Six Reflections on the Politics of Trauma

 

Loren Bliss as the crowd applauded (above), the legislators (below) responding with imperial disdain. On the dais from left: Rep, Jake Fey, Sen. Jeannie Darneille, Rep. Laurie Jinkins.  Photos by KD, OAN © 2016. (Click on images to view them full size.)

       

VOLUNTARY SELF-CRITICISM is one of the primary techniques of consciousness-raising, and the entire USian Left – both the True Left of revolutionary socialists and the False Left of pro-capitalist reformers, anti-union “progressives,” identity-politics zealots, self-proclaimed “anarchists” and all their ideologically ignorant (or merely thoughtless) kindred – could surely use large and regularly administered doses of it.

I am certainly no exception. Hence I will begin by temporarily sidestepping the contents suggested by the title – the trauma inflicted by 42 years of economic malignancy preceded by 11 years of political murder (its dead including at least 13 victims, the last of whom was Karen Silkwood)  – and I'll  address instead its results – this in the context of self-criticism. I'll also acknowledge one of my own more humiliating political failures and reflect on the lesson therein – a lesson that exemplifies how the politics of today's United States are in fact precisely what I hereby name them: the politics of trauma, the more purely psychological dimension of Naomi Klein's disclosures about capitalism and its shock-doctrine economic aggression.

My political failure – that is, the one central to these reflections – was caused by how the instinctive politeness and deference to authority I set aside so easily when shielded by a press card so often becomes reflexive when I am not so shielded. It is the admittedly craven legacy of my boyhood and adolescent years in the South, where because of familial notoriety and obvious northern origins I was generally marginalized as “white trash,” and I therefore learned to behave accordingly – that is, in ways always carefully indicative of “knowing my place.”

The resultant submissiveness, of which I foolishly imagined I had purged myself at least 50 years ago, came back unexpectedly last week to nullify the righteous anger I had intended to express in a public confrontation with a trio of Washington state's elected Democrat legislators, Senator Jeannie Darneille,  Rep. Jake Fey and Rep. Laurie Jinkins.  Each of these officials theoretically represent all the people of the legislative district in which I reside and vote, but in singularly USian truth they represent only their financial contributors. (That's right, like all U.S. major-party politicians, these legislators are vassals of their pro-capitalist donors, and what they favor or oppose is therefore dictated not by us, the voters, but by legalized bribes from business and professional sources.) We the people are thus left out in the proverbial cold, with no representation whatsoever. Such is capitalism – and capitalist governance – in action.

Each of these politicians is also therefore a betrayer of the 99 Percent, the present day synonym, born of the Occupy Movement, for the Working Class or Proletariat as defined by Marx, Engels, Lenin and Mao. In other words, the 99 Percent is literally every one of us – that is, every one of us who is not part of capitalism's hereditary (One Percent) aristocracy, every one of us who will never be admitted to capitalism's somewhat broader Ruling Class, which includes the executives, bureaucrats, military officers, police commanders, academics, journalists and politicians who are rewarded with significant wealth and power for fulfilling the One Percent's needs – above all else by strict obedience to the One Percenters' orders.

Regardless of their socioeconomic origins or their use of rhetorical camouflage, no member of the USian Ruling Class long retains any real concern for the well-being of the 99 Percent. Each answers only to their One Percent masters. Whether publicly or privately, most members of the Ruling Class soon adopt the sneering contempt that characterizes the One Percent's stance toward all of us – we the people of the 99 Percent. While the Republicans are more open about their disdain,  and often more gleefully sadistic in its expression,  the Democrats – as proven by their constant surrenders to Republican demands – are obviously no different.

Which brings me to the legislators I sought to confront. One of the three has a long record of support for gentrification and is therefore almost certainly an intentional betrayer of the Working Class. Another is a betrayer – probably not by original intent, but rather due to the inertial legacy of many years in a legislature so brazenly hypocritical, reporters and editors of my generation ridiculed it as a “clown show” – never mind its cost to the people in tax-exemption subsidies granted to the capitalists undoubtedly made it the most expensive clown show on earth. The third legislator, whose Ivy League academic credentials indicate a Ruling Class background, probably felt she had no choice but to ally herself with the Democratic Party and is now strait-jacketed by its incipiently fascist “neo-liberal” ideologies and its rigidly enforced policy of fascism-enabling surrenders to Republican demands.

Thus each of these legislators collaborates, willingly or unwillingly, with the Republicans' efforts to genocidally reduce social-service programs. Again willingly or unwillingly (but in this case unforgivably), each also participated in the Democrats' Big Lie campaign to keep these cuts secret from the non-victimized public.

Such secrecy, it should be noted, is a classic Big Lie tactic, especially for enabling genocide. Indeed it is traceable to Nazi Germany and how its propaganda apparatus ensured the German public was (generally) kept ignorant of the death camps. The operant principle is simplicity itself: if atrocities are concealed and officially denied – and the social-service cuts inflicted on Washington state seniors and disabled people are indeed atrocities – then we the victims are silenced by the (usually impossible) burden of proving the atrocities are real – this before we can even begin to demand redress for the devastation so inflicted.

Obviously the Democrats' intent is to sandbag our efforts to obtain redress – and just as obviously the keep-the-cuts-secret tactic is working. The Democrats including Obama himself are using the same tactic nationally to cover up their savage cuts to the food stamp program. In a realm of lies, it is always the liars who win.

*** *** ***

NORMALLY I AVOID conventional political activism. It is usually a fool's errand, a waste of time that merely perpetuates the Big Lie of USian “democracy.” But on this occasion I was motivated by pure anger – the anger evoked by a state-imposed income-reduction so vicious it is forcing me out of the apartment I have occupied since 2004, the additional anger generated by the Big Lie tactics the Democrats are employing to hide the cuts and their party's (now nearly traditional) role as Republican enablers.

It was the possibility of publicly expressing this anger – and thereby publicly embarrassing the Democrats' for their lies – that energized me to write a statement to make during the so-called “Town Hall Meeting” these three legislators convened on 10 February in the auditorium at the Tacoma campus of Evergreen State College. I knew my statement would change nothing. The cuts had been made, and given the continuing dominance of neo-liberal sociological theory and Ayn Rand economics, the funding will never be restored. But at least I would have the satisfaction of raising my voice in protest.

However, my journalistic instincts kicked in as I wrote, and I soon realized I would be speaking not only for myself but for the untold number of other seniors and disabled people who are being similarly victimized – a number “untold” only because the state is stubbornly refusing to release it. Assuming there would be some post-comment discussion, I carefully edited and rehearsed my remarks to fill three-fourths of the standard two-minute limit on speakers. Here after about three hours work is what I typed on a cheat-sheet and brought to the meeting:

Thank you for this opportunity to speak. I'm Loren Bliss, obviously a senior, obviously physically disabled (gesture with cane), and after the Great Wall Street Ripoff took away nearly 70 percent of my income, a very impoverished senior, which is why I want to ask you this question about social services.

But first let me say I'm also a reasonably well-educated senior, even in retirement sometimes still a working journalist and among other things a former college instructor, which means I know who owns the two-party system and understand why you impose social service cuts like this one (brandish document) – ending forever the Washington Telephone Assistance Program. Or like the 82 percent cut in my Medicare Extra Help, from $22 per month to $4 per month. Or like the policy changes that slashed a neighbor's food stamps from $128 per month to nothing.

And then you say in the “27th District Legislative Update” you mailed us all last fall – and I'll read it word-for-word (brandish publication) – your biennial budget (quote) restores damaging cuts to public assistance programs made during the lean years of the great recession (unquote).

Obviously that's a lie. You didn't restore anything except maybe the cuts themselves. In fact you made the cuts far worse than they were last year.

So I have to ask – and in an election year it's a question a lot of seniors and disabled people are asking – is there any real difference between you and the Republicans? Except maybe the Republicans are more honest about their genocidal intent.

*** *** ***

I BELIEVE IT was von Moltke the Elder who said no battle plan survives the first contact with the enemy's main strength, and this was surely true of my experience at the 27th District's alleged “Town Hall Meeting.”

The college auditorium was filled to near capacity with approximately 200 people. But they were nearly all Caucasians despite the fact the meeting was held in Hilltop, which is not only part of the 27th District but is Tacoma's main black-majority neighborhood. The majority of the attendees also appeared to be middle-aged petite-bourgeois types. If typical of similar demographic groups elsewhere in the USian homeland, the majority was thus presumably indifferent (if not actually hostile) to the plight of lower-income people. Whatever, their numerical strength (and therefore their white-bourgeois ideological dominance) was surely enhanced by the notable absence of any substantial number of elderly African-Americans – the very people who would have been, as a group, hit hardest by the social-service cuts. The absence of younger people was also notable.

Though it is a bit of an aside, the absence of each group, older blacks and youth of all races, suggests both groups are increasingly alienated from the Democratic Party– a significant indication particularly given claims the Bernie Sanders presidential candidacy is fostering a youth-renaissance within the party.

Ironically, the crowd's largest faction – a seemingly all-white band of not-in-my-back-yard “environmentalists” – had come to protest a local methane-plant proposal over which the Legislature has no authority at all.

But Darneille, who as a senator outranks the representatives and was thus the event chair, ruled the NIMBYs would be allowed to speak first – to squander more than half the time allotted for public statements – even as those of us with grievances inflicted by legislative action (and therefore the very grievances the three legislators might have been able to help redress), were relegated to the closing 30 minutes of the two-hour session. Darneille also announced our statements would be limited to one minute rather than the customary two minutes.

It was, indeed, a diabolically clever use of the (distant) methanol-plant threat to distract from the (immediate) issues of social-service cuts. In other words, the “Town Hall Meeting” was yet another example of USian (non)democracy in (calculatedly oppressive) action.

My response to the newly imposed one-minute time limit was to again edit my statement, paring it to the bare essentials of protests against the cuts in social-service stipends and against the Democrats' use of the Big Lie to cover up the cuts and thereby suppress any possible protest.

But then I noted how the legislative trio was so carefully avoiding any mention of the true source of the state's financial crisis – the staggering, no-cost-is-too-great extravagance of the legislators, Republican and Democrat alike, in awarding unprecedented subsidies to the One Percent. Washington state politicians have given their capitalist owners the largest tax exemptions not just in U.S. history, but in the entire known governmental history of Planet Earth. Yet not one of the nearly 200 people in attendance had dared utter even a single word protesting this robbery of the poor to further enrich those who are already inconceivably wealthy.

Thus when I was finally granted the alleged democracy of my allotted one minute, I opened my remarks with the traditional “thank you,” then said something like “I'm here to protest the cuts you made in social services, but first I want to ask a rhetorical question: just how much of the budget shortfall you keep complaining about is due to the truly obscene tax exemptions this state grants Big Business? They're the largest ever in the world – not just in the country but in the world – when you factor in that $8.5 billion tax cut you gave Boeing.”

The audience applauded enthusiastically (see the top photograph above), and Jinkins – in sharp contrast to the silence of her two colleagues – emphatically declared herself as an opponent of all such definitively anti-humanitarian transfers of wealth from the citizenry to the aristocracy.

Then I launched into my much-abbreviated condemnation of the social-service cuts and the Democrats' breathtakingly dishonest attempt to conceal them. But as soon as I got to “obviously that's a lie,” Darneille forcefully contradicted me, stating that TANF funding – Temporary Assistance for Needy Families – had been restored. She uttered the usual Democrat excuse for the cuts I was protesting (“the Republicans made us do it”), and she concluded her interruption with the meaningless statement that legislation had been introduced to restore funding to remedy these same cuts. (Her statement is meaningless because, given Republican control of the state senate, no such restorative legislation will be approved.) At that point – my one minute of pseudo-democracy mostly consumed by the state senator – the time-keeper flagged me into silence.

Now utterly intimidated by the prospect of being made to look like some stereotypically doddering early-Alzheimer's oldster, I mumbled a short, not very articulate protest that “senior needs are being swept under the rug” and, head down in defeat, hobbled away from the lectern. Never mind the response to my ad-lib comment about corporate tax exemptions; my cutback protests drew only stony-faced silence, thereby confirming my estimate of the crowd's petite-bourgeois majority bias.

Worse – because I allowed myself to be intimidated into self-censorship – I never made my most important point: that under capitalist governance, the only real difference between Republicans and Democrats is that the latter have become habitual liars while the former are increasingly more honest about their genocidal intent.

Only two people, one an elderly black woman who is a neighbor, the other a middle-aged Hispanic male with whom I had no previous acquaintance, thanked me for speaking up on behalf of all the seniors and disabled people who have been hurled under the proverbial bus by Jeannie Darneille, Jake Fey, Laurie Jinkins and all their Republican and Democratic colleagues in the 2015 Washington State Legislature.

And at least I had forced Darneille to tacitly admit the Democrats have now themselves adopted the long-time Republican strategy of pitting one group of victims against another, in this instance seniors and disabled people versus welfare mothers and children. That would have been a significant disclosure were I covering the event for some publication that does not limit “news” to that which attracts only the readership its advertisers seek as customers. But publications that define “news” as it was formerly defined – as anything that impacts humans whether rich or poor – now exist only on the electronic fringe. Hence Darneille's inadvertent disclosure goes forever unexposed.

In other words, my protest failed abysmally.

*** *** ***

I SHOULD NOTE here that in my 23-odd (award-winning) years as what in the craft of journalism is described as a “public affairs reporter” – that is, one who covers the performance and politics of state and local government, as I did in Tennessee (1957-1959; 1963-1965); in New York City (1965-1967); in New Jersey (1965; 1967-1970); again in NYC (1983-1986), and in Washington state (1971; 1974-1981, 2004-2009) – I have witnessed a significant change in the dynamics of public-meeting dialogue between elected officials and the citizens they (allegedly) represent.

The first political meetings I covered were in East Tennessee, where the politicians themselves would sometimes engage in fist-fights,  but their dialogues with the voters – at least the many I witnessed – were always respectful. Ditto everywhere else I worked until maybe 1978 or 1979. But – though I had not focused on it until now – this paradigm of mutual respectfulness eroded rapidly following President Carter's neo-liberal betrayal of the New Deal. Next came the Reagan Revolution, the subsequent transformation of the Democratic Party into the Republicans' austerity-enabling apparatus, and finally – to the infinite gain of the One Percent and a bottomless loss inflicted on all the rest of us – the reduction of the United States to de facto single-party plutocracy.

Political-meeting dialogue changed accordingly. Formerly, when I was a young newsman, the purpose of such dialogue was to allow (most of) the people to seek redress – an intent clearly demonstrated by the politeness with which the politicians (actually) listened to their (usually white) constituents.

But since the era of the Carter betrayals, public voter-politician interactions in the U.S. have moved far away from their post-colonial town-meeting origins to become ever more reminiscent of what I suppose political assemblies in pre-revolutionary France or pre-revolutionary Russia were like: public meetings during which exalted officials would pretend to humor the sans culottes (in popular usage, “those so poor they cannot afford pants”), or the народа (naroda: “the people” [as opposed to the aristocracy]), in either case by regally granting us a few moments to speak and then lecturing us on our alleged ignorance – exactly as Darneille lectured me.

Such is the political deterioration inflicted on the United States by capitalism: from the manifest democracy of genuine dialogues between (mostly white) voters and their elected representatives, to the implicit tyranny of assemblies the obvious function of which is to embarrass anyone who dares criticize the (ever more oppressive) regimen of capitalist governance. Now we Caucasians are increasingly subject to the same marginalization that has always been the lot of USian minorities.

How then might I have carried my self-assigned mission through to its conclusion?

The only answer is to have followed the behavioral example of Black Lives Matter and shouted down the state senator when she interrupted what I was trying to say.

Yes, as I implied earlier, I sometimes exhibited this sort of righteously angry relentlessness in my quests for information, particularly at press conferences.

But scheduled meetings of legislative committees or state or local governing bodies, where my official role was never more than that of silent observer, are very different from press conferences, which are by definition often confrontational, and where, shielded by my press card, I was authorized to be forceful or even rude in my demands for answers to questions. It was a ploy with which I was never truly comfortable (for under such stress there was always the fearsome possibility of some dyslexic speech-error that would reduce me to a professional laughingstock), but it was nevertheless a tactic I dutifully employed when necessary – occasionally with scoop-the-world results.

Yet last Saturday I allowed myself to be intimidated into squandering the only opportunity I am ever likely to get in this lifetime to publicly underscore the most vital truth of present-day USian politics – that the Democrat/Republican collaboration fostered by unlimited sums of capitalist money has reduced the United States to a one-party nation. Which means its governance differs from that of its financier and (alleged) enemy China only in that the Chinese are presumably fully aware of their circumstances – that their communism has been co-opted to meaninglessness by capitalism – while we USians are kept in a constant state of delusion and/or ignorance about how we are governed: hence Moron Nation.

Obviously – both because of fears related to dyslexia and because slightly more than one month away from my 76th birthday I am probably too old to un-learn my habits of deference and politeness, my best course of action is to avoid all such encounters like the one that took place at the alleged “Town Hall Meeting.” And if for some reason that is impossible for me to do – as indeed it was on 20 February (with all but one of my comrades engaged in vital political activity elsewhere) – to rehearse my protest so thoroughly, my unshielded responses to oppression become as automatic as they were when I was shielded by membership in the working press.

Meanwhile Black Lives Matter is thus proven to be the tactical master of this new age of resistance. The only way to be heard by Ruling Class politicians is to confront them with maximum rudeness – which for people like myself is a profoundly difficult tactic to learn.

That said, my apology to those who had expected better from me at the “Town Hall Meeting.”

*** *** ***

SUCH ARE THE present-day conditions that exemplify the politics of trauma.

Reflecting on my embarrassing failure at the “Town Hall Meeting,” I realized my core assumption is scarcely different from that of my fellow USians. I recognize I have no influence whatsoever over U.S. politics and even less over its Ruling Class perpetrators, and I take the hardships thus inflicted on my friends and neighbors and on me personally as mounting proof of my own ever-worsening powerlessness. (At least I avoid the error of blaming myself – the automatic reflex of most USians, induced by 35 years of Ayn Rand propaganda and prosperity-gospel conditioning.)

Though I still vote, rationalizing my participation as a meaningless gesture that is nevertheless necessary to preserve the franchise, in every other sense I am at one with those who who are so alienated from our failed experiment in representative democracy, they ask themselves – if indeed they trouble themselves to think politically at all – “why bother when it changes nothing?” Therefore they neither vote nor otherwise participate in politics whether local, state or national. This is the reality so vividly demonstrated by the USian Homeland's ongoing decline in voter turnout,  which in Washington state between 2010 and 2014 produced the largest such drop recorded anywhere in the nation.

Beyond the reams and kilobytes of Right Wing academic obfuscation, the real message of these declines is obvious. It goes like this: “There is no longer any real difference between the Democrats and the Republicans. That means we're going to get a Republican even if we elect somebody who's supposedly a Democrat – just like we got with Obama. That also means it doesn't matter – it won't make any difference – if the Republicans win. So why should I bother to vote (even if, with Washington state's 100-percent mail-in ballots, it only costs me a postage stamp).”

Such statements, from young and old alike, I have heard more times than I can count.

Significantly, the de facto election boycott by Washington state's voting-age citizens, from a 53.1 percent turnout in 2010 to a 28.0 percent turnout in 2014 (which some commentators have called the lowest rate ever recorded in the United States), occurred after the Republicans nullified all the 2012 state election results by a genuine coup that – exactly as I said on the comment thread of the linked report – gave them budgetary omnipotence and thus absolute control of the state government. The turnout of Washington's voting-age citizenry in November 2012 had been 60.77 percent – but that was five weeks before the coup.

Afterward, there was a gradual but eventually statewide awakening to the fact we the people are powerless in the face of such skulduggery. The coup itself was traumatic, the source of acute fear amongst lower-income people astute enough to recognize we were now doomed to become its primary victims. And its consequences, which include the savage cutbacks I unsuccessfully tried to protest last week, are more traumatic still. In fact the resultant voter-alienation will almost certainly enable the Republicans to sweep the state's 2016 elections – with an acceleration of deadly consequences for those of us who depend on Medicaid, Medicare Extra Help, food stamps or any other sort of state social-service money.

*** *** ***

PROBABLY FOR POLITICALLY alienated people who are in their 50s and 60s, the politics of trauma began with the carefully engineered war of economic subjugation demanded by the infamous Powell Memo of 1971 and publicly declared by President Richard Nixon when he proclaimed to William Randolph Hearst Jr. in a 1973 post-inaugural interview that “Americans had it too good,” that he would devote his second term to making life miserable for the 99 Percent. Nixon was thus voicing the One Percent's declaration of class-war against the American Dream, against the U.S. experiment in representative democracy and ultimately against the entire 99 Percent – every worker and working family in the nation. (That's probably why the interview, at the time Page One in every Hearst newspaper in the nation, has conveniently vanished down the Orwell hole.)

Those who were born after 1974 were therefore born into relentless economic decline, so if their families were part of the 99 Percent, they have known nothing but steadily increasing wretchedness all their lives. Hence, having no reason to imagine the American Dream as anything but monumental deception, they avoid its political rituals in exactly the same way a recovering Christian shuns even the near occasion of religious rites. Why participate in something bitter experience has taught you is nothing more than an invitation to abuse?

Even so, what too often gets lost in the telling is the fact it is the Ruling Class – and the Ruling Class alone – whose colossal treacheries and betrayals have reduced USian politics to a politics of disappointment and frustration and despair and thus condensed its diverse miseries into the politics of trauma.

The ultimate example of this process – at least the ultimate example to date – is the dismal denouement to our national outpouring of hopefulness evoked by Obama the Orator with his ubiquitous claim of “change we can believe in.” For a few brief months he genuinely uplifted our spirits. But for the past eight years, by his obviously premeditated shape-shift into Barack the Betrayer, he has cruelly hurled us into a hopelessness so deep the only exit is too often death itself.  At the very least it is as if the entire U.S. political process has been deliberately turned into an experiment in aversive conditioning. In this context, Obama's biggest Big Lie ever – the premeditated lie so hypnotically repeated by his 2008 slogan – becomes perhaps the most deliberately wounding ploy in the history of USian governance.

Given the unholy combination of the One Percent's efforts at voter-disenfranchisement and the empire's notorious skill at psychological warfare – one of the darker legacies of its embrace of the Nazi war criminals after World War II – it is certainly possible what we are witnessing is not just the happenstantial emergence of a politics of trauma but rather its deliberate imposition. The motive is obvious: the lower the voter turnout, the easier it is for the One Percent and their Republican storm-troopers to ensure the triumph of fascism.

But for me, as for others my age, the politics of trauma began far earlier, spawned by the murder of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy on 22 November 1963 and confirmed beyond doubt by the murder of his brother Senator Robert Francis Kennedy nearly five years later on 5 June 1968. Hence the relevance of what I wrote in response to a Reader Supported News exclusive by Paul Schrade, who witnessed the RFK assassination. (The text here is not italicized because it includes details I omitted in compliance with RSN's 1500-character limit):

I was working the day JFK was murdered – was the only one in the newsroom of The Oak Ridger, a small but excellent afternoon daily in East Tennessee. (The editor and all my colleagues were at lunch; I was finishing an unrelated story that would run the following week, this so I could leave early for a weekend with my lover, who was attending Virginia Intermont, an all-women's college in Bristol 100 miles to the north.) For the past week I had felt grave forebodings about the president's trip to Dallas, and when I heard the flash-bell ringing like an unanswered telephone on the A-wire teletype, the line that carried national and international news, I had a terrible premonition of what I would see:

F  L  A  S  H

PRESIDENT KENNEDY SHOT IN DALLAS.

It was the only time in my career I gave a “stop the presses” order, though it was not really needed as the press room crew had just heard the news on the radio and were already stopping the machinery on their own initiative. Within an hour we remade our home edition, published that, and then as the story developed we produced one extra (a special edition prompted by breaking news), considered producing a second extra, decided it was unnecessary and finally, just before midnight, closed the newsroom after what had become a 17-hour workday.  
  
Needless to say, I was exhausted. But my lover had successfully navigated the obstacle course of acquiring the false papers and making the clandestine arrangements then required of any young woman who dared seek momentary escape from the chastity belt of dormitory regulations, and both of us were   understandably determined to save as much of our weekend plans as possible. So she borrowed a family-heirloom wedding ring from one of her roommates, stuffed a pillow under her clothing to mimic pregnancy, and bummed a ride into town from another roommate who was so overcome by giggles at the deception she had difficulty driving. So disguised, my lover, a diminutive but formidably articulate brunette scarcely more than five feet tall, signed us into the region's swankest hotel as Mr. and Mrs. Loren Bliss – husband and father-to-be temporarily detained elsewhere on pressing business. 

There were no Interstate highways in those days, and the 100-mile trip was on mountain roads, mostly two-lane blacktop. But I had a good Volkswagen sedan, which handled the curves with far more alacrity than any Detroit iron, so by 2 a.m. my lover and I were in each other's arms. Both of us were so devastated by the assassination that at first and probably for at least the next two hours all we could do was cling to one another like lost and tearful children. 

That Sunday our room-service breakfast was interrupted by the grisly spectacle of Jack Ruby killing Lee Harvey Oswald on live TV. At that moment my lover's normally warm brown eyes turned bleak as  winter behind her tears of shock and despair. “What are we,” she lamented. “A banana republic? God help us.”

It was after the murder of President Kennedy that my late father, a Marxist since the Crash of 1929 schooled him with the unforgiving brutality of capitalism, adopted what became the political mantra of his final eight years: “Eventually things will get so bad in this country, the Red Army will be welcomed as an army of liberation.”

In 1968 when RFK was slain, I was the news editor of The Daily Record, a mid-sized paper serving Morristown, New Jersey and its surrounding Morris County. We normally rolled our home edition at 2 a.m. but on this morning we had held Page One until nearly 3 a.m. so we could include the California primary results. We knew if Kennedy won, he'd be the Democrat nominee and therefore the president. The story arrived as anticipated on the A-wires (two of probably a half-dozen teletype machines in our wire-room). I don't remember now if I chose the United Press International text or the Associated Press version – but I edited it, wrote a head on it (something like “Kennedy Wins It” proclaimed in 96-point type), and sent the copy up to the composing room. A few minutes later I initialed my approval on the Page One proof and then, my choice of careers once more affirmed by the feel-good seismic rumble of high-speed presses, I went home smugly thinking all was well.

When I awoke the next afternoon I walked to my neighborhood's corner store and saw a paper in the window – probably The Newark News – with a headlined reference to a Kennedy shooting. I asked the proprietor why on earth he had a 1963 paper in his window, and he said “oh you didn't know” and handed me the copy of The New York Times he always set aside for me. Exactly as in the cliche, it was as if the ground opened under my feet. Just minutes after I had left the Record's newsroom, assassins bullets – there is now no doubt there were at least two shooters – killed the last politician who might have saved us from ourselves.  
 
As the Crash of 1929 was pivotal to my late father, so was the murder of Senator Robert Francis Kennedy pivotal to me. It was then I recognized our alleged “democracy” is a cunning charade, a Machiavellian fraud, a Big Lie of such breathtaking proportions neither Josef Goebbels nor even his master Adolf Hitler could have imagined it. Indeed were I a Christian – even a modern-minded Christian – I would have no choice but take this Big Lie and its eventually suicidal success as ultimate proof of the Devil's reality. And proof too of all its dire implications: just as in the Tarot deck the Devil card is followed by the card depicting the Tower shattered by divine lightning and collapsing into ruin, so in USian life is our plague of political murders followed by realization that humanitarian change will never again be allowed in this nation – that our wretchedness will therefore worsen until we are liberated by apocalypse or invasion or revolution or perhaps by some combination of all three – or until capitalism reduces our entire species to extinction.

Again I am reminded of what the Celtic partisan Calgacus said of the Imperial Roman invaders and how true it is of the USian Empire as well: “They make a desert and they call it peace.” To which – though I remain firmly committed to the strategy and tactics of non-violence – the only rational response may yet be epitomized by graffito: “Boudicca Lives.” Or as our murdered president once said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

LB/21-26 February 2016

-30-

Six Essays: Gratitude for the Restoration of My Eyesight, Pagan Music as an Antidote to the Politics of Despair

 

Emergence Nr. 17 (Click on image to view it full size.) Photograph by Loren Bliss copyrights 1971, 1976, 1985, 2016.

*

THOSE WHO WERE appalled by my impending blindness will be delighted to learn an eleventh-hour charity paid Group Health Cooperative the obscenely prohibitive co-payments it charges for the surgery required to save my eyesight. (Group Health's fees, in no way exceptional, exemplify what obtains when health care is a privilege of wealth rather than a human right, and the care-giving organization's primary purpose is therefore to put oodles of boodle in executive pockets rather than treat the sick and heal the wounded.) That said, if there are any of you I have failed to thank for your supportive and/or prayerful good thoughts, please accept this expression of my gratitude as well as my apology for the oversight.

But I would be derelict in my journalistic duty were I to ignore this opportunity to note the likelihood there are also amongst OAN's readers a few who were cheering my blindness and praying it would silence me forever. Since Occupy Tacoma, http://occupytacoma.org/71-year-old-tacoma-veteran-on-why-she-got-involved-with-the-occupy-movement/ interference by the secret police will not allow me to email OAN's Internet address to anyone unless I first disguise it as a TinyURL. And let us not forget my 2010 ouster from Facebook in retaliation for suggesting the so-called “Great Recession” was deliberately engineered to usher in accelerated austerity and thereby speed the imposition of overt fascism.

Thus, in addition to thanking my benefactors, I give my most emphatic middle-finger salute to the vassals and functionaries of the One Percent – the spooks and police agents and soldiers and politicians and bureaucrats and cops and maybe even a welfare official or two – all of them fanatical defenders of capitalism and sworn enemies of the Working Class, each of them a-boil with Heinrich Himmler hatefulness perpetually inflamed by Christofascist or JesuNazi cults whose Yeshua is “der Führer Who Art in Heaven” and whose sadistic intent toward the 99 Percent is to brutalize us into slave-camp submission no matter our race or gender or how we define ourselves politically or spiritually or sexually – and then, when we are too old or crippled or mentally mangled to be exploitable for profit, to cast us off like worn-out machinery and exterminate us by “austerity” and whatever other methodologies of genocide can be hidden beneath cloaks of euphemisms, disinformation and Big Lies. Let us also in this naming of enemies note all those 99 Percenters who yet stupidly believe capitalism will someday let them “hit it big” – that is, to get so rich they can brazenly fuck over everybody else – and now either sit at home opiated by Mainstream Media and awaiting the Rapture or have already joined Moron Nation's roving bands of misogynists and homophobes, banging their Bibles and brandishing their biblical bellicosity to terrify women and lesbian/gay/bisexual/transsexual folk and anyone else who might dare rediscover the holiness of sensuality and everything else stolen from us by patriarchy in the name of “God's divine plan for salvation.”

To all such adversaries I turn the other cheek – that is, the other cheek of my arse, that they may glimpse the defiance implicit in a Full Moon.

Plus in my case there were probably also less fingerworthy, less cheekworthy detractors, a very few hateful kinfolk breathing sighs of malicious relief at the apparent end to my periodic disclosures of familial dysfunction. There's even a faint possibility the personal-adversary list includes the first woman I truly loved, she who at age 17 captured my heart by teaching me Plato's Republic. Though our relationship lasted three years, in her eyes I was never more than a stepladder for escaping the slums. Despite her sociological origins, she was boldly articulate and beautiful and memorably shameless in bed, but she thought my talents inferior and regarded journalism as an insufficiently glorious choice in comparison to the worlds of literature, fine art and academia. As soon as I was bailed out of jail, she demanded to know if I was “getting involved with Communists and stuff.” I answered truthfully – “probably,” I said – and without a moment's hesitation she replied, “then I'm leaving.”

This last event was long long ago and far far away on geography I have not visited since 1969 and will probably never trod again, but I remember it whenever I review my life as I am doing now in rescued-from-blindness introspection, and I am always surprised to discover her rejection still hurts, no doubt because she was my first lover in this lifetime whose intellect I truly respected, and she was therefore too the first woman whose claim to see me as attractive seemed believable and even trustworthy, never mind the all-pervasive sense of physical and psychological ugliness that is an irremediable part of my psyche. The long-ago blow of her rejection was thus many times multiplied by how it brought back to dagger-sharp focus my own negative sense of self. Such is the oddly enduring nature of love-related trauma, lingering even when the love is subsequently proven to have been wholly unrequited and the illusion of its sharedness thus discredited as nothing more than manipulation bolstered by one's own penchant for fantasy and wishful thinking. How happy I am to have escaped that relationship's ultimate ensnarement. How quickly introspection see-saws me from joy to sadness and back again, mixed reflections viewed – even with restored vision – behind mutually contradictory tears.

(Forgive me if I bathe in bathos or lapse into lugubriousness [the latter noun, by its congested-sinus resonance, perhaps my favorite example of onomatopoeia]. Or don't forgive me. As long as you keep on reading, I really don't care.) 

*** *** ***

THE MOST IMPORTANT point to take away from my brush with blindness is how the obscenity of defining health care as a privilege of wealth combines with the capitalist greed of chief executive officers to eliminate all meaningful distinction between non-profit and for-profit care-providers. That is the real significance of the prohibitive price – nearly $161 per minute for approximately five out-patient minutes of laser surgery – that without the intervention of charity would have damned me to permanent sightlessness.

But it is also important to note how the ability to pay that fee (or any comparable sum) has been put forever beyond my own financial reach by the senior-subsidy cuts imposed by Washington state Democrats.  Charity saved my eyesight (and thus saved me) this time, but what happens if there is another pay-or-die medical crisis? The truth is that I, like so many others, am now imprisoned in a de facto death-cell, locked behind invisible bars and restrained by invisible chains until the Reaper – himself obviously a Ruling Class functionary – calls my name.

These circumstances exemplify the murderous economics of capitalism and of the now unabashedly capitalist (and therefore overtly fascist) economics of the USian Imperial Homeland and afflict untold numbers of us whether old or young also exemplify the diabolical cunning of capitalist governance. We satisfy the partial-truth needs of the imperial propagandists because we (officially) have health insurance. But we also slake the infinite greed of the insurance barons who fatten their assets collecting premiums for insurance deliberately structured to be unusable. Here, of course, is the genocidal purpose behind prohibitively priced co-pays. If we purchase the care that might save our lives, we are left with insufficient money for food or shelter. Ultimately our only choice is how we will die: will it be from untreated illness, or from malnutrition and homelessness or some combination of all three. Or perhaps we will yield to ultimate despair and do an Ernest Hemingway or a Sylvia Plath or a Diane Arbus or exit via some other premature means. Such are the methods by which the capitalists exterminate those of us deemed “surplus workers” – those of us considered no longer exploitable for profit.

*** *** ***

IRONICALLY IT IS the Bible, the world's most viciously patriarchal (and therefore definitively capitalist) doctrinal sourcebook, that contains what is probably the most anti-capitalist proverb ever penned: “Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them” (Matthew 7:15-10, King James Bible).

Thus we witness the toxic fulsomeness of capitalism in all its genocidal savagery and ecocidal malignance. We see how capitalism transforms the (literally) deadly sin of infinite greed and elevates it to the capitalists' ultimate virtue – the one ethos most vital for capitalist function. We recognize how capitalism thereby rejects every humanitarian principle our species has ever evolved. We acknowledge how it replaces all these age-old principles with its might-makes-right (and-mighty-profit-makes-mighty-right) credo of serial-killer moral imbecility.

(“Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.”)

And now at last perhaps we are being forced to admit capitalism threatens the survival of not just our own species but literally of all life as we know it. Which makes capitalism the closest real-world approximation of the Abrahamic concept of Absolute Evil our species has yet spawned.

(“Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.”)

Yet far too many of us remain suicidally blind to what capitalism is doing to us all and how its own depredations point to socialism as our species' only possible means of survival.

Susan Sontag wrote of illness as metaphor, and though I have always understood the notion intellectually, I did not comprehend it emotionally until I understood how the blitzkrieg of looming blindness and my own financial defenselessness was a perfect metaphor for the plight of the entire 99 Percent. Capitalism has smashed all our mechanisms of resistance and now, as if to use us for compost in its next crop of atrocities, it is plowing us all under.

(“Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.”)

As for me, I probably would have been white-cane sightless by the end of next month, just in time for my 76th birthday. Between 3 January, when I first noticed my sight diminishing into milky haze, and 27 January, the date of the surgery, I had already gone nearly blind in my right eye, and the sight in my left eye was in jeopardy. But the laser surgery not only restored my distance vision, returning it to the Fountain-of-Youth clarity achieved by the original cataract surgery;  it also improved my close-up vision, minimizing my need for reading glasses – an affect my ophthalmologist says is commonplace but unpredictable and is therefore not mentioned to patients beforehand lest they by disappointed should it not materialize.
But what of all the other women, children and men who are not so fortunate as I have been? Reflect not just on the skyrocketing numbers of homeless people;  think also of the original Bloody Sunday and Triangle Shirtwaist and Bhopal and Katrina and Bangladesh.  How many more must die before the ravages of the capitalists are ended?

(“Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.”)

*** *** ***

WHY HAD MY vision been saved? What was Fate demanding of me? I had never been granted a favor of such magnitude, nothing even remotely so pivotal, and my dialectical-materialist skepticism was instantly at war with my Pagan intuition. The former dismisses my good fortune as random chance; the latter defines it as a genuine miracle, an event that requires some new vow of gratitude (“thank you Goddess; hence I shall devote the rest of my life to [whatever cause]”), this combined with some ritual of thanksgiving, by rainy-season necessity a private indoor rite though at least accompanied by incense and suitable music, the search for which brought a Muse-poet named S.J.Tucker into this text – she who  dares respond to the challenge Tim Buckley voiced 49 years ago: “if you tell me of all the pain you've had, I'll never smile again.” But that – articulating the pain of her gender and her generation – is only part of her repertoire; she also she grants blessings aplenty of comic relief, and not infrequently the purity of healing laughter as well. Her website tells me S. J. stands for Susan Jane, that her friends call her “Sooj” – and I find myself hoping she might read this and at least recognize me as a distant ally, a elder comrade, though I cannot imagine we would ever meet.

But first before I continue praising Tucker as a True Bard – surely as true as any since the first Taliesin (he who sang mysteriously of “the rulers of Britain, abounding in fleets” perhaps 2400 years before Trafalgar) – there is the matter of that other vision I mentioned in this essay's title: a dark vision, my own troubled vision of our present potential and our probable future (scroll down the comment thread for my two contributions), a haunting mind's-eye vision that in my film-camera past and as shown in the image above, sometimes took form, invariably with a faint warning prelude of alchemical sibilance, on DuPont Varilure in 1:3 Dektol beneath amber-filtered lights, and sometimes too as passages of spontaneous prose seemingly borne of some outside source (“where the fuck did this come from; I can't believe I wrote it”), as if the Muse (whose objective reality my dialectic materialist agnosticism forever forces me to question), were nevertheless once again whispering her double reassurance – that she forgives me even my gravest doubts and that – as Robert Graves put it – she offers “nothing promised that is not performed.”

As I confessed in today's title, I vacillate between faint hope for our species' post-apocalyptic survival and absolute despair at the runaway nuclear train of our self-inflicted extinction. The former is ephemeral at best; the latter, which too often seems impossible to refute, is authenticated by my too-intimate knowledge of the United States as the de facto Fourth Reich, which is (A), hell-bent on conquering the world; (B), ever-more-relentlessly subjugating all its peoples beneath the profiteering tyranny of the Imperial One Percent, whilst (C), being endlessly cheered on by Moron Nation mobs chanting “USA! USA! USA!” at every war crime or homeland atrocity.
Trouble is, most USians – all of our brains at least partially clogged with capitalist propaganda – are carefully conditioned to never dare look at ourselves in any sort of psychologically revealing mirror. Thus we are loathe to acknowledge Moron Nation's Zieg Heil reality is but few footfalls distant from that of Nazi Germany. And we are genuinely terrified to admit we are the most ignorant people in the industrial world – that we reside in the only realm on this planet to embrace Orwell's satiric “Ignorance Is Strength” as biblical writ – and that we have done so with such prideful malevolence it has become the one inviolable shibboleth of our national (un)consciousness.  As Vladimir Ilyich Lenin asked in 1902, “What Is to Be Done?”

Then as now, and precisely as Lenin stated, “'(f)reedom' is a grand word, but under the banner of freedom for industry the most predatory wars were waged, under the banner of freedom of labor, the working people were robbed.” But what is so radically different – and what reduces the ideological quarrels of Lenin's era to apparent meaninglessness – is the unprecedented extent to which the Working Class of today, the 99 Percent, has been robbed not only of the tools of resistance and the knowledge of how to use them, but all too often also gutted of the sense of selfhood and grievance from which effective resistance arises. In Vladimir Ilyich's time, whether in the imperial United States or the Russian Empire, the instruments of oppression were obvious: the bullets and bayonets of the soldiers, the knouts and truncheons of the Cossacks and the cops, the prison and the gallows, the lynchings and pogroms tolerated by (and often encouraged by) the authorities. The means of resistance were therefore also obvious. Now, despite our rising anger at what the capitalists are doing to us, it is for the most part suppressed by modern variants of pānem et circēnsēs, the bread-and-circus opiates by which the Roman Empire controlled its own oppressed masses. The USian forms of these distractions are many. They include the Colosseum-equivalents of violent films and professional sports; the pornographic antics of celebrities; other forms of vacuous entertainment including what passes for “news”; the zomboid numbing induced by alcohol and drugs whether legal or otherwise; and most of all the omnipresent opiate of Abrahamic fundamentalism, its socioeconomically malicious prosperity gospel having now become so malignantly popular its taint is found even in avowedly secular New Age and Pagan conceptualizations. (Yet what else could be expected here in the most moronically Christian-fundamentalist nation in the industrial world?) Hence what a fellow Occupy activist said to me in 2011: “the 99 Percent is terribly broken.” What she dared not add was the probability most of us are broken beyond repair.

What then – if anything – can be done?

In Lenin's day it was customary for revolutionary parties to offer political-education programs – and by all the available evidence, the global Working Class was eager – literally trudge-barefoot-through-the-blizzard eager –  to receive it. But in the USian homeland of today – where the prison-like atmosphere of government schools guarantees the educational process is disliked (if not despised outright) even by those of us who theoretically know better – the mere thought of returning to a classroom or even picking up a book or pamphlet is often prohibitively repugnant. This sort of aversive conditioning – part of a far greater scheme of making certain our every contact with government is unpleasant if not disastrous – is perhaps the most cunning way capitalism defends itself against socialism. Socialism is after all a form of government – the most democratic form our species has yet evolved – and as government it requires organization and personnel. But if government itself is despised, its form becomes irrelevant – and that is precisely the adverse legacy fostered by the inherent malevolence of capitalist governance. The same methodology is even more evident in the state and federal welfare bureaucracies, their obvious purpose not to help us weather the chronic instability of capitalism but rather to deny us the very aid we need for survival – thereby ensuring we are reduced to perpetual victimhood. This not only serves the capitalists by providing a vast supply of unemployed workers whose desperation for work shrinks wages to hitherto-unimaginable minimums; it also intensifies the hatred and suspicion that fuels anti-government sentiment ranging from the Anarchists to the Tea Party.  It is thus the key to understanding how so many Working Class folk are seduced into the economic suicide of supporting Right Wing candidates and parties: their anger and sense of betrayal by (capitalist) government leaves them no apparent alternative. In this context, education thus acquires a triple cloak of repugnance, firstly because of its prison pedagogy, secondly as a microcosm of capitalist governance, lastly as the traditional target of the venomous anti-intellectualism that has always been the prime effluent of Abrahamic fundamentalism.  Here is the root cause of why modern efforts to educate the USian Working Class invariably fail. Here too is the ultimate source of my own political despair, for it is one of the absolute truths of history that without education, revolution is not just impossible, it is also unthinkable.

But there remains one medium of communication (and therefore of education) that transcends all the negative associations the USian Ruling Class has maliciously affixed to education. This is music which – since its stimuli is as sensual as it is intellectual – is perfect for the dissemination of revolutionary or heretical ideas. Indeed it has already served as literatures of rebellion for populations as far removed from one another in time and geography as medieval peasants, antebellum slaves, modern USian minorities and indigenous peoples of the post-colonial Third World. Hence the relevance of the work by S.J. Tucker and her colleagues transcends its personal significance to me and becomes political in the broadest possible sense.

*** *** ***

A FEW DAYS after the surgery that saved my sight I was researching more of Faun's inspiring output and thinking what a tragedy it was my late friend and spiritual sister Helen Farias had not lived long enough to witness this example of the joyously revolutionary aesthetic and spiritual flowering that is taking place within – and in open defiance of – the electronic concentration camp the USian Empire is making of our entire planet.

Helen was the first person to read and comment on the earliest (1971) draft of “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer,” and it was Helen who paid the work what is probably the most significant compliment I will ever receive as a writer – “you have given me the vocabulary to describe what I have always known to be true but never had the words to express.” Eighteen years later she founded the women's spirituality journal Beltane Papers, worked herself to exhaustion advancing the scholarship that was legitimizing the resurrection of the Goddess and died of cancer on the autumnal equinox of 1994. By then, not only had “Dancer” been destroyed by fire, but the loss – 24 years of research notes, photography and text financed by my paychecks from print journalism and therefore accomplished mostly on weekends and during occasional periods of freelancing – had flung me into a clinical depression of such depth and duration it forced me onto welfare which, as all but the newest OAN readers know, branded me with the forever-inescapable odium of having been officially disabled. My formerly award-winning reportorial, photographic and editorial skills were thus rendered effectively worthless by the characteristic USian hatefulness toward anyone who is known to have been afflicted by mental illness. Even when such a condition is definitively temporary, as mine surely was – even though I was never institutionalized – such a diagnosis once officially rendered interacts with Moron Nation bigotry to produce more than enough venom to destroy one's career prospects forever. But despite the associated depths of despair I have never been able to abandon “Dancer's” core hypothesis: that no matter whether the Goddess is symbol or objective reality, it is only through her resurrection we will evolve – or perhaps restore – the sort of consciousness from which we can articulate and organize the politics we need to save our species from extinction. I was thinking about these matters, surfing the Internet and wishing I were necromancer enough to call back Helen to revel in the triumphant implications of Faun and the wild acclaim of its ever-growing audiences when the magic carpet of YouTube somehow bore me into S.J. Tucker's “realm of the sky.”  The accompanying video, one of the most evocatively powerful such pieces I have seen, is itself well worth watching. 

Though I am nearly 76 years old, my journalistic curiosity remains as intense as it was in my youth, and whenever I find myself happenstanced onto new ground, I am thus compelled to explore it. I was vaguely familiar with “Witches Rune,”  one of Tucker's earlier works, a verse from which I quoted to open Part 5 of “Dancer Resurrected,” an OAN essay  that is entirely too long and desperately needful of competent editing but after revision is sure to be a central part of a book I have tentatively titled “Encounters: a Modern Odyssey.” But I when I was researching and writing “Resurrected,” I was working with my usual intensity of focus and neglected to pursue Tucker's repertoire any further – obviously my loss, and an error for which I hereby apologize should she ever read these words. Now though I paid attention and explored her work and was soon rewarded with her variant of “Tam Lin,” a traditional ballad most likely borne of a remnant of what long long long ago in the age of the Goddess had been a lay of invocatory magick. It is a song for Hallowe'en, which in Celtic Paganism is the night the year dies, but the pre-patriarchal ancientness of its origins is suggested by its portrayal of the spirit of the year as female rather than male. Hence the lyrics seem to embody two liturgical purposes, first to mark the annual departure of the goddess of the Old Year, who in response to more recent expressions of Christian love [i.e. witch-burnings] has been disguised as the Queen of Faery; next to welcome the goddess of the New Year disguised as the shameless Janet pregnant by her chosen consort the Once and Future King, her pregnancy the metaphor for a rich harvest the following spring and summer. The earlier variants of “Tam Lin,” all of them collected during the past three centuries, each hinted at the underlying sexual connections, but Tucker's reconstruction implicitly recognizes the sacramental elements that define pagan sexuality. These she spells out in poetic detail (how else might Janet have gotten her “dirty knees”?), which elevates Tucker's “Tam Lin” to the most ritualistically appropriate variant I have yet encountered. It is also – very appropriately, I think – notably reminiscent of what traditional British balladry sounded like after a century in Appalachia (the archetypal example of which is the transformation of “burgundy wine” to “burglar's wine” in the murder-ballad “Willow Garden”). Tucker's revisions make me wonder – and yearn to find out – what she might do with two other surviving lays of sexual magick, “Jack Orion”  and “Willie's Lady,”  a more traditionally Scots variant of which is here. 

But for me the most intriguing element of Tucker's music is her merger of myth and mirth with the politics of resistance, a bonding exemplified by “Baba Yaga,” which repeats in story-form the humanitarian message the patriarchal lore-thieves stole from the Goddess many millennia ago: “as you do unto the also least of these, you likewise do unto me.” It also suggests song as the medium by which pagan steadfastness might yet, to the ultimate benefit of us all, be comfortably mated with Marxist/Leninist/Maoist determination. Which conjures up an image of a Peoples Court, the Red Banner adorning the wall behind the bench, the three judges briefly conferencing in whispers, then the senior judge ordering the defendant to stand for sentencing. “It is the finding of this court,” she says, “that you as a capitalist are guilty of innumerable crimes against the People. Accordingly, you are turned over to Baba Yaga, that she may eat you for her lunch.” Which recalls a graffito that began appearing on Pacific Northwest walls maybe 30 years ago: “Eat the Rich,” though nowhere did I see a corollary “Baba Yaga Lives.”

*** *** ***

WHEN WE EXAMINE the conceptual barriers that now seem to divide Marxists and Goddess-centered pagans into mutually exclusive camps, we see they are mostly derivatives of the same campaigns of Big Lies and disinformation that perpetuate Moron Nation itself.

For example, the notorious malevolence of Abrahamic religion toward Nature, women, minorities whether ethnic or sexual, sexuality itself, any forms of governance that might genuinely empower the 99 Percent, science and ultimately dialectic materialism, has left Marxists instinctively skeptical not just of Judaism, Christianity and Islam but of all religions and even of individual expressions of spirituality. Those who know little or nothing of Goddess-centered paganism thus find it difficult to accept it is in every way imaginable the diametrical opposite of the Abrahamic cults. Unlike Abrahamic religion, which curses the entire realm of physical being and dismisses life as an ordeal engineered by a divine sadist to determine one's fitness for an unlikely paradise of prayers, hymns and the rape of virgins, Goddess-centered paganism is grounded on the implicitly revolutionary premise life is a quest for knowledge and experience that includes every possible input. It thus emphatically embraces the entire spectrum of positive human experience, sensuality and sexuality included. It views us all as siblings in the family of Nature, regards femaleness as Nature's most complete living metaphor, embraces all the tools dialectic materialism has given us for knowing Nature and ourselves, restores to sexuality the ecstasy and freedom from guilt implicit in its original manifest sacredness and looks upon the Goddess as an earthly symbol of a truly humanitarian society. The goal of building a human society based on the core principle of Communism – from each according to ability, to each according to need – is thus already implicit in the concept of Earth as Mother. And the principle of giving voice to those who have been forcibly silenced by the ravages of capitalism – that is, of developing leadership cadres from those who have experienced the most acute forms of oppression firsthand – surely echos in the lyrics of “Baba Yaga”:

She said “I will be here when you're ready.
My fire will still burn when yours starts to go.”
She said “I have always been here,
I with my fearless feet in the snow”
She said “I'll be here just to watch you grow.”

Beyond “Baba Yaga” I found another Tucker song, “Rootless,” that in more ways than I can comfortably disclose seems to speak directly to me:

don't give up ride out be bold 
build the fire bright and strong
speak your truth and sing your song

Somehow, perhaps because despite my English surname my ancestry is 90-something percent Celt (and that seasoned with a trace of Mohawk), these lines remind me of what the Celtic warrior Calgacus said of an earlier plague of empire-builders: ubi sōlitūdinem faciunt pācem appellant – “they make a desert and they call it peace.” I think of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Fukushima, of Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon, but then I realize how Tacitus' story of the Brittani and their fight against Roman subjugation tells us our struggle against capitalism is but the newest form of the struggle against patriarchy and is therefore an old, old war indeed – an epic conflict in which our comrades include not just those of the past three centuries, but a roll-call of heroines and heroes dating at least to the Achaean sack of Knossos 3600 years ago. All at once this music of which I have been writing – Faun's and Tucker's – makes me ashamed of my despair. The lesson here is that revolution takes many forms, some not immediately discernible. But I cannot any longer doubt revolution is on its way. As Marshall McLuhan noted (though if memory serves, it was Carl Jung who said it first), art is often prophecy,  and Tucker's art, like that of Faun, is clearly preparation for a time in which capitalism no longer rules. If indeed there is some cosmic purpose for which my eyesight has been saved, surely it is helping foster that blessed future.

LB/6-13 February 2016

-30-

Looming Blindness and the Slow-Motion Genocide of Social-Service Cuts Make 2016 My Most MiserableYear

TO MY HORROR, I have learned the cataract surgery I had in late 2014 has failed. I am again going blind, this time from a post-operative condition called posterior capsule opacity – essentially the failure of a production-line surgeon to remove enough of the cataract cells to prevent them from growing back in a new inner-eye locale.

But now the slow-motion genocide of cuts to social services has left me without any means to pay the out-of-pocket cost of corrective surgery, which is $608 plus an additional sum in co-payments of approximately $200 – a total of $808.  

It might as well be $800,800.  Either sum is impossibly beyond my reach. 

Thus – barring a miracle – I will end my life a helpless, hopeless blind man, unless of course I am fortunate enough to die before declining vision forces me into the nightmare of assisted living in some miserably neglectful, piss-reeking nursing home.

In other words, 2016 – though it has hardly begun – has become the most miserable year of my entire life.

Before learning on 6 January of my encroaching blindness, I was already in extended shock at the magnitude of the cutbacks imposed on my 2016 income. It had been the worst yet of the now-inevitable Dismal Decembers – the annual political-becomes-personal nadir-of-reckoning in what is the cruelest month of all for U.S. lower income people. This year – a year in which the Big Lie Democrats claim to have “restored” social services – my monthly Medicare Extra Help stipend was cut from $22.90 to $4. My monthly food stamp allotment was slashed from $103 to $17. And, as noted in November, my telephone subsidy, approximately $17 per month, was abolished entirely.

In 2016, a year in which we seniors and disabled people are notoriously denied a Social Security cost-of-living increase – my barely livable monthly income of $1263 has been chopped by at least $121.90 – “at least” because I can only estimate the impact of an immediate 16 percent increase in Medicare Part D prescription drug co-payments and a pending 33.3 percent increase in local transit fares.

(Yes, I realize $121.90 is mere pocket change for a sneering One Percenter or any of the super-fortunate USian suck-asses whose abject obedience to capitalist tyranny enables them to cling to living-wage jobs. But for someone on a fixed income of scarcely more than $15,000 per year, the loss of $121.90 per month is total, irremediable ruin. What it does to me is eliminate every last penny of my discretionary income – this in a year in which I already [before the doctors discovered my impending blindness] – needed denture adjustment [approximately $100] and three pairs of new shoes [another $150 at least] – money I no longer have no matter the state of my eyesight.)

But the point here is not the hopelessness of my own circumstances – the fact I too like so many others in this ever-more-openly malignant nation must now choose carefully whether to spend my meager income on shelter, food, medicine or clothing – all of which civilized nations regard as human rights. Nor is it the fact my encroaching blindness makes all those choices ultimately meaningless.

The point is the documents I quoted here on 25 November 2015 only hint at the savage magnitude of the social-service cuts inflicted by the Republicans and their Democrat collaborators in the Washington State Legislature – cuts signed into law without so much as a whisper of protest by Democrat Gov. Jay Inslee.

As previously reported, one of the documents I cited was a slickly art-directed, expensively printed Democratic Party mailer boastfully claiming its legislators had “restored” social services. The other was a grimly unsigned notice from the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services announcing the state would no longer subsidize telephone service for lower-income people. Together, the two documents clearly demonstrate the ugly truth the Democrats are (again) operating as the party of the Big Lie.

Since then, it has (again) become obvious the Democrats are – perhaps even more than the Republicans – the enablers of austerity, a clever euphemism for slow-motion genocide: the methodical extermination of those of us who, whether because of age or disability, are no longer exploitable for capitalist profit. For now our already-bloodied noses are rubbed in the fact the legislators – the bought-and-paid-for strumpets of the One Percent who are always trying to bullshit us into believing U.S. “democracy” is anything but cruel deception – also slashed Medicare premium subsidies and hacked away still more dollars from food-stamp allowances.

But an apparent gag order – unprecedented in my years of covering state and local politics – has made it thus far impossible to determine the actual magnitude of the cuts. The Democrat legislators appear to have adopted a policy of ignoring any constituent who dares complain about the cuts, even those who send letters. Normally vocal advocacy groups – organizations necessarily aligned with the Democratic Party and therefore undoubtedly silenced by the Democrats' pre-election bullying – have yet to utter a single word of protest. Welfare bureaucrats, when pressed for information, reluctantly mutter “the legislature did it” but refuse to disclose further details.

All I want to know is who to blame – what perpetrators to name in public print. But even my own sources – the remnants of a handful of insiders whose veracity and reliability were established by years of providing accurate information – are refusing to answer my questions about the cuts. I am not an accountant, and without expert assistance, the closed-door secrecy of the budget process and the opacity of the budget itself nullifies my investigative reporting skills. As always, the operant principle of capitalist governance is “fuck the 99 Percent.”

Meanwhile, the local “mainstream media” – that is, the local branches of the plutocracy's de facto ministry of propaganda – continue to ignore the story, which any even halfway competent reporter of my generation would have pounced on. This in turn strongly suggests the media silence about the cutbacks is deliberate – truth-suppression in obedience to the plutocratic cabal that owns all U.S. major media and all Democrat and Republican politicians as well. Such is what passes for “journalism” here in the de facto Fourth Reich – where our capitalist overlords have by their diabolical cunning given themselves not only a Josef Goebbels-type propaganda apparatus but one that earns them obscene profits by its lies and disinformation. 

Not that I'm surprised. What is being employed to hide these newest social-service cuts is merely the logical extension of the Big Lie tactic the Democrats first employed in President Obama's 2008 presidential campaign, most notably in the slogan “change we can believe in” – which “change” turned out to be Obama the Orator's shape-shift into Barack the Betrayer. 

Now, just as the Betrayer tried to cover up his 2014 food-stamp cuts with a truly Orwellian lie – claiming the cuts “make sure America's children don't go hungry” – so are his state-level minions doing likewise.
 
The strategic advantage in this sort of Big Lie is found in the fact the Moron Nation electorate accepts it without question. This is partly due to conditioned ignorance, partly due to the ever-more-obnoxious, ever-more-implicitly reactionary cult of “positive thinking” by which the white USian 99 percenters who still have jobs deliberately blind themselves to what is going on around them. Thus they are psychologically distanced from capitalism's socioeconomic and political atrocities in exactly the same way the citizens of Nazi Germany were shielded from the more obvious atrocities of their own nation. Thus too when we the victims complain or protest, we are confronted with hostile disbelief and denounced as welfare queens or “greedy geezers.” 

Fortunately there are still a few websites, among them Reader Supported News, that remain willing to report just how truly wretched life in the USian homeland has become, not just for elderly and disabled people, but especially for women, particularly women of color, whose likelihood of suffering death in childbirth is nearly four times that of white women.

Because I am an old man, my time is obviously ending, and though it surely hurts when the capitalists and their factotum bureaucrats and politicians kick me in the balls, my pain has little affect on what is to come. But when you kill the mothers, you murder the very source of life. And this nation's deliberately deadly, methodically sustained misogyny exemplifies more vividly than any of capitalism's other atrocities its unconscionable threat to our species' survival.

LB/11 January 2016

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More Reflections on Faun and Revolutionary Music

(The following is a expansion of my recent comments about Faun,  the outspokenly Pagan German musical troupe that has become part of Europe's post-Christian avant-garde Left and one of its primary cultural magnets. Like today's commentary, this too was birthed by my correspondence with the writer Cate Montana, who has become one of my closest friends.)

***

I WAS ZENNING OUT, recovering from the monthly madness of the senior-citizen newsletter I edit and produce, when I decided to play some more of Faun's work including “Blaue Stunde,” a piece to which I had not really listened before.

Then playing it while actually paying attention,  I discovered several of those poetically indicative chills in the musical accompaniment and instantly became enough curious about the song to run down a translation of its lyrics. 

What I discovered was rather mind-blowing. From the lyrics of “Blaue Stunde” I would say whomever wrote them actually encountered the Goddess, much as I did in the water meadow at Wickersham on 15 August 1970...

I had walked alone and lonely into the Innis Creek water meadow, a vast unkempt field beyond the buildings and gardens of the Wickersham, Washington commune where I was then staying, and now I stood amidst Nature's shadowy harbingers of Autumn: blown thistles, bright clumps of pearly everlasting, iridescent cobwebs bejeweled with dew. The communards were meeting in their main building but were ensnared in psychodrama intensified by ideological disputes, and I had left in bitterness and disgust. Now in search of inner peace I sprawled on the ground and gazed at the zenith-high improbably brilliant full moon as if it were some mandala of last resort. Then to my astonishment there was a kind of psychic jolt, intangible yet seismic in its intensity, as if some unseen door had burst open, and all in the same breathtaking instant the moon spiraled into a rainbow that expanded to fill the entire sky, contracted to a vortex of spinning colors, plunged tornado-like to earth and shaped a magnificently ageless woman pale and translucent as mist yet undeniably real. She was majestically naked but loosely wrapped in the lunar blonde infinity of her own hair; she smiled, reached out her hands, touched me, perhaps even kissed my brow, then like some impossibly magical dancer swirled her endless mane into rainbow hues that swept her aloft, dissolving herself back into revolving bands of color that expanded once more from horizon to horizon and shrank into the moon again – a millisecond's vision, a mere glimpse so brief and so ephemeral I could scarcely believe I had seen it and yet so vivid it could not be denied.  But now as if nothing at all had occurred there was only the commonplace moon again, the midnight sky and its diamond constellations, the fragrant crush of wild chamomile beneath my head, the vast nocturnal stillness of Pacific Northwest woods so unlike the firefly-bright insect-rowdiness of the fields and forests in which I'd spent the summers of my boyhood and adolescence.  When the night's chill finally urged me to my feet, I remember there were faint tendrils of fog rising from the creek, and for a moment, just once, it seemed I heard the clear cold water chuckle.

….much as Apuleius (124-170 CE) encountered her at sea (for which see the account beginning on page 70 of The White Goddess [Farrar, Straus and Giroux edition: 1982]), much as Graves himself obviously encountered her but – lest he be declared insane – never dared acknowledge it save in his poetry: “Her sea-blue eyes were wild/ But nothing promised that is not performed.”

Whether such encounters are objectively real or merely an especially intricate manifestation of some carefully unacknowledged insanity spawned by our species' overwhelming terror of mortality – and I must confess I myself alternate between precisely those antitheticals – one does not write such poetically accurate description from belief or theory alone: again my own statement that one cannot be truly Pagan unless one has spent enough time in the back country to have seen the shadows dance. Indeed  as I wrote the preceding sentence it came to me – and with that bright undeniable certainty of an old-time flash-bulb going off – here is the entire story of my life: seeing the shadows dance sufficient times to learn not to flinch, to embrace the experience as a demonstration of love, and now that I am too old and worn down by age and poverty to retreat again to the wilderness and once more hide there from the Lords of Chaos who have usurped that which rightfully belongs to Our Lady, to at last bear witness to what half the time I know to be unequivocally true. Quoth Graves: “none greater in the universe than the Triple Goddess.”

Which, by the way, is why I bristle at the Xtians even when, as now, they occasionally acknowledge the relevance of ritual dance and thereby (unwittingly) underscore the irremediable contradiction between the dialectically inertial momentum of matter that is the essence of life versus the infinite hatred of sensuality and indeed of the entire physical realm that is implicit in the definitively misogynistic, definitively ecocidal dogma at the core of Judaism, Christianity and Islam alike.

But perhaps I should not bristle quite so much. Ritual dance has been methodically denied the followers of the downpresser Abrahamic creeds since the Deuteronomic (patriarchal) "reforms" of approximately 600 BCE,  and the fact dance is now (begrudgingly) admitted to some Xtian ritual cannot be anything other than yet another example of how, when the Goddess is barred from the front door, she inevitably creeps in the back door – a truism that is of course dismissed as “an old wives' tale” – never mind that is precisely what she did via the folk-music renaissance of the 1950s – in which context note the noun "ballad" as a  derivative of the same root (Latin as I remember) that gave us "ballet." In other words, a ballad was once by definition  the musical and poetic accompaniment of a dance, a ritual dance, the  connection remaining so powerful that in some of the original folk-renaissance renderings of balladry (such as Martin Carthy's variant of “Willie's Lady”), the music is so vivid my mind's eye can see the turns of dance – the very sort of vision so emphatically underscored by Faun, obviously knowingly as I believe they are all classically trained musicians and being European are of course classically educated as well.

(How ironic one of our main hopes for a sustainable world comes from what was only recently the most warlike nation on this battered planet.)

Returning to “Blaue Stunde,” as an individual piece of music it stands in stunning contrast to the present-day music associated with U.S. expressions of the resurrection of the Goddess. What was performed nearly 50 years ago by the (probably murdered) Tim Buckley was wrenchingly powerful – “if you tell me of all the pain you've had/ I'll never smile again,” a line from “Phantasmagoria in Two” (a modern variant of the classic dialogue between poet and Muse), probably has no equal even in antiquity – but it has no  counterpart in today's U.S. Paganism, which has become like the USian people themselves, oppressively submissive. A good example is Loreena McKennitt's work, which was originally unapologetically Pagan, but which she has since – no doubt under severe external pressure – diligently repositioned as New-Age-ecumenical instead. Indeed – and despite the sometimes-bold content of its lyrics – in its new, self-consciously de-Paganized context, it often comes off more as lamentation than celebration or defiance. (And as I know all too well from my various odysseys into the organized versions of U.S. Goddess-centered Paganism, the decidedly serf-like passivity of its participants [and therefore of much of its present-day music] goes hand-in-hand with its definitively oppressed and obnoxiously oppressive we-are-all-victims pacifism. The result is a vehement but implicitly frightened [maybe-if-we-aren't-militant-they-won't-kill-us] rejection of politics in any form – which is of course the source of the real U.S. Left's unmitigated scorn of Paganism as “no different from many other religion in being just another opiate to facilitate the oppression of the masses” [the quote is from a Marxian comrade] – and which therefore provides us with a classic example, as valid as the induced racism and sexism that forever fragments the U.S. Working Class,  of “divide et impera” in action.)

It is an aside, albeit a pointedly relevant one, to note the curious anachronism within the Buckley video linked above. The song was recorded in 1967, while the video – obviously made by someone who recognized the poetic vision that was the wellspring of Buckley's best work – was made in 2011. Though he has been dead since 1975, and though the relatively free world of the '70s was almost indescribably different from the slave-world of today, in the parlance of hipster poets and musicians, “Tim Buckley Lives.” Indeed there may be no greater praise the human mind can formulate.

That said, “Blaue Stunde” is truly a horse of a different sort (if you will pardon the spontaneous emergence of a stream-of-subconscious reference to the Celtic/Scythian Goddess Epona), with what kind of horse she is revealed by the accompany drumming. “Blaue Stunde” is ritual dance, yes, but it has none of the implicit submissiveness that has come to define so much U.S. paganism, which given the omnipresence of the secret police (and precisely as suggested by the semiotic evidence I cited above), has probably been infiltrated and co-opted much as Women's Liberation was infiltrated and co-opted – so that the depth of one's commitment is now defined by only by one's material success. As the mainstream brand of U.S. feminism is surely Ayn Rand feminism, so it seems there is also a mainstream Ayn Rand Paganism. Such is the Pavlovian power of capitalism, specifically the mind-mangling might of Madison Avenue.

What first caught my attention about “Blaue Stunde” – what prompted me to seek out the lyrics (and what so surprised me about their content) – was obvious militance of the music. Focusing more closely, I realized it was the drumwork, which, when I began actually hearing it, stood my hair on end with that wondrous chill of recognition. Note the four-beat drum-flourish at the end of certain lines in the lyrics:

“And the pale light of dawn outlined
Her head adorned by the morning dew” (drum flourish).

“Her fairy-like limbs were white as the moon
Her hair was like made of gold” (drum flourish).

Note also the drum riffs elsewhere in the piece.

What I realized, listening so intently, is “Blaue Stunde,” despite its poignant beauty, is most assuredly not the music of submission. It is instead the music of active resistance. Indeed – though I do not know how I knew it – I suddenly recognized the drums as  war drums, the sort of tribal ritual that is a prelude to a battle and the sort of music that accompanies you as you advance across open ground against a vastly superior enemy, you assuming you will not live to see the next moonrise or maybe even the next minute but not really giving a damn because that is the desperation to which you have been driven by the foe's depredations and yet by some miracle not only you yourself survive but so do most of your comrades and in the end you have won the day and won the future – perhaps as if Boudicca and all she symbolized had triumphed on that fateful morning in the midlands of Albion somewhere north of the still smoldering ruins of Londinium or if Wounded Knee had become the beginning of a victorious rising rather than the end of First Nations resistance. Whatever, I glimpsed it clearly for a moment, by the time-reference provided by its weaponry sometime in the pre-atomic past or more likely in the post-apocalyptic future...

(“And the pale light of dawn outlined
Her head adorned by the morning dew”)

I am as you know given to reject such mind's-eye visions unless I am able to rationalize them at least to the extent of recognizing their real-time sources, and of course I have since tried to do that with “Blaue Stunde” and have succeeded to the extent of recognizing the longer riffs with the congas echoing as if through slumlord streets, the rhythm identical to what one so often heard on the Lower East Side during the weeks after the Tompkins Park (Police) Riot of 1967, as an organization called Jade Companions of the Flower Dance briefly united Hippies and Hispanics in common resistance to the invading cops and thrill-seeking suburban phonies. Verily, if I may be allowed to paraphrase Dylan, “red lights flashing in the hot Manhattan night,” complete with drums echoing ominously 24/7. 

Faun's eclectic combination of drums and pipes in “Blaue Stunde” also reminded me of an incident during one of the anti-Vietnam War protest marches when maybe 500 or 1000 Caucasian thugs had bottled up the entire 500,000-person demonstration in Central Park and kept us there until the members of the Columbia University Pipe Band edged their way to the front of the crowd, formed themselves into what a half-century earlier would have been a line of battle and, skirling their pipes and drumming a rhythm similar to (or maybe even identical to) that of "Blaue Stunde," led us out of the park and onto Fifth Avenue. The thugs, some of whom had baseball bats or chains and who were brazenly countenanced by the cops (as was commonplace in those days), fled in obvious fear as soon as the pipers began leading the advance.

But what it was about the punctuational drum flourishes in “Blaue Stunde” that first caught my attention remains undefined, never mind the undeniable recognition implicit in the initial chill. Though now as I think of it I believe I remember reading or hearing somewhere – most likely both as the reality of music remains beyond the descriptive ability of linear language – such drum-emphasis was, along with stringed instruments and pipes, characteristic of ancient epic poetry.

As to the use of genuine love poetry as inspiration to resistance, the only people I know of in the modern age to have done so are Celts...and of course Russians, in which context note “Beriozka” (Birch Tree), a favorite of the Red Army in World War II and – because birch is used in making musical instruments – an invocation of Yulya,  one of the many Slavonic names for the Goddess – hence the chorus: variations on the theme of “Yulee, Yulee lovely birch tree.” 
 
It was so beloved by the Red Army, it was recorded by the Red Army Chorus and Dance Troupe.  and just for retro-kicks, here it is, static and all, as I heard it via the 78-rpm music of my earliest childhood.  Then of course there is how it is formally danced, in this instance preceded  by some of the most stunningly hypnotic choreography I have yet seen:   With this sort of aesthetic quality commonplace elsewhere, no wonder the rest of the  world damns us as “nyekulturniy.”

Not really relevant to this essay (which began as the sort free-association, semi-stream-of-consciousness thing Cate so often inspires whenever she and I talk or exchange emails) – or maybe relevant in some way I don't yet see – is the Faun piece that, were I a videographer, I would use – as I stated in an OAN essay in 2012 – as the accompaniment to that incredible footage of the horse rescue in Holland c. 2005.

Quoth Buffy Sainte-Marie many years ago, when only allegedly nutso people like myself (and unfortunately a few spooks) had any idea what obtained: “Goddess is alive/Magic is afoot”

LB/24 November – 2 December 2015

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