Can Sawant and Socialism End the Seattle Freeze?

Photojournalist W. Eugene Smith in Seattle, 1976. When I asked Gene whether skyrocketing costs of equipment and supplies might gentrify photography into a medium only the rich could afford, thereby purging it of its humanitarian vision, a few of Seattle's vindictively intolerant Ansel Adams disciples shouted both of us down, denouncing us for our mutual recognition that art and politics are inseparable. (The negatives from which this hitherto unpublished image is made miraculously survived the 1983 fire and were dug out of the rubble the following year.) M2 Leica, 35mm f/2 Summicron, Tri-X at 800 in D-76, exposure unrecorded. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2013. (Click on image to view it full size.)

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SOCIALIST KSHAMA SAWANT'S stunning victory in a Seattle city council election is forcing me to reconsider my longstanding hatred of what was undoubtedly the most xenophobic and politically hypocritical town in the United States.

Seattle's xenophobia, specifically its legendary hostility to people not born locally, was so venomous it has given birth to at least three web sites, I Hate Seattle,  Seattle Shmeng and the original, Seattle Sucks, which is seemingly no longer available on-line. The townspeople's hypocrisy, even more glaring, was measured by the huge gap between their haughty claims to progressive politics and environmental enlightenment versus the ugly reality of their malice toward lower-income people – particularly as demonstrated by their (carefully closeted) bigotry and their relentless opposition to tax reform and adequate mass transit.

The results of Seattle's bogus progressiveness, which because of the way the town dominates the state legislature actually afflict the entire state, include the most regressive state tax structure in the nation and a regional transit system that, as I noted in a comment on the aforelinked article's discussion thread, is nearly a half-century behind those of comparable areas.

One of these areas is metropolitan Portland, Oregon, which has a transit system that is considered a national model of forward-looking effectiveness.

But the fact newly elected Seattle City Councilwoman Sawant is not only a declared Marxian socialist who makes no secret of her radicalism but is an immigrant as well suggests a sociological change in Seattle that may be of unprecedented magnitude. Indeed it suggests Seattle is at last on the brink of evolving into a genuine city, with all the cosmopolitan open-mindedness that gives urban living its great potential.

That said, my loathing of Seattle is too justified by ugly facts, too long-standing and too intense for me to set it aside without a lot of further reflection.

I first wrote of my animosity toward Seattle in a 1984 Village Voice piece, a brief but bitterly truthful summation of the four bottomlessly miserable years I dwelt there, 1972-1976. In terms of unabated loneliness, these were by far the worst years of my life.

The Voice account provoked Seattleites to an unsurprising frenzy of censorship, angry headlines and venomous letters to local editors. In predictable submission to the malignant Scandinavian/Lutheran puritanism that lurked beneath Seattle's seemingly benign surface, the local reprints suppressed my best turns of phrase – especially those describing Seattle from the perspective of a shunned and ostracized outlander. Some of the better passages are thus restored here:

(Seattle is) no place for dedicated urbanites. Indeed, anyone tempted to move there should first read Raymond Gastil's Cultural Regions of the United States, a University of Washington press book which accurately equates the xenophobic quagmires of Puget Sound with the intellectual barrens of Ohio.

There are the wonderfully enlightened, culture-loving middle-class professionals who will call you to your face a “fucking East Coast intellectual” and invite you to “go back where you belong,” with even stronger language, occasionally accompanied by threats of physical violence. And then there's the prevalent ethos of “mellow,”  which means any conversation beyond a rudimentary cataloging of new possessions and recent conquests – his new wife, her new man, his new skis, her new boat – is “too heavy, man.”

New York males should be especially wary. Seattle women – they're still called “girls”  out in the Evergreen state – won't look at you twice unless you're blond, tall and built like a lumberjack. But that only gets you in the door. You've also got to wow the ladies with body language, man, which means dancing like John Travolta and never forgetting the taboo on conversation. Otherwise you'll spend the night (which ends promptly at 1:45 a.m.) getting sloshed on 3.2 salmon piss while you watch some plad-shirted executive cowboy try to seduce his prom-queen secretary out of her lip-reader jeans.

Like so many others who have encountered the infamous Seattle Freeze, at first I blamed myself. Then I met other outlanders and began to realize we were all despised merely because we had moved there from somewhere else. That I was born in the Borough of Brooklyn and came to Washington state from Manhattan made the locals' hatefulness that much worse. In Seattle, someone whose birth certificate was issued by the City of “Jew York” – a term I first heard during an unpleasant exchange of insults with a self-proclaimed Seattle “poet” in 1972 – is even more reviled than someone from California.

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My initial encounter with the region's carefully closeted but nevertheless intense bigotry – in this instance, the same anti-Semitism revealed by the damning of my birthplace as “Jew York,”  was in Bellingham rather than Seattle. It was November of 1970 and I had just learned to my horror I was homeless – that an unreliable sub-lessor had abandoned my wonderful Chelsea apartment five months earlier, that it had thus reverted to the landlord and left me without a place to live. Now with only a little money remaining after a summer and fall of chasing the Back-to-the-Land-Movement/agricultural-commune/resurrection-of-the-Goddess story through the rural Pacific Northwest, I had rented a room in a Bellingham boarding house and was desperately looking for work.

Obviously my first choice was the local daily, The Bellingham Herald. Because this was not the South, where my Civil Rights Movement activities had made me persona non grata at every mainstream paper but The Oak Ridger, I assumed that even if I did not find immediate employment, I'd be welcomed as a fellow professional, just as I had been on every Northeastern paper to which I had ever applied. Hence I typed up a resume, then phoned the lover who had managed to save my files and books from the Manhattan apartment debacle and asked her to please send me the recent clippings of my work. 

When they arrived a few days later, I phoned The Herald's managing editor, a guy named Fowler, and asked if he had any openings for reporters, as in those pre-Watergate days most newspapers did. He said yes, we made an appointment for an interview, and I assumed I would soon be on my way toward earning the exit money that would get me back to the City.

But as soon as Fowler saw where I had worked, he bristled with rejection. “We don't like your kind out here,” he said. “Do yourself a favor and catch the next flight back to New York.”

At the time I dismissed his reaction as that of a small-minded managing editor of a small newspaper in a small town that – despite its reputation as a “hippie Mecca” (a description famously applied by The Seattle Post-Intelligencer in 1970) – obviously remained as small-minded as any Southern Klanville.

Now of course I recognize the Seattle Freeze is misnamed – that with the notable exception of Tacoma, it should include the entire Puget Sound area.

To encounter that same hostility from the newsroom boss of the state's largest-circulation newspaper, as I did in 1973, was particularly shocking; I had repeatedly found the better newspapers – note again my experience at The Oak Ridger – to be sanctuaries of reason even in realms of unabashed prejudice. But the managing editor of The Seattle Times, Henry MacLeod, rejected me with essentially the same message that had been snarled at me by Fowler. MacLeod was perfectly polite, as Seattleites usually are when they're deliberately inflicting psychological injury, but the sentiments were identical. “All your experience is East Coast experience,” MacLeod said, “and that doesn't count out here. We do things differently. You'll be a lot happier if you go back where you came from.”

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The we-don't-want-you-here vandalism to which I was subjected so many times in Seattle began in Bellingham too, though there was only one major incident in the two years I resided there. While I never learned the identity of the perpetrator(s), it was already clear to me there were people in the local Counterculture community who vindictively envied my photographic and verbal skills, fervently hated me for my New York origin and were probably infuriated by my classroom performance as an unapologetic intellectual at Western Washington State College as well. Whatever my alleged offense,  it prompted some unknown person(s) to break into my rental house, disconnect the oil-burning heater's chimney-pipe, turn the stove up to high, leave my dog Dingo locked inside and nearly murder him with the stove's sooty outpouring of carbon monoxide.

It was New Years Eve, the last day of 1971, a night I remember as improbably clear and invigoratingly cold. I was attending a big party at a local tavern, was photographing the festivities, had connected with a young woman there and under normal circumstances would not have been home until late the next morning. But – fortunately for Dingo – I ran out of film. So about 12:30 a.m., I went back to the house for more. Thus an exigency of photography saved his life. But the house itself, everything in it blackened by soot and reeking of partially combusted petroleum, was rendered unlivable for the entire month of January. Happy 1972.

Dingo was a very protective half Malemute/half German shepherd, about 85 pounds of no-nonsense canine, and obviously the perpetrator(s) knew him well enough to fool him with phony friendship – a dishonest skill Seattlites seem to possess in abundance. Just as obviously, the intent of the crime was to kill Dingo and frighten me into leaving town. But as the Ku Klux Klan learned in East Tennessee, I'm not easily scared into retreat. Instead I contacted my real friends – a locally born Jewish businessman named Les and his Chicago-born fiancée Gabrielle, also a single mother named Billie who shortly afterward moved to California for graduate school and whom I regret to say I later lost track of (as I remember she too was from someplace in the Middle West) – and they willingly granted dog and man the necessary accommodations until I made the house habitable again.

In subsequent years, while I worked, resided and attended school in Seattle, all four of the tires on my automobile were slashed twice, once in 1974 and once in 1976, and the two right-side tires of a Volkswagen belonging to my then-lover, a woman from California, were cut beyond repair in 1975. Scribbled notes stuck under my windshield-wipers in the '74 and '76 incidents made the vandals' intent unmistakable: one said “go back where you came from,” the other said “we don't want you here.”

***

In 1975 I was assaulted during a post-opening party at which I was one of the honored guests. I was one of three participants in a show at King and King, a Seattle gallery that flourished during the mid-'70s but closed years ago. My presence in the exhibition was a courageous act on the part of the proprietors given that all my photography in those days was social-documentary work – an utterly taboo medium in a town where Ansel Adams is a cult messiah, his Zone System is the cult's biblical or qur'anic equivalent and any use of film to depict the human condition is considered a sacrilegious mixing of politics and art.

However it was not my photos that triggered the assailant's rage. Those he merely scorned, his “why don't you go back where you belong” routine a typical expression of Seattle xenophobia. Now, eavesdropping on my conversation with other guests, he somehow got the utterly mistaken notion I was badmouthing the hostess and tried to ambush me with a wild right hook aimed at the side of my face. He was at least a foot taller than I, built like a runner or a bicycle racer who also lifted weights, a blond, handsome, obviously athletic specimen of Homo Sapiens Seattlus, equally suitable for a Nazi recruiting poster or an advertisement for a trendy health club. If his wrecking-ball fist had landed with its intended force, I have no doubt he would have knocked me down if not out cold.

But in those days my peripheral vision was still good and I saw the punch coming and stepped inside his reach and all he did was knock my glasses off my face and send them flying across the room. I poked a couple of intentionally distracting left jabs upward toward his chin and launched a full-power karate kick at his balls. Yes I intended to hurt him – badly. The viciousness of his sneak attack warranted no less. I assumed the kick would drop him to the floor, where I would kick him again as he screamed and writhed and clutched his ruptured nuts: welcome to the jungle, motherfucker.

Alas the kick foundered in the tsunami of onlookers who washed over both of us and pulled us apart.

One of these onlookers was a pretty woman whose eloquent reaction to my photographic collages – see “Sandwiches for Mind and Spirit” – had aroused my interest both intellectually and physically. But now she turned on me, exactly the sort of treachery I had come to expect from Seattleites of whatever gender. She shrilly denounced me for my attempt at self-defense, yelling something like “you bastard you tried to kick him you fucking New Yorkers always fight dirty,” at which point I sensed I was in danger of becoming the object of a lynching and quickly departed.

As in this incident, Seattle-born women often seemed breathtakingly cruel to me. This was a profound shock because women elsewhere, particularly in the Northeast but even in the South, had generally regarded me as good company. Many Northeastern women – I can say it now at age 73 without seeming boastful – forthrightly acknowledged they were sexually aroused by my intellect and my ability to share its content. There's also the fact I genuinely like women, that I regard women as intrinsically better human beings than men and usually more interesting as well. 

But in Seattle, even if the women managed to be somewhat intellectually accomplished, they viewed intellectuality as an exclusively female domain. They dismissed male intellectuals – especially those of us who genuinely relish female companionship – as repulsively effeminate. Thus they retained the mating habits of high-school prom queens, insisting on men with the bodies of professional athletes and jock-strapped minds to match. Most of these women also made no secret of their contempt for what they considered “East-Coast-type” males – smallish, slight of build, with dark eyes, curly dark brown hair, coal-black beard and Manhattan's signature intensity – in other words, men much like myself.

Because Seattleites so often assumed I was Jewish, I soon recognized this almost fanatical aversion to physical features like mine as implicitly anti-Semitic – yet another of the fascist instincts that lurked beneath the allegedly “progressive” facade of Pugetopolis politics.

***

By the spring of 1974 I was beginning to sing to myself that Bob Dylan line that goes, “I'm going back to New York City, I do believe I've had enough,” but then by a strange quirk of fate I was offered the opportunity to became the founding photographer of The Seattle Sun, which would enable me to showcase my camera work as never before. It also put me more or less at the town's (pseudo) bohemian center, which I assumed would open doors both professionally and socially.

But the hatred actually intensified.

One of the unsuccessful contenders for my job was a smugly handsome local boy of about age 20, a typical Ansel Adams disciple named Nick who had no discernible photojournalistic talent and even less verbal skill but had the physique, carriage and blond cowlick of a male model. The local women on the staff didn't give a damn he was professionally incompetent; they merely wanted him around as a boy-toy to pretty up the office. Eventually – over vehement protests of two of The Sun's three outlander women (one of whom was my source inside the struggle) – the local women prevailed. They didn't care it flushed the paper's photographic quality down the toilet. For them, alternative journalism was more about having fun than producing great work. In any case, being from Seattle – or Texas – they wouldn't have recognized or understood quality social documentary photography even if it were handed them as the visual epic entitled The Family of Man. Just like Barbie wants Ken, and just as mindlessly, they wanted Nick no matter what. And when they finally got him – when his mediocre pictures began replacing my work on the cover – I knew The Sun had started to set.

So it was back to singing that Bob Dylan line. It took me another 18 months to get out of Seattle – I still had five quarters of school to complete before I got my bachelor of arts degree from Fairhaven College, and along the way I had acquired some private photography students to whom I felt strongly obligated – but by the fall of 1976 I was gone from Emeraldville. I was never there again save for occasional visits with friends, never more than an overnight stay.

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The South, where I spent about two thirds of my boyhood, was despite its xenophobic history infinitely more accepting of me than Seattle ever was. In 1957, obviously a Yankee, I immediately found part-time work on The Knoxville Journal with samples of writing I had done in Michigan for The Grand Rapids Herald and later for The Grand Rapids Press. Though I was the carpet-bagger son of a carpet-bagger mortgage-banker, though I bore the odium of a child of divorce, I was nevertheless during my senior year at Knox County's Holston High School voted “Boy Most Likely to Succeed.”

Seattle was therefore hands down the most viciously hostile place I have ever been. Considering those places include several locales in the the Ku Klux South –  one of which is this same Jacksonville that still honors slave-trader, Confederate general and KKK-Founder Nathan Bedford Forest – Seattle's hatefulness was surely without peer anywhere in the United States.

Since then I have continued to criticize Seattle relentlessly, focusing on its political deficiencies as revealed by its opposition to adequate transit and tax reform.

In fairness, I should note that Tacoma and its suburbs, formerly staunchly pro-transit, have now become more anti-transit than Seattle, actually damning public transport as a form of welfare, denouncing transit users as parasites and voting two years in a row to kill the local transit authority by ruinously downsizing its bus service.  But I still regard Tacoma as infinitely more cosmopolitan than Seattle. I have lived in Tacoma twice, 1978-1982 and again from late 2004 onward, and never once have Tacomans made me feel unwelcome.

Indeed three of my closest longtime friends are Tacomans, Mary whom I met at Western in 1971; Jim whom I met immediately after I moved to Tacoma in 1978; and another woman, Gretchen, a working artist, whom I met here in 1979. (After I sort of nudged Jim and Mary toward one another, they were wed in 1983. Not only do they remain happily married; they are also, for me, de facto family.) Thus Tacoma has become my home – that is, the closest approximation to home I will ever know in this lifetime after gentrification permanently exiled me from New York City.

But the point here is that now after the election of City Councilwoman Kshama Sawant, whose open affiliation with the revolutionary Socialist Alternative Party proves her to be what I consider a real socialist, I have to reconsider my attitude toward Seattle. No matter how repugnant I have found it in the past, Seattle now seems to be transcending its xenopobic bigotry and reaching out to the peoples of the nation and the world by offering a true alternative to capitalism. Perhaps Emeraldville is at last approaching the sociological maturity that will make it a genuine Emerald City. Let us hope – especially for Councilwoman Sawant's sake – this turn of events is not merely another Seattle deception.

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My Contributions to Last Week's Dialogues on Other Websites

“Does Hillary's Silence on Iran Show Neocon Pull on Her Presidential Run?”  Truthout's Robert Naiman challenges Hillary to declare her true self. Applauding Naiman's astute analysis, I cite the facts revealed by Jeff Sharlet in The Family, which prove Hillary to be not just a closet Republican but a secret collaborator in the JesuNazi effort to make the United States a Christian theocracy.

“We Need More Than Words” Thom Hartmann discusses how a recent speech by President Obama “cut right to the core of some of the biggest issues in our nation, but we need more than words to fix this broken system.” I reply the only sure lesson of the past six years is that any promise uttered or implied by Obama the Orator is sure to be a Big Lie – that to imagine he will not again always serve the One Percent by shape-shifting into Barack the Betrayer is to prove one's self a fool. The result is a notably civilized discussion on one of the Internet's  best news blogs.

LB/8 December 2013 

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Blog Censored Again: Now It's Suppressed by EarthLink

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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