Total Surveillance: Absolute Proof We the People Are Nothing More Than Lab Rats in a Capitalist Skinner Box

Another of my hitherto unpublished Occupy Tacoma images, the woman's placard as apt now as in October 2011, when her smile reflected the joy and optimism that was all too soon crushed by USian governments at all levels. Pentax MX, 100mm f/2.8 SMCP-M, Fujicolor 800, exposure data not recorded. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2013 (Click on image to view it full size.)

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(Note: Vital medical procedures consumed so much of my time during the past seven days, this essay is again unavoidably late, and I again apologize for my tardiness. But the news is good. Contrary to what was first suspected, my eyes are free of glaucoma. Moreover, the latest surgical techniques bypass unrelated conditions that would have prohibited cataract surgery. Thus my eyesight – and therefore my ability to photograph – can be surgically restored, for which I am grateful beyond words.)

 

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THE TOTAL-SURVEILLANCE STATE is undoubtedly the most terrifying governmental application of modern technology that has yet been revealed to us. Its terror exceeds that of thermonuclear weapons or nuclear melt-downs, which we can always convince ourselves will only be inflicted elsewhere upon others. Unlike The Bomb, which save in Hiroshima or Nagasaki has not yet been dropped, or the homicidal reactor, which – at least so far as we're allowed to know – has run amok only at Three-Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima – the total-surveillance state murders us all by killing our ability to think and speak freely. It thereby makes us less-than-human. In other words, it reverses evolution, reducing us to the mind-crushed state of slaves or prisoners. And as we grasp what it does to us in the context of the additional fear generated by organized assaults against specific groups and individuals  – women; Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and food stamp recipients; organized labor; members of the working press; photographers whether professional or amateur; any other social critics whose disclosures or protests dare expose the unapologetic savagery of the new paradigm of USian governance – it should already be provoking massive, nationwide anger. The very concept of what it meant to be “American” has not only been ruthlessly violated but maliciously abandoned, as if the government itself has officially torn down our flag, burned it, urinated on the ashes and stomped them into filth. Might there then soon be the same public outpouring of humanistic, patriotic rage as followed the sinking of the Lusitania, the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the massacre of innocents symbolized by the numbers 9/11? Apparently not. The vast majority of the USian people are sullenly silent – and in all probability will remain so.

Yet what is inflicted upon us is not, of course, really a new paradigm of governance at all, and that – especially the associated guilt – may be one of the reasons we are thus far so submissive. To the aboriginal inhabitants of North America, to the subjects of the colonial empire the United States seized from Spain, sought to expand into Asiatic Russia  and imposed elsewhere including Africa and other parts of Asia, the sadism and brutality that now characterizes USian governance of its homeland is an old and ugly story. All that has changed is such imperial malevolence has now become the domestic policy of the dominant political parties (or, more correctly, the One Ruling Class Party of Two Names), which means it is now enforced by the entire federal government (especially by the secret-police apparatus of the Department of Homeland Security), as well as by all the state and local governments. But it has always been the policy of the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Department and the various other overseas extensions of the USian empire whether official (as in Vietnam), capitalist (as at Bhopal and Bangladesh) or mercenary  (as in Iraq, Afghanistan and New Orleans). It also means we of the USian 99 Percent are now potentially no better off than the Iraqis or even the First Nations people our ancestors genocidally displaced – perhaps the true meaning of Barack Obama's “change we can believe in.”  The only difference is we have yet to suffer our own Trail of Tears,  our own Wounded Knee. But we can be certain of one thing: equal horrors – or probably events far more horrible – are looming, and they are not on a comfortably distant horizon, which means they will occur within many of our own lifetimes. For that is the hideous truth of the total-surveillance state: it has no other purpose  than to facilitate maximum zero-tolerance tyranny. And the fact we have not already taken to the streets in massive resistance suggests we have already been conditioned to the reflexive submissiveness required of a conquered people.

However there is one flame-bright exception to this dismaying acceptance of what seems ever more likely to be our unavoidable reduction to permanent serfdom and slavery: a growing number of USian women, whose liberation movements I once believed might at last force this nation to be true to its stated principles, are again rising up angry. More than any other force within the 99 Percent – certainly more than we males whose identities are occupational rather than biological and have therefore been hopelessly shattered by permanent unemployment – these women seem closest to recognizing that the United States has been cunningly turned into the human equivalent of a Skinner Box. Though they have yet to connect the proverbial dots, I have no doubt they will soon understand how the dramatic increase in oppression – the atrocities summarized above – exemplifies the new Ruling Class methodology of forceful behavior modification even as the all-seeing god's-eye of total-surveillance enables the overseers to monitor and refine their techniques with a speed and efficiency hitherto imagined only by villains of the same Ted Bundy arrogance that characterized Adolf Hitler, Pol Pot, Augusto Pinochet and let us not forget our own Nathan Bedford Forrest, the founder of the Ku Klux Klan. In this repugnant context – especially given that history shows the grievances of women are often the hinge-issues in successful revolutions, the methodical assaults on women's hard-won sexual freedom – the avowedly misogynistic political efforts  and the growing epidemic of physical attacks combined with the institutionalized protection of the attackers  – reveal how the Ruling Class views the suppression of female independence as the key to the abolition of liberty and justice for all. Damning enough in its own right, the revelation is underscored by the associated treachery of the Obama Administration, typical Obama the Orator ploys of eloquently endorsing women's demands while Barack the Betrayer sneakily back-stabs  the very measures he falsely claims to support. The common denominator in all these outrages – just as the would-be victims themselves proclaim – is a concerted effort to force women and girls back into the de facto slavery demanded by patriarchy, explicitly by its Abrahamic religious offspring (Judaism, Christianity and Islam), implicitly by its economic fulfillment in capitalism's final transformation to fascism. Every time a woman is imprisoned by the (very rational) fear she will not only be raped but her assailant will be officially protected, the intended behavior modification has achieved its goal. Factor in the similar barriers and prohibitions inflicted on social critics, journalists, photographers, labor activists, anyone else of either gender who might be inclined to resist the blitzkrieg by which Ayn Rand fascism is conquering the United States, and our portrait of a nation ruled like a Skinnerian rat-maze is complete and undeniable. B. F. Skinner himself stated in 1972 what is obviously the key precept of USian governance today: "The issue is to improve the way in which (humanity) is controlled." To which women are responding with increasingly public defiance.  The question, of course, is what they will do when the state confronts them with the same combination of economic retaliation bolstered by truncheon-and-pepper-gas barbarism that has already hammered us men into submission.

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Nevertheless it is by viewing the war against women as a carefully scripted campaign of behavior-modification we gain our most sharply focused picture of capitalism's thrust toward Christian theocracy as its primary modality for controlling the USian 99 Percent. But the Left is as powerless as the Right to combat it. The secular and/or libertarian Right is of course nullified by the fact the imposition of theocracy is a major objective of the Right's capitalist financiers. The Left however is paralyzed by its own insistence on political “correctness,” in this instance its refusal to recognize Islam's history of imposing its own brand of theocracy – including the most virulent forms of misogyny characteristic of human societies today – wherever it ascends to power. To denounce theocracy is therefore – at least obliquely – to denounce Islam, something the doctrinaire Left and even the pseudo-Left cannot bear to do. Though it is something of an aside, no doubt the associated taboos explain why Socialist Worker refused to publish the following letter, my response to its (above-linked) report on how President Obama backstabbed women even on the hitherto (seemingly) long-settled issue of access to contraception: 

While Ms. Schulte's reporting on how President Obama enabled the Religious Right to gain the tactical and strategic high ground in the reproductive-rights struggle is the best such work I have seen anywhere, it nevertheless omits a vital fact: the extent to which (even) Democratic Party politicians are (clandestinely) committed to the imposition of Christian theocracy on the United States.

 

Though it is fashionable for socialists of all sorts to underestimate the importance of Christianity (and Abrahamic religion generally) in USian life, a majority of at least 63 percent of the U.S. population is already fundamentalist as defined by belief in the Bible as "literally true" (see http://legacy.rasmussenreports.com/2005/Bible.htm), which itself indicates a looming danger to secular governance. Combine that with capitalism's historical preference for zero-tolerance theocracy as the most efficient means of ensuring a submissive, slave-minded Working Class, and the probable motive behind Obama's serial betrayals of reproductive freedom come into sharp and terrifying focus.

 

As for documentation of the Democrats' clandestine role in the imposition of theocracy, one source is especially useful. This is Jeff Sharlet's The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, (HarperCollins: 2008), which exposes Hillary Clinton's behind-the-scenes collaboration with Sam Brownback "for legislation dedicated less to overturning the wall between church and state than to tunneling beneath it" (pg. 275). The same sort of "tunneling" is precisely what was accomplished by the Obama “compromise” that added to the USian definition of religious liberty the alleged “right” of believers to impose their doctrines on non-believers, as for example in the case of Christian pharmacists who arbitrarily deny contraception to unmarried women. Given the president's oft-demonstrated Machiavellian skill, this staggering blow to church-state separation is clearly no accident.

 

Another excellent albeit more generalized book on the threat of theocracy is Chris Hedges' American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America (Simon & Schuster: 2006). But in most of the United States, the danger is already reality. The Bible Belt South has been a de facto theocracy since the Civil War: note the colloquial name for the Ku Klux Klan – “the Saturday Night Men's Bible Study Class” – which denotes its function as a Christian equivalent of the lslamic Morality Police. And – as proven by worsening restrictions on contraception and the near-total destruction of abortion facilities – the remainder of the midlands are not far behind. It is a risk we ignore at our own huge peril – a dire hazard that indeed we have already ignored far too long.

 

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It is perhaps worthwhile to note at this point that beyond history's seemingly endless series of isms, there are only two alternative forms of human governance. One alternative is tyranny: rule by a dictator, or dictators, whether overt (as in Nazi Germany or the theocracy of Iran), or from behind various pseudo-democratic facades (as in today's United States). The other alternative is liberty – the never-fully realized theory embodied in the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution: “We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this constitution for the United States of America.” During my elementary-school days, 1946 through 1951, all third graders not only learned to recite the Preamble from memory, but to give simple examples of its meaning, a requirement long ago repealed as dangerous to capitalism and deleterious to its objectives. But the Preamble is not as unique as we USians were typically taught, back in those halcyon days when fledgling minds were still entrusted with libertarian ideals. Similar sentiments are expressed somewhat more bluntly in the concluding lines of The Communist Manifesto: “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workers of all countries, unite!” Thus the greatest fear of the USian Ruling Class has always been that Communism (or some other form of socialism) would prevail here – a perfect fit with the purposes and principles of “we the people” as elicited by the Preamble and the Constitution itself. But in the Skinner Box United States, monitored as it is by total surveillance, all such potential is obliterated forever. 

The limitless tyranny of the total-surveillance state is, perhaps ironically, the final result of the so-called “revolution” brought about by computers, which have given the global Ruling Class the godlike omnipotence it has consciously sought for at least two thousand years. The computer is thus irrefutable proof of the One Percent's defining purpose – the unspeakable lust for the zero-tolerance subjugation and total enslavement of all the rest of us, which it is now after 20 centuries of effort achieving via technologies against which there is no effective defense save re-adoption of seemingly obsolete machinery.  Meanwhile the popularization of the computer is the result of the most elaborate snake-oil scam in human history. It and its offshoots are peddled to the public as the apex of modern necessity even as society is methodically restructured to make all such gadgets essential – and damn those who cannot afford to keep up. Yet all the while, and from the very beginning, the profits so amassed are focused on perfecting the computer as the ultimate weapon of oppression. Nor could this story have ended in any other way; the computer as we know it grew not from humanitarian objectives but from the profiteering instincts of the capitalists  and the deadly necessities of modern warfare.  Indeed the computer and the manner in which it was thrust upon us is an object lesson in pure capitalism – the moral imbecility of infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue, and therefore the closest approximation to absolute Evil our species has yet evoked. The computer, given its vital role in creation of the global slave state, is perhaps capitalism's most definitive product. It is surely capitalism's most pivotal tool. For without the computer, the Ruling Class would never have been able to shrink all human society to a Skinner Box, with ourselves reduced to nothing more than laboratory rats in the One Percent's frantic, apocalypse-driven quest for wealth and power. 

LB/13-14 July 2013 

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Real Leftists Know Capitalism Is Too Evil to Reform

“Human Rights Not Corporate Rights”/“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable”: another of my hitherto unpublished Occupy Tacoma images, as relevant now as when it was new. (The more conventionally journalistic pictures were published by Reader Supported News as the story developed in 2011 and 2012.) Pentax MX, 100mm SMC Pentax f/2.8, Fujicolor 800, exposure data not recorded; posterization by Gimp Image Editor. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2013. (Click on image to view full size.)

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(Note: Apparently when I boasted last week of feeling too healthy to work, I called down the wrath of the gods. That very night I was smitten by a nasty bug, which kept me bedridden six days and for which I am still taking antibiotics.) 

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SOMETIMES WHEN I write a comment for some other website, the result is so relevant I have no doubt it should be included here. Far more infrequent is the comment that expands into its own Outside Agitator's Notebook essay, and the comment that does so in such a way it suggests its own illustration from my stock photo files is downright rare. But that is what happened when I involved myself in a discussion about capitalism that was sparked by Charles Pierce's most recent report on how the breathtakingly outspoken but tragically ineffectual Sen. Elizabeth Warren is living up to her poignantly defiant post-election pledge,  “I won't just be your senator, I'll be your champion.” Pierce's piece,  titled “Senator Warren Won't Be Taking Your BS,” was picked up by Reader Supported News from Esquire magazine on 5 July, and is well worth reading, not the least for its combative joy. But as I was quick to point out in the subsequent discussion – though I said it there in far more gentle terms – anyone who still truly believes capitalism can be reformed is either in stubborn denial of the past 80 years of USian history or is suffering from clinical dementia.

In this context, Sen. Warren's heroic efforts – and they are indeed so heroic, some of us who remember the fates of Sen Paul Wellstone and Sen. Robert Kennedy have already begun to fear for her life – are a morality play, (yet another) teachable moment in the nature of capitalism. It is capitalism, remember, that seeks its ultimate fulfillment via fascism and Nazism: think not just of Hitler and Mussolini, whom Wall Street financed into power, but of the imperial USian puppets Francisco Franco, Fulgencio Batista, Anastasio Somoza Debayle and Augusto Pinochet, not to mention Ngo Dinh Diem and the Shah of Iran. Now, today, it is capitalism matured into fascism that, albeit without the strutting dictators, has been elevated into the ruling ideology of the United States by the Mein Kampf equivalents written by Ayn Rand. (“Mein kampf” means “my struggle,” which beneath its specific historical identity is nevertheless the same theme of übermenschen versus üntermenschen that Rand later spelled out in her own tedious prose.) And now in its strident opposition to Sen. Warren's humanitarian courage, it is the Randite brand of capitalism-cum-fascism that is revealing itself by its ever-more-brazen embrace of the traditional fascist paradigm. Nothing more need be said about a federal policy that – as if to punish any youth of the 99 Percent who dares aspire toward a college education – deliberately condemns entire generations to choose between lifetimes of indentured servitude or “voluntary” service to the empire in its cannon-fodder legions.

Hence when a reasonably articulate poster on the Charles Pierce thread wrote of “peaceful protest” as a means of forcing capitalism to “respond to the 'priorities of the people,'” I replied with what to me is the most painfully obvious lesson of all USian history: that capitalism will never “respond to the 'priorities of the people.'” Why? Because capitalism, by definition, responds only to the priorities of the One Percent to produce more wealth at maximum profit – which invariably means maximum wretchedness imposed on the 99 Percent. Thus the only way to achieve the "priorities of the people" is to abolish capitalism. Which (necessarily revolutionary) step the USian 99 Percent is too viciously oppressed and fearfully bigoted and greedily self-absorbed by trinket materialism to ever dare take, peacefully or otherwise. Forget Occupy; stop fantasizing about progressive resistance movements that will never again be allowed to develop beyond the political equivalent of embryos, their partial-birth abortions the precise fulfillment of the domestic Gestapo purpose of the USian total surveillance state. Note instead the obvious examples of the South and the flyover midlands. Observe how so many 99 Percent USians cut their own throats economically by habitually voting for reactionary politicians and causes. And note too how the same trends have metastasized far beyond their signature domains.

 

The busy Pacific Northwest seaport city of Tacoma, Washington provides an especially repugnant example. I have lived here twice, the first time from 1978 through 1982, the second time since 2004, and I will no doubt die here. Though I have harped long and bitterly on the manner in which an overwhelming majority of Tacoma and Tacoma-area voters were persuaded by the meme “transit is welfare” to destroy their own local public transport system, it is a story that demands far more widespread notoriety than ever I can provide. The destruction was inflicted via two elections, the first in 2011, the second in 2012. The earlier election resulted in a 55-45 landslide defeat for pro-transit forces. It should have taught transit advocates the alleged pro-transit majority within the city of Tacoma is too Ayn-Rand hateful toward public-transport users to get off its socioeconomically bigoted arse and vote to sustain a service desperately needed by local lower-income people. Nor is this condemnation unfair; voting in Washington state takes only the physical effort required to mail in a ballot, and the class and racial conflicts inherent in the election were made obvious from the beginning of the 2011 campaign. But transit advocates remained blind to the realities underlying the defeat – a textbook example of how suppression of the historical truth of class-struggle cripples accurate analysis. Hence they merely hoped for the best in 2012, persisting in their refusal to acknowledge the bipartisan magnitude of local hostility toward lowest-income peoples – never mind the huge irony that most of the anti-transit voters are themselves only a little better off. While the second outcome seemed misleadingly close – in the unofficial results available to me on 25 November 2012, the anti-transit majority was only 695 votes – an additional 15,400 so-called “under-votes” indicate the real anti-transit majority is much larger. (Under-votes are otherwise filled-out ballots cast by people too disdainful of transit and transit users to mark a preference on the save-transit measure.) Not only do the under-votes echo the ruinously low turnout in the February 2011 results; for that very reason they seem to provide an accurate yardstick for measuring the true magnitude of anti-transit sentiment. That this is a valid hypothesis is substantiated by (A), the entire Seattle-Tacoma region's 44-year anti-transit history (at least seven of at least nine proposals rejected since 1968, a result documentably linked to xenophobia and bigotry), and (B), by various statements made by the voters themselves, typically to the effect “I won't vote against the poor, but I don't believe in coddling those people with welfare either.” Thus the anti-transit vote becomes a microcosm of the class hatreds that now characterize the USian political macrocosm. It is also probably the national unveiling of the newest and perhaps most vicious form of gentrification the Randite forces have yet conceived. 

I have been told the local transit authority used the approximately the same reasoning about the significance of the unprecedented number of under-votes when it made its own determination that further electoral efforts are pointless. In other words – particularly given the region's anti-transit history (which, by the way, proves its haughty claims to environmental enlightenment are rank hypocrisy if not Big Lies) – there is no antidote to the class-warfare poisons stirred up by the “transit is welfare” meme. Despite the hardships characteristic of the (permanent) oppressiveness of the USian economy and the increasingly zero-tolerance totalitarianism of the total-surveillance state the Ayn Rand fascists have imposed for their own protection, the USian masses remain hopelessly reactionary. They continue to identify with the oppressor, imagining that with but a little good luck, they too can be magically elevated into the One Percent aristocracy, never mind even the mainstream propaganda media now admits entry to such circles is by heredity only. Thus – ultimately because its Working Class refuses to recognize itself as such – Tacoma and its environs have already become notorious for their lack of adequate public transport. Indeed their self-inflicted shortcomings are the worst in all the comparably urbanized locales of the United States – and therefore they are the worst in the entire industrial world. If long-range projections are correct, the area will within a few more years have no local transit at all. When that happens, tens of thousands of women, men and children will be forced to move elsewhere. The dispossessed will include students, low-wage workers, elderly and disabled people, any others who cannot afford the skyrocketing costs of automobiles and are not physically strong enough to ride bikes nor desperate enough to risk their lives pedaling amongst road-raging motorists already infamous for their deadly hatred of bicyclists. Which is – or so I strongly suspect – precisely the compulsory exodus the local Ruling Class intends. 

Originally I intended to end this piece here, but then another poster on the Charles Pierce/Sen. Warren thread supposed I was too young to remember when the capitalists – terrified into a temporary false-humanitarianism by the Soviet Union and the socialist revolutions it represented and fostered even amidst its own huge failures – made sure “life was affordable.” Yes, I replied, I remembered that era very well, never mind the affordability was shared only by those who were male, heterosexual, Caucasian and/or not residents of some urban ghetto, rural shantytown, backwoods shack or First Nations reservation. Indeed, born in 1940 as I was, I lived at the apex of the so-called "American" Dream – the irony quotes demanded by the fact the Dream never much extended beyond the USian borders. Thus, thanks largely to my father, I was also educated in economic reality, which means I was taught to recognize capitalism as infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue (and therefore the closest approximation of Absolute Evil our species has yet evoked). I also learned to see the Dream for what it was: a capitalist Big Lie, the modern equivalent of the politically savvy Roman emperors' panem et circenses. Like the free bread and the spectacular events in the Coliseum and its myriad smaller-city counterparts, the Dream and its sequel the New Deal was intended only to opiate enough of the masses long enough to ensure the permanent brain-death of their revolutionary instincts. That's why – once the One Percenters had taken back all the power they lost during the halcyon years of Communism and socialism – the New Deal and the Dream itself were terminated forever, as was the so-called "American" experiment in constitutional governance. Now, with the capitalists once again free to be their innately savage Ayn Rand selves, it's back to business as usual: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for all the rest of us. 

LB/6 July 2013 

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Downed by Wellness: I Felt Too Good to Work This Week

The Wright Park Sprayground: a cooling image, especially appropriate now since we're in the midst of the Puget Sound area's first summer heat wave. I snuck this picture on a rare hot day several weeks ago, my promised gesture of defiance to the hatefully fearful parents who seemingly wanted to lynch me  for trying to photograph a similar scene in the same place. Old-time journalism by an old-time guy: Rolleicord III, zone-focused and framed in the sports viewfinder (how else?); Kodak Tmax 100, f/16 at 1/250th. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2013.

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WHAT IF – instead of calling in sick – we lived in a society that allowed us to call in well? "Sorry, boss, I feel much too good to work today." 

In my case it was a too-rare opportunity for some real outdoor recreation, the sort of pasttime the United States, with its institutional hatred of public transport, routinely denies those of us who can't afford automobiles. 

Contrast this nation's uniquely (and therefore defining) anti-transit-user policies with the transit-is-a-civil-right principles that define the civilized world. Then we bring into sharp focus another of the innumerable ways Ayn Rand savagery characterizes USian governance whether at home or throughout its global empire. 

Yes, I'll be back next week – Goddess willing and the creek don't rise. Meanwhile I hope you enjoy the photo – and think about how the USian refusal to build adequate transit is deliberately crafted to inflict maximum punishment on anyone who is poor – how it leaves lower-income people stranded even as it inflicts on everyone else it the de facto tax of buying and maintaining a privately-owned automobile.

LB/28 June 2013

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FBI Probes Steubenville Rape-Case Hero as Obama's War on Whistleblowers Expands into Local Government Issues

Occupy Tacoma demonstrators, 4 November 2011. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2011. (Click on image to view it full size.)

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IN THE MOST disturbing demonstration yet of the magnitude of President Barack Obama's promise-breaking war on the public's right to know, its campaigns of fear and intimidation have been expanded into the affairs of local governments. 

This newest and most dramatic escalation of the assault on the First Amendment begun by President George Bush via the Patriot Act is revealed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation's targeting of Deric Lostutter, the Anonymous “hacker” who exposed the perpetrators of the now-infamous Steubenville, Ohio rape case. 

But the USian Left has, as of today (21 June 2013), remained stubbornly silent about the significance of federal entry into the Steubenville case. Not even ThinkProgress (linked above) had dared report on its broader meaning – that Obama's effort to suppress public scrutiny of government has no jurisdictional limits. Nor have the two petition sites that rallied to Lostutter's defense, UltraViolet.org and Watchdog.net.

 

The perplexing silence in response to this newest expansion of anti-First-Amendment warfare is almost certainly a measure of how the so-called Left – which ideologically would be considered middle-Right anywhere else in the industrial world – is still gagged by its lingering sense of obligation to protect the Democrat who is also the nation's first African-American president. Never mind notably Left-leaning constitutional experts already label Obama “worse than Nixon.” 

Meanwhile two of the Steubenville rapists – high school football stars whose arrogance reflected the cultoid view athletes are above the law – have each gotten two-year sentences in juvenile penitentiaries. 

But Lostutter – if the FBI continues to prosecute him – is facing 10 years in adult federal prison. For a male without prior criminal experience, this is probably a death sentence. Without Mafia affiliation or gang protection he would be repeatedly raped and most likely infected with AIDS. Thus, ironically, the hero in the Steubenville case is confronted by horrors infinitely worse than those suffered by the victim he protected. 

There's another irony too. While feminists have tried for years to make rape a federal crime – thus to bypass misogynistic local governments in much the same way federal civil rights legislation bypassed the racist governments of a half century ago – they have failed abysmally. Meanwhile, under Obama, it has become a federal felony to make a rapist's crimes public or to expose a local government's efforts to cover them up.

The message is clear: Lostutter – or any other citizen activist or official who courageously exposes secret wrongdoing – can expect the same merciless treatment Barack's federales are meting out to John Kiriakou, Julian Assange, Edward Snowdon and PFC Bradley Manning. 

Nor are the victims of Obama's anti-First-Amendment blitzkrieg limited to government officials, soldiers and citizen activists. Working journalists are now also under attack, not just in the Associated Press and Fox News incidents but on a much broader front. New assaults are reported almost every day by the website Photography Is Not A Crime  or PINAC. As I posted there on 14 June: 

I speak from experience when I say it cannot be an accident this sort of thing is happening throughout the United States. I covered cops during a journalism career that spanned half a century -- police officers and detectives in New York City and New Jersey as well as in Tennessee and Washington state.

While there are probably a few malfeasants in any given department, most cops are dedicated civil servants performing a dangerous, difficult job in obedience to established law and departmental regulations. The key word here is of course "obedience" -- specifically the fact the cops would not be waging war on photographers (and on the working press in general) had they not been ordered to do so.

Moreover, the nation-wide character of this war against public scrutiny of police activities -- and a war is precisely what it is -- indicates the existence of a nation-wide (and probably secret) directive mandating the suppression of all such scrutiny. This would be a logical precursor to the imposition of the zero-tolerance dictatorship long feared by political dissidents of both Rightist and Leftist persuasions...

 

That I was immediately denounced as “tinfoil behatted” by another poster suggests the site has already been infiltrated by government operatives, which should surprise no one in the maximum-surveillance despotism the U.S. had become. Quoth the late Lev Bronstein: “In any gathering of three revolutionaries, there is at least one agent of the Okhrana.” And whether we are dissidents exercising our (former) constitutional right to protest or members of the Working Press merely trying to do the jobs we were hired to do, the government now considers all of us to be revolutionaries – or in the parlance of the Department of Homeland Security, “terrorists.” 

Such is – how many times must I say it? – the new paradigm of USian governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation for all the rest of us. 

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Longtime readers who suspect they detect in the above text a subtle but profound change in my attitude toward current events are indeed correct. I am back, as it were, from a harrowing of hell, though whether I will prove stronger for the experience remains to be seen.
 

Two years of dreadful events had reduced me to a nadir of political and socioeconomic despair such as I have never known. It was so deep – “the darkness here under the Obama Bush,” as I many times described it – it had prompted me to begin turning this blog into little more than a journal of geriatric musings. 

Wretchedness seemed the order of the day. I had ridden with Occupy in its skyrocketing autumnal ascent to defiant resistance and its equally sudden late-winter collapse into factionalism and submission. I had allowed myself to be frightened away from alternative presidential candidates by the One Percent's brandishing of its Romney-Ryan assault gun and the Republican threats to Social Security, Medicare and women's reproductive freedom. I had been reduced to wallowing once more in the imbecility of hope and squandering my ballot on a Democrat who had already proven himself nearly as fascistic as his opponent. I had then watched his predictable but nevertheless breathtakingly malicious post-electoral re-transformation from Obama the Orator to Barack the Betrayer. No, I was not surprised; I had long ago acknowledged the (now-obvious) seizure of our former “government by the people” by a malevolent plutocracy bent on suppressing all opposition to its Ayn Rand variant of fascism. And now it seemed I was emotionally and intellectually paralyzed by the resultant combination of sadness, anger and disgust.

There was guilt, too, and a profound sense of failure as well. Newspapers, for my generation, were a base from which those of us who were of Working Class or déclassé origins and thus denied the privileges of caste and credentials might nevertheless occasionally succeed in improving the human condition. It was the old traditional Boy Scout mandate – leave the campsite in better condition than you found it – borne into the adult world of politics and economics. And I dare say it was a powerful motive shared in those days by nearly all of of us who took up the craft of journalism – surely all of us who stayed with it after we learned journalism is not just a job but a (very demanding) way of life. Yet now it seemed it had been all for nothing. We failed – I failed – and the proof for our failures was everywhere we looked, in collapsed bridges and closed libraries and shut-down transit systems and boarded-up schools, but most of all in the reproachful eyes of people who were jobless and foreclosed and evicted and homeless and unjustly imprisoned. 

As if that were not depressing enough, now in the outrages committed by the National Security Agency I saw confirmed beyond argument the plutocracy's glaring rule-the-world ambition, the terrible truth revealed by exposure of NSA's global surveillance network. The conquest-driven mandates for the military and police to have immediately actionable intelligence leave no doubt as to the network's aggressive purpose. It is the vital precursor to imposition and perpetuation of an empire literally as big as the planet – more ambitious, more powerful than anything in any former conqueror's dreams. It is therefore already the most oppressive apparatus in human experience. 

In all probability this new imperialism is the ultimate expression of “the secret (Christian) fundamentalism at the heart of American power” (for which see Jeff Sharlet's The Family). It is thus already an empire deliberately shaped, as man himself is said to be, in the patriarchal, zero-tolerance image of the god of eternal damnation, the most sadistic deity ever conceived. Already it is imposing theocracy at home.  And already it possesses powers hitherto reckoned as divine, including a Sodom-and-Gomorrah, “destroy-the-village-to-save-it” vengefulness that literally has no limit. Speak out against it, you're forever in its book of the damned; speak out effectively, you're dead. (That clearly was what befell Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Fred Hampton and Karen Silkwood. It was probably the doom of Sen. Paul Wellstone and his entire family. Hence I cannot but wonder if Michael Hastings  met a similar fate.) 

I've also had plenty of personal troubles during the past two years. Indeed it often seemed I was being stripped of all the (few) remnants of my selfhood. The most recent such trauma was the discovery I am going blind – and the cataract surgery that could restore my vision may be proscribed by other medical conditions. The question will not be resolved until mid-July – and I am not good at coping with prolonged uncertainty. Hence, whether personally or politically, I have learned to assume the worst. It is the only defense against the anguish of shattered optimism. That was the great lesson taught me in 1983, when the strong likelihood my book “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer” would at last achieve mainstream publication had raised my expectations to their all-time high just before a house-fire brought them to their all-time low, not only destroying the manuscript and all the rest of my life's work but obliterating all my journalistic ambitions. Now at age 73 what mattered was not recognition (which to be blunt is meaningful only when you're young enough it gets you laid) – but rather the quest for some comforting sense of having made a positive difference, however small, in the human condition: that is, of having not lived entirely in vain and to no meaningful purpose.  As I admitted in a letter to a friend on the night of 15 June, “it seems the one psychological constant of my old age is acceptance of my worthlessness, recognition of the infinitely bitter truth that nearly all my dreams, all my goals and aspirations and wishes, were never more than grandiosities.” 

Then the very next day I read a Truthout book review entitled “The Structural Genocide That Is Capitalism.” When I posted a comment on the associated thread,  I was still caught in the mental miasma that had been mine since the end of Occupy:

Mr. (Garry) Leech (the author of Capitalism: a Structural Genocide) argues much as I have for the past five years. Though I wonder if – caught up as he is in legalistic debates – he has allowed himself to see the (to me clear and obvious) progression from patriarchy to male gods to the one male god of Abrahamic religion (Judaism, Christianity, Islam), thence to capitalism and finally to capitalism's logical fulfillment in fascism, our Führer who art in heaven or on the chief executive officer's throne, whether as expounded by Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Pinochet or Ayn Rand.

In this context, the alleged excesses of socialism -- including the Dictatorship of the Proletariat (which is better stated as dictatorship by and of the proletariat) -- make perfect sense. It is the vital surgery necessary to excise individual greed and moral imbecility, the psychological cancers that ensure capitalism's continuity and most especially fulfillment of its genocidal mandate.

Indeed what has killed socialism, probably forever, is not any intrinsic ideological or conceptual weakness. It is rather the inability of socialist governments to adequately defend their constituents against the ultimate incentives to greed and moral imbecility provided by capitalist propaganda. These incentives not only destroyed the Soviet Union and co-opted China; they are also ensuring the destruction of our own species (and most life on this planet) in the now-looming apocalypse of nuclear war and/or environmental collapse.

Given these givens, perhaps the most useful metaphor is to think of patriarchy, and thus of its direct descendant capitalism, as the global equivalent of the smallpox-infected blankets by which Europeans weakened the First Nations people of North America to prepare them for genocidal conquest.

A few hours later, I responded to a relevant question by another thread-contributor: 

As far as I know, the only qualitative difference between Asiatic capitalism and Occidental capitalism is how the latter variety requires its local Ruling Class to manufacture illusions of consent. This (rapidly vanishing) pseudo-democratic process is seemingly a relic of lingering traditions that apparently date from the earliest, presumably matrifocal (if not actually matriarchal) tribal societies. Like charity and justice, these are among the ancient mores patriarchal religion was unable to co-opt or suppress, but which advertising has now effectively nullified. With or without religion, both types of capitalism are ultimately dependent on patriarchy – that is, on the class hierarchies and definitions of property and success unique to patriarchy. Thus the rejection of patriarchal religion is not, by itself, indicative of real change; what must be rejected is the entire ideology of male supremacy. 

 

Feminism has amassed compelling evidence that – just as capitalism is a logical extension of patriarchy, so was what might be termed tribal proto-communism a logical extension of matriarchy. Unfortunately all such information and evidence is methodically suppressed in the United States, where feminism has tragically acquired the same Ayn Rand taint that infects the broader society. But elsewhere there is growing recognition the world-wide dispersion of various ancient trade goods suggests the existence of one or more genuinely global trading commonwealths that apparently functioned for almost unimaginably long periods of time – a thousand years or more – without the slavery and genocide necessitated by capitalism or its patriarchal forebears. 

 

Returning for a moment to the Occidental necessity for the illusion of democratic process, the original fascists' rejection of that need was perhaps the real underlying issue in why the Western allies declared war on the Axis. Nazism, and to a slightly lesser degree fascism in Italy and Spain, discarded all pretense of humanitarianism and revealed capitalism for the infinite savagery it truly is, a development that was probably fully understood only by a few Soviet intellectuals. (Indeed – particularly given the interest in ancient societies exhibited by Engels – it is at least arguable modern-day communism was an effort to restore our species' collective sanity by re-establishing the communal ethos of the tribal world.) In any case, the Western allies were not ready for the glaring revelations implicit in fascism merely because their populations, ourselves included, had not yet been sufficiently conditioned in the requisite slave mentality.

It was commentary of an intensity I had not been able to write for some time. (In retrospect, my chief self-criticism is I did not note how the tacit support of fascism in Spain by the U.S. and its allies proves the point I made in its closing paragraph.) In any case, by the next day my subconscious had finished digesting the significance of Leech's message – at least his message as understood by book-reviewer Javier Sethness – and again I wrote to my friend, this time with a very different tone:

“There has been a rather strange and entirely unexpected turn of events apropos what I said about (worthlessness)...That a mainstream Leftist author  has written a book on (the genocidal consequences of capitalism) and thus achieved intellectual immortality by its publication – never mind I am not credited in the bibliography – confirms and vindicates what has been my main point of argument since at least 2008, essentially that Nazism (and fascism in general) is not an aberration of capitalism but is instead its logical fulfillment...Now though by this book, Capitalism: a Structural Genocide, I am not just vindicated but absolved of my despair...The book proves what I was doing IS important. Hence, and instead of the recent acts of abandonment to which my blog bears witness, I will take up the fight again, first by abjuring my own acts of hopelessness, next by reading the book, finally by resuming the verbal warfare for which I seem, after all,  to yet have some proven talent.”

Thus in one sense I am restored, though in nearly every other sense I remain the same. I still doubt our species' capacity to survive its self-inflicted apocalypse – verily our patriarchal hatred and contempt of Nature has brought down upon us the implacable wrath of Gaia, the Goddess, the one deity (if indeed there are any deities at all), the denial of whom is not just death but extinction. I still believe the present-day Ruling Class is omnipotent, protected by its technology from any possibility of overthrow or even reform. But I also recognize what a huge conceptual breakthrough Leech has made – a breakthrough without which, as I recognized years ago, any effort to build a sustaining human society is doomed. In this context, the fact I am prohibited by caste from ever sharing in his intellectual triumph is irrelevant. Perhaps best of all, Leech has ended my rejection of what might be termed the wild-card factor – history's penchant for sometimes dealing improbable hands – which until now I believed had been nullified forever by the One Percent's technological superiority. But now again I think of Petrograd, 1917, where so-called “conventional (Ruling Class) wisdom” yet supposed Tsardom was forever – until a demonstration by the women of the Lesnoy Trextile Works grew into the February Revolution (8 March by today's calendar). I also think of Paris on 14 July 1789, the storming of the Bastille. Most of all I think of Concord, Massachusetts on 19 April 1775, and an event of which there has been no better reporter than Ralph Waldo Emerson:

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag unfurled to April's breeze,
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world.

Make no mistake; I am not advocating violent revolution. Indeed I believe it would be suicide. The fate of Occupy proves the government will mercilessly suppress any revolution whether peaceful or violent, the only difference being the weapons it will use: truncheons and pepper gas against the former; small-arms ammunition, napalm, white phosphorous and possibly even tactical nukes against the latter. And of course I am afraid; I already fear I have spoken too critically. In these terrible hard times, anyone who is not afraid is a fool. Given the dreadful reality of government by, for and of the One Percent and its lethal hostility toward all of us who dwell below the salt – survival itself has become a revolutionary act.

LB/19-21 June 2013

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No Essay, Just Another Test of the Old Rolleicord III

Greening my bedroom window. Rollecord III w/Spiratone #1 close-up lens, Kodak Tmax 100, 1/10th at f/11, colorization by Gimp Image Editor. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2013. (Click on image to see it full size.)

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THE SENIOR HOUSING in which I live imposes quarterly premises inspections, always a bit of an intrusive hassle – part of the many punishments capitalism inflicts on those of us who are poor and therefore deemed unworthy of full citizenship. Usually I manage the preparation without too much disruption. This time however it's different  – not the inspection but my physical condition (an unusual combination of simultaneous upper and lower  back problems) – and it's just about all I can do to run the vacuum cleaner,  much less the bending and stretching associated with a full-fledged dusting, mopping and general tidying-up. (The obvious question is why don't I do these sorts of chores more regularly. The answer is with my spinal condition – four damaged disks and deteriorative scolioses inflicted by a 1978 encounter with a habitually defiant, politically protected drunken driver [19 DWI arrests, all dismissed or pled down to nothing before the son-of-a-bitch nailed me], and now since maybe 2006 arthritic inflammation of every vertebra in my spine – any such activity is painful as hell. Indeed my doctors think it's a miracle I'm not permanently in a wheelchair. But by doing major housekeeping only once per quarter  it's only painful as hell four times a year.) In any case this time the "discomfort,"  as the medical people like to call it, is a lot worse than usual. As a result, I'm hurting a lot more than usual,  the cleanup is taking a lot longer than usual, and I find I have neither the time nor the inclination to write anything of substance. But I'll be back next week, Goddess willing and the creek don't rise. Meanwhile here's another of those test pictures I made last month, the geezer photographer with his geezerly old Rolleicord and an astonishingly sharp Spiratone auxiliary lens.   

LB/14 June 2013

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Secret Police Operations Refute Big Lie of 'Free Society'

This photograph has no connection to the story below, which mentions President Obama's genocidal efforts against life-sustaining social services only in passing. The image is an accidental sandwich, an inadvertent double exposure with a camera so old it lacks automatic double-exposure prevention. As to whether it might have been a compensatory gift from the Muse, with poetic or subconscious relevance to the reason this posting is so tardy, I leave that for viewers to decide. Rolleicord III, Kodak Tmax 100 in D-76, each of the two exposures 1/100th at f/16; colorization – to intensify the ethereal mood – by Gimp software. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2013.

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AN EMOTIONAL CRISIS precipitated by a medical crisis – discovery I am going blind due to cataracts but may be denied corrective surgery by another medical condition for which there is no cure – delayed this week's posting. It is also the reason I'm filling this space with a commentary I wrote six days ago: anything more recent would be too bitter for public consumption. Hence the following, my pre-threat-of-blindness response to a story in Crosscut, the Seattle on-line daily, in which a local journalist – apparently too afraid of the secret police to tell the truth about what the United States has become – cravenly described our subjugated nation as a “free society.” 

The journalist, Floyd McKay, is a former long-time member of the Pacific Northwest working press and a professor emeritus at Western Washington University. I do not know him personally, but we are nevertheless indirectly connected. WWU is the descendant of Western Washington State College, the last of my own several almae matres, which through its Fairhaven College granted me an interdisciplinary bachelor of arts degree in 1976 – and 34 years later made it unmistakably clear I am one alumnus its officialdom would surely strike from their roster of graduates if they could. Though McKay joined Western's faculty long after I left its student body, I am familiar with his work via Crosscut's coverage of the ongoing Puget Sound coal-port struggle. His reporting of that wrenching conflict seems not only fair but exceptionally well researched – the sort of in-depth writing that was routine on the New York, New Jersey, Michigan and East Tennessee papers for which I worked during my first two decades in journalism but which has since gone the way of Archaeopteryx. (Apropos the coal port, the usual suspects intend to build it just outside Bellingham, a blatant “fuck you” to what is probably the most environmentally conscious city in all USia. Moreover, the obvious vindictiveness of the coal-port scheme has a nasty parallel in the equally assaultive Roman Catholic campaign to abolish female reproductive freedom here in the nation's most officially pro-choice state by buying up all the local hospitals and clinics. Might these developments be part of a multi-pronged effort to turn the entire realm into a West Coast version of Appalachia? Asking such an allegedly “unthinkable” question is well within the purview of the investigative reporter, at least as I learned the craft, but it is the one element McKay has failed to explore. Perhaps he has forgotten – or never knew about – the testimony of Watergate Felon John Ehrlichman that Washington state is the One Percent's favorite proving ground for its strategies and tactics of oppression.) Be that as it may, I was appreciative enough of McKay's reports on the coal-port fight, I turned directly to his analysis of the recently exposed secret police investigations of journalists, part of the (still-unfolding) story of the Obama Administration's unprecedented efforts to nullify the entire First Amendment.  

But I was sorely disappointed; McKay's lead set the (cringing) tone of his entire text: 

“Technology changes, but the basic tenets of journalism and the codes that govern reporting in a free society remain remarkably the same.”

Finally, hours after McKay's essay appeared – I had been busy all day with regular first-of-the-month errands – I wrote a response on the associated comment thread: 

(Note: Crosscut does not allow embedded live-links in comment threads, hence the URLs  below appear as in the original, this to spare me the necessity of revision. My apology for the resultant awkwardness.) 

 

Seems to me there are three points of contention in this story. These are: the nature and motives of the Obama Administration; the nature and role of the nation's informational media; and – pivotally – whether the United States remains “a free society.” 

 

It also seems to me – this from behind my own 50-plus years doing journalism – McKay's understanding of these questions is...well, less than adequate. Indeed, based on the foregoing comments, the one poster with whom I come closest to agreement is dbreneman. Given our total disagreements on public transport – I like most New Yorkers believe it is a civil right, dbreneman seems to share the defining local conviction transit is a form of welfare – our near-consensus over what should be termed the “USian press crisis” is probably an irony of the first order. 

 

The biblical admonition “by their fruits shall we know them” is at least as applicable to politicians, governments and economic systems as it is to matters of metaphysics and morality. Viewed from this perspective, Democrat Barack Obama emerges as the most carefully camouflaged and willfully deceptive Republican tyrant ever elected to the presidency. That he is in fact a latter-day Richard Nixon has been posited by many pundits both Left and Right, but none more convincingly than Jonathan Turley. Here Turley shows us how Nixon – in the persona of Obama – has achieved every imposition of tyranny the Watergate-criminal president ever imagined: http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2013/03/25/nixon-has-won-watergate/2019443/ .
 

“More than any figure in history,” says Turley, “Obama has been a disaster for the U.S. civil liberties movement. By coming out of the Democratic Party and assuming an iconic position, Obama has ripped the movement in half. Many Democrats and progressive activists find themselves unable to oppose Obama for the authoritarian powers he has assumed. It is not simply a case of personality trumping principle; it is a cult of personality.”

At the same time, the nature of USian informational media has also been transformed. In the era McKay and I joined the working press, about 90 percent of the nation's newspapers were locally owned. Now, today, something like 95 percent of the (shrinking number of) print news outlets are owned by monopolies, with lockstep reportorial conformity enforced nearly as rigidly on today's USian papers as it was on Hitler's Voelkischer Beobachter or the Stalin-era Pravda. (Coincidentally, my newest blog post [http://lorenbliss.typepad.com/loren-bliss-outside-agitators-notebook/2013/05/notes-on-life-after-uselessness-the-old-man-with-an-old-rolleicord.html] describes the personnel-office methods the monopolies – which also own or control all the nation's broadcast media – use to ensure the political reliability of their employees.) The result is news coverage and opinion that is almost never more than the approved, quasi-official voice of what the Occupy Movement labeled “the One Percent” – the Big Business/Wall Street aristocracy that, by its financing of both the Democratic and Republican parties, has become a genuine Ruling Class in the ancient and most arrogantly despotic sense.

Meanwhile the cult of personality that now silences Democratic criticism of Obama has again, just as it did under presidents Carter and Clinton, forced the Democratic Party to abandon its own egalitarian New Deal principles. Therefore let us not forget it was cults of personality that enabled the tyrannies of Hitler and Stalin, the former in the name of a prototypical Ayn-Rand-type master race, the latter in the name of the very socialist humanitarianism he so wantonly betrayed. Perhaps the far-Right's odious characterization of Obama as a new Führer is eerily prescient.

In any case we see the United States is clearly no longer the “free society” McKay claims it to be. A growing number of citizens, myself among them, would argue the nation we formerly thought of as “ours” is now but a modern, globally imperial version of pre-Revolutionary France, with the former middle class now permanently reduced to the status of the sans culottes. The politicians no longer represent us – “we the people” – at all. In fact – note the impending cutbacks to Social Security, Medicare and food stamps – “our” elected officials now make no secret their only loyalties are to the bankers and chief executive officers who are their financial masters.

In this context any discussion of “the role of informational media” is a form of denial. USian mass media is, as an institution, no less compromised – that is, no less a wholly owned subsidiary of the One Percent – than the political system or the economy. Hence the only relevant question is not how the (hopelessly corrupt) judicial system might rule on reportorial and photographic rights, or whether the (irremediably compromised) politicians will enact an effective shield law; it is instead whether individual journalists will recognize today's United States gives them only two choices: submission or revolution. Hence too the new relevance of an old Appalachian song of resistance, “Which Side Are You On” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SB0fc9CobQ ).

The problem, of course, is that today's journalists are hired precisely for their conformity and obedience. 

But history shows us even the most hopelessly submissive serfs sometimes rise up angry. History also suggests the brazen, piss-on-our-constitutional-rights intrusions the USian secret police are now tyrannically inflicting on all of us – not just journalists but everyone in the 99 Percent – might finally awaken any number of hitherto suppressed revolutionary instincts. 

Too bad resistance is now futile, exactly as under the (fictional?) Borg. Whether nonviolent or otherwise, the result – as we have already glimpsed in the Obama Regime's suppression of the Occupy Movement and its expansion of Bush Regime surveillance into Orwellian monitoring of all 99 Percenters all the time – would be a bloodbath of Third Reich magnitude and Greasy Grass futility.

Thanks to the very technology that was supposed to save us not enslave us, the One Percent has finally achieved its ultimate divine-right fantasy: re-creation of itself in the merciless and sadistic image of Yahweh/Jesus/Allah, the vengeful and implacably misogynistic god of patriarchy. Now as a result the USian Fourth Reich is truly omnipotent and eternal – that is, until the Mother of All Gods blows the whistle on our entire species. 

LB/7 June 2013

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