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Another
of my recent photographs of the dark and dreadful loveliness of Pacific
Northwest autumnal light and color. Pentax MX, 35mm-70mm Sigma f/4 zoom
at 70mm, Fujicolor 800, f/5.6 at 1/250th. Photograph by Loren Bliss
copyright 2013. (Click on image to view it full size.)
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OBVIOUSLY
IN RETALIATION for last week's column describing how the murder of
President John Fitzgerald Kennedy and the eviction of a formerly
middle-class woman in Tacoma are each examples of capitalism in action,
the email server EarthLink has arbitrarily locked me out if its system.
Because
the lockout is by Internet Protocol (IP) number rather than by the name
or Uniform Resource Locator (URL) of my blog, this is a permanent
embargo that cannot be lifted by any remedy short of a lawsuit, which of
course I cannot afford. This means I can no longer correspond with
anyone – three longtime friends included – who uses EarthLink email. It
also means there's no way I can notify my EarthLink-dependent readers
when I post new material.
OAN
has been harassed by censors since its beginning. It was forced off
Facebook in 2010. It has long been censored to the extent I cannot
transmit its name or URL over my own Internet service provider.
Originally this was Comcast; since 2011 it's been Century Link. (These
are the only broadband ISPs available in my area.)
Significantly,
during one of my many, ultimately unsuccessful attempts to fight the
censorship, a CL technical representative admitted he could do nothing
to lift the embargo on my blog's name and URL because the order for it
came from “outside and far above” the ISP.
Though
the tech rep refused to elaborate, the obvious inference was the
perpetrator is one of the agencies that are part of the Department of
Homeland Security, for which the dread SS/Reichssicherheitshauptamt provided the organizational model.
Such
is the “nonexistent” censorship imposed on the allegedly “free”
Internet by corporate and governmental authorities in the United States.
I
am, of course, complimented by the fact somebody out there in the USian
Empire secret police regards my writing as politically dangerous.
But
that doesn't keep me from desperately hoping my occasional yet always
terrifying dreams of being hauled off in the dead of night by
Gestapo-like government agents – the sort of nightmare I never
experienced before this year – are psychological aberrations rather than
expressions of prophecy.
*****
A New Feature: My Contributions to Dialogues on Other Sites
AS LONGTIME READERS know, I have periodically wrestled with the question of whether and how to post here on OAN
my comments on discussion threads elsewhere. Now finally I think I have
an adequate (and maybe even perfect) solution. I'll link the title of
the story, summarize what it says and my response, and this way have
both a complete anthology of my week's writing plus more space for
original material on OAN. Here goes:
“Can Right and Left Rally Against Walmart?”
Ralph Nader says it's possible and urges it be done. I note history
proves capitalists respond only to force and/or threats of force, point
out the problem is not just Wal-Mart but capitalism in general, and cite
the 1938 Non-Aggression Pact and how Hitler used it to facilitate his
invasion of the Soviet Union as a perfect example of what happens when
the Left is seduced into collaborating with the Right.
“The Right's Misconstrued Constitution”
Robert Perry says the looming Supreme Court decision that will in all
probability prohibit Affordable Care Act coverage of birth control is
based on the Right's misinterpretation of the U.S. Constitution. I reply
that Perry is wrong, that the war against women's hard-won reproductive
rights is a key part of the One Percent's vast, lavishly funded effort
to ensure the perpetual subjugation of the U.S. workforce by reducing
the nation to zero-tolerance Christian theocracy.
“What World War Z and Tacoma Have in Common” Valerie Tarico of the Seattle online daily Crosscut
does an entirely too-cute job of reporting the grave threat implicit in
the Pierce County Council's move toward Christian theocracy. I denounce
the Teabagger-dominated council's flagrant violation of our right to
freedom from religion, and I call the council's motivation exactly what
it is: “JesuNazism – zero-tolerance theocratic hatefulness in the name
of Jesus.”
“Why Health Care Isn't Just About Insurance”
Maya Schenwar describes how her struggles with epilepsy exemplify the
glaring inadequacies of the Affordable Care Act, which – because it has
cemented into federal law the notion of health as a privilege of wealth
rather than a human right – continues to deny care to millions of
lower-income USians. I applaud Ms. Schenwar for her rare combination of
courage, honesty and eloquence.
*****
An Apology for a Thoughtlessly Inappropriate Use of a Word
SOMETIMES
I FUCK up Big Time, and last week – by ignoring a matter of semantics
and psycholinguistics that had been nagging at the edges of my mind – I
did exactly that.
The
atrocities capitalism inflicts on us every day are often the framework
of what I write in this blog, though I had not planned to write about
them last week. Instead I had begun writing a lamentation for President
John Fitzgerald Kennedy, whose death was also the murder of our nation's
democratic potential and was therefore one of the worst capitalist
atrocities ever. Because I had participated in covering the
assassination – I was a young reporter/photographer on a small but
excellent local daily newspaper – I felt that now 50 years after the
fact I should include my personal recollections of that dreadful day and
its aftermath.
But
I was troubled by mass media's simple-minded penchant for calling 11
November 2013 an “anniversary,” and when I could not quickly think of a
suitable alternative, I set my work aside. I would do some essential
shopping – a chore I despise – and perhaps while I was going to and from
the store, or even in the store itself, my subconscious would come up
with a proper solution to my semantic quandary.
That's
how I came to witness the shocking eviction of an elderly woman from an
apartment building near a corner where I had gone to catch a city bus. I
live in a generally attractive and well-maintained urban neighborhood,
and the eviction was the first I had witnessed since I moved here in
2004. For various reasons – some of them deeply personal – I found the
woman's ouster profoundly wrenching, too painful to ignore. So I
abandoned my originally intended text and wrote of the eviction as a
microcosm of what the capitalists are doing to all of us. I described it
as an example of all the daily acts of oppression that, exactly as James Douglass asserts, have been enabled by the assassination.
But
in my anger at what was being done to the woman who was evicted and my
grief at what is being done to our country and to the Constitution we
who were soldiers swore to defend against all enemies foreign and
domestic, I made the thoughtless error I had intended to avoid and now
profoundly regret. I wrote of “the 50th anniversary of the
assassination,” heedless of the fact an “anniversary” is implicitly a
celebratory event – which of course it is for the victors, the One
Percent, the military/industrial aristocracy to whom the assassins
granted the ultimate triumph of capitalist governance, the Ruling Class
whose absolute power and unlimited profit mean total subjugation for all
the rest of us.
Not
only should have I avoided the usage of “anniversary”; I should have
denounced it for its deceptiveness, which to my mind borders on the
obscene. I should also have come up with an alternative term for our
50th annual date with national sorrow, our day of lamentation, of
despair, of shame and mourning.
Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
If
we dared speak truth to power, the assassination of President John
Fitzgerald Kennedy would be known as the Coup of 22 November 1963, or
perhaps now all these years later as just The November Coup. But that's
too honest. The perpetrators – or perhaps I should say perpe-traitors –
would never allow it.
Nor have their fathers and grandfathers ever allowed full disclosure of the Bankers Plot of 1934,
which would have made the United States the financial, industrial and
agricultural mainstay of the Nazi Third Reich and the Berlin-Rome-Tokyo
Axis. The Fascists – especially Hitler – stood ready to provide whatever
help and guidance the USian One Percent requested. But today such
assistance is unnecessary. The United States, which absorbed so many
Nazi war criminals after World War II, is becoming the de facto Fourth Reich all on its own.
*****
The Murder of President Kennedy as Seen from a Local Newsroom
FIFTY YEARS AGO I was a staff member on The Oak Ridger,
the small but nationally renowned afternoon daily that served the
scientifically and technologically elite community of Oak Ridge, Tenn. I
was there because Publisher Don McKay and Business Manager Tom Hill and
Managing Editor Dick Smyser all had the brass balls to hire me after I
had been defamed nearly into journalistic oblivion.
In June of 1963 Editor/Publisher Guy L. Smith of The Knoxville Journal
had fired me for my refusal to write a slanderous Big Lie – the
maliciously false portrayal of “40 Negroes and whites, most of them
students at the University of Tennessee,” as participants in an
interracial sex orgy – an event that took place only in the obscenely
racist minds of the Ku Klux Klan-infiltrated Knoxville city police and
Knox County sheriff's departments.
In retaliation for my rebellion, Smith had me jailed – arrested in The Journal's newsroom – on an equally false charge of disorderly conduct.
Fortunately
the local courts had already been liberated from segregationist
control, and I was soon acquitted. So were the other 39 people, many of
whom were friends of civil rights activists or civil rights activists
themselves – undoubtedly the real reason we were all were arrested.
In
the aftermath I spent the summer working for the Civil Rights Movement
in Knoxville. It was a deliberate act of defiance, tantamount to
shouting “fuck you” in the face of Smith and all his Klannish henchmen,
who meanwhile were doing their venomous best to ensure I would never
work for another newspaper nor even finish college. Hence my everlasting
gratitude to Messrs. McKay, Hill and Smyser.
Though The Oak Ridger was a much smaller paper than The Journal – one daily edition Monday through Friday with circulation of about 10,000 as compared to The Journal's five daily editions Monday through Saturday circulating nearly 100,000 – it was in every other sense a major step upward. At The Journal,
for which I had worked part time from the fall of 1957 through the fall
of 1959 and full time beginning in September 1962, I would never have
been more than a sportswriter, while at The Oak Ridger I was
not only the sports editor but a government reporter and a photographer
as well, complete with an issue Speed Graphic and its 4x5 Polariod back.
I had been hired in August, had quickly proven myself to be not just
competent but exceptionally so, and was already showing the knack for
hard news I had always known was mine but never would have been able to
demonstrate via a sports page.
Now,
barely four months after I'd been hired, it was 1:30 p.m. Eastern
Standard Time Friday 22 November 1963. The paper was abed, our presses
had begun to rumble out that day's edition, and I was the only person in
the newsroom. I was banging away at my typewriter to finish a long
feature story – I no longer remember about what – so I could leave work
three hours early to begin what promised to be a delightful weekend. My
then-lover attended Virginia Intermont College, a classically Southern
women's college 100 miles north at Bristol, Va., and she had schemed her
way past the in loco parentis guardians of its dormitories and
freed herself of its plantation-house regime of magnolia-blossom
chastity until Monday morning. I would meet her at 4:30 p.m. in the
Bristol railroad depot, we would drive another 100 miles across the
mountains to Asheville, N.C., and there we would alternate between the
joyous lechery of blatantly heterosexual youth and the fond
companionship of like-minded friends.
Because
I had eerie premonitions of the assassination, it is not an aside for
me to note here that despite my English surname, my family's genes are
about 95 percent Celtic, mainly Scots, dominantly the northeastern
Highland Scots who are themselves genetically identified as descendants
of the Scythians, the People of the Steppe described by Herodotus in The Histories.
Hence most of my paternal relatives and I share various degrees of what
depending on your metaphysical orientation is either applauded as
genuine psychic ability or rejected and jeered as superstition.
In
my case this means I have occasionally seen ghosts, specifically those
of my father and maternal grandmother at their moments of death. More
often I sense spectral presences, usually benign, as immediately after
the death of my beloved aunt, or sometimes malicious, as in the
unpleasantly creepy Baltimore apartment where my first wife and I
briefly lived or in the malevolently haunted wilderness – a place local
First Nations people will not enter even in daylight – through which the
South Fork of Washington state's Nooksack River flows. Once, a
12-year-old boy in a vast Michigan forest, I heard the strange singing
of what decades later I learned were most likely the Birds of Rhiannon,
and thus I can attest (if indeed those Birds they were), that their song
is at least the most exquisite music I have ever known, if not – as the
old myths assert – the most exquisite music in the universe. Such are
the nominal limits of my alleged gift. Save for small events of no
meaning to anyone but self and friends or kinfolk, it has never shown me
the future.
But
once in a rare while it seems to enable me to feel the future's echoes,
as I apparently did in the pre-9/11 World Trade Center, which always
gave me the heebie-jeebies even if I merely passed beneath it on the
subway colloquially known as the Hudson Tubes. Likewise – of relevance
to all that follows – I felt a terrible sense of please-don't-go-there
doom at every announcement or mention of President Kennedy's proposed
trip to Dallas.
I
had spoken of those fears to my lover, but for her they were too
painful to explore.
Hence I mentioned them only once, and soon – because
I was decades away from learning to trust any intuitions that were
other than specific to some story I was covering – my dictatorially
logical left brain had jeered my right-brain apprehensions into the
limbo of forgetfulness.
But
now in the newsroom as I heard the teletype bell ringing all the dark
portents returned in full measure. By the wire-service protocols of that
era, there would have been one ding for a dispatch prioritized as
“urgent”; three dings for a “bulletin”; an extended ringing – a signal I
had never before heard – for a “flash,” the highest priority dispatch.
And that is how it rang now, like an untended alarm clock or an
out-of-control telephone.
I
sprang up from my desk and dashed across the newsroom into the
wire-room. But because I felt the most profound foreboding I would ever
know as a newsman, a big part of me did not want to learn why the bell
was ringing.
We had only Associated Press wires at The Oak Ridger,
which meant the wire-room housed only four teletype machines: the
global or A-wire, the state wire, the sports wire and a spare that could
be plugged into any of the three circuits. It was the A-wire bell
making the noise, but on its roll of copy paper there was at first only a
perplexing quarrel between the Dallas Bureau and Atlanta Relay. The
latter, “AX” in wire talk, was trying to transmit what was called a
“budget” story, a report previously scheduled – “budgeted” – for
transmission. But Dallas was trying desperately to break in. The result
looked something like this:
CIVIL RIGHTS BUDGET
ATLANTA (AP) – DEM
THS DALLAS
BUSTING
BUSTING
BUST THIS
KENNEDY SHO
ATLANTA [AP] – DEMONST
BUST THIS AX
BUST NOW
DALLAS BUSTING
...and then there it was, with the bell shrilling its warning, the teletype's electric motor thrumming its omnipresent base and now in sudden counterpoint the drum solo of the keys
hammering out in staccato black letters on beige paper the death notice
of the president and what even then I sensed was also the death of our
nation and all the democratic dreams of its founders and all its people
forever:
F L A S H
PRESIDENT KENNEDY SHOT IN DALLAS.
Fuck, my mind said. Fuck
.
O god let him live.
But
there was no time for prayer or any other self-centered reaction. If
you really are a journalist, if you truly have what it takes, when
something of that magnitude happens, you turn off your emotions and
focus your brain and do whatever needs be done to cover the story.
Because
I was alone in the newsroom I ran to the managing editor's desk and
flipped on the intercom to the press room and punched the buzzer and
when Foreman Lee Girth answered I said “the president's been shot,
better stop the presses,” the only time in all my journalism years I
ever gave that order Hollywood had made so famous. But Girth said he had
heard it on the radio and was already stopping, and as he spoke I could
hear the press rumble diminish and feel its near-seismic vibrations
lessen. Then I phoned the local restaurant where most of our small staff
was having their usually relaxed Friday lunch, but the honey-voiced
waitress who answered the phone said my colleagues had already heard the
news and were racing back to the paper.
Soon
Smyser and City Editor Gene O'Blennis and Society Editor June Adamson
and others whose names I no longer remember were there and I had cranked
that nearly-finished feature story out of my typewriter and set the
copy aside and then we were all making telephone calls or running out to
our cars to drive around the town and take notes on what was happening
and returning to the office to cobble together fast paragraphs
describing what we had seen and heard. We fed our paragraphs in one-page
takes to Smyser who was cutting and pasting and writing everything into
a single story.
Sometime
early in the organized anarchy that is a news staff covering breaking
news, I found a moment to phone my lover and tell her I had no idea when
I'd get to Bristol. “Yeah,” she said. “I figured you'd be busy.” She
said her classes had been suspended and now she and a bunch of other
young women were in the dorm watching the news on television. “Nobody
cheered,” she said, anticipating my question about her schoolmates, some
of whom were no doubt from segregationist families. “Everybody here is
crying.” “I'll be ok staying in the dorm,” she added. But I told her I
didn't want to cancel our weekend. I said it would be late but I'd get
there as soon as I could. “Good,” she said, her voice taught with tears.
“Time like this, I'd rather be with you than anyone else.” She was
silent for a few seconds. Then she said “I know what, I'll book us a
hotel room as Mr. and Mrs. Bliss,” and somehow she managed a quick light
chuckle at the irony and the double entendre. “I'll call you with the
details so all you need do is check in.” “I love you,” I said. “Me too,”
she said. “Take care.”
And
now it was back to work, this time to grab the Speed Graphic and shoot
photographs of the little groups of silent mourners who had gathered on
the sidewalks to watch the TV sets that had been placed in store
windows by merchants to slake the public's thirst for information.
Meanwhile
the A-wire continued to hammer out its reports. Five of these would
later prompt my rejection of the Warren Report and its conclusion the
murder was the work of a lone gunman. My refusal to accept the report's
conclusions would trigger a shouting match with Smyser that nearly got
me fired. Here are the five:
AP
repeatedly stated most witnesses described the fatal shots as “a burst
of automatic weapons fire.” Many of these witnesses had fought in or
covered World War II and Korea. Unlike people who are ignorant of
firearms and gunfire, combat veterans typically identify such sounds
accurately.
Many witnesses quoted by AP said at least some of the shots – maybe all of them – were fired from the grassy knoll.
Shortly
after the story broke, AP reported a light plane had violated the
Dallas air-traffic-control zone, its pilot taking off from Dallas
International Airport without authorization. The aircraft was said to
have fled southward at low altitude, apparently into Mexico, as if it
were the assassins' escape vehicle.
AP's
first accounts of the rifle found in the Texas Book Depository reported
multiple police sources had identified it as a German-made Model 1898
Mauser equipped with a sniper scope. The M98 Mauser, in decided contrast
to the junky M1891 Mannlicher-Carcano that was later alleged to be the
assassin's weapon, is an extremely well-made firearm that would enable
its shooter to fire rapidly and with deadly precision. Nor is there any
possibility anyone knowledgeable about firearms – as most cops of that
era were – would mistake one for the other: the two rifles radically
differ in appearance.
Maybe
45 minutes into its coverage, AP reported the discovery of two
Lee-Enfield rifles in the rear of a station wagon in the parking lot
behind the grassy knoll. I remember I nodded to myself as I read this
dispatch and then tried unsuccessfully to explain to Smyser how the
significance of these particular rifles was demonstrated by the
witnesses' descriptions of what they heard:
The
Lee-Enfield, the British Empire service rifle adopted in 1888 and used
in modified forms well into the 1990s, is the fastest manually operated
military rifle in world. Trained soldiers using it can generate such
volumes of fire that German, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman combat intelligence in
World War I, and Axis combat intelligence in World War II, often
mis-identified British rifle companies as machine gun companies. Thus
two skilled operators with Lee-Enfields could indeed produce a volley of
shots that would sound like “a burst of automatic weapons fire.”
After that there were no other AP reports – at least none I remember – that later stood out as anomalies.
Before
the night was over we had remade the regular Friday edition, published
that and an extra as well. (I remember a second extra was discussed; I
do not remember if we published it too.)
Finally
– very curiously, I thought – Smyser made a point of confiscating all
the AP copy, some of which had been distributed through the newsroom for
us to use as points of reference in our local reaction paragraphs. He
was particularly careful to ensure I relinquished any material that
contained references to firearms. Only then, at about 11 p.m., did he
tell us our work day was ended. It had stretched to 15 hours.
Years
later I would learn that similar wire-copy confiscations occurred at
other U.S. dailies. Coincidence? Editors merely pulling rank to gather
and keep historically valuable copy for themselves? Or was it the
beginning of an organized effort, clandestinely orchestrated by federal
authorities, to cover up the coup? Obviously I will never know.
Seems
to me it was just before midnight I began driving my black Volkswagen
Beetle up serpentine U.S. 11E, mostly at the car's top speed of 72
miles-per-hour. I remember I got to the hotel about 2 a.m., and almost
literally fell into the warmth of my lover's arms, the two of us too
exhausted and heartbroken to do more than comfort one another. We stayed
in the hotel that night and all day Saturday we watched the news on the
room's big black-and-white television set and that night we made love
as if there were no tomorrow and Sunday morning as we were eating
deliciously generous Southern room-service breakfasts of fried eggs and
bacon and sausages and grits and sliced fresh tomatoes and toast, we saw
Jack Ruby kill Lee Harvey Oswald live on national TV. My lover who was
clad only in her raven-black hair looked at me with sudden tears in her
soft brown eyes and said “my god its like some banana republic” and I
answered, “my father says that's what we've always been,” and she who
had often told me how much she despised the hypocritical false modesty
of Abrahamic religion now grabbed a blanket and wrapped it tightly
around herself and said in a choked voice “god help us,” and there was
no question she was praying a true prayer.
I
managed to restrain my own tears until the Black Watch skirled their
pipes as the military pall bearers carried President John Fitzgerald
Kennedy in his casket out of the White House to the horse-drawn
artillery caisson that would bear his bullet-torn flesh to Arlington
National Cemetery. The pipes keened their banshee's lament and the
television camera zoomed back to take in the entire scene and I bawled
like a baby.
Now
50 years after the November Coup I also lament the murders of Malcolm X
and Martin Luther King Jr. and Sen. Robert Kennedy; of Fred Hampton and
Allison Krause and Jeffrey Miller and William Schroeder and Sandra
Scheuer; of Phillip Gibbs and James Green; of Karen Silkwood and maybe
Sen. Paul Wellstone too.
But
all those additional, post-22/11/63 deaths were what the military calls
“mopping-up operations,” the consolidation of victory that ensures the
conquerors remain in power forever and we the conquered remain forever
in subjugation.
And
since the USian Ruling Class Media now marks only the “anniversary” of
President John Fitzgerald Kennedy's slaying, perhaps this the most
powerful of all banana republics that rules the largest and most
unforgiving empire in human history will follow the pattern it set by
its Veterans Day and declare an official Assassinations Day to
commemorate the deaths of all the other victims, complete with “Free
Speech Zones” in which we are assured we can publicly grieve without
fear of governmental retribution.
LB/1 December 2013
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