The Provocateur in the Park: a Lament for USian Freedom

Kids playing on East 5th Street, Manhattan, 1967. Speculative work – unassigned random pictures such as this image, made for potential sale or inclusion in a portfolio – is a big part of photojournalism. I've photographed in New York, New Jersey, Michigan, Minnesota, Illinois, Ohio, Tennessee, North Carolina, Virginia, Georgia, Montana, Oregon, Washington state, Canada, parts of South Korea and probably some other locales I don't remember, but the only hostile reactions to my spec-photo efforts came from Seattleites, who in their well-documented xenophobia seem to regard “photographer” as synonymous with “interloper” if not “intruder.” Yet even in Seattle, where the sorts of street photography I had routinely done in Manhattan provoked so much anger I gave it up entirely, I was never hassled for photographing in public parks, even when the subject was children at play – pictures that often, though not always, were later published in The Seattle Sun. But earlier this week, when I attempted to shoot a mere three frames of spec work I thought might interest the Tacoma Metropolitan Parks District, I discovered that if you're an elderly, crippled male, merely pointing a camera at kids on a playground can put you in real danger of being lynched. Data: I used Bic Wite-Out and a red Marks-A-Lot, the only suitable paint-like materials I had on hand, to deface the print. The film is Tri-X; its grain structure says it was processed in Microdol-X at 400 ASA, but the rest of the information was lost in the 1983 fire. Because I snapped only one frame on East 5th Street before these attentive kids spotted me and started mugging for the camera, I was obviously not using one of the VT Canons on which I then normally relied, which means I was shooting with a Pentax H1A and probably its 55mm f/2 Super-Takumar – the choice of lenses indicating it may well have been that camera's maiden voyage. Photograph copyright Loren Bliss 1967, 2013. (Click on image to view it full size.)

 

 

 

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THE POST-TRAUMATIC atrial fibrillation that made this piece so tardy has finally stopped, and now I can tell the story as it deserves to be told rather than as a narrative disjointed by bitterness and anticipation of death, but to put everything in sharp focus, I should preface all that follows by the mundane admission I cling to film cameras because I cannot afford the approximately $1000 it costs to convert to a digital single-lens reflex. The realities of Social Security, Medicare and the post-American-Dream economy make it clear I will never have that sort of money in whatever remains of this lifetime. Thus to any onlooker even the least bit camera-savvy it is obvious I remain the technological equivalent of an ignoramus or a bum or a weirdo and possibly all three. True, M Leicas were the best and therefore most prestigious 35mm cameras on this planet, but the retirement of the last factory-trained Leica repairman in the United States mandated their return to Germany even for routine cleaning and lubrication, which I was authoritatively told would take a year or more, not to mention the prohibitive costs of shipping plus the near certainty of huge hassles with our ever-more-tyrannical customs officials. Hence last year I sadly realized I had no choice but to to sell these beloved machines while they were still operational, and with funereal sadness I did just that. Since then my only 35mm cameras are relatively low-end SLRs, specifically Pentax MXs and K-1000s, which I formerly employed only as bodies for long lenses. They are certainly durable, and the associated optics are superb, but they are not Leicas, they are at least 30 years old, and I fear they'll die before I do. 

Because I am also fond of the 120 format, I've likewise kept a 1953-vintage Rolleicord III. For those unfamiliar with the wonderful machines formerly made by Franke & Heidecke, Rolleicord is to Rolleflex as Volkswagen is to Porsche. This means the 'Cord is mechanically simple enough it need not be returned to Deutschland for repairs – that even given the notorious ineptitude characteristic of too many USian camera mechanics, with careful shopping I can (probably) find someone stateside to clean, lubricate, adjust and – assuming the continued availability of spare parts – even fix it if it goes Tango Uniform. And I love what can be done with medium-format negatives. There is also the fact I am inordinately fond of twin-lens reflexes. My first camera, which my father gave me for my 12th birthday, was a TLR, a Kodak Brownie Reflex that used 127 film, and I learned my first (self-taught) grab-shooting lessons with its eye-level sports viewfinder. The first newspaper-issue camera with which I worked – this at age 16 for The Grand Rapids Herald in Michigan – was a Zeiss Ikoflex, a Rolleflex competitor. The second, during my 18th year, was a Rolleiflex itself; it was issued by The Fountain Citizen, for which (if memory serves), my first picture assignment produced a rather pedestrian but nevertheless Page-One-worthy image of U.S. Sen. Estes Kefauver braving a torrential East Tennessee summer thunderstorm as he campaigned for re-election in 1958. Then maybe four decades later I realized the tacit bowing of one's head to the subject – the gesture mandated by the waist-level finder that defines all TLRs – evokes a response that is entirely different from the what obtains during eye-level photographic encounters, especially amidst the Cyclopean intrusiveness of SLRs. At about the same time it dawned on me one of the great but mostly unacknowledged attributes of M Leicas, VT Canons and I guess all other 35mm rangefinder cameras is how they enhance photographer-subject intimacy because the machine never completely masks the photographer's face. Hence I concluded a TLR operated at waist-level appears safe, compliant, respectful, even reassuring, to the person or persons on the other end of the lens, which makes it a very useful tool indeed – except of course in the Land of Omnipresent Hatefulness the U.S. has become since 9/11 – or more accurately since 11/22/1963. 

*** 

The senior housing project in which I reside is not far from Wright Park, one of Tacoma's better recreational facilities. The park's 27 acres is especially convenient for walkers and joggers because a single circuit of its perimeter path measures exactly one mile. It was also a primary beneficiary of the $84.3 million improvement bond the Tacoma Metropolitan Park District convinced the voters to approve in 2005 – fortuitous timing indeed, as two years later the One Percenters began their deliberate downsizing of the USian economy and thereby ended forever any electoral willingness to invest in expanded government services. But the park is in a high crime area, and its interior was ruled by criminals even in daylight until it was reclaimed about four years ago through the cooperative efforts of the local neighborhood association and the Tacoma Police Department. The park is now not only attractive and well maintained, it is also notably safe, and it has become a favorite spot for mothers with children. But when I walked there Wednesday, children were not on my agenda. I was intent on photographing only a huge paper-birch – a tree so big it probably predates the park's 1886 founding by as much as a century. Though I soon realized my Gossen Luna-Pro SBC had finally died of old age – had I followed its reading I would have over-exposed my negatives by five stops – the light meter in my head seemed as good as ever, and nine frames later I had what I wanted – textural studies I intend to use in some new sandwiches. 

As I walked back toward my apartment I passed one of the more notable improvements the bond issue had funded: a water-playground for children. Called the Sprayground, it was built to replace a conventional wading pool. It features a number of fountains, shower-head devices, stationary hoops and exercise bars, many of them distinctly sculptural and therefore visually interesting, all designed to allow kids plenty of room to run and play while granting them the pleasure of a thorough soaking on a hot summer's day. And now watching the girls and boys joyfully dart around and through the gleaming columns of sun-bright water, I understood why some of my neighbors here in geezer manor had been urging me to visit the Sprayground with a camera. I also saw immediately how much safer it is for children than playing in streets doused by sprinkler-headed fire hydrants, a summertime sight so common in the urban neighborhoods of New York City, it long ago became a journalistic cliché – one to which I surely contributed my own share of hackneyed images during those halcyon years before gentrification exiled me forever from my home. Now, knowing I had three frames left on the Rolleicord's 12-exposure roll of Kodak T-Max 100, I wondered if I might get a non-cliché image I could peddle to the park district. What better than the Sprayground to illustrate the reclamation of the park from its former criminal masters? The pictures would be all the more telling because the kids I was now watching – a dozen children ages five through 10 – were of such obvious ethnic diversity.

 

It is relevant at this point to note I was casually but reasonably well dressed – blue-gray flower-patterned shirt, khaki bush jacket, navy blue slacks, tan straw hat. My shirt collar was neatly folded over the collar of the bush jacket. The Van Dyke that in 2005 or so replaced the full beard I had worn since the 1980s was freshly trimmed, and I was wearing new dark brown leather sandals over black wool socks. I bore a tan canvas shoulder bag with a medium-sized matte-gray aluminum tripod collapsed and hooked to its top, the strap slung diagonally over my right shoulder. As always – thanks to a knee injury from junior high school football and the spinal injuries inflicted on me by a habitual drunken driver in 1978 – I walked with a cane. In other words, I looked exactly like what I am – an elderly, obviously crippled but nevertheless dedicated photographer, most likely a resident of one of the multi-storey apartment complexes that abound near the park. 

As I usually do before I start exposing film – unless of course it is a riot or a fire or some other such emergency – I stood and watched, absorbing the possibilities of the scene, framing and otherwise previsualizing pictures. The visual geometry of the interactions between the romping children and the water and the hard bright circular and linear forms of the facility itself were fascinating, and the potential for transcending cliché – particularly since I was shooting black-and-white film – seemed uniquely promising. But the two-stop difference between sunlight and shadow was tricky, especially with all the added glare. My old Luna-Pro was now garbage, I no longer have a darkroom in which to manipulate an image, the burn-and-dodge capabilities of my Gimp photo software are minimal at best, and I learned long ago the over-priced local labs are less than adept at remedial custom printing. Hence it took me a couple of minutes to decide an exposure – f/11 at 1/500th, and to get the shadow detail just right I would bracket one stop each way, f/16 and f/8. But after I had shot only one carefully composed frame, a young white woman approached me – a pretty woman scarcely more than five feet tall, golden-brown hair to her shoulders, a seemingly intelligent face. Curiously enough I don't remember the color of her eyes, but she may have been wearing sunglasses; I know she was a few minutes later. I wasn't paying that much attention; I merely assumed she was going to do as so many other parents have done on nearly all the (relatively rare) occasions I've photographed children – that she would ask who I was and how she might get a print “if the pictures come out.” Instead she quietly asked if I had any children there in the Sprayground. 

“No,” I answered, instantly concerned yet another economically ruined parent had abandoned yet another hungry and heartbroken child and had chosen the park as the place of abandonment. “Why, is there some kid here missing a par...” 

Her response interrupted my question: “you're creeping us out. What are you doing photographing these children?” 

“I'm a professional photographer,” I said. I reached into my bush jacket for my black leather business card wallet, extracted a card, held it out for her. “I'm just...” 

She interrupted me again. She ignored my offering. Now her voice rose several decibels: “Who do you work for?” 

“I work for myself, anymore. I'm retired. Before that I worked for newspapers and magazines. But I still...” 

Her third interruption, and now she was yelling: “why are you here? Why are you even looking at these children?”

“Because...” 

Interruption number four: “we don't don't want you here. You don't have any right to be here.” 

“Ma'am, look, I'm trying to explain but you keep interrupting. Take my card...” 

“I don't want your damn card.” Her voice became a loud belligerent screech. “We don't care who you are or what you are. You're creeping us out. We” – her sweeping gesture indicated everyone within the Sprayground or just beyond its circular concrete perimeter – “want you out of here now, creep. Now! NOW!” 

The vehemence of her words bespoke an enmity I had not encountered since confrontations decades ago with segregationists in the Jim Crow South. Now she looked a “why-aren't-you-here-yet” look toward a group of white males who stood maybe 30 yards away at the perimeter's far side, four or five young shirtless men staring in my direction though not yet really glowering. And now I felt the first twinges of fright. The woman's facial expression and body language suggested the “sugarpie-that-man-just-insulted-me” combination of lust and sadistic yearning you see on southern belles and other female bloodhawks when they're trying to goad their beaux into making them wet by beating someone senseless or dead, and I realized the woman's tantrum – never mind it was utterly unjustified and unprovoked – might be putting me in real jeopardy. 

My muddle of emotions – vexation at how easily she had ambushed me, anger at her consummate unfairness, astonishment at the Ku Klux caliber of her hatred, growing fear of her now-obvious effort to instigate violence, profound shock at how such a fine productive day had been so suddenly and totally ruined – now coalesced into pure outrage, and I finally answered her as I should have answered her from the very beginning, as I would have answered her had I not been deceived by the deliberate lie of her falsely pleasant initial approach. 

“Look, lady,” I snarled in my most defiant basso, “I've been Working Press more'n 50 years, long before you were even born, so don't you imagine for a minute you and your band of thugs over there can tell me what I can and can't photograph. You're in a public place, you're fair game. You got a complaint, go call the cops.”

“I already have,” she shrilled, turning away, tossing her hair, literally stomping back around the concrete perimeter toward the men she obviously still hoped she could draw into the confrontation. 

“Good,” I growled. “You people ever hear of the First Amendment? Maybe the cops'll teach you what it really means.” 

By then of course the woman's malicious braying had metastasized her hatefulness throughout the Sprayground. It was clear she had intended to provoke the selfsame hysteria that spawns lynchings and pogroms and witch hunts, and now it seemed as if all the parents were glaring at me and herding their children out of the water. Recognizing I was potentially in harm's way, realizing the severe penalties by which Washington state punishes assault on the working press might no longer protect me in retirement, knowing I would have no allies here until the cops arrived, remembering all the lynch-mob horrors vindictive southern white women have sadistically inflicted on southern black men, wondering if now in Tacoma I would be the first white male in the United States to be lynched by an interracial mob, I closed up the Rolleicord and hobbled away. Yet somewhere amidst all this madness I was also blessed with a single quick sympathetic glance from a young African-American woman. She was a mother seemingly no different from all the others, but her liquid-brown eyes surreptitiously met mine and seemed to grow huge with deep concern, as if she were saying “yes I've seen all this before and I pray you don't get hurt.” It was just a fleeting instant, an impression so ephemeral I later wondered if I had imagined it, but at the moment it assured me I was not totally alone after all – never mind this woman (very wisely, I thought afterward), dared not publicly defend me.

 

And now my own blood was up, boiling with an intensity I have not experienced since my years in the Civil Rights and Anti-Vietnam-War and Back-to-the-Land and alternative press movements and my last long-ago encounter with violently Christian vigilantes, and though within hours I would be paying the geriatric price of such increased adrenalin – a night and a day and another night of scary cardiac arrhythmia – I now openly glared my own contempt and hatred in return. Meanwhile the hair-trigger white woman and her companions and the other parents she had provoked to tripwire hostility continued to regard me as a hate-object. Too bad I had never suspected my presence might evoke such a hostile response; otherwise I'd have had the proper equipment to photograph the provocateur in full rant, and we would get to see her nominally attractive features in all their hate-distorted ugliness, but the old Rolleicord with its baroque film-advance knob and its independently cocked shutter and its relatively shallow depth of field is entirely too genteel a machine for such high-intensity reportage. At least though my rising anger prompted me to hobble far more slowly in the defiant hope prolonging my departure would give the cops time to show up. I am known to the Tacoma Police Department not only as a retired journalist but as an outspoken member of the neighborhood association that helped liberate the park from its former gang-banger masters, and I relished the likelihood the cops would inform the provocateur – in terms she could understand even amidst her convulsions of paranoid loathing – that I had every right to be in the park and every right to photograph as I had intended. 

Once I was beyond the Sprayground, I paused on the adjacent hillside to shoot my last two frames of film, another act of defiance that wasted good emulsion on prosaic silhouette-images of a young couple talking under a big maple but nevertheless made the point I would not be driven from the park. By then I was probably 100 yards from the provocateur, but behind her sunglasses she continued to glare at me as if I had not moved a foot since her initial assault. Her malice remained palpable. For just a moment she seemed to scowl with obvious disgust at the bare backs of her male companions, who were now oblivious to my presence; again I sensed her fury she had not been able to provoke them into lynch-mob action. Then she resumed her glaring. I glared in return. I considered giving her the finger but dismissed that as too predictable, too likely to re-provoke her coterie of males and in any case insufficiently insulting to be worth the risk. Finally she averted her gaze. Maybe five minutes later I had hobbled out of the park. The cops never showed up. 

*** 

In all my years in journalism, whether as a photographer or reporter or both, I have never encountered anything quite like what happened in last Wednesday in Wright Park. Certainly I have been attacked, but always only by the usual suspects – Klansmen, Nazis, crooks whose scams I have exposed, perpetrators of police brutality, sundry other fascists, goons and thugs. But not since the horrors of my (involuntary) years in southern public schools have I been assaulted merely for being who I am. Though perhaps I should not be surprised; I have long noted the xenophobia, the conformity, the anti-intellectuality and all the other depressing qualities the present-day population of the Puget Sound area shares with the reflexively hostile public school students I encountered in Florida and East Tennessee as the Yankee son of a Yankee carpetbagger in the 1940s and 1950s. Swap the racism of the South for the socioeconomic bigotry of Pugetopolis, and you've a near-perfect match. But I never imagined I might someday again be confronted by a 21st Century version of the schoolyard psychodynamics that several times got me mauled by jocks – this to “put (me) in (my) place” for saying hello to somebody's prom-queen girlfriend and thereby crossing some forbidden caste line. Hence immediately after I returned to my dwelling from the park, I initially assumed what had happened there was merely another ugly dimension of the so-called Seattle Freeze, the defining element of Puget Sound regional culture that – especially since the death of the American Dream – has escalated into a war against lower-income people of all ages and ethnicities. But then I opened my email as I always do following a day afield whether good or bad, and the first item I read told me what a federal jury had just done to the Oak Ridge Three. 

Suddenly, realizing the news from Knoxville was of a kind with what happened to me in Wright Park, I was more frightened of my own nation than I have ever been. I realized the long-feared termination of USian pretend-democracy is upon us, its death signaled not just by the fate of the Oak Ridge Three but by the fatal persecution of Aaron Swartz and the de facto martial law imposed on Boston in the wake of the terrorist bombings. Indeed the house-to-house searches conducted by militarized police  in Watertown, where cell-phone and video footage clearly shows that to be a civilian was to be the enemy, reminded me of nothing so much as the documentary footage I have seen of the Nazis' rounding up the Jews of Poland and savaging all the diverse peoples of the western Soviet Union. Obviously the nominally mindless Right was eerily prescient when it characterized Obama as a new Hitler. But what neither Right nor Left dare acknowledge is the extent to which Obama's Hitlerishness is the true expression of this entire nation's malevolent will. As in Wright Park, as in Knoxville, as all across the land from coast to coast, from border to border – precisely as it was demonstrated to me personally by the Sprayground provocateur and the would-be goon-squad she nearly recruited to bolster her persecutorial zeal, exactly as if she were an official jeerleader at an Orwellian Five Minute Hate.

I cannot imagine any other rational explanation for her vindictively provocative tantrum. Did she think I was a terrorist? Did she imagine I was a Russian spy? (It is true many people say I look Eastern European, probably because of my tiny fraction of Mohawk blood or maybe because, as familial genetic studies have revealed, my most distant pre-Celtic ancestors were indeed people of the Steppe.) Perhaps she feared I was a private detective out to catch a parent in adulterous company or a child with a forbidden relative. Possibly she thought I was a Jew, as even now with my formerly coal-black beard and darkest brown hair gone mostly gray, I am occasionally assumed to be – and therefore automatically despised by a surprising number of allegedly “progressive” Puget Sounders, some of whom years ago in Bellingham and Seattle actually challenged my right to reside in Western Washington. Or maybe she felt her children weren't prettied up enough to be photographed. Perhaps she assumed because I did not have a shiny new digital camera, I was nothing more than a bum. Maybe she herself is on the lam and is running from an Amber Alert or fears her picture might show up on Most Wanted. Possibly – especially considering how she damned me as a “creep” – her private litany of bigotries convinced her my gender and age and disability and lack of digital equipment identified me as some sort of pervert. But that makes no sense either. If she believed me to be a sex criminal, why did she reject my effort to prove my identity? Besides, a real pervo would have been lurking in the bushes, clandestinely shooting from afar with a long telephoto lens, not obviously photographing in the open as I had been attempting to do.

All that said, it seems to me the most indicative elements of the confrontation are how the provocateur repeatedly interrupted my attempts to identify myself as a legitimate photojournalist and refused to allow me to explain my purpose. This suggests my photographic effort was hardly the issue, a probability further substantiated by the wording of some of her assaultive questions – especially “why are you here” and “why are you looking at these children.” Therefore my best guess is I was targeted because (a) I am elderly, (b) I am visibly disabled and (c) I am a male who conforms to no approved USian stereotype. I wear a fedora rather than the ubiquitous baseball cap that identifies the “American” jock-worshiper whether male or female as a conforming and therefore reliable citizen of the One Percent's de facto Fourth Reich. I wear Nike sandals, not Nike athletic shoes. Instead of a team jersey, I like nearly all photographers of my generation wear a bush jacket to compensate for the lack of pocket-space in modern shirts and trousers. But Puget Sounders do not wear bush jackets. Neither do they wear their shirt collars turned out over their jacket collars, nor do they wear fedoras. Though I never gave it much thought until now, my sartorial choices, shaped as they were by work and mostly in Manhattan, would probably say “outlander” nearly anywhere in the United States, bespeaking origins in (despised) realms like New York City or Europe. Mostly I suspect my lack of digital equipment plus my obvious age and disability suggested to the provocateur I am impoverished and – in the malevolent irrationality of present-day USian public opinion – therefore to blame for all the savagery that afflicts capitalist society, just as the Jews were allegedly to blame for all the afflictions of Weimar Germany. In any case I was clearly someone from Elsewhere, at the very least a Nonconformist, and given my age, disability and antique camera, obviously one of the hated poor – the 21st Century USian equivalent of the Weimar Jews. In the ever-more-Nazi-like atmosphere of today's zieg-heiled USA! USA! USA! with all its imperial self-righteousness and witch-hunt fervor, I might well have been similarly attacked had I merely lingered too long while walking through the Sprayground area, camera or not.

In this context, the fearsome magnitude of the provocateur's hatred is the predictable byproduct of a carefully structured process – another example of how ideas have consequences. The entire episode is therefore a teachable moment. It is bitter proof of the core toxicity that now characterizes not just the population of Puget Sound but the vast USian majority whether Democrat or Republican; its universality is confirmed by public acceptance (and therefore at least tacit support) of previously intolerable atrocities that range from assaults on the working press to the death-dealing consequences  of the Sequester and the pending cutbacks  in Social Security and Medicare. It is as common amongst so-called “progressives” as it is amongst alleged “conservatives,” its poison immediately recognizable by any of us who have witnessed the idiotic fanaticism of the Ku Klux Klan or the equally ignorant anti-gunowner frenzies of the forcible-disarmament cult or the rabidly moronic furies of the Nazis whether old or new. It exemplifies the mindset that facilitated the original Holocaust and now facilitates a new USian Holocaust based not on ethnicity or race but on age and health and socioeconomic status. Its earlier manifestation gave Hitler control of Germany; without 35 million human sacrifices by the soldiers of the Red Army and the men, women and children of the Soviet Union, it would have given him the world. Now 68 years later it is the reason a jury condemned three prisoners of conscience to potential 20-year prison sentences on the same day a provocateur tried to muster a lynch mob against me at the Sprayground in Wright Park. It also explains why there is not now (nor ever will be again) a viable USian resistance to capitalism – why resistance is pointless and ultimately suicidal and above all else simply not worth the effort to squander one's life however long or short in rebellion that will always suffer betrayal at the hands of provocateurs and their submissively lockstep followers. It is the hybrid venom of greed, ignorance and moral imbecility and – precisely because of how deftly its festering is concealed beneath new pathologies of celebrity and trinket materialism and the old Nazi pathology of the Big Lie – it has become the closest approximation to Absolute Evil our species has yet unleashed. And now it transforms this nation from the birthplace of constitutional democracy to the death house in which Liberty herself is being murdered and the grave in which she will soon be buried forever. 

LB/8-12 May 2013
 

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Concern and Community in a Time of Growing Despair

IF YOU'RE OLD or disabled and no longer exploitable for profit and you are trying to survive in the industrial world's most deliberately cruel nation,  you are daily forced to endure the kind of constant anxiety that may eventually kill you or drive you to suicide. The government is now every bit as much your enemy as the fat-cat bosses were before you were tossed off the job, and that's because those same greedy bastards who were always trying to make you work more hours for less pay have bought off all the politicians and most of the upper-level bureaucrats as well. As a result the constitution you once trusted (and if you are male probably swore to defend with your life) has been nullified and subverted to the point it has become nothing more than the proverbial toilet paper upon which the One Percent routinely wipes its metaphorical ass. And it no longer matters whether their wholly-owned politicians are openly sadistic Republicans like Alan Simpson, who sneeringly described Social Security-dependent elders as “greedy geezers,” or serpent-tongued Democrats like this president who so often shape-shifts from Obama the Orator to Barack the Betrayer and then back again whenever his (always) Machiavellian agenda demands some new deception.
 

As I have said before and will continue saying until I die, it is obvious the Betrayer's intent and for that matter the intent of all today's elected (i.e. bought-and-paid-for) politicians is to reduce younger people to slavery and exterminate those of us who are now dangerous subversives merely because we have lived long enough to remember the better times Ayn Rand capitalism has now stolen from us forever.

 

Meanwhile the Betrayer's purpose has become obvious enough we can now name it with certainty: he intends to go into history as Wall Street's most faithful and reliably obedient servant ever and thereby ensure he and his descendants live the same pampered lives as the wealthiest aristocrats – never mind the color line will never allow the president and his family entry into the vindictively racist, adamantly all-white aristocracy itself. He knows – and you have to give him a kind of sleazoid credit for the morally imbecilic cunning with which he acts upon this knowledge – exactly who rules the global plantation into which our ever-more-enslaved and desperate planet is being transformed, and he will do anything in his imperial power to serve the Ruling Class. He is the perfect butler, the perfect overseer, the perfect factotum. He does not give so much as a Marie Antoinette damn if We the People are at last awakening to the fact he's the most dishonest U.S. president ever. If we dare resist, he will crush us at home as surely as he now crushes his enemies abroad.

 

That context – the ugly truth the genocidal war against Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid is now being led by the man so many of us hoped would protect us – was deliberately submerged by the Josef Goebbels clones who manage Ruling Class Media, and with the One Percent cleverly pointing its Romney-Ryan assault weapon at our heads, our fears thus enabled the Betrayer to lie his way into a second term. (I admit I voted for him twice, first time by choice, because I believed his “change we can believe in” Big Lies – that he supported single-payer/public-option health care, would enact Employee Free Choice and restore our constitutional rights – second time because Romney/Ryan terrified me into not voting my default preference, the Socialist Workers Party.) But whether it was acknowledged or not, the threat was always there Obama would do again what he had done in his first term and prove himself to be, behind his his Afro-Democrat disguise and his mastery of rhetoric, another Richard Milhous Nixon, at last fulfilling the Nixonian dream of being the man who struck the final blow against the constitutional democracy the One Percent has despised since the days of the Banker's Plot, when the Wall Street aristocrats collaborated with Nazi Germany in a (failed) attempt to topple President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. But Barack the Betrayer has in fact done much worse: were there a medal entitled “Most Obedient Servant of Wall Street,” Obama would have already won it.

 

Yet amidst all this misery and anxiety and wretchedness and sense of impending doom in a realm so transformed by capitalism into fascism it now bears only the most superficial resemblance to the nation in which I was born, the human spirit yet prevails in myriad ways. It reminds me of Lao Tzu's description of Tao as translated by Richard Wilhelm – “you look for it and you see nothing special; you act according to it and you find no end” – and that is what the above photographs are really about. I am blessed to live in a senior housing project that has evolved into a genuine community, thereby of course disproving all the Ruling Class lies claiming subsidized housing breeds alienation and irresponsibility, and when I limped outside today to hobble to a bus stop on a first-of-the-month errand, about 15 of my neighbors were gathered in the paved courtyard. They were seated on outdoor chairs and at outdoor tables, a jolly circle in the afternoon sun, and I was greeted by their smiles and friendly salutations and reminded again of how last summer maybe a dozen of us – even some who are severely disabled – had volunteered to paint the rusting steel bars of the courtyard fence. I spent hours grinding off the rust spots with an electric sander, then near the end of the workday grabbed a Pentax MX and a pair of SMCP-M lenses (a 28mm and a 100mm, each an f/2.8) and photographed a few of the painters as they finished the job. If our species is to survive what is to come – what indeed is already upon us – it will only be by such small local but definitively human efforts. The film is Fujicolor 400. All photographs by Loren Bliss copyright 2013. (Click on image to view it full size.)

 

LB/2 May 2013

 

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How Stealth Attacks by Christian Theocrats Are Killing Reproductive Rights, Overruling End-of-Life Choices

Election day in Everson, Washington. This was sometime in the late 1980s or early 1990s,  close enough to the fire I was still distraught over the death of my career, hence  didn't bother taking notes or keeping records. But I remember the tech data. The camera was my Olympus RC – the best pocket camera I ever owned – loaded with Kodak 400 ASA color negative film. It was rainy and windy and cold, typical winter weather on the Pacific Northwest coast, near noon, yet so dark I was working at the lower limit of the RC's electronic shutter and lens, probably 1/15 of a second at f/2.8. Posterization with Gimp software adds an illusory sharpening to an image blurred by inadvertent camera motion. Click on image to view it full size. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2010.

 

*

AMONG THE GREATER IRONIES of present-day politics is the fact those of us whose rights are most jeopardized by the One Percent's lavishly financed  efforts to impose Christian theocracy  on the United States are often the least likely to recognize the threat.

 

Whether because of misinformation, denial, fears of being labeled “politically incorrect” or some combination of all of the above, we who identify ourselves as secular-minded or spiritually independent tend to ignore or dismiss any openly religious assault against our hard-won freedoms of conscience. Though we instantly mobilize against identical attacks by seemingly secular politicians and political groups, we are profoundly reluctant to resist or even acknowledge the equally egregious threats that emanate directly from – and often in the name of – organized religions.

 

The fact so many of these these assaults happen far away – on the other side of the globe, in the former Confederacy or in some flyover state – makes it easy for us to brush them off as isolated events of no personal consequence, the random deeds of distant extremists. Particularly if we live in a great city, we can readily convince ourselves such fanatics could not possibly impinge on the liberties we enjoy in our island of civilization.

 

But our indifference is ultimately our defeat. It measures the success of our enemies' most perfect strategy – their skill at convincing us they are too intellectually remote or geographically far away to hurt us. That's how the Christian theocrats have already managed to deny abortion providers to the women who live in in 87 percent of the USian counties. 

 

Similarly we pooh-pooh Christianity's escalating assault on our right to dictate our own end-of-life circumstances. Yet Christian zealots do not hesitate to defy assisted-suicide laws or do-not-resuscitate orders and thereby condemn victims of permanently debilitating accidents or medical crises to years of “redemptive” suffering  – misery that, not coincidentally, pumps windfall wealth into the already overflowing coffers of church-owned hospitals.

 

We tell ourselves how happy we are to be exempt from such barbarism and dispel all further thoughts of what it might be like to endure such physical and psychological abuse. “It will never happen here,” we say.

 

But it is already happening. The barbarians are already inside the gates. Our islands of civilization are already being overrun.

 

And we are bringing our downfall on ourselves. It is happening because our secular-minded smugness has blinded us to the toxic reality of the theocratic incursion. We have failed to comprehend the awful strength and implacable dynamics of fanatical religion. We deny the totality by which it both shapes its adherents and is itself shaped by their fanaticism, how it shapes or reshapes the societies in which they live, how it is the ultimate historical proof of the ancient adage “ideas have consequences.”

 

Even now we remain blind to the stranglehold Christianity has on the USian population. Nor do we comprehend the savagery – real and potential – implicit in a people 63 percent of whom are fanatics by definition:  that is, they believe the Bible is not only the word of god but is literally, word-for-word true.

 

Many who claim to be Christians vehemently object to characterization of their religion as founded on the hatred of women, sexuality and Nature. Yet history proves that to be the quintessential doctrine of all the Abrahamic religions. In the case of Christianity, it is confirmed by a two-thousand year litany of victims. The contrary examples of the Christian Bodhisattvas – St. Francis of Assisi, St. Theresa of Avila, Albert Schweitzer, Dorothy Day, Fr. William Bischel, others of their kind – are rare exceptions indeed. Their humanitarianism is like a frail scatter of bright blossoms on a dark and bloody tide, its tsunami of carnage ironic fulfillment of the precept given us by St. Matthew, the fruit by which Christianity makes its true self known. As a dear friend and leading pagan scholar was wont to say before her untimely death in 1994, “the goodness of the saints is in spite of Christianity, not because of it.”

 

Moreover, the failure of the so-called mainstream churches to publicly denounce the fanatics who have emerged as the most powerful, influential and well-funded members of the USian Christian clergy proves – if only by default – such hatefulness whether Protestant or Catholic is as much the “true Christianity” today as it was at the height of the Burning Times.

 

The fanaticism-supporting silence of mainstream Christianity is no doubt among the primary influences that prompt too many secular-minded or independently spiritual folk to reject all notions of a theocratic conspiracy to overthrow constitutional governance in the United States. “Religion is just not that important anymore,” say the secularists. “Only morons still believe in that sort of thing.”

 

Alas, as documented by Susan Jacoby in The Age of American Unreason, it is Moron Nation in which we reside. Read Chris Hedges' American Fascists: the Christian Right and the War on America; read Kevin Phillips' American Theocracy; then pull it all together by reading Jeff Sharlet's The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, which tells how Christians – Catholic and Protestant alike – have been working at least since the 1930s to subvert the constitution and replace it with Biblical law, the Christian counterpart of Sharia.

 

Also there are at least three websites vital to building an understanding of the magnitude of the theocratic threat. These are http://www.mergerwatch.org/, which probes the Catholic war against reproductive freedom and end-of-life rights as manifest in the church's leveraged purchases of the nation's secular hospitals; http://www.au.org/, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which documents the inroads Christian theocrats are making on government and USian society in general; and http://www.theocracywatch.org/, which exposes the doctrines and doctrinal interpretations upon which the thrust toward theocracy is based.

 

My sole criticism of these on-line resources is that Americans United and Theocracy Watch too often sidestep the bipartisan nature of the theocratic threat. TheocracyWatch – otherwise a veritable encyclopaedia on Christian subversion of constitutional governance – is especially misleading in this regard. It focuses on “the rise of the Religious Right in the Republican Party” but steadfastly ignores the identical danger within the Democratic Party, which keeps its collaboration with the theocrats carefully hidden beneath a deceptive cover of (apparent) secularism. As Sharlet reports in The Family, “Hillary (Clinton) fights side-by-side with (Sen. Sam) Brownback and others for legislation dedicated less to overturning the wall between church and state than to tunneling beneath it” (first edition, Harper, New York: 2008; p. 275).

 

Note also President Obama's dramatic expansion  of the Bush Administration's Faith-Based Initiatives,  which facilitate the privatization of social services and give religious organizations control – often zero-tolerance control – over who receives aid. It is especially telling how Obama applauds such (theocratic) programs as “a force for good greater than government.”

 

In terms of actually working to impose theocracy, the only meaningful difference between the Republicans and the Democrats is the extent to which the latter have thus far managed to conceal their commitment to an officially Christian United States – a point frighteningly demonstrated by Sharlet's research. 

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While I have long recognized  and many times warned against  the theocratic threat, I was unaware of how the Catholic Church is using its near-infinite wealth to buy or affiliate with secular health care organizations as a means of terminating reproductive freedom and limiting end-of-life alternatives.

 

But then two Seattle news outlets, The Stranger and the on-line daily Crosscut, bravely published stories exposing the alarming local impact of this (typically devious) theocratic scheme.

 

One of these reports, “Faith Healers,” describes in general terms the attack on all such freedoms.  The other focuses mostly on the prohibitive threat to end-of-life choices.  Both are well worth reading.

 

Group Health Cooperative, the non-profit, single-payer organization I joined as a political statement when I was in Washington state during the 1970s and which now administers my Medicare program, sends its Tacoma patients to a local Catholic hospital whenever they need such services. The hospital is St. Joseph, part of the Franciscan Medical Group that operates in the Puget Sound area. Hence I immediately telephoned GHC's customer service department and asked whether St. Joseph would honor documented end-of-life wishes that conflicted with Catholic doctrine.

 

The response was anything but reassuring: “Since that is not one of our hospitals, we do not know what they would honor.”

 

A Catholic source who has personal experience coping with end-of-life issues says the situation is not as bad as the two articles portrayed – that the Franciscan hospitals will at least honor a do-not-resuscitate order. The source, a dissident who openly rejects the church's opposition to contraception, abortion and homosexuality yet regularly attends Mass, is therefore especially credible.

 

But the mere fact such questions now arise demonstrates the extent to which even avowedly secular Group Health – originally perhaps the most staunchly patient-rights-oriented medical institution in the Pacific Northwest and certainly amongst the most outspoken such organizations in the nation – is being trampled by the stampede toward theocracy.

 

The Stranger's Cienna Madrid reports the Catholic Church now owns 12 percent of the hospitals nationwide and a staggering 44 percent of the hospitals in Washington state, the latter a rapidly growing monopoly that already includes all the hospitals in three very large counties. It is an unprecedented – and unprecedentedly sneaky – assault on reproductive rights in the state that was first in the nation to vote for legalized abortion.

 

Anyone who has read the relevant works by Hedges, Phillips and Sharlet will recognize immediately how the dramatic expansion of Catholic hospital ownership is yet another manifestation of the obscenely well-funded corporate campaign to impose theocracy, via Christian fanaticism whether Catholic or Protestant, on the entire United States.

 

Its long-range objective is to subjugate us all beneath local variants of the theocratic ethos that rules the Bible-thumping (and often virulently anti-Catholic) South. As I know from the school years I (involuntarily) spent there c. 1950-1959, also from the years I worked for daily newspapers there (1962-1965) and my summer there in the Civil Rights Movement (1963), the South is a realm of Christian fanatics whether Protestant, as in Appalachia and the cotton-belt, or Catholic, as in the jungles of the Louisiana bayou country.

 

Imagine, if you will, a United States in which possession of Alan Ginsberg's Howl is a felony and the teaching of evolution is a gross misdemeanor, a realm where behavioral codes are enforced by Christian counterparts of the Islamic morality police. Such was the South – the land to which I was exiled by familial dysfunction. Yes, the copy of Howl lent me by a Knoxville woman in 1959 could have subjected either of us to five-year prison sentences. As for morality police, this function in Protestant communities was (and likely still is) fulfilled by the Ku Klux Klan, hence its colloquial name: "the Saturday Night Men's Bible Study Class." Rumor attributed a similar clandestine purpose to the Knights of Columbus in Louisiana and in Catholic communities elsewhere in the South.

 

(Though it begs the question, I should probably explain why I returned to Tennessee after I completed the three-year active duty portion of my six-year U.S. Army obligation. Because I had been a stringer for The Knoxville Journal and two community weeklies during my last year of high school and the 18 months between graduation and enlistment, Knoxville was the one sure place I could get work as a journalist – and thus begin building a viable résumé to get me back home to New York City as soon as possible. I have returned to the South only twice since then – in 1967 with Adrienne just after our marriage and in 1969 on a photo assignment that coincided with a younger sister's wedding.)

 

That said, why would morally imbecilic capitalists – especially given their enthusiastic adoption of Ayn Rand's principle of infinite greed as ultimate virtue – prefer rule by Biblical law? While the anti-environmentalist implications of Christian doctrine are obvious – see again the first item linked in my opening paragraph – the Southern brand of Christianity-protected capitalism predates the environmental movement by nearly a century. What did the the Southern One Percent discover after the Civil War that bound the Bible so inseparably to capitalism? 

In the first place, the core ideologies of capitalism – the hierarchy of the rich over the poor; the ruthless exploitation of underlings and Nature; male supremacy and/or the supremacy of patriarchal values and methods – all originate from Biblical principles. (Those who doubt this should read not just Max Weber [The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism] but the works of Barbara Mor [The Great Cosmic Mother] and Rianne Eisler [The Chalice and the Blade]).

 

More to the present-day point, innumerable studies in what used to be called “industrial psychology,” all of which seem to have been carefully removed from public circulation, long ago concluded the combination of divine-right management, sexual taboos, misogyny and psychological terror implicit in all Abrahamic religion (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) makes for the most obedient, most productive, hence most profitable workforce possible. Abrahamic theocracy thus effectively reduces “human capital” to its original antebellum meaning, a euphemism for slaves and enslavement.

 

Studying the slavishly religious South, the industrial psychologists realized its practice of elevating the boss to the equivalent of a divine-right monarch and anointing him god's representative on earth ensures the unquestioning obedience of all believers in the workforce. The Christian Prosperity Gospel  reinforces managerial authority by defining poverty as divine punishment. Collective bargaining is thus implicitly condemned as wanton defiance of god's will – a deadly or mortal sin.

 

The counterparts of these Christian principles in the other Abrahamic religions structure their respective societies in recognizably similar ways. The rich and powerful are portrayed as god's chosen; the poor and/or the non-believer as his rejects; males as made in the image of god and therefore superior to females; structures of gender, class and caste as divinely ordained and therefore inescapable; Nature as god's gift to man to be exploited however man chooses. Replace “fear of the Lord” with der führerprinzip and you have Nazism – particularly its core concept of übermenschen and üntermenschen – hence the intimate connection between Abrahamic religion, fascism and imperialism.

 

Borrowing from Freud and again studying the South, industrial psychologists also discovered the bottomless frustration resulting from strictly enforced prohibitions of sexual expression outside  heterosexual marriage is typically sublimated  into frantic productivity and endless frenzies of trinket materialism. Later events – most notably the expansion of the USian empire – proved the result is the same whether the workers are Christian, Islamic or Jewish. For the One Percent, theocracy thus means more profit at less expense. 

The notorious oppression of Southern women – best illustrated by the South's intense opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment –  reflects another defining characteristic of Abrahamic theocracy. But denial of female personhood – though obviously prompted by the Jewish/Christian/Islamic patriarchy's envious fear and hatred of women's sexuality – also seems to have economic motives. In today's world it is apparently yet another expression of the One Percent's infinitely despotic intent, an especially vivid example of the new paradigm of global governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for everyone else. 

Semiotics gives us our most important clue as to why the One Percent so relentlessly supports theocratic male supremacy. Throughout Occidental history, liberty is invariably personified as female, no doubt in (mostly unconscious) tribute to the central but oft ignored role of women in innumerable revolutions. The history so symbolized begins at least with Boudicca's rebellion against Imperial Rome c. 60-61 CE; it may have originated 1500 years earlier in the Minoan resistance to Mycenaean conquest. The storming of the Bastille in 1789 was triggered by the women of Paris protesting the price of bread. The Russian Revolution of 1917 was sparked by the women of the Lesnoy Textile Works, who boiled into the streets of Petrograd to protest the firing of five organizers. The fierce activism of women in New York City after the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist fire gave the U.S. labor movement one of its greatest and most pivotal victories.

These histories and others like them suggest women may be notably quicker than men both to develop revolutionary consciousness and to evolve the cooperative solidarity essential to successful radical action. If true – and you can assume industrial psychologists and intelligence analysts alike have had this matter under investigation for years if not decades – it gives the One Percent an obvious motive for excluding women from the workforce and methodically reducing them to the abject powerlessness so horrifically prophesied by Margaret Atwood in The Handmaid's Tale. 

Once again, we witness how the oppressive functions of Abrahamic theocracy provide capitalism with profitable mechanisms of oppression: not just opiate, but brain police as well. 

The imposition of Islamic theocracy on Iraq and its seemingly permanent disempowerment of women is therefore probably no accident. Likewise the theocratic takeovers that followed the so-called Arab Spring in Egypt and Libya. Indeed the USian military is relentlessly drilled in Christian-crusader ideology.   Its ultimate proverb – “kill 'em all; let god sort 'em out” – is the perfect facilitator of the imperial war machine's true function as the One Percent's international goon-squad.

 

Sectarian warfare over which fundamentalists will control the power structure of a given state – Protestant versus Catholic, Shiite versus Sunni, one Hasidim versus another – ensures the disunity that perpetuates the power of the One Percent even as  theocracy subjugates the workforce. Whomever wins, once the fundamentalists rule,  the quest for progressive change becomes blasphemy if not heresy, just as it was in the time of the Inquisition, in the time of the Sultanate, in the times of Franco and Pinochet, just as it is now in Saudi Arabia and Iran and much of Israel and in the 87 percent of the United States where women are already denied local access to abortion. God is watching. The intelligentsia are silenced; the masses are shackled by cradle-to-grave orthodoxy; in some realms the disobedient are publicly tortured to death and they are everywhere cursed with eternal damnation. “God remembers how you vote.”  

Can it be coincidence the model societies of the Bible and the Qur'an so closely approximate the burgeoning reality of the USian surveillance state?

 

Verily, we are ever more a conquered people. When O when will we awaken?

 

LB/16-25 April 2013

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A Photo to Contemplate Until I Return to the Keyboard

When I'm photographing,  the process is entirely visual and often Zen-like. Hence any moral I might read into a picture is always after the fact. But it seems to me the moral here is obvious: those who assume "elderly" is synonymous with "feeble-minded" prove themselves to be morons. This was part of an extended essay on the life of a retired scientist, a project on which I worked from 2006 through 2008. The traditional veracity of black-and-white was achieved via Kodak BW400CN and commercial C-41 processing, the subtle purplish tinge reminiscent of what you got when you selenium-toned DuPont Varilure, the finest photographic paper ever made. The camera was a Leica, probably an M4, the lens most likely a 50mm f/1-point-something Voigtlander. Click on image to view it full size. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2013.

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OBVIOUSLY I'VE MISSED my self-imposed Thursday deadline. This is because I've been sick all week with an especially nasty upper respiratory virus – yet another bellicose bug the government neglected to include in last fall's flu shot. I'll be back to the keyboard as soon as possible, Meanwhile my apology for any inconvenience.

LB/19 April 2013