Photographic illustration by Loren Bliss ©1968, 1974, 2012 -- One of those sudden mysterious creative impulses prompted me during a night of darkroom work in 1968 to contemplatively sandwich a '67 negative of Hare Krishna dancers with a '67 neg of anti-Vietnam-War protestors; I impulsively added the moon with my photo-editor's punch in '74 while contemplating whether to print it for a Seattle gallery show, as I then did. It survived the '83 arson only because it was among the mounted prints with me in my portfolio case. Today I am astounded by how relevant these images remain. For more of my photographs, lllustrations and collages, go to https://www.dispatchesfromdystopia.net/ .
*****
(Author's Note: because this is such a long post -- 8578 words -- I respectfully suggest
separate reading and contemplation periods for each of the eight passages
set off by the five-asterisk dashes [*****] as complete essays.)
*****
IRONICALLY, IT'S THE (Kapitalismus-uber-alles) Business Administration Department at (private) Duke University that has exposed our Masters' academese-obscured, price-censored, banner-headline-caliber abstract of horrifying (real) news soon downsized to a crisis-minimizing fourth paragraph predictably buried by the Republican Fifth Column at Politco.com,which -- despite obvious attempts by the authors of each text to discourage perusal by Working-Class1 readers -- proves beyond question how and why a tiny cult of deliberately chaos-fostering fake-news perpe-traitors are intentionally destroying the already dis-United States.
It
also proves our Masters' choice of ecogenocidal psychopaths -- the
potentially suicidal snot-bombers our Masters' vassals most likely
sought in focus-groups and then probably recruited and paid to propagate
with their Big Lies the deceitfully named "Neoliberalism" (sic) that euphemistically hides its mutated Nazism as "Neoliberalism" (again sic't) (each sarcastically quotation-marked sic as an entree to exposing how "Neoliberalism" (sic't once more) is now protected by a cloak of Goebbels-caliber disinformation) to conceal our Masters' thorough Nazification of "Neoliberalism" (sic)
-- originally by the secret renewal and export of the apocalyptic
ideologies of Original German Nazism and by OGN's ChristoNazi, NeoNazi
and Neofascist pseudo-mutations, and thus sic't one last time in this
essay.
My
point is, "Neoliberalism" is neither new or liberal; it is every bit as
much deception -- and therefore yet another proof of Ruling Class
malevolence -- as "change we can believe in."
Meanwhile let us never forget Neoliberalism's
sources include Ayn Rand's wretchedly written fictional popularizations
of the Nazi ethos, all critically damned as literary garbage that would
never have been published save for Plutocratic intervention and is now
all-too-often-required reading in what are therefore falsely described
as "literature" classes. These often-mandatory Ayn Rand studies
invariably seduce Moronic-Majority types to embrace a Nazism they are
thus often unable to recognize as such.
As
I describe in a subsequent essay below, it is just such ignorance that
enabled someone I had presumed to be friend for nearly 40 years to send
me a deluge of pro-Nazi links (fake news included), and when I
criticized the choices in a return email, the response was first a long
silence followed by a denunciation
of me in print as an enemy, the only mercy thus shown being the
omission of my name, perhaps with the knowledge its publication might
combine with the fact I am a known anti-Nazi, a position that today is
becoming as dangerous as it was to have been an advocate of civil
rights in the Jim Crow South, which I also was.
Too bad most of us have forgotten that among the parents and grandparents of today's Nazis were the murderers of 41 Blacks and civil-rights advocates,
their courageous but fatal dedication to the quest for freedom now
reduced by the moral imbecility of the present to little more than --
what? A struggle for nothing? Given what this nation has become, who can
doubt the final triumph of their enemies? Capturing the government so
all but maybe three solidly "Democratic" (sic) far-west states (with
enough combined economic power to easily support themselves), and the
much smaller (and therefore less economically able) eastern states, our
Masters have already made of most of the national interior a potential
New Confederacy, the ad hoc militias of which no doubt await our
Masters' marching orders with the same insane eagerness that defined the
Southron traitors of 1861.
The
diametrical opposite of yesteryear's well-armed abolitionists, too many
of us who oppose these traitors are cravenly disarming themselves --
an apocalyptic expression, I fear, of the cowardice that makes a soldier
fling away his rifle and surrender to the enemy in hope of mercy that
ends when the victorious soldier then kills the surrenderer,
instantaneously by shooting if there's not an ammunition shortage; by
much more grotesque and agonizing methods if ammo is in short supply.
In any case it's a battlefield occurrence far more common then a
lifelong diet of USian war propaganda will ever allow us to believe. (To
my knowledge Hollywood has never made -- nor ever will make -- a
genuine anti-war film, especially of the sort produced by the Soviet
Union.) But that's an aside, another of our paths for future
exploration. The critical point here is extent to which, thanks
to the another Fifth Column service provided our Masters by the
"Democratic" (sic) Party's anti-gunowner movement, the populations in
those states that are mostly likely to be victimized by Nazi aggression
are increasingly disarmed. Thus they are literally reduced to the
mandatory pacifism and compulsory victimhood that defines slaves. Which
is precisely how the Democrats are busily ensuring how once fuse of
civil war is lit, any anti-Nazi stronghold is doomed, making the
outcome of any future struggle to preserve the coastal states from Nazi
conquest pathetically obvious.
Thus
today the utter futility of the Civil Rights Movement and the ultimate
sacrifices made by its 41 martyrs is accepted as proven fact; indeed
today's Nazis hail the murders as examples of the proper response when
any member of the üntermenschen demands recognition of rights
the Supreme Court is busily nullifying, obviously intent on terminating
every civil protection we the people have ever managed to obtain. In
some instances the Nazis have actually used CRM and its subsequent
undoing as proof of the rightness of white supremacy; they claim the
Black quest for equality itself proved the Ku Klux Klaim that while
Blacks are biologically human, their brains have never evolved beyond
those of the apes by which they were ancestored. That such inferiors
would dare rise up, say the Nazis, merely proves they were fools; the
subsequent undoing of their foolishness, now 100 percent successful, is
thus manipulated to further confirm their creed of white supremacy.
Having
been a small but sometimes influential part of CRM -- the latter
because I managed to remain a member of the working press during most of
my remaining time in Tennessee -- the Klan made at least four
attempts on my life -- possibly six, if I count two attempted vehicular
assaults while traveling the era's two-lane blacktop highways, though
these might only have been early explosions of road rage prompted by the
obvious superiority of the machines that facilitated my escape, the
Porsche whose emergency brake would later save my life, and a friend's
Triumph TR-4 I was driving as practice for post-Porsche participation in
a mountain-road rally.
In retrospect, and from an increasingly physically disabled old age, my escapes from
martyrdom tend to seem ever-more-miraculous. In reality they were the
due to a combination of factors, paramount among them the defensive
prowess of a fine German shepherd, later poisoned in retaliation, and
the killer-discouragement inherent in my own already well-known skill
with firearms. While
I was and remain a firm believer in political nonviolence, I have also
always believed that when you are attacked as a lone individual,
especially at home or while out-and-about as when grocery shopping, you
should defend yourself with whatever force is necessary to remain among
the living.
Knowing
CRM as I do, I am ever-more-convinced it was the last genuinely
enlightened mass movement the United States will ever produce. Its
internal factionalism -- ideological differences ranging from
gradualism to various intensities of belief in non-violent protest --
was always obvious during strategic and tactical discussions. But, by
mutual consent, it was never allowed to overwhelm the intensity of our
belief in our collective right -- "Black and White Together" was the
era's slogan -- to fulfill the Constitution's supposed intent by
achieving for Blacks and other peoples of color the same degree of
freedom allowed us whites. For whatever reason, we have since shed what I
now must suppose was merely a veneer of civilization -- the mutual
tolerance that actually, for a brief period starting in maybe 1932 and
undoubtedly ended forever in Dallas on 22 November 1963, enabled us to
function as a unified modern society.
However,
given how, thanks to my British/Canadian heritage, I knew from boyhood
the so-called "American Revolution" was at its heart a reaction to the
British judiciary's 1772 ruling that Blacks are fully human, the fact we
as a nation seemed to be moving ever closer to to fulfillment of the
goals of the few abolitionists who were among the Founders always felt,
to me, like too much of a miracle to prevail. As indeed it proved to
be, overthrown not by invasion, but by the most in-depth,
all-encompassing, ultimately omnipotent program of subversion ever
undertaken by any known human agency.
How
did it win? It adjudged greed to be the only truly common human
denominator, targeted its subversion accordingly and has been
incessantly victorious ever since. Behind this I sense (but surely
cannot prove) the same invisible force that reached out to me in 1983 to
validate my life's work with arson at the exact moment I was meeting
with the well-connected freelance editor who had pledged to bring its
most important project to publication That all such hopes have since
been slain by our Masters -- that the deaths of the movement's martyrs
were now obviously all in vain -- pains me to such an extent it indeed
makes my physical survival seem all the more miraculous. Perhaps, as
even many avowed secularists are coming to believe, ours' truly is an
accursed species.
Returning
to present-day events, let us not allow our daily dosage of horrors
real and fake to distract us from how the fake-news onslaught by
ecogenocidal psycopathic liars includes doing whatever our Masters
prescribe to
further -- generally by concealment -- the terminally devolutionary
terraforming of our earthly Motherland. Among the ever-more-obvious
long-range purposes of the ongoing Fake News Onslaught is generating
sufficient quantities of what we might term "crisis fog" -- i.e., the
sense of bewildered hopelessness produced when self and community are
repeatedly trashed by storms and evictions and other disasters even as
the U.S. response to the pandemic makes it clear our Masters have
unquestionably weaponized the virus to rid themselves of us "surplus
workers."
Add in the ongoing threat of world war; the anxiety produced by looming Nazi victory and radically intensified by the probability the Nazis have already conquered the dis-United States; growing fears of runaway inflation,
and of course Covid, which the permanently Nazified SCOTUS has
weaponized into a sure nation-killer, which means the death rate will
continue to soar accordingly. It's no surprise national anxiety is soaring.
As the mainstream media propaganda machine is showing its pro-Nazi bias by not telling us, Biden the Beguiler could quickly end inflation fears by re-creating the Office of Price Administration,
the agency that kept Capitalism's top-hatted, silk-suited closet-Nazi
predators from destroying the nation with their greed c. 1941-1947).
OPA was created by executive order, which means Biden could do it again,
which in turn means his refusal to do so is an excellent indication of
the strength of the financial tethers by which our Masters have reduced
all oval-office occupants to naught but obedient puppets. A new OPA to
ameliorate the ever-more-apocalyptic spasms of our Masters greed? Not a
chance; I think it safe to assume there is not a single professional
politician anywhere in the United States who has not been enslaved by
our Masters' bribery since the Supreme Court knowingly destroyed the
nation with its Citizens United decision in 2010 -- about which more in a
moment.
For
now suffice it to say the court's traitorous redefinition of dollars as
words and thus due the same constitutional protection made it legal for
the plutocrats to financially enslave every politician in the land. As a
result we now live under a de facto dictatorship infinitely
more cunning and technologically powerful than any of its human
predecessors -- a realm in which SCOTUS is now removing all the
remaining obstacles to our Masters' final achievement of their fathers'
and grandfathers' traitorous dreams of a Nazi United States, Hitler's
ever-more-obviously anointed successor-nation fulfilling der Führer's of a thoroughly Nazi world.
One
of the many indexes to our Masters' (absolute) power is the extent to
which they're using the court's atrocities to distract us from our
species' deadliest most pressing crisis ever. Our Masters have generated
a crisis fog -- real and fake news included -- so thick it seems to
have cloaked terminal climate change to invisibility. But in truth we
have made it invisible for the same reason the anti-war movement
is not even a shadow of its former self: war is another of the threats
about which about which we are convinced we can do nothing whatsoever.
And it is also surely true no anti-war movement in the post-JFK U.S. has
ever done more than spawn a flurry of news reports that subsequent
events proved were nothing more than introductions to obituaries, as at
Kent State University and Jackson State College; and if we choose to
close-focus this matter, let us start with Karen Silkwood, then expand our vision into all the other murders
of obviously heroic individuals and celebrities and then of folks who
were unfortunate enough to have been somewhere at the wrong time, all
these deaths linked by political undertones.
Obviously
a long-ago lover spoke an ultimate truth as we watched Jack Ruby murder
Lee Harvey Oswald; we were eating room-service breakfast and watching
CBS News: "My god, we live in a banana republic," she said, her
olive-green eyes flooding with tears. To which, 59 years later, I can
only add, "You were right; and now Donald Trump intends to be top
banana." Which awakens my investigative-reporter's mind just enough to
make me wonder if maybe his seeming unstop-ability is ultimately just
the result of knowing where more bodies are buried. Such is life -- and
death -- in a plutocracy ruled by an invisible cabal of zillionaire
moral imbeciles.
Meanwhile
-- thanks to the combination of crisis-fog and the daily unfolding of
additional horrors both real and faked -- our ultra-misogynistic Masters
continue unchecked their ecogenocidal aggression against our Mother
Earth, seemingly intent on reducing her back to the bug-ruled planet into which she properly began evolving in the Ordovican,
a mere 480 million years ago. This is accomplished by any number of
policies, court-edicts, toxins and diseases -- among the vectors the
same tiny let's-inflict-globally-irreversible-chaos cult of (mostly) ChristoNazis and NeoNazis, the most obviously hateful of the anti-mask/anti-vax agitators.
Now
perhaps it will also dawn on us the irremediably Nazified U.S. Supreme
Court obviously shares the nation-destroying intent of the fake-news
mongers. The court is, now and therefore probably forever, reduced to
yet another of our Masters' most reliable puppets. It is ruled is by a
sextet of ecogenocidal theocrats, a trio of whom began our Masters'
Citizen United's SCOTUS-approved funding of the federal union's destruction.
The fact of the court's lifetime appointments ensure its one remaining
function is to legitimize whatever our Masters want done to complete
the ChristoNazification of the entire nation.
The presence of solid pockets of continued anti-Nazi, anti-theocratic resistance in some of the coastal states -- see maps here and here -- is a threat our Masters obviously intend to suppress by more typical Nazi methods, for vivid previews of which go here and here.
Warning: both these films have scenes of the mass murders by which the
German Nazis proudly defined their rights as world-ruling übermenschen.
Nevertheless I urge you to view them precisely because they show us
what is sure to happen here in the dis-United States once our Masters'
SCOTUS vassals have given them enough mechanism of control, the
extermination of opponents becomes no more difficult than ordering a
servant to take up a swatter and kill the houseflies that, thanks to
terminal climate change, are descending on us in ever increasing
numbers. (Note that in the polio era, the housefly was considered the deadliest disease-vector on the planet.) That servant is in all probability someone who recognizes such servitude as a modern form of enslavement but
also recognizes our Masters' omnipotence and thus knows or at least
senses our species has been reduced to such an oppressed state, there
is no longer any nation in the world committed to slavery's overthrow; resistance truly is futile.
Meanwhile
our Masters have knowingly dosed our obviously disintegrating nation's
NeoConfederate rabble with deadly ChristoNazi lies and paranoia,
much of it vectored by the fake-news snot-bombers. The Moronic
Majority's impassioned belief in these falsifications has grown so
imperative, SCOTUS is now making law of them. Hence their relentless
edicts of anti-humanitarian subversion include an allegedly
"Constitutional" foundation for an
utterly terrifying expansion of the anti-vax/anti-mask suicidal
snot-bombers' cult's alleged "right" to exterminate the entire global
population by what is now undeniably our Masters' biological warfare
weapon.
In other words, SCOTUS has unleashed de facto lynch mobs
of murderously unmasked and suicidally un-vaccinated snot-bombers to
infect us with the virus that has already proven itself the doomsday
bug for at least 18 million dead women, men and children
-- our Nazi-controlled government's most radical escalation yet of the
deadly snot-bomber onslaught by which Covid's homicidal vectors have
repeatedly attacked us since the pandemic got here in late 2019.
*****
BUT IS THE U.S. truly the world's deadliest failed state? Here are more links to help you decide for yourself:
The proto-Nazi exterminators of the North American First Nations literally built the United States on a foundation of rotting corpses -- the murdered bodies of at least
95 million native women, children and men -- as far as anybody knows,
the deadliest holocaust in the 200,000-plus years of our species'
existence. Nor has anything since ever quelled our national blood-lust:
by 2007, the Empire's post-World-War-II body-count was already approaching 30 million.
In
2010, SCOTUS issued the Citizens United edict, about which -- inspired
in large measure by the MSNBC-broadcast original of the above-linked
Keith Olbermann video -- I wrote of the court's decree with properly prophetic harshness,
the accuracy of my suppositions since fully confirmed, in small part
by how maybe five years later the newly corporatized Typepad maliciously
deleted this post from its 2010 archives. The same fate also
disappeared another of my more controversial 2010 Typepad posts that again would have been forever lost but for its preservation by the Internet. Each
piece was censored from my 2010 archive by the same plutocratic
takeover that destroyed a mostly Left-leaning blogger-nest that made
national news with its journalist-protecting
Typepad "Bailout" in 2008 and '09. For whatever unknown reasons --
most assuredly not design considerations -- its new, avowedly Capitalist
owners also reformatted the outlet’s type schedule, thus turning these
two measured and visually proofed one-line headlines into a
layout-besmirching two lines, with (as you will see via the links) the
second line an obtrusively dangling single word – a visually distracting
“widow,” as they were pejoratively (and correctly) labeled by
yesteryear’s molten-alloy typographers.
In 2013, former State Department official William Blum declared our bogus "democracy" America's Deadliest Export. In 2017, we learned "how US imperialism continues to kill the people and planet."
On 5 September 2019 -- with the start of the pandemic disaster still at least three months in the future -- Newsweek ranked the U.S. as "Among Worst Countries in the World to Live In."
Come April 2020, Covid's skyrocketing body-count was not only proving to the world the deadly magnitude of our national failure,
but doing so amidst a rising fog of above-confirmed suspicion our
Masters were weaponizing the virus as part of their (final) solution to
what they see as the only (real) threat to 21st Century Capitalism: a
growing surplus of laborers -- that is, way too many Working Class
children growing into way too many Working Class women and men making
way too many more Working Class babies. Nor is such Ruling Class cruelty
unprecedented; think not just of the obviously permanent termination
of the child tax credit and the ongoing destruction of the socioeconomic
safety net in general; reflect also on the fate of slaves deemed surplus or otherwise unwanted
during the trans-Atlantic passage from Africa. Thus, at least to the
observant, do our modern Neoliberal (Neonazi) overlords reveal their
slave-trader lineage, ideological and often genealogical as well.
Now, in 2022, the fact our Masters deliberately sustain the world's highest Covid-death toll as a matter of policy not only underscores the extent to which the U.S. is a failed state but strongly suggests the failures are beyond reversal and thus will only worsen until the nation disintegrates completely.
*****
SCOTUS ALSO CONFIRMED, unintentionally of course, the scholarly hypothesis about secular art that so infuriates the theocrats.
Which
-- if I may veer aside to acknowledge the one possible bright spot
hidden in the court's infectious darkness -- surely does add to the
already conclusive body of evidence amassed by Carl Jung and Marshall McLuhan2 that proves secular art far more usefully prophetic than its allegedly "sacred" counterparts, witness this Jackson Browne piece from 1974:
Some of them were angry
At the way the earth was abused
By the men who learned how to forge her beauty into power
And they struggled to protect her from them, only to be confused
By the magnitude of her fury in the final hour
And when the sand was gone and the time arrived
In the naked dawn only a few survived...
Yes of course I know the standard proof of secular prophetic art is "The Scream,"
but I believe the Supreme Court's ChristoNazi majority has now proven
Browne's apocalyptic vision to be at least as accurate for the 21st
Century as Edvard Munch's insights are known to have been for the 20th
Century. The all-encompassing horror Munch portrayed in his 1893
paintings has long been recognized as our species' most accurate prelude
to the 20th century, which -- were human societies still capable of
recognizing historical truth -- we would know was shaped entirely by our
Masters' body counts. It is thus hardly surprising the now-inescapable,
probably bottomless trauma of the apocalypse Browne correctly foresaw
is becoming the common though yet mostly unacknowledged denominator of
consciousness for every one of us who has thus far managed to escape or at least resist the mental zombification imposed on us by today's ever-more-omnipotent GOP.
Originally
"GOP" was an acronym for "Grand Old Party," the (formerly rational)
Republican Party. It gave us a kindred synonym, "Grand Army of the
Republic," for the U.S. soldiers who's epic courage and determination
seemed for a time to have defeated the Confederate traitors.3 But today's GOP differs from the original to the same degree as humanitarian reason differs from homicidal mania; today's GOP is instead a growing Sturmabteilung of lockstep-obedient perpe-traitors led by a Hitler-worshiping cabal of Greed-Obsessed Plutocrats
and their vassalage of Josef Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler and Adolph
Eichmann emulators in the global economy, the mainstream media
propaganda machine (MMPM) and planetary governance at each of its five
levels: international, imperial, federal, state and local. Thus
yesterday's (merely) Moronic Majority becomes the Murderously Moronic
Majority of today.
The German Nazi hierarchy and their Capitalist collaborators -- wherever and however the U.S. protected them from rightful Soviet vengeance via Operation Paperclip and many other still-classified rescues during and after World War II
-- would surely be proud to see how, 78 years later, their ideological
graduates are completing the subjugation of the global population into a
de facto Fourth Reich and -- as if they truly believe their
rocketry can enable them to escape the consequences -- hastening the
reduction of our species' planetary motherland back into the bug planet
from which it evolved. The ecogenocidal magnitude of the geoengineering
in question has already convinced a small but expanding minority we are being conquered by predatory extraterrestrials
-- that our morally imbecilic human Masters were long ago bribed to
submission by guarantees of eternal omnipotence and are now behaving
accordingly, reshaping the global environment to the conquerors'
specifications and forcing whatever remains of the Working Class into
permanent slavery. Absurd? Let us hope -- but given the never-ending
chaos of lies and disinformation by which the Plutocrats and their
vassals began poisoning our minds in 1945, who now can distinguish truth
with unassailable certainty?
Which
is precisely why I shrug off, often with an uplifted social-finger,
the "conspiracy theorist" slander invariably directed at any of us who
dare point out how rapidly accumulating evidence at the very least
suggests our world is now ruled by some top-secret but nevertheless all-powerful Nazi International -- perhaps the final form of the conjectural ODESSA organization.
Worse, given our definitively ecogenocidal post-World-War-II history,
if such a Nazi International exists -- as the post-WW-II years (and
particularly the decades after the murder of JFK) surely suggest -- it
is ever-more-obviously sponsored by the U.S. government both domestically and abroad,
and it is therefore also most likely headquartered in the United
States, probably -- typical of all such U.S. intelligence operations --
hidden beneath the fake legitimacy of a benignly named bureaucracy,
research foundation or other such organization.4
I
suspect I need not point out how these developments thoroughly
legitimize a formerly taboo question: was the preservation and
propagation of Nazism the true purpose of Operation Paperclip? Is that
why our Masters then infiltrated thousands more Nazis to protected havens in the United States?
*****
TERMINAL
CLIMATE CHANGE or TCC -- as it should have been labeled from the
beginning, but obviously wasn't, apparently because the Goebbels
disciples in governance and on Madison Avenue rightfully feared the
TCC-concept's confirmation of the looming apocalypse might terrify the
increasingly subjugated Moronic Majority into open rebellion -- was
instead disguised as "global warming." Thus our Masters' entire response
to the looming ecogenocidal disaster was never more than a Disney-like
effort to conceal its all-season magnitude and minimize its horrors by
coating the deadly crisis with the emotional chocolate of an implicitly
cuddly euphemism.
Which -- now the true body count and cultural cost of terminal climate change
has become so overwhelming it's beginning to escape the censors --
should leave us all wondering to what extent our Masters' privately
owned, for-profit versions of the Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda are censoring the pandemic reports.
Meanwhile,
one of the less obvious issues of this increasingly apocalyptic era is
the extent to which the content of our informational media, alternative
and mainstream alike, is being reshaped by the evidence we -- our
species and our planet -- are doomed. Have some of our Masters eased
their censorship? It would surely seem so -- though my best guess is
they hope to make the news so traumatically depressing, we can no longer
bear reading, hearing or viewing it at all. Already it perpetuates (and
often intensifies) the anguish generated by our helplessness. Even I --
for whom sociopolitical journalism was my financial lifeblood -- now
regard the news as a prime depressant and avoid it more often than I can
comfortably admit.
Truth is -- unless one is a Trumpite, or ranks among the plutocrats and plutocratic vassals who have been disguising Neonazi racial and ethnic ecogenocide as Neoliberal economic austerity
at least since my late father helped defeat Sen. Barry Goldwater's 1964
Republican presidential campaign by cross-referencing Goldwater's
ideology to its sources in Mein Kampf -- there is literally no longer any such thing as "good" news. Indeed,
because of the hybridization of undeniably terminal climate change and
the ever-more-probably terminal Covid pandemic by the Court's knowingly murderous and now irrevocable imposition of "herd immunity," it is increasingly likely there will never again be "good" news -- news that's reassuring or confidence-building -- for any of us in the Working Class.
As
a direct consequence, an ever-growing number of us hide beneath
whatever shields, real or metaphorical, we might find to protect
ourselves; as best we can, we tune out the skyrocketing frequency of
disasters that redefine the outside world exclusively in terms of its
new Gaian deadliness, proving it more divinely capable of self-defense
than we ever allowed ourselves to imagine and now -- as if vexed to
terminal fury by six millennia of patriachal ecogenocide --
increasingly hostile to human survival.
*****
THE
MORE ASTUTE amongst us -- at least those reasonably familiar with our
species' history since the advent of patriarchy -- are at last beginning
to realize the extent to which we've all been conned by the Christian
notion the universe displays a "moral arc" toward "justice." This is
indeed one of the most destructive Big Lies ever. The historical truth
is the diametrical opposite; under patriarchy, any "moral arc" is
determined solely by our Masters, who constantly refine their
technology to compel ever-more zero-tolerance compliance. Thus
"progress" inevitably leads toward ever more inescapable subjugation.
The bloody physical trauma inflicted by the overseer's whips and the
lynch mob's grisly extermination parties is replaced by the less obvious
but demonstrably more crazy-making psychological trauma mandated by
Neoliberal "austerity" and the inescapable 24/7 surveillance by which
it's enforced; while the homeless camp may have replaced the death camp
as the most obvious symbol of our Masters' intent, the Nazi ideology
that sustains their underlying greed remains as impregnable as ever. No
matter what we do, in the end it seems we cannot escape the
down-pressing burden of our Masters' ever-more-crushing tyranny, the
cause of its terrible permanence pointedly revealed by Audre Lorde: "The Masters Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House."
Often
-- as a growing plurality is already doing -- we thus reject the entire
concept of democratic process; we view its weakness and permanent
failure as conclusively proven by the breathtaking speed with which the
Neonazis are conquering the planet. Already they're reversing the
humanitarian outcomes of World War II, nullifying the U.S. Civil War and
even cancelling the positive results of our domestic Masters' violent
exit from the British Empire. Nor -- given how the defeat of the
Soviet Union has robbed us of the only historically proven antidote to
Nazism -- can I rationally blame the dropouts; I nearly became one
myself. Thus
-- though no one has yet dared make public an authoritative analysis of
the statistical proof -- it is clear there is within the so-called
"progressive" community5 an accelerating trend toward what amounts to unconditional surrender: the abandonment of all political activity.
To me, the potential consequence of that likelihood
is by far the most terrifying prospect facing us today. The ranks of us
who resist the Plutocracy's campaigns to reduce us all to prideful
ignorance and morally imbecilic self-obsession are rapidly dwindling;
the why-bother shrinkage of the electorate combines with Biden the
Beguiler's innumerable "change-we-can-believe-in" betrayals to almost certainly guarantee Christonazi victory in November and in 2024. For those of us who know enough history to foresee the looming horrors,
our (entirely rational) anxiety is often so intense it cannot be
accurately described in any known human language, though Edvard Munch
surely did a proper job of communicating it as a visual artist.
Hence I'll say it once more: it is ever-more-probable there will never again be any "good" news for Working Class humans.
*****
DRIVEN
BY A surprisingly relentless inclination to keep writing and
photographing even in the face of what is obviously irreversible
humanitarian defeat, I began contemplating nearly a year ago how I might radically minimize my reliance for Dispatches
content on the endless litanies of disaster, lies and disinformation
we're now routinely force-fed 24/7 by media whether Left, Right or
center. Eventually I began weighing various approaches to transforming
Dispatches into a grammatically disciplined and therefore
more accessible anthology of present-day selections from the journal I
began keeping in 1956, my 16th year; Dispatches' new content
will henceforth be focused way more on aesthetics, social history and
examples of something I think of as "indicative weirdness" than on
politics per se.
It
will also include factual descriptions of the often-curious, sometimes
downright eerie events that inspired some of my most telling
photographs, sustained my 24-year effort on "Glimpses of a Pale Dancer"
and prompted a quest, inspired by discoveries on the East Coast, for
Pacific Northwest archaeological anomalies; my success unearthed yet
more of the sort of evidence catalogued by the New England Antiquities
Research Association. If substantiated, this evidence resoundingly
refutes our Masters' misogynistic claims of white patriarchal
intellectual supremacy -- no doubt another reason why, as many of you
know, my attempted contribution to this material -- my photos, drawings,
site maps -- was itself among the potential forever nullified by the
1983 arson.6 But with this new Dispatches format, I may try to reclaim from memory a few of those losses.
My
new content will thus include carefully selected passages of what
ethics require I clearly label "speculation" -- never mind these are
actually the same sort of insight -- its accuracy confirmed by
subsequent events -- that underlay "Dancer." Spontaneous,
fleeting and frequently unsought, these days it most often arrives
amidst the near-daily meditation by which, thanks to more than two years
of ongoing quarantine, I am finally naming, examining and (somewhat)
ameliorating the ultimately unhealable trauma of being suddenly reduced
to an emotional orphan, as I was, aged only a bit more than five years,
by familial reaction to my birthmother's violent attempt at post-partum
abortion, eerily on the Summer Solstice eve of 1945.
I
have yet to determine which behavior is more representative of the
traditional Midsummer-Eve rites: my birthmother's homicidal madness or
the love for his son that compelled my father to rescue me and forcibly
confine her violence to our living room floor until the police rescued
us both by carting her thoroughly shackled self off to jail. But soon
after that, my father fearfully concluded my mother's genetic legacy had
reduced me to a "goon boy," his favorite pejorative, usually soon
followed by the oft-repeated, always-deeply wounding accusation I was
"just like my mother." Meanwhile all but one member my birth-mother's
family -- my birthmother's older sister, the aunt whose beneficence
literally saved me from the worst consequences of Dyslexia -- decided my
existence was more threatening to the expansion of their already
substantial life-insurance profits than even my privately
institutionalized birthmother had been. Thus in 1957 they permanently
ended my summertime visits by evicting me after I brandished a firearm
to rescue my 79-year-old maternal grandfather from a club-wielding
18-year-old thug I feared would easily kill him. Apparently he -- and
all the rest of my birthmother's kin save the aforementioned hero-aunt
-- feared the odium of a never-more-than-hypothetical police response
far more than they feared the threatened death of their patriarch, who
did die maybe six months later, in '57's mid-November as best I recall. I
attended his funeral only because there was no way I could escape it;
afterward I was defiantly absent from every one of that
emotional-orphan-making family's funerals; I couldn't attend my
rescuer-aunt's 2004 funeral because my eternally hateful birthmother
delayed sending me her obituary by two months, resulting in some
metaphysical suspicions I will probably address in a future essay.
My
subsequent adult life was thus inevitably shaped by so many epics of
disastrous romance, I knew by 1970 -- my 30th year -- that reduction to
an emotional orphan had rendered me permanently unfit for parenthood or
marriage. Nevertheless, as age draws me ever closer to death, Covid has
quite astonishingly granted me a privilege nominally denied all Working
Class people merely by its prohibitive price: that of an extended
interlude for the introspection and journal-writing without which I'd
have never discovered the meditative self-healing potential U.S.
for-profit health "care" typically tries to hide from Working Class
discovery. Meanwhile anything approaching the requisite degree of
therapeutic excellence is affordable only by the tiny minority that can
afford it -- that is, the obscenely rich.
To repurpose my Zen-like cogitations for the new Dispatches,
I had to relearn to trust my intuition enough I now in meditation keep
pen and paper handy to record anything of apparent significance I might
recognize; the results repeatedly confirm my suspicion it is only the
theocratic stranglehold of Abrahamic religion that keeps our more
adventuresome scientists from following their Soviet counterparts;
liberated as they were from religious taboos, they were reportedly
investigating all sorts of psychic-phenomena questions including whether
there truly is some aquifer-like cosmic reservoir of collective
consciousness accessible only via maximum mindfulness. In any case,
I'd decided I would publish many of these internal visions as vignettes.
In
my choices of what might be relevant I'll be strongly influenced by
what I know of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. The population
of Rome itself, estimated as at least a million (and possibly twice
that) at the empire's height, had shrunk to about 25,000 by the 13th
Century. This is among our best indications of the depth of Dark-Age
reality forced onto the entire Occident; the magnitude of cultural
collapse is also measured by the superstitious destruction of libraries
and the church-enforced scientific and technological ignorance that led
to the loss of central heating and the abandonment of aqueducts,
running water, indoor plumbing and municipal sewerage -- so-called
"modern conveniences" lost for the next nearly 1500 years. Such is the
pattern by which our species waxes and wanes, the individual microcosm
of birth and death writ large in the societal macrocosm of rise, failure
and collapse, its universal truth repeatedly proven by the failed
empires archeology has since unearthed on every continent save
Antarctica.
While
each of these discoveries tells us we humans could survive apocalyptic
conditions in the past, that is clearly no longer true today. The
cooperative skill and instinct that facilitated our survival through
four ice ages and who knows how many other disasters is precisely the
same skill and instinct that gives us socialism -- precisely why our
Masters are doing everything the can to condition it out of us. Which is
the ultimate reason both for Neoliberalism and its underlying Nazi
content. At the same time our
Masters' misogynistic hatred and contempt for our planetary Mother --
the ecogenocidal venom at patriarchy's core -- combines with their
chemical, biological, radiological and thermonuclear weaponry to doom us
all, even as their now-inescapable surveillance makes effective
resistance impossible. Our Masters and their chosen vassals literally possess the omnipotence previously granted only to divinities. Thus when we finally recognize what Barack the Betrayer7 long ago prompted me to denounce as "the imbecility of hope," we are reduced, logically and correctly, to utter hopelessness.
Seems to me we now have but two choices: one is surrender
(which my ethics and sense of personal honor forced me to reject); the
other is the profoundly difficult task of ferreting out the faint,
often nearly invisible traces from which we might yet evolve new
pathways to Working Class liberation.
Among
these traces are, or so I believe, the three extensively footnoted and
now event-confirmed hypotheses upon which I built "Dancer." Firstly, I
confirmed the spontaneous resurrection of the goddess-symbol, both as
science (the Gaia Hypothesis) and -- via music, visual art and
literature -- as alternative spirituality.
Secondly, with an appreciative nod to McLuhan, I hypothesized from
these developments and from the rise of the Counterculture itself the
probable existence of some hitherto-unidentified human instinct to
collectively organize ourselves for mutual protection and sustenance
even when its prophetic compulsions are not consciously recognized; I
was particularly impressed by the spontaneous emergence and explosive
growth of the Counterculture's environmentalist, feminist and
back-to-the-land factions, likewise by the popular rediscovery of
primitive technologies. Lastly,
I identified an anti-patriarchal aesthetic solidarity implicit
throughout the Counterculture's creative output -- the one quality I
felt might have transcended the induced ideological hostility by which
our Masters keep us divided into warring factions. The late Cicely
Nichols obviously agreed; she repeatedly said she believed "Dancer"
would be "among the most influential works of the 20th Century."
Apparently so did our Masters; no doubt that's what got "Dancer"and all
the rest of my significant work burned.8
*****
THOUGH BY THE closing days of 2021 I had pretty much finalized my plans for resurrecting Dispatches, I remained unsure how to introduce the new format. As I sometimes do when I am genuinely perplexed, I consulted the I Ching,
the Wilhelm/Baynes translation (Princeton University Press: 1997). The
text is at least 3,000 years old and is -- as far as I know -- the only
oracle ever thoroughly investigated by Carl Jung, after which he wrote
approvingly of it in his "Forward" to the Wilhelm/Baynes translation.
Jung's endorsement of this mode of seeking clarity has always been
sufficient approval for me to make it my own; hence via coin-toss, I
asked the oracle what might obtain "if I turn these stories and
fragments" (that once went into my journals) "into Dispatches
posts." It responded with the 46th Hexagram, "Pushing Upward," the
judgement of which is "supreme success." The two changing lines
elaborate:
"Six at the beginning means:
Pushing upward that meets with confidence
Brings great good fortune."
"Six in the fifth place means:
Perseverance brings good fortune.
One pushes upward by steps."
The changed lines create a new hexagram, in this instance the 5th, "Waiting (Nourishment)," its judgement as follows:
"If you are sincere,
You have light and success.
Perseverance brings good fortune.
It furthers one to cross the great water."
The appended "Image" is especially telling:
Clouds rise up to heaved:
The image of waiting.
Thus the superior man eats and drinks,
Is joyous and of good cheer.
So
I opted to wait, sensing the possibility of some pivotal discovery or
event. That was on 28 December 2021; then on Thursday, 13 January 2022,
the Neonazi-conquered U.S.
Supreme Court officially weaponized Covid-19 into our Masters' 21st
Century equivalent of Zyklon B, a brazen, viciously ecogenocidal decree
that forever rejects promotion of "the general welfare" as part of our
national purpose. It does so by granting the Trumpites and other
anti-vax contagion-vectors the right to inflict the so-called "herd
immunity" that turns the un-vaccinated and never-masked moral imbeciles
into -- it cannot be said too often -- potentially suicidal, obviously
murder-minded snot-bombers. Far worse, it turns all of them into
ambulatory Petri-dishes for the breeding of ever-deadlier Covid-19 mutations. It could spawn the ultimate doomsday bug and so exterminate our entire species.
At the very least, the court's permanent Neonazi majority has
smirkingly condemned who-knows-how-many-more of us to death and
financial ruin -- which should tell us all we need know about our
Masters' long-range intentions.
It also reveals something of the treacherous intent behind the
"Democratic" (sic) Party's post-John-Fitzgerald-Kennedy function as the
ChristoNazi Fifth Column.
But its most damning message is that any pretense of U.S. humanitarianism is gone forever.
Instead we may soon discover we Working-Class humans are inmates of a nation become a de facto
death camp, a place wherein it is now entirely legal for the defiantly
un-vaccinated and anti-masked Neonazis and their Nazi and
Neoconfederate collaborators to exterminate as many more of us as
possible by deliberately spreading -- knowingly and therefore with
murderous premeditation -- a virus that can literally mutate to slay us
all. Nor -- thanks to the Neonazi-conquered courts -- will these
bacteriological Ted Bundys ever again face even the most minimal forms
of justice.
All
of which marks the impact and consequences of Thursday morning's SCOTUS
atrocity as tantamount -- both personally and societally -- to
"crossing the great water."
About
the latter I will for the present utter no more than two statements,
firstly how I fear the court has inflicted a wound on our nation that,
just as the Dred Scot decision did, is already solidifying
our divisions to the point civil war is again inevitable -- this time
with all the apocalypse-accelerating chemical, biological,
radiological and thermonuclear horrors of modern warfare; secondly how
it should be obvious to anyone with what in Appalachia is termed "a
lick a sense" the post-JFK "Democratic" (sic) Party has quite
deliberately and with Oberkommando der Wehrmacht cunning confined themselves (and us) to a political cage from which escape is impossible.
About
the former, the personal, suffice it to say that, as if precursory to
the SCOTUS decree, someone we'll call Person X -- someone I had for
nearly 40 years foolishly presumed a dear and trusted friend --
denounced me as no longer worthy of companionship. I should have seen it
coming; instead I dismissed X's occasional, invariably brief but
always perplexing expressions of admiration for Ayn Rand's
Goebbels-clever fictionalizations of Mein Kampf as situational
rather than existential. My mistake; X finally tested -- I suspect
intentionally -- my acceptance or rejection of the definitively
ecogenocidal, anti-humanitarian, incipiently mass-murderous, morally
imbecilic arrogance and elitist self-obsession known to be the
psychological epicenter of Nazism, but which also lurks, often
clandestinely, yet always with full Nazi potency, in the darker corners
of the mental Draino that, in its pre-Esalen/pre-Charley-Manson
forms, was already government-asset-brazen enough to pimp itself as
"the human potential movement." Needless to say, from X's perspective I
failed the test, even as from my own viewpoint I amassed a perfect
score. And thus was, by this Person X, declared an enemy and irrevocably
dismissed. And so, resigned to the traumatic fact my composition speed
was radically reduced by the loss of neurotransmitter-nicotine's
temporary anti-dyslexia medication when I finally permanently beat its
addiction on 23 September 1995, I began this writing.
But
as it turned out, the interval suggested by the "Waiting" hexagram was
substantially lengthened, first by my de-nicotinized dysklexic
difficults at writing, next by the nagging intuition I should continue
my observant wait -- an intuition confirmed on 19 January by the
Duke/Politico disclosures I discovered quite by surprise -- which
discovery immediately compelled a total revision of my originally
intended post, including rewriting six of the eight essays I had written
in the wake of the SCOTUS Covid horror.
*****
MAKING
ART, IT seems, remains the one activity most essential to my life, even
as I approach my 82nd year. Having written, re-written and edited this
essay, I feel as if I've stepped into a cloud of quiet joy: a sense of
being bless-ed from without, a feeling as perplexing to my
Newtonian/Marxian/agnostic self as it is encouraging to that atavistic
wellspring at the core of my consciousness, the cauldron from which I
sometimes guzzle the diverse but always thirst-quenching nectars of my
Picto-Celtic, Norse, Saxon and Iroquoian genes. I guess I took that
sense of blessedness for granted in my 60-odd years as a working
professional; I realize now I'd have given up journalism long ago but
for the encouragement of this hitherto unrecognized but obviously
protective cloak. And amidst the hurly-burly of pandemic and quarantine
and the political terrors the Nazis inflict upon us all, in my
heart-of-hearts I tried to do just that -- but instead discovered I
cannot. Which surely feels -- at least at the moment -- as a welcome
blessing of its own.
I'm ending this beginning by introducing another new Dispatches
topic: what might be termed "metaphysical" stuff, including material I
had self-protectively excluded from "Dancer," among the exclusions some
very compelling evidence the ancient liturgies of the goddess retain
invocatory power even after thousands of years of concealment and
fragmentation. But before anyone supposes I'm about to surrender to
Moron Nation gullibility, let me reassure you all I'll temper any
associated text both by my solid grounding in basic university-level
science including physics, astronomy, geology and archaeology plus by my
investigative journalist's tendency to distrust anything, my own
personal experience included, that cannot be objectively confirmed.
Those interested in a factual account of the incident I now recognize as
the beginning of "Dancer" may read it here.
Also
I do not yet know how frequently I will publish; I am leaning toward
monthly or bi-weekly, though that is an ongoing decision-making
admittedly influenced by the realization geriatric reality may make my
production of new material somewhat random.
Another
quandary through which I am working -- probably already obvious to
critical readers -- is whether the (alleged) distinctions between Nazis,
Neonazis, Neoliberals and fascists have any real validity in the face
of their ever-more-unified and therefore ever-more-murderous assaults.
While I'm leaning toward calling them all Nazis on the basis of their
shared ethos and footnoting the reasons why, the question remains open,
and I would appreciate any suggestions or observations you readers
might choose to offer, for which my thanks in advance.
Meanwhile
let us never forget that in times such as these, survival itself is a
revolutionary act. May we all remain safe, healthy and determined.
__________________
1 The
definition of "Working Class" used herein is that implicit in Marxism:
like the statistically incorrect but nevertheless usefully descriptive
"99 percent," it describes those of us who are neither plutocrats nor
plutocratic vassals, are thus entirely dependent on wages or commissions
and are thus never more than a layoff or firing away from potentially
deadly disaster.
2 Until I began the memory-confirming research that generated the above links, I knew neither of Walter Benjamin nor of his valuable contribution to the implicitly anti-patriarchal quest to re-legitimize the prophetic functions or art and literature.
3The New York and Michigan cemeteries of my youth were filled with Grand Army of the Republic markers, most of them still bedecked with flags and repeatedly honored with fresh flowers.
4Two
books and a Netflix film do a thorough job of documenting the
Christonazi infiltration of USian governance at all levels. The books
are The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (Jeff Sharlet; Harper: 2008) and American Fascists: the Christian Right and the War on America
(Chris Hedges; Free Press: 2006). I heartily recommend each text. The
Nexflix film, which I have yet to watch, has the same title as
Sharlet's work and is said to be based on his reporting. Will I watch
it? Probably. Will I review it? Maybe.
5Here
I use "progressive" in its broadest sense, from Marxian to social
democracy and thence rightward to the vast array of pseudo-Leftists who
serve our Masters' by agitating the culture wars that foster identity
politics and thus perpetuate the ultimately suicidal divisiveness that
defines today's domestic and global Working Class. As to the U.S.
"Democratic" (sic) Party, I believe it forever renounced any right to
claim the "progressive" label when it unconditionally surrendered to the
Warren Commission, thereby granting total victory to the (already
Nazified) perpe-traitors of the 22 November 1963 coup.
6"Dancer"
was a thoroughly footnoted manuscript of about 150,000 words
illustrated by approximately 100 photographs; it and all the rest of my
significant work -- clippings of published work, 31 years of
photography, 27 years of journals, a near lifetime of reference files,
awards etc. -- was destroyed by arson on 1 September 1983.
7It
came to me last night while revising this piece that Obama's treachery
may be the best evidence yet of our Masters' unprecedented cunning: how
better, with maximum deniability, to legitimize the nation's
infamous white racism than by electing as its first Black president a
class-traitor whose subsequent betrayals hurled enough metaphorical
gunpowder to explode the existential Nazism of the Moronic Majority's
whites into today's now-obviously unstoppable Neonazi onslaught.
8In what
was obviously a "fuck-off-or-die"message from our Masters, the fire was
lit at the exact moment I was meeting with Nichols to finalize our
working agreement; the ignition time was preserved by a melted electric
clock adjacent the fire's point of origin.
LB/13-22 January 2022, with typographic revisions and minor editing 29 March 2022.
--30--
Given Biden the Beguiler’s combination of the world’s highest Covid death-toll with his relentless efforts to leverage Russia and China into thermonuclear apocalypse, it seems ever more likely his owners – whomever (or whatever) they might be – have chosen him as their global Eichmann.
Thus he’s now overseeing their Final Solution to Terminal Climate Change, the academically touted 90-per-cent reduction of our species urged by Eric Pianka, its eventual acceptance previously given Neoliberalism-camouflaged (Nazi) momentum by publication of “The Population Bomb” in 1968.
Here, as these events unfold, we see revealed the ultimate Neoliberal purpose: reshaping human society into a global, unspeakably oppressive, high-tech-omnipotent version of a Nazi death camp. For us, We the People of the Working Class, this clearly means the extermination of every one of us our Masters deem “unprofitable”; it also means the permanent enslavement of the few survivors.
Meanwhile our species’ continues to demonstrate the ever-more-irremediable totality of its subjugation, its Moronic Majority already too paralyzed by fear to dare ask “why?” and “for whom…or what?” and thus rationalizing its own suicide — clutching at Trump with the same desperation the drowning survivors of a torpedoed ship fight one another for fatally treacherous bits of flotsam in the vain hope of preserving themselves for one last moment of self-obsessed hatefulness and greed.
I voted Green in 2016 because I recognized Hillary’s fanatical embrace of the Bonaparte/Hitler Let’s-Conquer-Russia psychosis made a vote for her tantamount to a vote for thermonuclear apocalypse. Now obviously Biden the Beguiler – for whom I did (idiotically) vote (and for which my guilt is thus lifelong) – besets us with the same fanatically terminal intent; indeed it would seem Eichmann (and perhaps Mengele too) are replacing the Founders as the USian Empire’s most exemplary archetypes.
Whatever; in any case our species’ survival is now (entirely) dependent on whether — in the face of an ever-more-Hitler-like onslaught — the Russian and Chinese governments are allowed to retain some semblance of sanity.