No Blog: Sick with Infected Kidney but Recovering

Laid low by an infected kidney and its accompanying fever, which peaked at 103.2 degrees (Fahrenheit), I am now recovering thanks to the antibiotic Ciprofloxacin. (Yes, cipro  is as unpleasant as they say, nearly as debilitating as chemotherapy, and if you're unlucky, it can cripple you with ruptured tendons.) Hence I'm not blogging this week; not doing much of anything, in fact, save sleeping. My apologies; I'll be back as soon as I am able.

LB/21 September 2014

Ferguson Is Everywhere, and We Are All Michael Brown

THE WHITE RULING CLASS in Ferguson, Missouri is obviously terrified by the anger of the town's African-American majority population – hence the rush toward reforms  reported in useful detail by The New York Times two days ago.

The PollyAnna liberals, of course, will soon be hailing the reforms as a great triumph, the silver lining in the storm-dark clouds of Michael Brown's death and the still darker portends of the local police fulfilling the purpose for which they have been federalized and militarized – to serve as capitalism's army of occupation in the USian Empire's domestic colonies. But nothing will change save the gradual banishment of that conquered-territory image,  which must be suppressed because it (correctly) tells us our overlords think Iraq, Afghanistan and the imperial homeland are tactically and strategically interchangeable.  That's why, within weeks if not days, a team of obscenely salaried Josef Goebbels wanna-bees will be revising our recollections of what really happened so that eventually Ferguson fits the official Horatio Alger version  of U.S. history. And do not doubt they will succeed. The USian Ruling Class manages the most diabolically sophisticated tyranny in all human time, and its propagandists are the most effective truth-benders ever: note how they have already revised the story of Martin Luther King Jr. to remove the “r” from his call to revolution.

No doubt the propagandists will do with Ferguson as they have done with the life and death of Rev. King – they'll afix a smiley face to it. Picture a smiley face replacing the Roman execution order atop a medically accurate representation of Jesus' crucifixion agonies, or (like the Arbeit Macht Frei above the main gate at Auschwitz), hung at the entrance to Guantanamo: in either instance, complete with its slogan – “have a happy day” – and you'll understand the ultimate grotesquerie of this approach. Its historical context is especially telling: the smiley face emerged at the height of the Vietnam War, as if it were an admonition to capitalism's victims: “have a happy day” (or else).

Yes that is the precisely sort of predator nation in which we now live, as the dismantling of the New Deal,  the nullification of the Civil Rights Movement,  the defeat of feminism  and the terrifying triumphs of the lavishly funded theocratic counter-revolution  prove beyond all argument. “Reform” in this context is fraud – its sole purpose is deception, an illusion of “change” that does nothing more than temporarily cloak the savagery of capitalism, which is so malevolent it can no more be “reformed” than cancer.

But this time the marks know the score. The Ferguson residents who dismiss the reform effort as a scam  are undoubtedly correct. The black community, like all other USian minority communities, has learned from bitter experience that anything the Ruling Class gives, the Ruling Class can just as quickly take back – and no doubt will. Blacks know what too many of the rest of us still refuse to learn: the federalized, militarized police and their conversion into capitalism's army of occupation in the homeland colonies means Ferguson is Everywhere U.S.A. just as Michael Brown is all of us – every 99 Percenter regardless of race or gender or age.

Sometimes, rather than offer bogus reforms, the Ruling Class merely lies, a response at which the president is an obvious master. Hence Obama the Orator's 2008 campaign slogan, “change we can believe in” – possibly the most glaring Big Lie in U.S. political history – and his post-electoral transformation to Barack the Betrayer. Now in the latter persona he is again showing his true Republican selfhood by helping Pennsylvania privatize Medicaid, which – exactly as intended – will significantly worsen the plight of the state's poor, no doubt in some cases fatally, all the while enabling the One Percent to turn a handsome profit on the resultant misery.

Since Obama's absolute fealty to the Ayn Rand principles of capitalism is so obvious, I would also question the promises by the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate Ferguson and an even more obvious atrocity in Louisiana, where a black man who'd been arrested, searched and shackled with his hands behind his back and locked into a police car then supposedly produced a concealed handgun and fatally shot himself.

The president has also called for a “review” of his own police federalization-and-militarization policies. (Yes, the process of turning the police into storm troopers was begun under Bush II, but like the nullification of the Bill of Rights, Obama has continued it with a vengeance.) Probably all the “review” means is the imposition of new measures to cover up the ongoing conversion of the police into a new Schutzstaffel.  We the People are becoming more rebellious, and the One Percenters, who worry the imperial war machine might not reliably kill U.S. citizens, are becoming terrified. Hence here in the United States the aristocracy turns to the police, exactly as the aristocrats did in Tsarist Russia, which gives “serve and protect” a new and decidedly more Ayn Randish meaning.

Hence too what I would anticipate from these investigations is nothing more than dramatic pronouncements in the characteristic Obama style: compelling rhetorical flourishes that when carefully analyzed say exactly nothing and change even less. Bear in mind too it's an election year: that means Obama's required to (seemingly) pander to the Democratic base. Never mind all the sensible Democrats (of which, long ago, I was one) have already figured out the party labels are meaningless – that we're governed by one Ruling Class party of two names, and that the only meaningful difference between the Republicans and the Democrats is the former are fascists and brag about it while the latter are every bit as fascist but try to hide it behind a smokescreen of lies.

As many of you know I was an active supporter of the Civil Rights Movement and in 1963 was jailed on related charges in Knoxville, Tennessee. Reasoning from the eye-opening lessons I learned then and during the subsequent 18 months I remained in the South, I have selected a three more follow-up stories that seem to me to capture the essence of Ferguson's importance – and more importantly stress the fact Ferguson is (as I said above, and as cannot be said too many times) Everywhere U.S.A. One of these texts is a Popular Resistance.org piece that makes the point the killing of Michael Brown and other young black men is part of the nationwide class war,  “massive disinvestment in urban neighborhoods and unconscionable levels of joblessness and economic underdevelopment.” Another is an Associated Press dispatch Reader Supported News rescued from the Orwell hole: it says the Ferguson resistance is inspiring a nationwide resistance movement –  which is precisely what the Ruling Class doesn't want us to know. Lastly, also from the previous week – I now feel I should apologize for having been so caught up in the personal angst of viewing newsprint copies of my fire-destroyed photography – a Truthout exclusive examines the clash between “peacekeepers” and activists that is a vital part of the Ferguson backstory.  It is actually a new twist to an old conflict: in my day, the “peacekeepers” were called Uncle Toms.

Finally here are three more stories that fall into the “as-if-there-were-any-remaining-doubts” category.

The first reveals the extent to which the so-called Main Stream Media (MSM) has become the government's propaganda apparatus,  a perfectly logical evolution given the fact government at all USian levels is now a de facto subsidiary of Wall Street. In other words, government and business have merged, producing the ever-more-obvious reality of “capitalist governance” – absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation for all the rest of us – what earlier generations knew as fascism.

Next, in the second report, we have another revelation of the forceable imposition of Christian theocracy on the military.  Undoubtedly (though the text doesn't say it), this is a desperate effort by the Ruling Class to use the Prosperity Gospel  in an attempt to bolster the political reliability of the troops. Will the theocrats succeed? Will biblical law replace remnants of our constitution? Margaret Atwood  surely thinks so – and having lived in the South, which is already a functional theocracy, I tend to agree.

Lastly, an anti-Michael Brown website provides a new yardstick by which to measure the magnitude of USian racism  – one of the many reasons I believe we are not far from the emergence of an USian Nazism that will target racial, sexual, political and spiritual minorities here in the bourgeoning Fourth Reich much as they were targeted in the Third Reich. But here it will no doubt be under the aegis of a smiley face, perhaps even with clowns to comfort the children before they are gassed: “have a happy day.”

LB/14 September 2014

-30-

Perhaps This Will Help You Understand the Plight of Patrick McLaw

(For A.H., whose belief in my courageousness gave me the courage to write what follows, with my apologies to all for how long it took me to write it.)

THE STRANGE STORY of Patrick McLaw, the novelist and language-arts teacher who was seized by the police  and at this writing is involuntarily confined in a Maryland mental institution, warrants our continued attention – and not only because of its frightening suggestion the authorities may now be using mental-health facilities as extra-constitutional prisons. While the Gestapo-reeking circumstances of McLaw's detention remain unclear,  the one absolute certainty is the state's claim he is mentally ill has ruined his life beyond any rational hope of repair. The fact he is African-American in a nation that is again becoming infamous for its bigotry  merely underscores the finality of his doom.

McLaw's case is significant because brings together the issues of class warfare, racism, the expansion of police authority, the theft of our constitutional rights – and adds to them a topic I know by heart but seldom have the opportunity to explore: the hatefulness and brutality that characterize U.S. attitudes toward people who are mentally ill or mentally disabled. As the authorities' treatment of McLaw demonstrates, and as innumerable studies confirm, mental illness in the United States of America is the penultimate nadir of pariahdom. Only child-molesters are more publicly hated and feared. It makes no difference at least 26.2 percent  of the U.S. adult population is mentally ill in any given year. Only the Ruling Class rich – those who are wealthy and powerful enough to stay out of the social-service system entirely or to bribe its bureaucrats to secrecy – escape the stigma.

Meanwhile, locked away as he is, McLaw's captors have successfully reduced him to a non-entity. His personhood is hidden from us, which means we can only guess what he might be thinking and feeling. But given how my own talents were forever nullified by the odium of mental illness – the clinical depression inflicted by the fire that destroyed my life's work – perhaps by retelling my own story I can at least portray the magnitude of troubles with which McLaw is likely to be afflicted if and when he is ever released.

McLaw's education and chosen occupation suggests he invested a great deal of time and effort in becoming who and what he was. So did I. Though my own journey differed from his – for example, poverty kept me from a bachelor of arts degree until I was 36 years old – I suspect the passions we brought to our arts were very similar. Our greatest differences – the fact I am a Caucasian male, with all of the presumptive socioeconomic advantages, and the fact I have never been institutionalized – are eliminated by our common plight. Neither race nor gender provides any defense against how an official diagnoses of mental illness or disability destroys everything you were and might have been. Nor does it matter, in the eyes of the public, whether you were institutionalized or not. In-patient or out-patient, you're now damned as a “crazy”– and so you will be for rest of your life.

Some of you already know my story. In the spring of 1983 I returned to New York City, assuming my birthplace and the home of my early childhood would again be the permanent home of my adulthood. I was traveling light. At the invitation of the late Helen Farias, a dear friend who had inherited a two-storey pioneer farmhouse near Alger, Washington, I had boxed up my files and other possessions and stored them in one of her unused second-floor bedrooms. When I found a suitable apartment in Manhattan, I would send her the money to ship these pre-packed items to my new address. But instead there was the fire, and now there was nothing left. The house and even its adjacent outbuildings were reduced to heaps of smoldering ash. My friend's work – Helen too was a writer and editor – escaped the flames only because her office was elsewhere. Her cats were not so fortunate; they died in the fire.

The loss of my work was the most wrenching shock I have ever known. My grief was overwhelming. It was profoundly intensified by the fact the fire's casualties included abook of photographs and text that had begun as an entry in my 1959 journal and was at long last seemingly on the brink of major publication. Titled “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer,” it argued that the Counterculture which had grown out of the 1950s Beat Movement and crested during the 1960s was exactly what it claimed to be, a “revolution in consciousness” – and that its rebelliousness, the true nature of which was obvious in its music and art,  was amongst the first waves of a global revolution against patriarchy.

I knew my hypothesis was radical and perhaps even inflammatory, no pun intended. It had generated substantial controversy when I presented it for academic scrutiny during the final year of my bachelor of arts program at Fairhaven College. Despite the decades of research I put into its text – the quest to name what I was photographing was as important as the photography itself – I never imagined “Dancer” would be more than a volume of pictures accompanied by the photographer's reflections on his odyssey toward understanding. But the late Cicely Nichols, longtime friend and former editor-in-chief at Grove Press, convinced me “Dancer” could be shaped into one of the most important books of the 20th Century.

The fire's devastation was thus all the more intense because of my newly heightened expectations. I am not an optimist; raised as the unwanted child in a painfully dysfunctional family, I have never been given to unrealistic expectations, but after Nichols' enthusiastic response to my photographic portfolio and a few samples of my writing, for once in my life I actually dared be hopeful about my future. But now, as if in cosmic retribution for my folly, I had no future at all. The flames took not just the rough draft of “Dancer” but all its 24 years of research notes and pictures; all my other photography including hundreds of prints and thousands of negatives and color transparencies; two other books in progress that existed only as photos, notes and outlines; nearly all my other unpublished writing; clippings and tear-sheets of all my published work; all my journalistic award certificates and letters of commendation; paintings and drawings – literally all the creative efforts of my life dating back to my 12th birthday and my first camera, a used Kodak Brownie Reflex given me by my father.

Worse still was the eerie timing of the fire, which occurred on 1 September 1983. It started at the exact moment Nichols and I were meeting to finalize the agreement that would presumably bring “Dancer” to print. The time of ignition was revealed by the heat-welded hands of a clock at the fire's point of origin. First attributed to arson, then mysteriously changed to fire “of undetermined origin,” the blaze began at 4:30 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time, which three time-zones to the east is 7:30 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time – exactly when Nichols and I began our work-and-dinner session. Regardless of the fire's cause, its timing – which turned what might have been the best day of my life into what was indisputably the worst – was too exact to be coincidence.

Though I had been targeted as a suspected subversive by the U.S. government on three occasions that I know of – once in the Army, twice in civilian life (USian fascism is nothing new) – I never imagined my personal politics might result in the destruction of my life's work. But the fire's timing is typical of the “plausibly deniable” acts with which undercover operatives – especially those skilled in psychological warfare – torment their victims. Because of this – note again the waffling of some (perhaps easily bullied) rural fire-marshal – I cannot doubt the fire was arson, most likely government arson at that. Who but some telephone-tapping agent of the national secret-police apparatus could have known when to light the flames with such hurtful precision?   And the message itself was unmistakable: I was opposed by forces so relentlessly powerful, it was futile to resist. Thus I learned what is obviously the central lesson of my life: that hope, at least for me, is not audacity but imbecility.

It took the resultant depression almost exactly three years to drive me out of my beloved Manhattan. For most of my adult life I had recognized the City as the place for those who have something to offer the world. But now after the fire I had nothing to offer anyone, not even myself – and given the malevolence of my enemies, it was obvious I would never be allowed to develop such offerings again. Thus in late 1986 I returned to Washington state, a place I disliked for the notoriously xenophobic small-mindedness of so many of its people but where I had paradoxically fallen in love with its light and its water and how its mountains plunge directly into the sea. Believing periodic contact with nature would be healing, I had been putting some of my New York City earnings into a tiny piece of rural Washington real estate – probably, in retrospect, an act that was itself symptomatic of how befuddled I had become – though for nearly a year after my return that place would be my only sanctuary.

I already knew there were few journalistic opportunities in Washington state. A decade earlier the local mainstream-media editors had shown themselves to be as xenophobic their as readers. The late Henry MacLeod, then managing editor of The Seattle Times, told meEast Coast experience “doesn't count out here,” and suggested I hasten back from whence I came. A managing editor named Fowler at The Bellingham Herald was more blunt: “we don't like your kind here,” he said. “Do yourself a favor: catch the next flight back to New York City.”

No matter. I could no longer dependably write or photograph; the associations with the lost work were too painful. Hence I would fall back on my secondary skills, work as a commercial fisherman or a laborer or maybe a commercial printer and perhaps eventually freelance a bit on the side. But unemployment remained high due to the Reagan recession. I was unable to find any job at all, and my mood worsened until some days I could hardly muster the energy to get out of bed. At last recognizing the nature of my affliction, I went into therapy, but it was too little too late; my economic circumstances were already becoming desperate. My therapist, Dr. Arthur Budke PhD, formally diagnosed my condition as post-traumatic depression. He said it was severe enough to qualify me for welfare and began insisting I apply for it. Finally, in the late spring of 1987, so impoverished the only alternative was homelessness, I did as he demanded. Like McLaw, I was now trapped in the system – and so began the process that destroyed my life.

Citing my therapist's findings, the welfare bureaucrats categorized me as “mentally disabled” and enrolled me to receive a state check for $314 per month plus about $75 in food stamps. The stipend was labeled “GA/U,” which stands for “general assistance/unemployable.” It is colloquially known as “nut money”; its recipients are officially called “clients” but are colloquially known as “welfare crazies” and “nut cases.”

GA/U was supposed to be paid on the first of each month but was often late, sometimes as much as a week and frequently with catastrophic results, invariably because welfare funds were arbitrarily withheld to maximize the interest earned by state deposits – a prime example of the official attitude toward welfare recipients in general. As for GA/U, its bureaucratic overseers were the most condescending and vindictive officials I have ever encountered. They made no secret of the fact they regarded us as subhuman. And they behaved as if their sole purpose was to punish us for our poverty, which they did at every opportunity.

I was on welfare through the winter of 1989, a reality in which the mundane disguises horrors that are incomprehensible if you have not experienced them firsthand. I was too distraught in those awful years to trifle with metaphor and simile, but now in retrospect it comes to me I was like some shell-shocked refugee captured by a flood and swept away by its irresistible current. Its water was brown and treacherous and toxic and alligator-infested and it raged through kudzu jungles and cottonmouth-moccasin swamps and it allowed me only two choices: I could yield to to its undertow and drown or I could grab onto some piece of flotsam and fight to keep my head above the torrent. Obviously I chose the latter. I had not even the faintest hope I might be washed up onto some shoal or sandbar, but eventually I discovered – perhaps a gift of my Celtic ancestry – I possessed a seemingly congenital inability to surrender. Since this is probably the sort of choice that's now confronting Patrick McLaw, I can only hope he chooses wisely.

***

 

Innumerable studies document the U.S. attitude toward mental illness as the harshest and most unforgiving in the developed world. Indeed mental illness in the United States is feared as if it were a fatal contagion, something you might catch from mere proximity to a mentally ill person on a bus or – horrors – use of a toilet-seat upon which a mentally ill individual has recently sat. Yes, the prejudice is that extreme. But why? The sociologists with whom I have discussed it say they suspect that in the de facto theocracy that underlies the cult of U.S. “exceptionalism,” mental illness is subconsciously viewed as divine retribution. I agree; the Abrahamic god, the death-dealing deity of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, is undoubtedly the most sadistic god in human experience, and the hostility directed at people with mental troubles is “exceptional” indeed. Mentally ill persons are shunned as if they are accursed – fingered by god as hate-objects – and in extreme cases they become the human equivalents of sacrificial scapegoats. But the influence of religion on U.S. society is woefully underestimated. Hence even in the secular realm of journalism, no career-minded editor will dare hire you if you have ever been officially labeled “mentally ill” or “mentally disabled” – never mind your diagnosis or the brevity of your affliction. Even beneath the gloss of enlightenment, the conditioned fear of the divine lightning bolt often remains tyrannically compelling. 

The oppressive commonality of such prejudice is why I feared life as I had known it would end forever the moment I was labeled “mentally disabled” – an apprehension soon confirmed in every dreadful detail. Hence at the same time I applied for nut money, I applied to the state's Division of Vocational Rehabilitation for help finding some new career – work that would be insulated against the climate of loathing but would utilize at least some of my visual, verbal and analytical skills. Here though I encountered a succession of mysterious obstacles: DVR psychologists declared me a top-notch candidate for vocational retraining, yet I was repeatedly denied access to all DVR programs.

Initially, the DVR bureaucrats contented themselves with “losing” my paperwork. After the third such loss, Dr. Budke, who was still my therapist, intervened to get my application processed. But the bureaucrats rejected it again, claiming my entire work history was a lie or a delusion or both. They demanded I provide them names to attest its reality. I did; the bureaucrats obtained confirmation of my achievements, but the questions they asked my former supervisors and colleagues made it obvious I was on nut money. Now there was no question my journalism career was dead. Yet once again the bureaucrats found a litany of reasons – so many I cannot remember them all – to deny me rehabilitative services.

I will never know the true source of these obstructions. One possibility is they were inflicted by the same nameless, faceless but obviously malign sorts of individuals who destroyed my life's work and so annulled all my lifetime efforts. Another possibility, perhaps underscored by the bureaucrats' efforts to confirm my resumé, is the obstructions were vengeance for the anti-DSHS investigative reports I had written during the late 1970s and early 1980s. A third possibility – the one I still think is the most likely – is that I had run afoul of the legislatively prohibited (and therefore secret) gender-quotas for which the Department of Social and Health Services was then becoming infamous.

Angered by the endless delays, bolstered by yet another evaluation that found me “exceptionally well qualified” for vocational rehabilitation, I contacted a pro-bono lawyer and threatened legal action against DSHS. I had hoped this would force DVR to admit me to a job-training program; I knew DVR endorsement was now the only way I could neutralize the mental-patient odium enough to get myself back into the workplace. And for once the bureaucrats responded quickly: they changed my diagnosis, branded me “permanently unemployable” and forced me onto Social Security/Disability, thereby destroying forever my ability to earn any sort of living at all.

Note here the disturbingly Orwellian parallel to the McLaw case: first the Maryland authorities publicly announced he was detained because of alleged threats they claim are implicit in his fiction. Then, when McLaw's extra-constitutional detention raised a national storm of protest,  the authorities quickly changed their story. His novel and his use of pen names were no longer the cause of his incarceration. Now they are claiming he was involuntarily committed because of “mental health issues.” Obviously, whether on the East Coast or the West Coast, the government officials will say whatever is necessary – truth be damned – to justify their egregiousness and protect themselves from lawsuits.

As I noted before, I have never been institutionalized. Though I did not realize it until years later, during my struggle with the welfare bureaucrats I was obviously protected by Washington state's admirably strict laws against retaliatory commitment – a fact for which I remain ever thankful. Had the bureaucrats been able, they would probably have tried to bury me forever in some piss-reeking DSHS Bedlam. But being forced onto Social Security Disability Insurance was bad enough, and from the bureaucrats' perspective it was no doubt a triumph: the “M” they had metaphorically branded on my forehead ensured no employer would ever again take me or talents seriously.

Theoretically, you can return to work while receiving SSDI stipends, but the ubiquitous animosity toward mental patients makes continued employment highly unlikely once your disability is revealed as mental.  And such disclosure is unavoidable because your employer is an essential participant in the review process by which the Social Security Administration evaluates your employability. Nor does the Americans with Disabilities Act offer any real protection – note again the above-linked report. From the perspective of the truly needy, ADA is like all other U.S. social-welfare legislation, intended mostly as propaganda and therefore more about deliberate deception than actual amelioration – yet another example of how the so-called American Dream was never more than a Big Lie.

Yes, the fire and its ruinous aftermath was a long time ago. I was 43 years old when it occurred, 49 in 1989 when the bureaucrats forced me onto SSDI and slew whatever might have remained of my socioeconomic prospects. I am now 74. Though my depression ended long ago, my existence has seldom risen above a desperate and often humiliating struggle against poverty, isolation and loneliness. Again we see the relentlessly unforgiving nature of capitalism, which teaches that those felled by misfortune are victims of their own folly and are therefore to be brutalized accordingly, whether by deliberately murderous cutbacks in the social safety-net, wildly increasing attacks on homeless people  or egregious denial of our constitutional rights. That's why, if I believed in a just and loving god – perhaps the most absurd notion of all time – Patrick McLaw would be at the top of my prayer list.

***

Strangely enough – or perhaps, in terms of Jungian synchronicity, not strangely at all – on Saturday night, 6 September 2014, I was confronted by a new and painful realization of all that was taken from me. And much as it had been 31 years and five days before – though without any of the original crippling intensity – it was an occasion of happiness turned to sadness. But this time the resultant anguish had a positive effect: it solidified my sense of situational kinship with Patrick McLaw. And a moving compliment from a stranger gave me the courage and determination to write of the circumstances that once bedeviled me and now bedevil McLaw – and anyone else caught in the treacherous clutches of the U.S. mental “health” and “welfare” bureaucracies.

The source of this interplay of Yin and Yang was a reunion of people who had been associated with The Seattle Sun, an alternative weekly founded by professional journalists and therefore equal in quality to the original Village Voice and in some aspects – especially visually – no doubt its superior. The Sun, of which I was the founding photographer, was published from July 1974 through January 1982; it was driven out of business by a longstanding advertising boycott organized by the local Ruling Class, which was implacably hostile to the truth-telling reportage that was the paper's award-winning forté. Its former writers, photographers, artists, advertising and circulation staffers and its many friends and financial supporters gathered in Seattle at an attractive facility on the Lake Union waterfront to celebrate the 40th anniversary of The Sun's first year of publication. (It is an aside, but part of Seattle's unique physical beauty is its combination of salt-water and fresh-water port facilities; Lake Union is part of the latter.)

For me the reunion was a pleasant opportunity to briefly reconnect with former colleagues and to view my own work as it is preserved in bound volumes of The Sun's entire production, an invaluable collection assembled by Carl Thorgerson, who was the paper's indomitable advertising manager. Here were not just the best of my Sun pictures – the covers and section fronts – but all the other images I had made for it, and suddenly I remembered just how many there were and how joyfully proud I had been to make these pictures of histories whether personal or political and large or small. And now for an instant it seemed I knew again the solid feel of an M Leica and the quiet but decisive snick of its shutter and the sharply alchemical scent of my darkroom and the wizardly submarine quality of its amber light and the oddly comforting odor of the Pekasol as I hung the film and how the tonal brilliance of prints made on DuPont Varilure emerge in the Dektol with an ever-so-subtle hiss and I thought of the countless times I said to rightfully impatient editors as I was washing and drying the day's take, “you can't rush the chemicals; you'll have the pictures as soon as they're done,” and I smiled at the recollection.

It was as if I were seeing ghosts or was perhaps myself a ghost reliving scenes from a former life, and as I paged through Thorgerson's wonderful archive, my body in real-time 2014 yet somehow for a long moment also present amidst the equally real physical and olfactory sensations of 1974 or 1975 or 1976, it came to me these fading images on fragile sheets of yellowed newsprint plus the few archivally processed exhibition prints that had escaped the fire because they were in my portfolio were all that remained of one of the most purposefully productive and aesthetically fulfilling periods in a stolen life I had never missed quite so forcefully as now. I had never seen so much of my forever lost work gathered in one place, and for that reason I had never felt quite so poignantly the actual dimensions of my loss. Suddenly I was crushed by its awful breath-stealing weight, and I could not bear to look anymore. There was nothing left for me to do but walk away, first from the pictures, finally – as quickly as I could politely arrange it – from the party itself.

In deference to my former colleagues, and later in deference to the woman with whom I attended the reunion, I maintained a pleasant countenance. Obviously I have made peace with my circumstances, have somehow even regained a bit of my former joie de vivre, and I channel my emotions into productive outlets such as this blog and the local campaign for a $15 minimum wage and the monthly newsletter I produce for my fellow residents in the senior-housing complex where I live. But there are limits to my endurance. Alone in my tiny apartment, I could no longer avoid the reanimated woe of the fire and its aftermath – the loss of the occupation that was my selfhood and the pictures that were my identity and then my credibility and finally all my societal worth as a human being and thus my ability to ever again build any other identity or hope for any reality beyond used cameras and worn-out coats and ragged blankets and the inescapable wretchedness of food-stamp poverty. 

For a moment I floundered in self-pity, again overwhelmed by old and bitter truths: that I will have no more second chances, no more lovers, will undertake no more quests, will have no more expectations of yearnings fulfilled or hopes realized, and because I know the viciousness of capitalism, I know the only changes in my material circumstances will be changes for the worse. But then – if I may fall back on my earlier metaphor of a wayfarer trapped in a flood – I began once more to swim. There is a terrible freedom in hopelessness such as mine, a freedom to tell the truth without fear of the consequences, and I realized that perhaps in an odd way – never mind the arthritis in my spine and shoulders that now sorely limits my ability to photograph – I might nevertheless once more carry on the truth-telling tradition that drew me to The Sun and kept me there for as long as I could stay and brought me back to Seattle 40 years later for an evening with my fellow truth-tellers. I would write this story not just to assuage my own hurt but to provide a living, breathing illustration of the plight of Patrick McLaw, who is only 23 but is already suffering the loss of all his hopes and dreams and facing the probability of an entire lifetime of destitution. Perhaps, whether he reads these words or not, he will come to understand, as I did long ago, that in such cruel times as these, survival itself is an act 

of revolutionary defiance.

LB/7-11 September 2014

-30-

Late Again: This Time Due to a Story's Unforseen Turn

I INTEND TO have this week's post -- which quite unexpectedly and at the last possible moment took an entirely unforseen twist -- up sometime later today, probably this evening. Meanwhile my apology for the delay. 

LB/8 September 2014

-30-

Making Sense of Ferguson: an Anthology

IF ONE TAKES the long view of what's happening in Ferguson, Missouri, United States of America, it is but the newest atrocity in a seemingly endless sequence of events that began with the advent of patriarchy maybe 6,000 years ago.

That's when the voice of some self-proclaimed god spoke from a burning bush and also from a fiery wheel to intimidate our species into accepting his toxic mandates: god as heavenly Führer, war against Nature and war against women and the war of God's Chosen against the Damned until all the planet is “one nation under God.”

An estimated four-and-one-half millennia later, a microcosm of the vectoring of these possibly interstellar malignancies would be re-enacted when Europeans who believed themselves divine nemissaries* acting “in the image of God” maliciously distributed smallpox-infested blankets amongst First Nations peoples to begin the “ethnic cleansing” of North America.

Now, today, after centuries of übermenschen vs. üntermenschen (whether patricians versus plebeians, Ruling Class versus Working Class, white versus people of color or however else defined), we witness in Ferguson the direct consequences of an idea that once, eons ago, was so alien to our species it had to be seared into our brains by fire – first by the biblical bush and wheel, ultimately by the flames of the burning-stake and the lynching-tree and the voices of victims whose final agonies are so monstrously horrific they cannot stop shrieking until their vocal cords are charred to silence.

But the shorter-term and therefore more easily provable sequence of events that made Ferguson the new international symbol of “American exceptionalism” and what it really means to reside in “one nation under God” began with the advent of fascism in Italy and Nazism in Germany and the clandestine meetings of German and Italian officials with the secret cabal of U.S. plutocrats who correctly recognized fascism and Nazism as the mature and therefore inevitable forms of capitalism.

 

The immediate result of these meetings was the Bankers Plot (scroll down for my addition of historical facts to the comment thread). Thanks largely to Soviet intelligence operatives, the U.S. Communist Party and the heroism of Gen. Smedley Butler U.S.M.C. (retired), the plotters failed in their effort to turn the United States fascist and make it the fourth (and economically dominant) partner in the Rome/Berlin/Tokyo Axis. But they were never prosecuted – they were too rich to be jailed – and it now seems obvious they succeeded in securely implanting in the minds of their children and grandchildren the lingering notion of a fascist United States in which We the People are reduced to zero-tolerance slavery. 

Now – because the U.S. (pseudo) Left in its arrogant stupidity constantly underestimates the diabolical cunning of the Bankers Plot descendents – one Ruling Class party of two names tyrannizes the entire nation. The One Percenters, the masters of the pretend-to-be-not-so-fascist Democrats and the unabashedly fascist Republicans, have bribed themselves into total control of all government at every U.S. level whether local, state or federal. The result is capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation for all the rest of us – what earlier generations knew as fascism or Nazism, albeit without the authority of an obvious dictator. 

That's why despite Roe v. Wade there are no abortion providers in 87 percent of all U.S. counties; why there is a war on women; why the U.S. Supreme Court has nullified voter rights  and eliminated the separation of church and state; why the risk of biblical-law theocracy replacing what little remains of constitutional governance is at an all-time high;  why hate crimes are soaring  (see also here  and here); why there's no end to joblessness,  foreclosure  and eviction; why homelessness is now a crime;  why U.S. press freedom is but a memory;  why U.S. citizens are denied health care by prices so prohibitive they literally condemn us to death;  why the infant mortality rate is skyrocketing  even as our educational level is flushed down the societal toilet. 

It's also why there's a new war against racial minorities – not coincidentally, the very minorities a Soviet intelligence study** leaked during the early 1990s said were notable for their legitimate (and therefore potentially revolutionary) anger at the racism inherent in capitalism. 

Because the Ruling Class long ago recognized the U.S. military might not be reliable in homeland search-and-destroy missions against U.S. citizens – remember the real reason the draft was abolished was to deny potential revolutionaries access to military training – the U.S. local police are now being federalized and militarized and trained as an army of occupation. That's why they behave as they did in Ferguson on 9 August 2014 when Officer Darren Wilson gunned down Michael Brown and similarly trained officers fired military-grade pepper gas and riot-control projectiles at people who had peacefully assembled to protest the killing. These same federally trained officers targeted the journalists who were trying to cover what soon became notorious as police brutality of a magnitude unseen since the era of the Jim Crow South.

But the Ferguson story's not about individual cops run amok – never mind that's the disinformation with which we're being deluged by our Josef Goebbels media. It's not even about the police per se. What it's about is the methodical transformation of the United States into the de facto Fourth Reich – a transformation of which the militarized cops with their assault rifles and their Nazi-style helmets and their armored cars are merely the most visible manifestations.

_________

*“nemissary” – the combination of “nemesis” and “emissary,” for which my thanks to a dear friend who prefers to remain anonymous.

**The analysis cited here was amongst the KGB papers leaked after the collapse of the Soviet Union. I read of it in major media – possibly Macleans Magazine, maybe also Newsweek – probably in 1992. The focus of the KGB study was rebelliousness within the U.S. during the 1960s. It concluded that white rebelliousness was mostly either fad or, as in the anti-war movement, motivated by fearful selfishness; therefore it had no revolutionary potential. But the rebelliousness amongst First Nations peoples, African Americans and Hispanics was motivated by legitimate grievances against capitalism and was therefore implicitly revolutionary. Unfortunately the report has since apparently been disappeared down the Orwell hole, as neither I nor far more skilled researchers have been able to find it. 

******

Making Sense of Ferguson: a Veteran Agitator's Reactions

I posted these remarks, reproduced here in italic, on the comment threads of various Ferguson stories published on other websites. (Special thanks for the superb coverage by Reader Supported News.) 

On “The Body in the Street”: To understand why Michael Brown's body was left (on display) in the street for four hours it is necessary to understand the new paradigm of governance that's being imposed on the U.S. homeland.

 

This new paradigm is brazenly capitalist governance – absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for all the rest of us – other names for which are fascism and Nazism.

 

It has always been the paradigm of governance in the USian colonies – places like Pinochet's Chile and Diem's Vietnam. But now with the labor movement dead and the Soviet Union gone and China eternally co-opted, there is no longer any power on earth adequate to prevent the capitalists – the One Percent – from ruling domestically with exactly the same savagery they have always ruled their overseas possessions.

 

The function of the police in this new paradigm is to protect and serve the Ruling Class and to tyrannize all the rest of us. In this new paradigm, We the People are the enemy. The police are an army of occupation protecting the Ruling Class from the rage of this foreclosure-conquered nation.

 

That's why Mike Brown's body was left in the street for four hours.  It was a warning to the people, a standard army-of-occupation tactic. It is a 21st Century version of how the Nazis in their conquered territories hung dissidents from lampposts with signs proclaiming the new order. Disobedience Is Death, whether in Hitler's Grosse Deutschland or in the United States of America.

 

***

On “The Ferguson Police Have a Card up Their Sleeve”:  Firstly, the Ferguson police are not “incompetent.” They are a latter-day Gestapo behaving with the same sneeringly competent viciousness that defined the Nazi occupation troops in Europe. In other words, the Ferguson cops are (competently) doing what the (white) Ruling Class trained and equipped them to do: terrorizing blacks.

 

Secondly, the reason blacks in Ferguson do not vote no doubt lies in the state's history, which includes long years of the most violent racism in the United States. Indeed, Civil-War-related violence in Missouri continued “until 1889.” But given the behavior of the police in Ferguson, it is now obvious Missouri's penchant for racial violence has never been suppressed. (For an introduction to the state's bloody history, see here  and here. 

 

Thirdly, racism is a subset of capitalism, a byproduct of its master-slave mentality. Thus if we are to win against capitalism, we must stop underestimating our oppressors. They are in fact the most malevolently competent tyrants in human history. That is why they now own and control the entire world.

 

Fourthly, the function of the police under capitalism is not to serve and protect the people. It is instead to serve and protect the Ruling Class by terrorizing real and potential dissidents – exactly as the Ferguson police are doing.

 

***

On “Police Officer Resigns, Another Is Fired After Ferguson Incidents”: As I said on the thread of an earlier story about these two cops, nearly all U.S. police departments – militarized by the federal government and federalized by the Patriot Act – are hotbeds of neo-Nazi ideology and/or Ku-Klux-Klan-type Christian fanaticism...Hence these two officers will quickly be hired by other departments. Meanwhile do not imagine the new savagery of the police is an isolated event...Open your eyes, people: see the pattern. An atrocity against one is an atrocity against us all. Stand in solidarity. Otherwise we're doomed.

 

***

On “Why We're So Blase About Global Warming” (and what that attitude has to do with Ferguson): Unfortunately for our entire species, at least 63 percent of the U.S. public has already been seduced by Christian idiocy (see for example here) – and the number of these malevolent morons is growing. Supplemental proofs include skyrocketing hate crimes, the war against women and minorities, the Oath Keepers tape from Ferguson, etc. ad nauseam. We are indeed fucked – raped, actually, and abandoned to die – and it is Abrahamic religion with its fanatical hatred of nature and femaleness that has murdered us.

 

***

On “This One May Be Worse (than Michael Brown)”: It's not just “the South.”  It's the entire country. The federalized, militarized police have obviously been deliberately equipped to wage war on us, We the People. Just as obviously – see for example here  – the targeting of minorities marks the war's first offensive. And, despite claims to the contrary, the orders to begin this war have obviously – like the plethora of equipment that has turned police departments into conquering armies – come from the federal government. Though the war's immediate victims are minorities, protesters (remember what was done to Occupy) and journalists – especially those who try to cover the escalating savagery, in truth the entire 99 percent is on the government's target list... To paraphrase Martin Niemöller, “First they came for the Blacks...”

   

******

 

Making Sense of Ferguson: Ten Vital Background Reports

(My special thanks to Pat Fletcher, whose Internet research skills helped gather these exceptionally informative stories.)

 

“A Former Marine Explains All the Weapons of War Being Used by Police in Ferguson”: Reprinted from The Nation by Truthout, Lyle Jeremy Rubin's documentation of the equipment the Ferguson cops are using against local citizens is invaluable. It is tantamount to a seasoned intelligence-analyst's report on an enemy army's order of battle. (“Order of battle” is the military term for studies of an enemy's capabilities that focus on leadership, organization and equipment.) It's relevance, which cannot be over-emphasized, is that Rubin's work is probably the first easily accessible public disclosure of the extent to which U.S. local police departments have been federalized into de facto armies of occupation.

***

“Suspended St. Louis Police Officer: 'I'm Into Diversity, I Kill Everybody'”:  Allen McDuffee's report for The Wire, republished by Reader Supported News, adds the dimension of police personality to our understanding of militarized-police order of battle. McDuffee's disclosures are based on the (now-censored) videotape that reveals the boastful murderousness and the violent Christianity of Dan Page, the St. Louis County cop who assaulted an African-American journalist during the ongoing Ferguson protests. Another account of the Page's bigotry is here,  (also linked in “Global Warming,” above), complete with some representative footage CNN captured from the videotape before it was censored.

(Note: I listened to the entire tape – this obviously before the unknown censors blocked public access to it – and Page's statements are indeed as murderous, and as murderously Christian, as McDuffee describes. Page was addressing a gathering of Oath Keepers, the organization of Christian fanatics, which of course responded favorably to his boasts. McDuffee's report is therefore also relevant to my ongoing coverage, previously linked in the introductory essay, of the intensifying effort to impose biblical-law theocracy  on the United States.) 

***

Five reports give us a a picture of the brutal circumstances under which Michael Brown lived and died. “Why Michael Brown had the right to stand his ground” references the demographics of Ferguson, which implicitly white-supremacist USian capitalism has turned into a de facto ghetto. Routinely policed as if it were Bull Connor's Birmingham, Alabama, it is also somewhat reminiscent of Henrich Himmler's Warsaw.  A more scholarly and detailed demographic report is “Ferguson, Mo. Emblematic of Growing Suburban Poverty.”  A Brookings study, it reveals at least 25 percent of the community's families live below the federal poverty line – in other words, in truly abject poverty. “In defense of black rage: Michael Brown, police and the American dream”  gives Brittney Cooper's account of the reality behind the statistics. “Violence,” she writes, “is the effect, not the cause of the concentrated poverty that locks that many poor people up together with no conceivable way out...” Another relevant report on the policing of Ferguson is “Police raid Ferguson church for third time.”  Finally there is the ultimate portrait of police attitudes in Ferguson, “Nurse on Site Was Not Allowed to Tend Mike Brown.”   

*** 

“A Movement Grows in Ferguson”: Jelani Cobb of The New Yorker does what only the very best and bravest reporters do and goes beyond the police lines to get the back story: “...it is now beginning to look like a movement. The local QuikTrip, a gas station and convenience store that was looted and burned on the second night of the protests, has now been repurposed as the epicenter for gatherings and the exchange of information. The front of the lot bears an improvised graffiti sign identifying the area as the 'QT People’s Park.' With the exception of a few stretches, such as Thursday afternoon, when it was veiled in clouds of tear gas, protesters have been a constant presence in the lot...” 

***

“Missouri GOP Outraged About Voter Registration Booths In Ferguson”  As noted above, voter participation in Ferguson is extremely low, reminiscent of the South in the years before the voter registration drives of the Civil Rights Movement and passage of the (now-nullified) Voting Rights Act. But as soon as a few folks tried to to make it easier for Ferguson citizens to exercise their right to vote, a top official of the Missouri Republican Party denounced the effort as a threat to “justice and peace.” 

***

“Four Things You Probably Don't Know About the Ferguson Protests” gives us another revealing glimpse inside the beleaguered community.

******

Making Sense of Ferguson: Racism as Class Warfare

Profiling Is as USian as Apple Pie: If there are any OAN readers who still doubt the federalized, militarized police have been ordered to specifically target African Americans – perhaps even more ruthlessly now that closet-Republican Barack Obama is effectively channeling Richard Nixon in the White House – let “When You Fit the Description” relieve you of your uncertainties. It is the infuriating story of how television producer Charles Belk was busted, publicly humiliated and imprisoned in an especially egregious case of mistaken identity and false arrest inflicted by the Beverly Hills Police Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Wrongfully accused of bank robbery, Belk was relentlessly interrogated by an agent from the FBI, the primary U.S. secret police agency.

Why? Merely because Belk is a “tall, bald head, black male,” as was the perpetrator, who of course escaped. In the mind of the Ruling Class, as in the minds of their militarized-police guardians, black – even well-dressed black – means poor which means criminal, just as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar points out in the essay linked below. And maybe – given the immediate involvement of the secret police – it's also because the Ruling Class remains terrified by that KGB study I mentioned in the opening commentary. 

***

Influenced as I am by Marx, Engels and Lenin, I have long recognized U.S. racism as a particularly vicious subset of class struggle – the methodical reduction of African-Americans to the very lowest ranks of the üntermenschen. Having lived half my boyhood in the South, I bear witness to the fact the savage relentlessness of the Ruling Class is fueled not just by the usual capitalist components of moral imbecility – the infinite greed and selfishness the works of Ayn Rand and the graduate schools of business have elevated to maximum virtue – but by the karmic dread-of-revolution indigenous to any willfully sadistic aristocracy. The ideological and often genetic ancestors of these present-day One Percenters profited handsomely from slavery before the Civil War and again 70 years later when slavery was resurrected by the Nazis in their concentration camps. Now they themselves have resurrected the antebellum term “human capital,” reintroducing to our 21st Century workaday vocabulary what is no doubt an arrogant gesture of their own malevolent intent. 

But the upwelling of resistance in Ferguson suggests at least the potential of a rather more optimistic future. Hence the relevance of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's surprisingly candid Time magazine piece entitled “The Coming Race War Won't Be About Race”:  “...to many in America, being a person of color is synonymous with being poor, and being poor is synonymous with being a criminal...and that's how the status quo wants it.” Obviously the Josef-Goebbels-minded editors forced Abdul-Jabbar to write “status quo” instead of Ruling Class, (or maybe changed his original text), but the point is nevertheless made: We the People, whether we're dodging rubber bullets in Ferguson, waiting hopelessly in unemployment lines or starving under bridges, are at last awakening to the fact we're in a class war. The question is what – if anything – will we dare do with our newly raised consciousness: whether and how we will solve the problem now that we have recognized the Downpressor Man  for who and what he is. 

LB/23-31 August 2014 

-30-