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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What then – if anything – can be done?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LB/6-13 February 2016

-30-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LB/11 January 2016

-30-

More Reflections on Faun and Revolutionary Music

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Note also the drum riffs elsewhere in the piece.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LB/24 November – 2 December 2015

-30-

Why I Will Probably Never Again Vote for a Demoicrat

THE FOLLOWING ESSAYS explain why it's almost certain I will never again vote for a Democrat – not even Bernie Sanders. Each essay describes an aspect of the defining truth of present-day U.S. politics: that when we vote a self-proclaimed Democrat into office, we almost always discover afterward we have elected a Republican instead.

This has been the result of an overwhelming deception – simultaneously Orwellian and Machiavellian – that became the operational core of U.S. “democracy” in 1964, when President Lyndon Banes Johnson presented himself as the “peace candidate” even as he and his henchmen were engineering the Gulf of Tonkin incident to justify the Vietnam War. Thus LBJ escalated limited military assistance to the viciously anti-Buddhist Diem regime into a major regional conflict that killed millions of human beings and reaped the USian One Percent literally untold profits.

While the Republicans make no secret of their warmongering and their intent to savage us every way they possibly can – “us” meaning the U.S. 99 Percent, and “every way they possibly can” including the slow-motion genocide of intentionally deadly social-service cuts – the Democrats raise our expectations by feeding us an entire mushroom-farm of bullshit humanitarian rhetoric. Then, exactly as if they were Republicans in disguise, they methodically inflict upon us all the GOP's proposed depredations – all the while claiming “political reality” leaves them no other choice.

In other words, just as it took a seemingly pacifist Father Gapon to set up the original Bloody Sunday,  so does it take the Democrats to turn the Republicans' visions of a permanently enslaved Working Class into inescapable and ever-more-harsh U.S. reality.

This is the Big Lie writ large, and the ultimate example of how it has become the Democratic Party's signature strategy is President Barack Obama's 2008 election campaign. Obama the Orator proclaimed “the audacity of hope” as the one sure path to “change we can believe in,” only to demonstrate – by his instantaneous and obviously pre-planned post-election transformation into Barack the Betrayer – that hope is imbecility instead.

Three additional examples of the imbecility of hope should suffice to underscore the point, but here for the record are five...actually six, when I include the fact that – despite Washington state's (allegedly) Democrat administration – its Department of Social and Health Services has begun inflicting on seniors the same deliberate viciousness that has always characterized its response to the needs of younger impoverished people.

***

Example One: Democrat Doublethink – Cancellation as “Restoration”

ACCORDING TO AN obnoxiously upbeat newsletter snail-mailed to all registered voters in September by the House Democrat Caucus of the Washington State Legislature – bear in mind, Washington is allegedly a “progressive” state – the Democrat-approved budget for the 2015-2016 biennium “restores damaging cuts to public assistance programs made during the lean years of the Great Recession.”

Sounds good, right? (We'll take up the ironically misplaced modifier – apparently the combined work of a less-than-literate writer overseen by a woefully incompetent editor – in a moment.)

But days before I received this latest example of Democrat deception as part of the daily deluge of huckstering that endlessly floods my Postal Service mail box, I had gotten a disturbing notice from the Washington State Department of Health Services:

“You have been getting help paying for your home phone (landline) through the Washington Telephone Assistance Program (WTAP). We are sorry to tell you that WTAP will end August 31, 2015. This is because the legislature did not fund WTAP in the current budget. As a result, your landline phone service will cost you more.”

The bottom line is that, thanks to the Legislature's decision to eliminate WTAP, our telephone bills will spike approximately $17 per month, in my case an increase from a subsidized $2.97 to an unsubsidized $18.80 or 533 percent. This combined with other devastating cuts in 2016 (for which see below) will inflict enough of an income-loss to force many low-income seniors and disabled people to cancel their landline telephone service. The only alternative will be going without food, medicine or shelter.

It was the Republican Senate, the Democrats claim, that made us do it. But it was the Democrats who in 2013, when they controlled both houses of the Legislature,  enabled the 2015 destruction  of WTAP by abolishing its tax base. The legislation that ended WTAP's funding was part of a measure that increased phone bills by imposing Washington state's highest-in-the-nation retail sales tax on residential telephone service. This year's termination of the WTAP program and its potentially ruinous phone-bill hike was thus not only predictable but obviously planned at least two years beforehand.

Welfare bureaucrats – never truly empathetic with the poor – now say people afflicted by the end of WTAP should apply to the federal government for free cell phones.  But here in Washington state, this is all too reminiscent of the infamous “let them eat cake” comment that – whether apocryphal or not – was one of the provocations of the French Revolution. That's because in Washington, severe storms are the wintertime norm and seismic or volcanic disasters are a constant threat. Cell-phone service, especially in rural parts of the state, is notoriously unreliable – and therefore effectively useless as a (life-preserving) communication medium.

Which means the legislators have undoubtedly murdered some of their constituents. No such death has been reported yet – at least not to my knowledge. But the winter is young. And the first time one of the cutback victims needs to call 911 for emergency medical care but has no way to do it, he or she will almost certainly die.

Why then are we denied reliable landline service? One reason is to enable the state to continue its obscene, largest-in-the-nation's history tax exemptions for Big Business.  The other reason – increasingly axiomatic amongst lower-income seniors – is the Ruling Class wants us dead, albeit without the public embarrassment of death camps.

WTAP served at least 121,404 households including 19,500 persons age 65 and above,  all of whom the Democrats hurled under the proverbial bus. (Alas, thanks to ever-intensifying efforts by the One Percent and their wholly owned politicians to conceal the true magnitude of U.S. poverty, 2008 was the last year for which I could find WTAP recipient statistics.)

Oh, yeah: one more thing:

Out of perverse curiosity, I checked to see if DSHS had publicly announced the end of WTAP,

It should have been big news when the Democrats met in a back-room during the 2015 legislative session and decided not only to end the program forever but to make sure their decision was kept secret until it was too late to fight it.

But did DSHS even bother to send out a press release reporting the death-dealing decision to end the program? Of course not. See for yourself.

Nor was it ever reported by “mainstream” media – not surprising, since “mainstream” media is owned by the same One Percenters who own the politicians who killed the WTAP program. Indeed it is “mainstream” media's (intentionally) damaging refusal to adequately cover politics that provides the cover under which our plutocratic overlords are looting the country.

But the point here is the restoration of public assistance programs touted in the Democrat newsletter is (another) Big Lie – (another) example of how the Democrats talk humanitarianism but actually govern as if they were Republicans.

Perhaps, though, that phrase “restores damaging cuts” should be taken not as a badly misplaced modifier but as a sneaky statement of truth a crafty, subversion-minded editorial team slipped past the censors.

***

Example Two: Routine Betrayal of the Most Powerless Constituents

THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION – which like all persons and groups labeled Democrat tries desperately to hide the party's Ayn Rand viciousness behind a smokescreen of deceptive oratory – is more effectively hostile to the social-safety net than any presidential administration since Herbert Hoover.

Yes, it was President William Jefferson Clinton – aka “Slick Willie” or “Blowjob Bill” – who by so-called “welfare reform” sentenced untold numbers of welfare recipients literally to death  and created a new and particularly insidious form of institutionalized racism  as well.

But Democrat Clinton's depredations were inflicted during a time of relative prosperity, which means they pale by contrast to the economic wounds inflicted on us by Obama the Orator and his cronies after his speed-of-light post-2008-election transformation into Barack the Betrayer.

First there was the death of Employee Free Choice, which ended forever any hope of resurrecting the U.S. labor movement. Next was the death of real health-care reform, also the death of the remnants of our (former) constitutional rights.

Then there was Obama's steady escalation of the war against the poor – the constant, obviously methodical destruction of the already-damaged socioeconomic safety net. It is a process that is ever more obviously a carefully conceived program of slow-motion genocide – a “final solution” by any other name – against all of us the Ruling Class deems useless because we are not exploitable for profit.

The Republicans threaten it openly, but the Democrats, hiding behind their “humanitarian” rhetoric, are the ones who make it happen. Every time.

Thus the slashing of food stamps, first, in 2013, by $35 a month for a family of four, then, last year, by $90 more  – a savaging the Democrats deceptively applauded as “maintaining the important benefits for families” (doublethink by Sen. Debbie Stabenow) and making the program “more legitimate than it was” (doublethink by Agricultural Secretary Tom Vilsack) – truly Orwellian examples of Big Lies  topped only by the Betrayer himself, who said the cuts will “make sure America's children don't go hungry” – probably the most damning example of presidential doublethink to date.

Indeed that's almost as big a Big Lie as “change we can believe in,” since proven to be the biggest Big Lie in U.S. presidental history.

***

Example Three: Depredation and Disenfranchisement by Appointment

JAY INSLEY, THE Democrat governor of Washington state, appointed a plutocrat to run DSHS, the state's largest agency, which has long been deservedly infamous – especially amongst welfare rights activists and the few remaining members of the working press who actually care about the increasingly Dickensian circumstances of lower income people – as quite possibly the most arrogantly vindictive governmental bureaucracy in the entire United States.

The plutocrat's name is Kevin Quigley,  who said from the beginning he would run the welfare department like a business – that is, by doing everything possible to maximize the gains of the stockholders (in this instance the state's taxpayers) and therefore doing everything possible to enslave the workers and short-change the customers.

Selecting a capitalist business executive to head a state welfare bureaucracy is thus rather like appointing a Ku Klux Klansman to run a for-profit nursery school for African-American children. By definition a capitalist is one for whom insatiable greed is the highest virtue, and the fulfillment of that infinite greed is the ultimate in virtuous behavior. The poor – no matter our circumstances – are viewed either as serfs to be exploited for maximum profit or as lazy and therefore worthless parasites to be eliminated as expeditiously as possible – again, as already noted, without the public-relations damage done by death camps.

Quigley's definitively punitive, definitively exploitative (Ayn Rand) conception of welfare and welfare recipients is glaringly evident in one of DSHS's recent press releases about food stamps, for which SNAP – Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program – is the current acronym:

“DSHS Takes Additional Steps to Reduce Food Assistance Fraud...The Department also has worked hard to improve the efficiency of the program. In fiscal year 2013 (the latest federal data available), the total administrative cost per SNAP case associated with eligibility determinations was $18.24, compared to $22.51 in fiscal year 2012. This efficiency is saving taxpayers in excess of $2.5 million per month, based on an average monthly caseload of 595,115 cases. Washington’s SNAP administrative costs are among the lowest in the nation, and much lower than Oregon ($25.81) and California ($67.84).”

Note how the text of the release methodically reinforces the public image of welfare recipients as thieves and thereby focuses on “saving taxpayers in excess of $2.5 million per month” rather than the agency's (alleged) purpose of helping people escape poverty.

Indeed this is more evidence of the same 180-degree turnabout – the shift from defining the poor as victims of circumstance to damning us, a la Ayn Rand, as perpetrators of our own wretchedness – that underlay Clinton's “welfare reform.” It – and the ongoing Randification of USian public opinion – is also reflected in the fact that, between 1970 and 1990 inclusive (and as shown by data in Statistical Abstract of the United States), the federal and state welfare bureaucracy increased its administrative costs by 5,390 percent even as it slashed stipends and services to recipients by 66 percent.

Nor is Washington state in any way exceptional. The Democrat/Republican war against the poor is equally evident in how Obama has stacked the Social Security Board of Trustees with people who want to slash stipends and privatize the program, another of the (deliberately unreported) facts that show how the Democrats are working hand-in-glove with the Republicans.

The Democrats' intent – identical to the Republicans' intent – is to pay back their capitalist benefactors by robbing us of the money the government deducted from our paychecks. The downsizing and privatization of Social Security has at least two purposes, further intensifying economic fear within the Working Class, and giving the money to the Wall Street robber-barons the Democrats and Republicans so dutifully serve.

Here is a list of Obama's trustees and a brief description of their views and activities, with Wikipedia links for documentation:

Jacob J. Lew – Secretary of the Treasury and Managing Trustee of the trust funds. (Clintonite, bankster, unindicted housing-bubble criminal, loved by the Republicans.)

Thomas E. Perez –  Secretary of Labor and trustee. (Clintonite, hence presumably in favor of Social Security cuts but hated by the Republicans nevertheless.)

Sylvia M. Burwell –  Secretary of Health and Human Services and trustee. (Bankster associate, former Wal-Mart exec, loved by the Republicans.)

Carolyn W. Colvin –  Acting Commissioner of Social Security and trustee. (Obvious Obamanoid; will no doubt do whatever the president orders; significantly, approved by most of the Republicans.)

Charles P. Blahous III –  trustee. See also here. (Bushnik, outspokenly conservative, is Obama's chief destroy-Social-Security hitman on the board of trustees – hence his presence as Obama's appointee reveals the Betrayer's true [and truly genocidal] agenda.)

Robert D. Reischauer –  trustee. (Obama's token [apparent] liberal, but like all Obama appointees, he would not have been chosen were there any question about his unquestioning obedience to the president's orders.)

Virginia P. Reno –  trustee. (Seemingly a friend of the worker, but scanty on-line biographical material makes her true ideology and intent uncertain.)

Admittedly I don't know how much influence the anti-Social-Security majority on the board had over the decision to deny us a cost of living increase in a year of skyrocketing medical expenses. But what is significant here is that despite my reportorial resourcefulness, I could not find anybody in authority willing to talk to me about it.

Nevertheless I have no doubt the denial of a COLA will kill some of us before 2016 is finished. I also have no doubt the denial's deadly impact is intentional. Moreover, after years of covering municipal and state government, I know the interactive machinations of politicians and bureaucrats well enough to recognize the pro-genocide trustees undoubtedly influenced the decision.

Obviously, in this new United States – so different from the United States in which I was born – the fact I am old and no longer exploitable for profit has not just nullified but definitively canceled what I was taught were my rights as a citizen.

Worse, because I am old, I remember when the U.S. was – assuming you were white – a fairly good country to live in. And the fact I remember such good times makes me a genuine subversive. It does likewise to every other elderly person who remembers when the U.S. actually made an effort to live up to its ideals.

That's no doubt among the reasons we seniors are forced to live apart, ghettoized in age-segregated housing and activity centers. Obviously the Ruling Class fears our memories of good times might foster rebelliousness amongst our grandchildren and great-grandchildren. It's also another reason the Ruling Class unquestionably wants us dead – the quicker the better.

***

Example Four: How Media Silence Helps Democrats Abolish Tenant Rights

THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION has joined hands with the national landlord associations in a new effort to suppress tenants' rights – in this case by shifting pest-control costs from landlords to tenants.

What is especially significant about this story is that it isn't a story. Though OAN has several times over the years broken stories that soon thereafter were apparently picked up by major media, my exclusive report on the administration's curtailment of tenants rights has been resoundingly ignored. Once again, we see what happens when the government and the media are owned and controlled by the same unimaginably wealthy (and therefore unimaginably powerful) clique of One Percenters.

The bottom-line truth is that behind its seductive glitz and glitter, the United States is a fascist dictatorship little different from any of the world's other fascist dictatorships – those of Mussolini, Hitler or Pinochet. But here the dictator is a capitalist cabal rather than a single individual and the de facto propaganda ministry is the for-profit media monopoly, which includes the deceptive genius of Madison Avenue and its almost inconceivable skill at sustaining the Big Lie of USian “democracy.”

Though now, with Donald Trump bidding to become the dictatorship's public face – the 21st Century equivalent of der Führer...

I ask you readers: is the Trump poster in the photograph at the end of this linked report  disturbingly reminiscent of some of the Hitler posters here?  And does Trump's “Make America Great Again”  have the same jack-booted, Horst Wessel  resonance as “Deutschland Erwache”  (“Germany Awaken”)? Knowledgeable as I am in semiotics – including the unspoken messages in commercial art – I believe the answer in each instance is yes.

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Example Five: Democrat Precursors to Barack the Betrayer

LEST WE FORGET, the Democratic Party's standardization of the Big Lie began with President Lyndon Banes Johnson, who immediately after the murder of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy on 22 November 1963 reversed the dead president's efforts to disentangle the U.S. from its escalating military involvement in Southeast Asia.

In this instance, the Big Lie was LBJ's presentation of himself as the “peace candidate” even as he and his henchmen were scheming to expand U.S. military aid to South Vietnam into a major war. In retrospect, this began the first of the USian Empire's efforts at preemptive global conquest or – failing that – the deliberate, shock-doctrine  creation of international chaos from which only capitalism can benefit.

An equally damning example of the Democrat Big Lie was the party's longstanding pledge to protect women's reproductive rights – a pledge the Clinton Administration knowingly violated with the North American Free Trade Agreement. Imposed in 1994, by 2003 it had already stolen 1,673,453 jobs from U.S. workers. Women were at least 35 percent  – and in many industries 66 percent  – of these job-theft victims. Thus were as many as 1,104,479 women denied health insurance and as a result robbed of their sexual freedom – an atrocity about which the USian feminist movement (shackled as it is to the Democratic Party) – remains astoundingly silent even now.

Those who wonder at the motives underlying this particular Democrat hypocrisy – and also wonder what force could possibly be powerful enough to so completely silence U.S. feminists – should read The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (Harper: 2008), Jeff Sharlet's carefully researched exposé of how the U.S. government has become the global executive-action agency of fundamentalist Christianity, which itself is the ideological handmaid of capitalism.

But Clinton's betrayal of women via NAFTA was not the first instance of the Democrats' unreported collaboration in the deceptively labeled “Republican” war against women – which is, in ugly truth, a relentless campaign by the USian Ruling Class to force Working Class women back into domestic slavery. The first Democrat betrayer of women was the defiantly Christian theocrat Jimmy Carter, who even before he took office had effectively nullified the party's platform-pledge to protect women's reproductive rights.

I should note here I was a member of the working press during the Carter campaign and distinctly remember the (subsequently validated) pre-election concerns of my female friends, all of whom were veterans of women's liberation. Given Carter's publicly declared Southern Baptist fundamentalism – a declaration tantamount to proclaiming one's self a biblical-law misogynist – all these women (very rationally) feared he would try to abolish their sexual freedom. But most of them voted for him anyway because – in what I now recognize as preview of future Ruling Class election strategy – they were convinced their only alternative was voting for “the far greater evil” of a Republican.

When I am writing of such matters I always – at least whenever possible – authenticate recollection by documentation. Thus it is both relevant to this essay and indicative of the magnitude of our allegedly “nonexistent” Internet censorship here in the USian homeland that virtually every reference to Carter's pre-election public pretense of supporting women's rights has vanished down the Orwell hole. The last time I sought this topic's corroborative links, probably four years ago, I found many within a very few minutes. Now, after three hours of diligent searching, I have found only one – a formerly famous, once universally available Time magazine piece describing Carter's denial of abortion rights to impoverished women via the Hyde Amendment as “mean spirited” – a report that is now price-censored by a pay-wall.

Obviously – just as in Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia -- the historical revisionists have been busy. Thus does the malevolently theocratic USian Imperial Ruling Class  methodically protect its own.

Nevertheless, the Internet search paid off by showing me the best analysis and historical summary I have yet read anywhere of the Democratic Party's lethal transformation from New Deal liberalism to neoliberalism, which is actually a new and frightfully Orwellian name for fascism.

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Example Six: Intensifying Bureaucratic Hostility to Low-Income Seniors

AT THE BEGINNING of this piece, I mentioned how DSHS, the Washington state welfare bureaucracy, has extended to seniors and disabled people the unprovoked viciousness with it has always responded to younger, more conventional welfare applicants. For the latter group, the function of DSHS was never to provide assistance, but rather to gate-keep public funds by maximizing denial, cancellation or reduction of stipends and services. But toward seniors and physically disabled people, the agency was until now relatively friendly, as I myself – a DSHS beneficiary since the Great Wall Street Ripoff permanently obliterated nearly 70 percent of my post-retirement income – can personally attest. Indeed it seemed to me DSHS personnel often went out of their way to be helpful to folks in my demographic group.

To me this was a double surprise, since I had encountered naught but hostility – often extremely vindictive hostility – when I was forced to deal with DSHS during the clinical depression that followed the destruction of my life's work by fire in 1983 and, in the decade before that, when I was a member of the working press, during my (invariably adversarial) contacts with DSHS when it was a source of news.

But under the plutocratic despotism of Kevin Quigley, the scornful antagonism that always defined the DSHS attitude toward younger welfare supplicants now defines its interactions with elderly and disabled people too. Two examples – each unthinkable in previous years – should suffice to illustrate the agency's new, decidedly Ayn Randish policy of deliberate nastiness:

The worst of these examples is the victimization of a woman of the lower-income Working Class who is both physically disabled and officially retired. A lower-level menial employee all her worklife, she was receiving pension payments of $255 per year plus a Social Security retirement stipend of $1001 per month for a total income of $12,267 annually. Including the two tiny pension payments, this averaged out to $1022.25 per month, which included subsidies for nearly 100 percent of her health-care costs. This is definitively rock-bottom poor, which also qualified her for $134 in food stamps each month. Apart from these stipends and subsidies, she had no other income, but by living frugally, she was able to survive.

A few months ago, DSHS randomly audited her case and mistakenly recalculated her pension payments as monthly rather than annual. Thus they abolished all of her health-care subsidies and food stamps,which leaves her only $870 per month to live on. When she appealed, submitting all the requisite documentation, the welfare bureaucrats rejected the documents as fake, called her a liar to her face and refused to reverse their decision. Now – denied all access to health care and needing more than half her monthly income for rent – she lives in abject terror, wondering which will kill her first, the denial of medical services, starvation or homelessness.

In the second example, various non-governmental organizations had stepped up to help process DSHS paperwork in the wake of the huge bureaucratic downsizing fostered by the Great Wall Street Ripoff – no doubt one of the primary reasons the capitalists engineered the crash, as I speculated in 2010  (and for which I was immediately and forever banished from Facebook). Typically the NGOs take welfare applications, verify the documentation and electronically forward the work to DSHS. Now however DSHS has begun rejecting these applications, demanding the supplicants appear in person at the local welfare office, bringing the documentation there for further review. This adds weeks (and sometimes months) to the process and – obviously as intended – also makes it profoundly difficult for many elderly and/or physically disabled people to comply.

The second-example maliciousness I have experienced personally: specifically the arbitrary denial of nearly $700 in medical expenses that – supported as they are by official receipts – would previously have been factored into my monthly food-stamp allotment.

Hence – and I say this again for emphasis – the purpose of the Washington state welfare bureaucracy (which is now the purpose of the federal welfare bureaucracy in Washington D.C. and in all the 49 other states), is not to help the poor, but rather to placate the ever-more-frightened taxpayers – that is, those who still have living-wage jobs -- by denying us life-sustaining stipends and services, and thereby shoving us as quickly as possible into our graves.

Welcome to the Democratic Party's United States.

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Conclusion: the Big Lie Has Become the So-Called “American” Way

THE ULTIMATE LESSON here is in the varied applications of Josef Goebbels' famed Big Lie.  His basic principle was simple: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”

Application of the Big Lie by the USian Ruling Class is evident two forms, firstly in how the Republicans routinely lie about reality (as in the “weapons of mass destruction” falsely claimed  to be in Iraq), secondly in how the Democrats routinely lie about their intent (as in Obama's “change we can believe in”).

The first Big Lie form – the knowingly false description of reality – is ultimately subject to fact checking and is therefore maintainable only by the strictest censorship, in which context the remainder of the Goebbels quite linked above is especially relevant: “The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State” (emphasis added).

In the Big Lie's second form – deliberate falsehoods about intent – the truth cannot be established save by the (invariably speculative) indications of past conduct, which in the case of a carefully managed candidate may themselves be deliberately deceptive. From the perspective of the Ruling Class, the primary advantage of the second form is that it requires a much-less-severe regime of censorship and is therefore particularly amenable to maintaining the Big Lie of USian “democracy.”

Thus, in these applications of the Big Lie – one to drum up support for an imperial conquest, the other to dupe the voters into accepting “progressives” who in fact are no less fascist than their Republican rivals – we see how the Democrats are far worse than the Republicans, not only in their savaging of the socioeconomic safety net (and of non-police, non-military government services in general), but most especially in the long-term damage they have done to the U.S. experiment in representative democracy – damage obvious in the unprecedentedly low voter turnout  and in the various expressions of public hopelessness that sometimes surface via random polling, for example here  and here. 

In short, the Democrats hide their malevolence behind humanitarian Big Lies even as the Republicans brandish their own viciousness to make the eventual Democratic alternative palatable – never mind in principle it is equally savage. The Republicans thereby create the perfect diversion behind which to camouflage the ugly fact the Democrat Party of today is as much the party of Ayn Rand as the GOP. The Democrats meanwhile lie about who and what they are, exploiting the genuinely humanitarian history of the (forever abolished) New Deal and the (never-to-be-fulfilled) expectations deliberately raised by carefully selected, allegedly “progressive” personalities such as Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Alan Grayson to further conceal the party's predatory intent. This is, indeed, the defining Big Lie of USian Empire politics – an alleged two-party system that is in fact a single-party dictatorship diabolically disguised as its opposite.

Why then vote at all? However much our election process has been perverted – and I believe that since Citizens United  it has been totally perverted – I think it is vital to preserve the franchise itself against the (faint) possibility of revolutionary reform. The more we don't vote, the easier it will be for the Ruling Class to abolish elections entirely.

For whom then will I vote? For third-party candidates: Communists, socialists, maybe even Greens if they'd set aside their white-bourgeois hostility to unions.

Why only third party candidates? Because – as we see from the above – the notion that not voting for a Democrat automatically aids the forces of reaction is yet another Big Lie. Both parties are instruments of the Ruling Class, and by playing the good-cop/bad-cop role, they intimidate us into giving the Ruling Class everything it wants. Hence, as a member of the Working Class, I know I'm fucked whomever I vote for – or whether I vote or not. That's because we in the Working Class are methodically denied any influence in U.S. governance,  whether it's the Democrats in power or the Republicans.

Again – and it cannot be said too often – that's why voter turnout is already at an all-time low and still declining. Why cast a ballot if your vote is meaningless?

Though the U.S. population yet remains too Moron Nation ignorant to understand the necessity of voting to preserve the franchise, it is at least awakening to the fact elections don't matter when the country is ruled by a handful of nameless, faceless plutocrats who, individually and collectively, have the same serial-killer mentality as Adolph Hitler, whom their fathers and grandfathers financed into power to be the savior of capitalism – the very role Trump now seeks for himself.

LB/10-24 November 2015

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