioned, already tanned enough to suggest time under ultraviolet lamps or a recent trip to some warmer climate. Her daughter is tiny, no more than three months old – as another passenger said, “hardly bigger than a pekingese pup.” The soft yellow blanket that wraps the baby girl is spotlessly clean, and when the infant awakens, we all see she is truly beautiful – and beautifully content. As the bus rumbles its herky-jerky passage toward my destination, this transit-system Madonna-and-child are softly highlighted through the windows by alternating bands of over-building sunshine, wan with late afternoon Pacific Northwest latitude and its thin but seasonally omnipresent clouds, first illuminating the mother's face, then the infant's, repeatedly, as if Gaia or the Sky Gods could not decide who was to be haloed. I cannot forget this strangely dappled light nor how the mother and her daughter glowed in its embrace, how they moved, how by merely being there they soothed a busload of weary and potentially antagonistic strangers.

 

Hence my new resolution for whatever remains of this old lifetime: I will do as I did in most of the years after my 1965 conversation with Tyson and before the clinical depression that followed the 1983 fire; to the best of my ability, I will again carry a camera everywhere I go, the physical discomfort be damned. Perhaps I will thus fulfill the initial promise of this blog, to be – above all else – about photography. In any case I will strive once more to sooth the craving implicit in what my parents always said was the first word I ever spoke, “light,” as if the rest of the sentence were to be the summation of all my yearnings: “Light. Give me light...so that I may truly know completion.”

 

LB/28 March 2013

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