Only the Sisterhood of Motherhood Can Save Us Now

Long ago I tried to make a poem about what fall feels like deep in the back country of the northernmost county in western Washington state. But I soon doubted any words of mine could ever convey the quietly poignant resonance of a land where the Goddess remains so untrammeled and powerful even skeptics find it difficult to deny her presence. For despite the encroachments of patriarchy, here she yet reigns supreme, and whatever you might call her – Gaea, Mother Nature, Rhiannon, the Morrigan, Lada or any of the countless other names by which she has been invoked since the advent of our species (or whether you dismiss her as nothing more than delusion) – she is what she has always been, the cosmos and all its Yin and Yang potential, which in the Pacific Northwest is most often taken as synonymous with the natural environment: the densely forested mountains that run down to the emerald ocean; the ocean itself and the inland waters whether vast or small; the stately evergreens that sometimes, as if to challenge our notions of reality, inexplicably shimmer into ultraviolet; the long slow blue midsummer dusk that is the color of sensuality and revelation; the yellow moon of late spring and early autumn, pumpkin round and indescribably pregnant, humming softly as she rises above the jagged horizon; the northern lights that crackle and hiss like radio static, writhing like ghostly serpents or flaring across the heavens, ephemeral tapestries unfurled as if by some phantom weaver; the lethal magnificence of storms; the deadly energies of earthquake and volcano; that which we most love and that which we most fear. She is all this and more, every creature living or dead; all things inanimate; macrocosm and microcosm; matter and nothingness. To me the writer, she is the Pale Dancer whose flesh is lunar mist and whose anthems are the sound of wind on harp strings or of wind chimes when the air is without motion. To me the photographer, she is the ever-changing light and all its choreographies of shadow. But most of all and even in the spiritual dead-zones of the cities, she is the season of the turning leaves, vine-maple red and big-leaf-maple yellow and cottonwood orange ironically bright against the midnight-graveyard green of the conifers, and each year I cannot but wonder if sometime in the future she will kill me with her dark and dreadful loveliness. Fujicolor 800, Pentax MX, Sigma 35-70mm f/4 at 70mm, exposure f/5.6 at 1/250th. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2013. (Click on image to view it full size.)

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MOTHERHOOD IS THE one human quality that knows no borders. It has neither racial nor political identity. Its language is so wordlessly transcendent it is truly universal – which gives a new and profoundly deeper meaning to the notion of an original human Mother Tongue. Indeed, if matriarchy was the first and most enduring social construct of our species – and I can no longer doubt it – surely in the common exaltation of motherhood (and ultimately therefore the honoring of femaleness whether fecund or not), was the original solidarity that enabled our species' survival.

I write these words astounded it has taken me nearly 74 years of life to learn this lesson that is daily taught us by women everywhere. It is a lesson that now, after I have finally learned it, seems so utterly obvious I can only rail at my apparent stupidity. Observe any gathering of women with children – especially one in which the women are of diverse nationalities or castes or races – and almost invariably you will witness how the common processes of motherhood quickly, often literally within minutes, overcome all those barriers the males of our species find insurmountable. It is as obvious as sunrise: for women with children – and I have seen it more times than I can count – there is almost invariably an organic unity of purpose so powerful its participants need not consciously acknowledge it, a momentary state of harmony and peace so deeply instinctive it seemingly has no peer in human experience.

Oddly enough, I am not sure when I first began observing this phenomenon. Probably it was during my childhood, no doubt after the savage dysfunction that shattered my family during my fifth year prompted me to begin watchfully comparing my own notably abnormal circumstances as an unwanted child to the seemingly normal circumstances of other obviously beloved children. But that seems almost too glib, for on a deeper level it often feels as if I have always recognized the solidarity of motherhood as the sole human constant, the very quality of soul my own birthmother so violently rejected, never mind that for nearly all other women it is everywhere and every-when an ultimate form of immediate sisterhood. 

Even so, for most of my life what I now think of as the Motherhood International was scarcely more than part of the background, something I noticed in the same way I might notice the advent of autumnal color or the sudden presence of a neighbor's handsome new dog, significant enough to prompt a momentary sharpening of focus but without any associated analysis. But then a couple of years ago, as part of my ongoing effort to find logical support for my growing conviction that patriarchy is a fatal mistake and confirmation for my near-lifetime suspicion that females are generally better people than males, I began closely observing women and how they interact with one another. Of course I have always observed women, but because I am a heterosexual male, most of my years of observation were beclouded by lust and lustful purpose, so it was not until I achieved the sexual neutrality of old age I was able to see beyond the (exquisitely beautiful) intellectual and physical sensualities of even the most allegedly “plain” women to the deeper implications of femaleness itself.

Here of course is one great advantage of the observational skills I acquired as a journalist and photographer. But the irony of those talents is the extent to which their application – mostly in official functions such as the enactment of legislation or the formal interviews essential to biographical reportage or investigative work – radically limited what I could watch and therefore might see. A woman in a forcefully patriarchal society – which the United States most assuredly is – must necessarily adopt the defining male qualities of aggression and ruthlessness if she is to achieve and maintain any sort of power or influence. Hence I spent most of my professional life observing women trying to function within the confines of a nation that is reduced to moral imbecility (if not manifest evil) by its commitment to capitalism – infinite greed elevated to ultimate virtue – and to capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for everyone else. What I typically saw was therefore scarcely representative of womanhood per se.

My first clear look at what might obtain beyond the confines of patriarchy was in the context of the old Counterculture. Though mainstream-media employment severely limited my ability to give myself wholly over to la vie boheme, I nevertheless managed several sanity-preserving interludes away from the world of deadlines and tweed-sportcoat conformity. Typically but not always these de facto vacations were in association with the alternative press. Hence I was able to observe a goodly number of womens collectives, which were an organic and influential faction within the Countercultural rebellion, particularly in the rural Pacific Northwest. Those with which I came in more than merely superficial contact all seemed possessed of a unity far more resilient than anything men alone or even men and women together were able to achieve.

But the real eye-opener came after my downfall, when the 1983 housefire destroyed all my life's work and the definitively USian, no-jobs-for-crazies odium of the subsequent clinical depression banished me forever from any sort of journalism save part-time or freelance work. Thus reduced to inescapable poverty, I spent (and spend) a disproportionate amount of time in welfare offices and other such realms of ruined lives, impossibly straited circumstances and irremediable dispossession. And there for the first time I witnessed how the very realities that had us men sitting as far apart from one another as possible and invariably in sullenly silent, utterly alienated mortification seemed to somehow free the women from the societal restraints that might otherwise have kept them divided. I saw it repeatedly: how women of diverse races and nationalities and even castes (many of them by their clothing obviously the newly impoverished victims of capitalism's most recent savageries), somehow as if by magic set aside their differences enough to freely converse, often with obvious empathy for one another, as each woman awaited the elaboration of whatever bad news had summoned her to Misery Central, the harshly lit, heartlessly managed offices of the Washington Department of Social and Health Services. And whenever these women were accompanied by their children, the sisterhood of motherhood – race and caste and nationality be damned – became overwhelmingly apparent in mere minutes.

But that beautiful and compelling solidarity of mothers was not just a phenomenon of the welfare office. I witness it time and again on public transport. First and long ago and before I realized what I was watching, I had seen it on the Knoxville Transit Lines and Grand Rapids Coach Company buses of my 1950s youth, women helping other women with children regardless of race or apparent social status. I had seen it on the subways of Manhattan and Brooklyn and on the Hudson Tubes and other rail transport in New Jersey during the 1960s and again during the 1980s, and in all probability had seen it as a child on the trains and trolleys I rode with my parents in New York and lesser cities during the first years of this lifetime. Now I see it regularly on crowded Tacoma buses: women who are total strangers to one another, as in “here I can hold your baby while you fold up that stroller,” a well-dressed young black woman helping a shabbily dressed young white woman, the black woman cooing to the white child as the white woman fights the perambulator down and under the seat as required by transit regulations, then the black woman handing the white child back to the white mother and the two women now talking about babies and children as easily as if they were sisters. I have seen as many as four young women – all strangers to one another, two white, one Asian, one black, the Asian and one of the whites barely able to speak English – collaborate to hold a tiny baby and find a fallen-off perambulator part to solve a problem that became obvious when the big pram which was fully laden with groceries and baby gear collapsed just after the mother had lifted her baby out. The four women worked together as if they had been teammates all their lives and within minutes they had repaired the pram, and the Motherhood International had triumphed once again.

That I can tell this story is the beauty of regularly riding mass transit. It enables you to witness every extreme of human behavior, from criminal selfishness to selfless humanitarianism. In this sense it's the same in Manhattan, where public transport is a civil right, as it is in Tacoma, where the Ayn-Rand-minded electorate publicly denounces transit users as parasites, damns mass transit itself as welfare and is maliciously downsizing an already inadequate bus system in the hope of socioeconomically cleansing the area of all the lower-income peoples who make up more than half of its population but vote in disproportionately small numbers because they believe, mostly correctly, that USian elections will make no meaningful differences in their lives. Local politics aside, there is probably no better or more thought-provoking sociological vantage point than a city bus, trolley or subway car, especially for a journalist whose inclinations run toward social commentary. And it was on a Tacoma bus just yesterday again watching with awe the international sisterhood of motherhood it came to me: first that motherhood has no borders, next that only the solidarity of motherhood is powerful enough to save our species from self-extermination. 

LB/17 November 2013

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Taking Time Off, Meanwhile Here's a Photo to Contemplate

WHAT WE THINK of today as “Hallowe'en décor” reminds us the original Night of the Dead was a harvest feast -- a ritual of thanksgiving honoring not just our departed lovers, friends and kinfolk, but all the departed animals and plants whose flesh, vegetables and fruits assure human survival. It was also one of the high Gaian (also spelled Gaean) holidays – the night the year dies, when the spirit of quickening that returns in the spring abandons the land to winter. (That strange sense of the land's emptiness some of us feel on the day after Hallowe'en is thus metaphysically very real.) In honor of all that, here is a hitherto-unpublished image of my 1989 garden, in which I grew nearly all my own vegetables while living in Whatcom County, Washington, just south of the Canadian Border. Rolleicord II (note how the Xenar lens, despite its lack of color-correction, has captured the exquisitely golden light of a late October afternoon). Kodacolor 100, exposure not recorded. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2013. (Click on image to view it full size.)

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AS THE HEADLINE suggests, I'm taking this week – and maybe the next week – away from Outside Agitator's Notebook to work on a couple of projects that have long been clamoring for my more focused involvement. Meanwhile, Happy Hallowe'en, Samhain blessings, and thank you all for your faithful readership. 

LB/27 October 2013

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Shitdown, New Betrayals, Hacktivists vs. Theocrats

“PATTY MURRAY LISTEN TO US! No cuts to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, veterans benefits or education...” That's Kristiné M. Reeves, right, the South Sound Regional Director of Sen. Murray's staff, as she was confronted by Occupy Tacoma activists Francesca Carreras-Velez, left, and Joy Bonney, center, on 16 November 2011 during a demonstration that braved cold, relentless and often torrential rains. Bonney is the editor and publisher of the pop-culture magazine Wake Up 253, which is named after the local telephone area-code. This picture – relevant in 2013 given Murray's repeat role in the renewed effort to impose even harsher austerity measures on the subjects of the USian oligarchy – was originally published by Reader Supported News as part of my Occupy Tacoma coverage. Pentax K1000, SMCP 28mm f/2.8, Fujicolor 800, exposure not recorded. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2011. (Click on image to view it full size.) 

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“SHITDOWN” WAS ORIGINALLY a typing error, the geezerly and perhaps Freudian slip of arthritic fingers. But I left it uncorrected after I realized it is the perfect name for the U.S. governmental shutdown, which is the piss-on-the-99-Percent policy of trickle-down economics expressed in solid rather than liquid form. Thus the childhood euphemisms for urination (Number One) and defecation (Number Two) become useful additions to the vocabulary of toilet-bowl capitalism. Now we can accurately describe how the One Percent and its Ruling Class support-staff of politicians, bureaucrats and thugs first hosed us into submission with decades of Number One and now assault us with Number Two, legions of assholes spewing projectile diarrhea intended to imprison us in the ever-expanding cesspool of wage slavery and indentured servitude.

I write of this fecal onslaught in the present tense because the shitdown was merely the most recent deposit of turds into the reeking effluent of the USian economy. Since President Nixon's 1973 declaration of war against the 99 Percent, nearly half the population has been reduced to lower-income status if not official poverty.  Now with the immediate crisis ended and the Big Lie of the Democrats' so-called “victory” over the Republicans, the ringmasters of the One Party of Two Names  have set the stage for (another) imposition of genocidal austerity  disguised as another bipartisan “grand bargain.” Meanwhile all we are witnessing is a temporary cessation in the One Percent's offensive. Nor is there any letup in the murderous campaign of fear and anxiety by which the Wall Street aristocrats hope to reduce the numbers of those of us who are dependent on Social Security, Medicare, food stamps or any other life-sustaining government subsidies. The only real unknown is how much more deeply we of the 99 Percent will be buried in shit once the bargaining resumes. 

To understand what is being done to us, we need to fight off our conditioned “American Dreamer” obliviousness  enough to recognize that if we are not actually part of the One Percent, we are all Working Class. That and the reality of class-struggle are the most important lessons of our time. Through them we see the core truths of our individual and collective existence. We understand that all the political tantrums and financial brinkmanship around the budget and the debt ceiling are nothing more than manifestations of the most maliciously dishonest strategy of governance in all USian history. We see how the plutocrats and their henchmen are methodically imposing a genuinely murderous depth of austerity, and we know they regard us as too hopelessly dumbed down to ever catch on to their scam. Verily, we are up the proverbial Shit Creek. Not only do we lack the metaphorical paddle; we have already been cast overboard from the requisite lifeboat.

But beyond the banks of that infamous creek there are a few glimmers of genuinely promising alternatives. They are barely more than flickers – and in the methane darkness of the septic-tank existence to which we have been condemned, they could prove either fatally implosive or explosively liberating. We of the USian proletariat, like the too-often-unacknowledged USian peasantry that lives on the First Nations reservations and in the migrant labor camps, are beginning to awaken.  That's why it is time to resurrect the forbidden revolutionary labels of proletariat and peasantry with all their former ferocity and pride. We are starting to understand the vital truth we are all sisters and brothers of the Working Class regardless of gender or race or any of the other apparent differences by which our overlords seek to shatter our implicit solidarity. We are glimpsing the almost inconceivable power inherent in our unified resistance resistance to the punishing realities of proletarian-and-peasant existence. As a result, we are also awakening to the hideous truth the greed and sadism of our plutocratic masters has no limit this side of our individual deaths and our collective extinction. Hence we are now asking of ourselves the same question Vladimir Lenin – a man some of us are beginning to suspect may have been more hero than villain – famously asked in 1902: “What Is to Be Done?”
 

Am I again falling prey to another example of what I have so often denounced as “the imbecility of hope?” Maybe yes, maybe no. Proud cynic that I am, my inclination is to point once more to “change we can believe in,” the biggest single Big Lie in USian political history, and to again sneer at how the alleged “audacity of hope” – the one emotion allowed the powerless – was proven to be the nadir of gullibility. But a tiny voice from my subconscious urges me to remember the eventual aftermath of the original Bloody Sunday.  Then I think of a song I have known at least since my earliest childhood, a now-taboo and mostly forgotten anthem of resistance translated by Paul Robeson into words that for reasons I will probably never fully understand made such an impact on my mind and spirit I cannot possibly forget them: “Far and away the road goes winding/Look and see how merrily the road goes.”

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Advent of Obamacare Reveals Another of Barack's Betrayals

An authoritative Kaiser Family Foundation report details yet another of Obama the Orator's Big Lies about health care “reform,” specifically that under Obamacare, people who like their present health insurance policies will be allowed to keep them.

The truth, however, is that hundreds of thousands USian who were taken in by the Obamascam are now being slapped with cancellation notices – and the stunning, often ruinous reality of skyrocketing premiums. Once again, the only winners – exactly as the nation's most dishonest president intended – are the capitalist pigs of the insurance industry. 

Kaiser Foundation, by the way, is a nonprofit think-tank and research organization not aligned with any of the so-called “stake-holders” or (in reference to the caduceus) “snake-holders”of the uniquely USian business of profiteering on sickness. Indeed Kaiser is considered the best independent source of health insurance information in the entire USian Empire. 

Which puts a spotlight of relevance on a recent Truthout discussion-thread wherein a writer who steadfastly denies he is an undercover Democratic Party activist implicitly calls me a liar by asserting that I “cannot honestly believe” both parties have been equally deceptive about the so-called Affordable Care Act. The truth, of course, is that no law in the nation's history has ever been so effectively smokescreened by falsehoods, disinformation and the deliberate withholding of facts – a carefully scripted campaign of obfuscation in which both parties are equally culpable. (Click on “Show Comments,” then scroll down for my several contributions to an unusually civilized on-line debate.) 

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Theocracy: a 'Good Christian Town' Virtually Lynches a Rape Victim

In Maryville, Missouri, where church attendance fills the local A&G Restaurant after Sunday services, the misogyny at the core of Christian doctrine has again become evident in the USian cult of the divine athlete and how it inspired the Internet lynching of Daisy Coleman, a formerly popular Maryville High School cheerleader who dared complain she had been raped by Matthew Barnett, one of the school's football stars. Nor was the girl the only target of the town's vindictive fury. Her entire family was persecuted. Her brothers were threatened and otherwise harassed, her mother was thrown out of work – and when they continued to fight back, their house was burned to the ground, a traditional tactic of the Ku Klux Klan and other Christian vigilante groups throughout the USian homeland. 

As is typical in such cases, the Maryville victim has not been allowed to confront her accused assailants in court. The charges against Barnett and other suspects were dropped under questionable circumstances. Moreover, Barnett is the grandson of Rex Barnett, a politically influential former legislator and Southern Baptist deacon. The inexplicable refusal to prosecute the cases plus the magnitude and viciousness of the retaliatory hate-campaign against Ms. Coleman and her family suggests – but certainly does not prove – an organized effort clandestinely driven by people who are members of the local Ruling Class if not of the actual One Percent. 

Though no other journalist has thus far dared link the Maryville atrocities with the town's ideology  – its above average number of avowed Christians, its overwhelming Teabagger Republicanism that repeatedly re-elects U.S. Rep. Sam Graves  and thus its implicit part in the thrust toward biblical-law theocracy that's sweeping the old Confederacy and the USian interior states – the connection should be obvious to anyone who knows the sociological underbelly of such locales. An on-line satirist who writes under the nomme de guerre Foster Disbelief understands it well enough to describe Maryville as “a good Christian town.”  And having spent nearly two-thirds of my boyhood and teenage years in the South, where the Ku Klux Klan  is colloquially called “the Saturday night men's Bible-study class,” I too know the relevant psychodynamics. 

Anyone foolish enough to regard the threat of Klannish hatefulness as remote should note the KKK still publicly claims to be “a Christian organization” and is again expanding its ranks,  not just in the South but throughout the nation.  The most recent (2012) edition of the Southern Poverty Law Center's “Hate Map” lists 21 such groups active in Missouri, though none are headquartered in Maryville.

 

Yet despite the apparent absence of any obvious Klan-type connections to the Maryville atrocities, the town is nevertheless behaving as if it were under the domination of a Christian version of the vicious Islamic Morality Police – and this is precisely one of the functions the KKK and other hate groups traditionally fulfill in the more rural districts of the USian interior. It's a terrain with which I am enough familiar to be profoundly thankful I live in a city on a distant seacoast and am despite being old and crippled yet able to maintain a few vital self-defense skills. But not even the alleged bastions of secularity are truly safe from these fanatics, as shown by frightening reports about the nationwide nature of the Christian war against female sexuality.  Similarly tyrannical Christian dogmas  that fueled the recent shutdown of the federal government. In this context, the relentless persecution of Daisy Coleman and her closest kin is a terrifying microcosm of the theocratic assault on all the rest of us. A recent essay by Chris Hedges summarizes the dangers quite succinctly. 

Meanwhile the anarchist hacker-collective Anonymous has announced it is targeting Maryville to avenge the attacks on Ms. Coleman and her family. Anonymous is also organizing an anti-rape protest demonstration scheduled for 6 p.m. on Tuesday (22 October). Not surprisingly, it already has the town fathers in a call-out-the-garrison panic.  

But the story's newest and potentially most controversial development is that the Anonymous announcement, which includes an implicit threat of hacking all the electronic files associated with the Maryville case, might be taken as a direct challenge to the Obama Administration Justice Department. That's because Obama Justice is effectively siding with the Steubenville rapists by investigating the hacktivist whose work exposed the town's protect-the-sacred-jocks coverup and compelled the prosecution of two of the rapists. Thus there is no doubt where the administration stands in the global struggle against patriarchy and its religious and political descendants – a revelation that should make feminists and all other civil libertarians profoundly wary. 

LB/20 October 2013

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Electronic Surveillance Is the End of All Human Potential

The personal computer: despite its apparent homeyness, an electronic ball and chain. A picture made while I was adjusting the focus on my M2 Leica. Kodak BW400CN, no other data; colorization and posterization by Gimp Image Editor. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2013. (Click on image to view it full size.)

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(A conceptual prelude to this essay appeared as my contribution to the comment thread of Truthout's republication  of Chris Hedges' “The Sparks of Rebellion,” 30 September 2013.)

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PREDICTABLY, NO ONE DARES articulate the three most bitter truths revealed by Edward Snowden's courageous disclosures about the National Security Agency and its total surveillance state. Firstly, Snowden's revelations make it clear the political revolution that was allegedly to have been facilitated by computers and other digital technologies was never more than delusion. Secondly, he has laid bare the fact the United States of America is no longer anything like yesteryear's “sweet land of liberty” – that it is instead the most aggressively merciless empire in human history, potentially as murderous at home as it already is abroad. Thirdly – and this is by far the most painful truth of all – there is no longer any doubt we are now and forever stripped naked by the relentlessly probing electronic fingers of the state. We have been robbed of the privacy that was the wellspring of not just our personal freedom but of all human aspirations, and it is now becoming ever more obvious there is not one fucking thing any or all of us can do to regain what has been stolen from us. It is literally as if we have been conquered by some alien race of super-tyrants from outer space.

Our stunned silence in the face of this self-inflicted and most likely fatal turning-point in our species' evolutionary history – the fact it obliterates any and all possibility for the sorts of individual innovation that has hitherto been our collective salvation – is attributable to the Moron Nation ignorance fostered by the censorship and disinformation necessary to perpetuate capitalism, with capitalism here defined as I always define it – infinite greed elevated to ultimate virtue. Thus we have been conditioned to adopt the self-defeating belief liberty is not an inherent human right protected by law but is merely a privilege awarded only by possession of certain products, specifically computers, cell phones and other devices of information technology.

Now though we are discovering these instruments we were falsely taught were the epitome of liberation are instead the cornerstone devices of the total-surveillance state and are therefore mechanisms of self-enslavement. Our resultant mental paralysis is yet another proof of our cradle-to-grave conditioning in a society cunningly restructured into a global Skinner Box, the notorious rat-race prison beloved of the behavior-modification psychologists whose incipiently fascist theories underly so much of capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation for all the rest of us. Whether we admit it or not – and most of us cannot stand the pain of such honesty -- we are reduced to the terrorized consciousness of laboratory animals for whom certain maneuvers previously brought rewards and an illusion of security but now yield only painful electric shocks.

Meanwhile the absolute refusal of mass media to acknowledge what obtains is merely another example of the obscene selfishness that is capitalism in action. Computer sales alone generated revenue of $85.5 billion in 2011,  the last year for which complete data is available, with sales of wireless devices adding another $169.8 billion.  The combined totals, $255.3 billion, amount to 15 percent of 2011's retail and wholesale gross domesticproduct. In other words, our induced compulsion to squander skyrocketing sums of money on our own ever-more-inescapable electronic shackles generates an income vast enough to bribe every paycheck journalist in the nation and yet allow for the unimaginably lavish profits demanded by our One Percent overlords.

Perhaps in part because I am a grandson of Amos R. Bliss, the Canadian engineer who in 1901 invented theautomotive dynamo  and thereby made possible the motorcar as we know it, I know something about the research and contemplation that precedes creativity whether practical or artistic. I therefore recognize how the bottomless pathos of our now-eternal nakedness is the death of all such effort. From now hence, the omnipresence of the total surveillance state denies us the privacy essential to human initiative and guarantees our ingenuity can be realized only within the vindictively conformist and therefore relentlessly oppressive limits of the corporate hierarchy.

We already know the results. An earlier example was the zomboid stultification of the Medieval schoolmen, imprisoned by doctrines that, on pain of being burned alive, allowed no metaphysical speculation beyond how many angels might occupy the head of a pin. Today we have the corporate and governmental aristocracies similarly straitjacketed by the dogma of ever-expanding profit and thereby denied the measures that might (yet) save our species from extinction and our planet from reduction to a cockroach-infested midden. Tomorrow, thanks to the electronic rapists of the NSA and how they have violated even our contemplative space, we are allowed no creativity whatsoever.

That fictional production-line art factory in which each sweaty member of a minimum-wage workforce uniformed in smocks and berets repetitively applies a single one-color brush-stroke to each canvas as it speeds past on a conveyor belt may be more prophecy than fantasy. Go to school; study art; indenture yourself for life with student loans; don the black beret and white polyester smock of Picasso Products or the blue beret and gray denim smock of Matisse Manufacturing -- that or paint yourself an artsy placard saying “will work for food”: it's the new American Dream. 

Surely it is no coincidence the U.S. government with all its spies and assassins and surveillance technology and weapons from which there is now no sanctuary anywhere on this planet is the exact duplicate of the all-seeing, endlessly vengeful, infinitely sadistic god of the Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The Republican Party, from its inception the voice of the financial and industrial One Percent, now officially claims the U.S. as a Christian empire, “one nation under god,” which of course means all the enemies of that god – Nature, women, a long litany of “deviants” that includes gays, lesbians, transsexuals, bisexuals, unbelievers, nonconformists and of course writers and artists – are now (or soon will be) enemies of the state. In the previous century, such tyrannies were sometimes overthrown by revolutions, witness the events in Russia, China, Vietnam and Cuba. But now, given the eternal invincibility guaranteed the government by its technology, our only hope of liberation is the death-dealing paradox of Mother Nature's apocalyptic rage against the very infrastructures upon which our lives depend.

Nevertheless I still hear many people, and not all of them young, who in their abyssal ignorance of realpolitik fantasize some basement-bound hacker – the modern equivalent of the attic-dwelling anarchist – will cobble together a digital device capable of defeating the machines by which we are oppressed and enslaved. Obviously this is the newest most delusional manifestation of the clinical condition known as magical thinking – believing in something that is simply not possible. To repeat what I noted above, such invention demands privacy, and that is precisely what we are no longer allowed, nor will we ever be allowed such privacy again. It also demands vast sums of capital – the imperial necessity that underlies our staggeringly huge military research budgets – and most of all what it requires is access to supportive technology of a caliber no revolution-minded hacktivist could ever possibly afford. Thus the evil genius of the One Percent in making access to such knowledge and facilities dependent on education so impossibly expensive it is available only to the trust-funded spawn of the corporate aristocracy or to those willing to indenture themselves for life – in either case the ultimate guarantee of political reliability under capitalist governance.

I have argued earlier variants of these points since the personal computer craze began in the late 1970s, when the earliest forms of digital technology were fervently embraced by the nation's (pretend) Left – bourgeois elitists who were too anti-intellectual to comprehend class struggle and too slothful for the hard work of organizing but had enough disposable income to decorate their homes with electro-baubles by Hewlett-Packard, Radio Shack, Apple and a half dozen other manufactures. The owners of these new machines instantly proclaimed possession of a computer an essential demonstration of one's revolutionary zeal. They defined the virtual way as the only true path to “people's revolution” – ironically the very sort of uprising their other activities, such as spiking trees to maim or kill forest workers, proved they secretly but profoundly (and hypocritically) feared. Most of all they sneered whenever I pointed out to them that any medium dependent on public utilities or corporate and government communications networks was only “free” until some bureaucrat or executive felt threatened enough to flip the master-switch and turn it off. And – of course – they haughtily dismissed those of us who did not own computers (typically because we could not afford them), as hopelessly reactionary.

Hence, eerily like the ever-formidable Russian intelligence operatives who recognized a mechanicaltypewriter can never be hacked,  I long ago chose to retain the 1935 Royal Standard I now routinely use for addressing envelopes or filling out forms and as my writing machine during power outages. I likewise kept the 1940s vintage Royal Portable that has accompanied me on various journeys since I was in my late 20s and now lives in semi-retirement under my desk. But my lingering fondness for typewriters was dictated by economics rather than foresight. I had no computer at all until 1999, and that was a used machine given me by a dear friend. Even I – a proud cynic all my adult life – did not recognize the ultimate capitalist scam of disguising electronic shackles as vital personal and household tools and thereby convincing us to build, with our own hard-earned money, the digital slave pens in which we are now inescapably imprisoned.

Now though thanks to Edward Snowden and thanks even more to Audre Lorde, a woman about whom I unfortunately remained in total ignorance until only days ago, I at long last have far better words to describe the ultimate truth of our electronic circumstances. Indeed they are Ms. Lorde's own words,  written in 1984 as the title of an essay, and I cannot possibly improve on them: “The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House.”

LB/13 October 2013

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Nightmare: Government Shutdown Reductio Ad Absurdum

“Premonitions”: a sandwich made of Hare Krishna dancers in Tompkins Square Patk and anti-Vietnam War demonstrators in Central Park c. 1967, the moon added with my editor's punch in Seattle c. 1974. Tri-X, other data lost. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyrights 1976 and 2012. (Click on image to view it full size.)

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RECOGNIZABLY PROPHETIC DREAMS come to me very rarely, no more than a dozen times in all my 73 years, and thus far they have foretold only personal disasters, occurrences of no significance to anyone but myself or maybe a few other members of my relentlessly dysfunctional family. 

A few of these events were relatively minor vexations that at the time of their occurrence seemed bottomlessly horrific, like the vengefully inflicted delays by which my birthmother ensured I missed an end-of-summer passenger train and was fretfully tardy in returning to my academic-year residence in the home of my father and stepmother and even more anxious about my entrance to the bully-dominated jungle of a southern public high school – itself a profoundly disturbing transition after four years in the carefully regulated sanctuary of Roman Catholic parochial education. 

Some episodes in which my nightmares came true were a bit more problematical, like Vietnam-Era G.I. Bill education checks inexplicably delayed so long the resultant poverty nearly flung me into homelessness, which happened three times in 1971 and once in 1972. 

Another incident, of which I dreamed at least twice beforehand, was irremediably injurious: it was a Godzilla-versus-Bambi car crash at 4:30 p.m. on a rainy 23 September 1978, when one of Washington state's obscenely coddled habitually criminal drunken drivers slammed his huge 442 Oldsmobile into my tiny new Honda Civic and inflicted the spinal injuries that now in old age have reduced me to a cripple.

(For the record, “obscenely coddled” contains not one scintilla of hyperbole. The moral imbecile at the wheel of the monster Oldsmobile had been arrested 19 times on charges of driving while intoxicated, but the arrests were all dismissed or reduced to meaninglessness, a fit prelude to his 20th offense, when he crippled me, destroyed my little car and reportedly rang the Breathalyzer bell with a near-record blood-alcohol score of point-32. But the associated charges, which included assaulting an officer, also were thrown out, and this obviously well-connected Chug-a-Lug Charley continued his potentially deadly spree of defiantly dipsomaniacal motoring until only a few years ago, when terminal liver failure rather than a blind [drunk?] judiciary at last took him permanently off our streets and highways.) 

Nor could I have foreseen my encounter with this malicious sociopath clearly enough to avoid it. Unfortunately for my prospects as a professional seer, I never recognize my dreams as prophetic until they are confirmed by subsequent events. There are never any of those Biblical jazz angels whose trumpet riffs are alleged to signify prophecy; neither is there – as would surely be more appropriate in my case – a Celtic or perhaps Scythian priestess with Jecsa Hoop's  astonishingly evocative voice chanting of “Havoc in Heaven” or singing of a woman with “hair of fire and skin of snow” as if to warn me I am about to bear witness to my own future. 

Having duly acknowledged the relevant metaphysical handicaps, I will now try to write coherently of the dream that, five nights ago, scared me into palpitations of such intensity I thought for a moment I was having a heart attack. Then of course I remembered the Yoga by which I had held my deteriorating spinal injuries at bay for nearly three decades – that is, until the exercises themselves became impossibly painful – and there in my bed of post-frightmare cold-sweat nightfullness I soon managed to deep-breathe my pulse back to normal. 

Yet the content of the dream continues to haunt my waking hours, which tells me the only way I can exorcise its chilling grasp is by revealing it. Hence I describe it here as best as I can reconstruct its curious sequence of images, not because I suspect it might be prophetic – in fact I pray it is not – but rather because I hope full disclosure will be fully healing. 

I've also no doubt the dream expresses something of the awful anxiety the now undeniably total corruption of the U.S. political system and both its parties is inflicting on all of us – particularly on those of us who are dependent on the government for survival, as for example are all Social Security and Medicare recipients. We are afraid because we know cutbacks to these programs will literally kill us, and these days – given that the Republican and Democratic party labels are themselves Big Lies and that we are in fact ruled ever more despotically by one party of two names – our fears are rational, constant and mercilessly relentless.

Thus in this dream I am logically as I am now, old and crippled though still as journalistically capable as ever. But in its surrealism I am also again the investigative reporter for The Jersey Journal as I was in 1969 and 1970, when I scooped the world on the heroin-addiction epidemic inflicted on the U.S. by the Vietnam War, only to be robbed of proper credit for my greatest story ever by some back-shop patriot's vindictive removal of my byline and the resultant unrestrained glory-hogging by The New York Times the following morning. 

Jersey Journal Managing Editor August Lockwood has been dead since 1997, yet now in the dream he is again my boss. With his omnipresent corner-of-the-mouth cigar he looks exactly as he did when I was one of his star reporters, and just as he might have done in real life, he has assigned me to track down and interview a Jersey City man who supposedly knows the details of President Richard Nixon's plan to suspend the 1972 elections.

Perhaps significantly, this Nixon aspect is based on an obscure but damning truth. By Christmas 1969, a few Washington D.C. insiders were credibly claiming Nixon had commissioned the Rand Corporation to prepare the rationale for just such a coup, and their allegations were courageously exposed by the Newhouse News Service, another property of The JJ's parent corporation, which gives these parts of the dream even more logical cohesion.

But then as so often happens in dreamtime, the meaning of “now” shifts without warning or advance notice and it is suddenly 1 October 2013. I am still on assignment, still working for the resurrected Gus Lockwood, still at my battered oaken desk, still banging out my copy on a Royal Standard mechanical typewriter in The Journal's smoke-filled newsroom, and my reportorial thought process is still subconsciously punctuated by the suck-bang of the pneumatic tubes that carried copy to the composing room, but the Nixon story has morphed into an elaborate conspiracy by which the Democrats and Republicans and their Wall Street masters are scheming to end all pretense of constitutional governance. 

These politicians have gridlocked Congress behind a charade of controversy and shut down the government, and now they intend to hurl the nation into internationally ruinous default by refusing to raise the debt ceiling. The stock market has plunged to an all-time low and the resultant chaos already includes breathtakingly violent rioting by desperate people who are condemned to death by the end of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps and every other federal socioeconomic-assistance program. 

Meanwhile the same sources who had defied federal secrecy to reveal the Vietnam Era heroin-addiction scandal have returned from their own graves and retirement homes and are restored to the bodies they occupied in 1970, and now in my dream they are telling me the entire shutdown crisis is the deliberately scripted prelude to a military takeover intended to be at least as bloody as the 1973 Chilean murder-and-torture coup that was engineered by the Central Intelligence Agency to protect USian imperial business interests and capitalism in general. The military, these sources say, will impose the fascist dictatorship the One Percent has sought since the failure of the Bankers' Plot in 1934. And one source has finally squirreled away the top secret documents to prove it.

The purloined papers indicate the dreamland junta will immediately transfer power to a national board of directors chosen from the chief executives of the most profitable USian corporations. The formerly elected politicians whose deceptions facilitated the coup will be rewarded with lifetime appointments as local managers who carry out the board's decrees. The board's absolute and unchallengeable authority will be explained to the USian citizenry as vital to the defense of corporate personhood against angry parasites turned domestic terrorists – seniors, disabled people, welfare recipients, all the “takers not makers” officially despised in accordance with Ayn Rand doctrine.

"At last" – or so the nation's most expensive advertising campaign will announce as soon as the coup is complete – “we're running government as a business.” 

Now in the dream I recognize my story is shaping up to be one helluva fine exposé, and in the old days before the news monopolies turned USian journalism into Randite propaganda, I already know it would have earned me a sure Pulitzer. But it is still 2013; even in dreamtime  I must convince the presumably immortal Gus to defy the invisible censors if the scoop is ever to see the light of day. 

But when I gather my notes and unhook my cane from a slightly open desk drawer and lurch up from my swivel chair to go tell Gus what I've unearthed and plead the case for its full disclosure, The JJ's busy East Coast newsroom is suddenly an empty but familiar Pacific Northwest newspaper office with a torn and faded “Tired of the Same Old Shit” poster on its far wall, a defiant bit of Manhattan outrageousness the politically correct staffers of this particular publication would never have tolerated in actuality.  

What has happened is I've been dream-teleported into an abandoned and thoroughly trashed version of the ramshackle space in the faded-brick-and-crumbling-plaster, Klondike gold-rush-era building from which a self-consciously countrified but environmentally competent alternative journal called Northwest Passage was published in Bellingham's Fairhaven District during the height of the Back-to-the-Land Movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

I am utterly alone. There is no one else in this structure save the fearsomely malevolent ghosts I know are lurking in its darker corners and behind its closed doors and at the ends of its oppressively lightless corridors. I have been in this place during other dream odysseys and have learned from experience my magick is not strong enough to protect me from these ectoplasmic predators. 

In self-protective revulsion I hurredly limp outside, but now the entire physical environment has changed. The building is no longer a nightmare variant of the Good Earth Community Center, which was a countercultural meeting hall and a crash-pad for itinerant hippies as well as a food co-op and the editorial home of the Passage. Instead it has become the ominous remnant of a three-storey Georgian mansion amidst a Blair Witch Project forest, toxically gnarly versions of the deciduous trees common to New York and New Jersey and Pennsylvania, oak and ash and sycamore and willow, their branches stripped bare by winter, the overwhelming sense of desolation eerily intensified by occasional white pine or blue spruce grown uncomfortably like exclamation points of silent screams. 

Then beyond the ruin I see a river, thick and murky and steaming with pollution, and amidst the barren willows on its further bank is a squad of soldiers – present-day U.S. soldiers with their Darth Vader assault rifles and camouflage uniforms and Nazi-like helmets – and now the soldiers are shooting at me and their bullets are cracking past my head and smacking into the building and gouging the surrounding trees and I am fleeing, hobbling as fast as I can through damply matted piles of brown leaves and across cold slippery patches of dirty snow ever deeper into the forest and my arthritic knees hurt and now I am too old and too tired and too winded to go any further and my fear gives way to terrible sadness and I wake up gasping for breath and grateful to have been rescued by wakefulness from torture and death.

Thank Goddess or god or fate or karma or randomness or entropy or the divine self or whatever higher power you choose, it was only a nightmare. I hope.

LB/6 October 2014 

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