Loren Bliss: Dispatches from Dystopia

A Fine Encore by Barack the Betrayer and His Traveling Medicine Show

Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2009.

***

I made the above photograph back in the halcyon days when “change we can believe in” was still considered a possibility rather than an especially infuriating Big Lie. I used an elderly but seemingly indestructible Pentax K1000 and an even more agedly enduring Tokina f/4 70-210mm with Kodak 800 Color Print film. The lens was at maximum extension and because it was late in the day was opened to either f/5.6 or maximum aperture. The picture was one of many I shot last August during the health care reform “town hall” assembly held by Rep. Adam Smith (D/WA).

Though the image was extremely appealing to me personally – I returned to my socialist roots some time ago -- it was not sufficiently representative of the crowd to be among my initial choices; the attendees, though mostly supportive of reform, tended toward far more moderate signs and slogans.

But in light of our subsequent betrayal by Obama and the DemocRats in general, “Tax the Rich” becomes all the more compelling, and I publish it here tonight because it seems to offer an excellent counterpoint to the reactionary, capitalism-uber-alles tone of President Obama's State of the Union speech earlier tonight.

Exactly as we have come to expect from our newest presidential celebrity – the nation's top officeholder as winner of the ultimate American Idol competition – Obama's speech was indeed a masterful display of showmanship, a truly Shakespearean recital all the more notable for being performed in a political theater usually dominated by carnival burlesque and bumpkin histrionics.

But I have little doubt this speech will prove to have been no different from Obama's other performances: charged with rousing emotion fostered by eloquently stated promises that eventually dwindle to nothing.

Perhaps because I am old enough to remember not just the breathtaking achievements of Franklin Delano Roosevelt but to have shared the now-inconceivably empowering belief John Fitzgerald Kennedy would resume the long quest for humanitarian governance FDR had begun, perhaps too because after the horrors of Dallas I recognized in the person of Robert Kennedy the last remaining hero who might have saved us from ourselves -- I would so much love to be proven wrong about Obama.

Indeed were I given to prayer, I would actually pray to be proven wrong. But since I long ago recognized the god of Judaism, Christianity and Islam as nothing more than a viciously sadistic adult version of Santa Claus (his true malevolence vividly demonstrated in Haiti), my prayers would probably provoke his punishment and unquestionably his rejection -- much as, ironically, an (avowedly secular) magazine now apparently rejects all input from my e-mail address -- no doubt because I denounce the DemocRats as freely as I condemn the GOPorkers.

The publication is The Nation. One of its reports, disseminated last Thursday via the excellent news site Common Dreams, asked members of its “community” to give their assessment of Obama's performance, adding “you can share your take on Obama's highest and lowest moments in the form provided...Here is historian Howard Zinn's response":

“I've been searching hard for a highlight,” wrote Zinn. “The only thing that comes close is some of Obama's rhetoric; I don't see any kind of a highlight in his actions and policies.”

The Zinn piece – all the more important since it was one of his last works before his death a few hours ago – is linked here: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/01/21-7

Since I have commented on enough Nation essays to consider myself part of its “community,” I wrote the following reply, which instantly bounced. (Not that I'm surprised; some DemocRats are already again citing my support of the Second Amendment as proof I'm a “Nazi,” exactly as they did when they drove me out of the party  c. 1987-1989. Such is political discourse in Moron Nation, where GOPorkers and DemocRats alike invariably scream “Nazi” at anyone who rejects their factional orthodoxies.)

In any case – and now with a huge sense of loss evoked by Zinn's demise (I did not know him personally but profoundly respect him as the I.F. Stone of historians) – here is what I attempted to submit:

As to the negative elements of President Obama's first year, I am in substantial agreement with Howard Zinn, though unlike Zinn, I am now convinced "change we can believe in" was a Big Lie from the very beginning.

Of course I voted for Obama -- my only other rational choice was not to vote at all -- but I did so with the research-bolstered skepticism of a half century in journalism and thus with the profound sense my vote was nothing more than the gesture of a shipwreck victim grasping for flotsam.

And now I have discovered -- again "of course" -- that what I had hoped would be life-preserving debris was actually the dorsal-fin of a shark.

Following Obama's serial betrayals of Working Class economic resurrection, health care reform, Employee Free Choice, restoration of the Fourth Amendment, gay rights, even (by his refusal to intervene against Stupak-Pitts) women's reproductive freedom -- each betrayal proven by research to have been carefully engineered in advance -- I have begun calling him "Barack the Betrayer," this in my blog, Outside Agitators Notebook.

Nevertheless I believe history will eventually recognize that the strategy by which Obama achieved election was surely the most brilliant, most daringly Machiavellian ploy in U.S. history -- quite possibly in all of human history.

Alas it was a brilliance exclusively in service to oppression.

Playing on the white-racist belief all African Americans are somehow genetically Left-leaning, Obama gambled he could mobilize this passive bigotry -- which despite its seemingly positive content is merely the political variant of the “natural rhythm” myth -- and exploit it to leverage Main Street's economic despair into electoral victory. Hence the generally unspoken but implicitly Left-leaning promise of "change we can believe in."

Once elected -- and absolutely in keeping with the obligations he incurred as recipient of the largest bounty of Big Business funds ever recorded -- Obama has since betrayed the entire Working Class.

Thus he flings Main Street into the bottomless pit of "jobless recovery" even as he fosters Wall Street's blitzkrieg onslaught toward infinite wealth and unconstrained despotism.

Thus too like every other president since JFK, Obama has proven himself merely another another imperial figurehead, a human symbol of the singular post-JFK purpose of the United States: the expansion and protection of monopoly capitalism regardless of the human cost -- absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation and bottomless poverty for the rest of us, eventual extermination by abandonment and neglect of any of us deemed no longer exploitable for profit.

So ends forever -- that is, until the human species dwindles to extinction -- the American experiment in constitutional democracy.

LB/27 January 2010

(-30-)

Moron Nation's Biggest Big Lie: 'U.S. Charity Begins at Home'

Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 1967, 1971, 2010 (Pro-Vietnam-War demonstrators, Fifth Avenue, Manhattan, 1967. Accompanying a group of anti-war protesters – most of them military veterans like myself and all of us from the Lower East Side – I was stringing the epic 15 April peace march for United Press International. Minutes after we passed, the flag-waving thugs in the background attacked. Tech data: Pentax H1A, 35mm semiautomatic f/2.3 Takumar, Tri-X at 800 in D-76: processed by UPI. Zoom down to view full image.)

***

I am not the least surprised by increasingly outraged reports that United States “earthquake relief” to Haiti consists entirely of soldiers who, once positioned, are methodically imposing a blockade on the delivery of life-saving supplies.

Notwithstanding the glib excuses mouthed by the generals, what appears to be taking shape on the Island of Hispaniola is yet another application of The Shock Doctrine precisely as described by Naomi Klein – that and continuation of the vengeance inflicted on Haiti for being (as Keith Olbermann correctly reported perhaps a week ago) the only nation on Planet Earth founded by a slave rebellion: viciously punished ever since both for its African ethnicity and its revolutionary origin.

Anyone who wishes to become more familiar with Haiti's proud history might begin by Googling the names Henri Christophe and Toussant l'Overture.

Just as anyone who wants an example of a genuine civilization's genuine relief operation should familiarize themselves with the Minoan evacuation of Calliste aka Thera aka Santorini, for which also Google. (Yes I know the proper spelling of Calliste requires a diacritical above the e, but that grammatical nuance is not allowed by the ethnocentric English of the OpenOffice word processing system.)

In any case an informative starting point on Minoan civilization – increasingly recognized as the apex of human achievement -- is here:

http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/2007/04/saffron_mother.html

Meanwhile the self-righteous boast of the United States that it is the most charitable nation in human history is refuted beyond argument by the manner in which Haitian “earthquake relief” is being engineered into another episode of genocide by abandonment and neglect – the technique developed against First Nations peoples and brought to perfection in post-Katrina New Orleans.

The same murderousness is of course implicit in the DemocRats' back-door, $550 billion assault on Medicare – now perhaps (and with dreadful irony) aborted by the GOPorker victory in Massachusetts.

It is also evident in the litany of everyday indignities the citizens themselves maliciously inflict – regardless of their politics – on any one of us who happens to be obviously old, crippled, poor or simply nonconforming.

Save in definitively political clashes, I never witnessed adult expressions of such savagery – and savagery is precisely what it is – during the years I lived in Manhattan, and because in the City I was typically afoot, out-and-about at all hours, there is no doubt I would have seen it if it were there to be noted.

Nor did I ever see it – except in the context of racial conflict – in the South.

But – largely on the basis of the reports I read (and sometimes wrote or photographed or edited) during a half-century in journalism – I suspect that elsewhere in the United States, we elderly, disabled, visibly impoverished or otherwise nonconforming people are targeted by bullies at least as often as I have learned from personal experience we are targeted here in Pugetopolis, which differs from the Moron Nation norm chiefly in the exceptional intensity of its xenophobia – its hatred of people who were not born somewhere in Washington state.

The context of my involuntary look into the vicious moral imbecility hidden behind Moron Nation's prime symbols – its flag, its cross and its smiley face (“have a happy day”) – is that here in an urban area uniquely infamous for its hostility to public transport – a 42-year record in which five of seven transit-expansion measures suffered overwhelming defeat (and the other two were enacted only by the narrowest margins) – I have been reduced to total dependency on such herky-jerky bus service as the Ruling Class begrudgingly makes available.

My automobile – a 1992 Canadian-built Ford Tempo V6 that gave an astonishing 292,000 miles of excellent service – died last July. And it is painfully clear this permanently jobless economy will never again allow me sufficient money to buy another car, especially since I am rapidly approaching age 70.

Hence, in the eyes of the motoring public, I am just another “goddamn worthless bum” (an actual quote) to be physically threatened and otherwise harassed at the bus stops or indeed at any other opportunity.

As for example my first week riding the bus, I unwittingly made myself a target merely by sitting on a stone retaining wall that separates the public sidewalk from the (barren) front yard of a dwelling adjacent a seatless bus stop; the stone wall seemed like a logical place to await the always-unreliable bus. (I should note here that I am obviously a cripple; I have been officially disabled since 2007, walk only with a cane and can stand in one place for no more than a minute or two without immediately worsening pain.) But none of that mattered to the young skinhead property owner who boiled out his front door to threaten me with physical assault if I didn't go elsewhere.

“Get off my wall,” he said. “Now.”

“You can see I'm crippled,” I answered, “and there's no seat in the bus stop.”

“I don't care. Get off my wall. You're trespassing.”

“Tell you what then – why don't you call the cops and charge me with trespassing.”

“No, what I'll do,” he snarled, “is make sure you never trespass again,” adding something I could not quite hear but understood as a threat to stone me to death with the jagged chunks of broken concrete that made up the wall.

The immediate arrival of the bus ended my impromptu sit-in before the skinhead's verbal assault turned physical, though I later learned this particular individual -- his conduct a prime example of U.S. Christian charity -- similarly threatened so many other people (including an obviously pregnant woman), the transit authority began to fear his violence would soon escalate beyond angry words.

Hence the TA replaced the bus-stop seat it had originally removed in the belief the discomfort imposed by its absence would somehow discourage vagrants and petty criminals – never mind the neighborhood's largest demographic group is made up of elderly (and often physically disabled) retirees like myself.

Another such bus-stop episode occurred on the second day of 2010. I am obviously old – my formerly black beard is now silver-gray, and the formerly dark-brown hair protruding from beneath whatever hat I happen to be wearing is now mostly white; I was sitting on the bus-bench, which is inexplicably positioned so you face away from traffic, and perhaps I was a bit hunched over, as I often am due to an unconscious but futile effort to distance myself from relentless back pain – for many years now the last thing I feel before falling asleep at night and my first sensation upon awakening.

I remember I was thinking about a photographic project I have in mind, wondering whether I could somehow transcend my physical disabilities enough to actually do the camera work. Occasionally I would glance to my right to see if the dependably undependable bus was finally approaching.

But my usual situational awareness was obviously not functioning that morning as I didn't realize a huge white long-bed four-wheel-drive pickup truck with its extended cab filled with young white males had quietly backed up to the bus stop until suddenly the truck's horn blared in my ears, so startling it literally made my heart stammer, so close it was momentarily deafening, so ominous the instant picture it formed in my mind was of injury or death by a vehicle gone out of control and crashing into the bus stop.

I leapt away, flailing my arms for balance, nearly dropping my cane and almost falling on my face.

Behind me I heard a chorus of jeers and guffaws, a testosterone-hoarse male voice bellowing “wake the fuck up you goddamn worthless bum,” the floored-accelerator roar of overpowered engine and the squeal of tires as the truck sped off: "Mission Accomplished."

Then there are the myriad routine insults that have nothing to do with our modes of transport, as when our arthritic fingers are a just a bit too slow in checkout lines – “why don't these stupid old fuckers hurry up and die” – or the obvious we're-just-suffering-from-dementia condescension we encounter whenever the abuse actually becomes physical and we try to report it to the authorities.

For the record, this latter outrage has not happened to me yet personally, but three years ago I witnessed two young white male jocks in a rehab ward viciously harass a stroke-afflicted colleague by deliberately locking him out of a shared bathroom and convulsing with laughter every time the old gentleman – a retired university professor – humiliatingly shat or pissed himself as a result.

And – yes – the victim's complaints were dismissed as dementia until I forcefully intervened, not just as his friend but officially as a member of the working press (and thus with the presumptive power to inflict legal harm) that in those days was still mine.

Without that power I have no doubt I too would have been ignored – “just another crazy old geezer.”

So much for the Big Lie of charitableness the United States presents to the world.

As I already knew from my years in journalism, the charitable events of Moron Nation – for example the community that rebuilds a house to accommodate a disabled veteran – are newsworthy precisely because they are so unusual.

It remains for the nation's pathological liars – whether in the Ruling Class or the population in general – to convert those episodes into bogus examples of a national norm.

The true U.S. norm is of course the diametrical opposite: the military blockade that nullifies the relief effort, the post-disaster aid that never arrives, the methodical destruction of welfare and Medicare and Medicaid – all applauded by the skinheads in their houses, the bullies in their pickup trucks, the sneering jocks in the next room laughing not just at the old professor standing at the maliciously locked door with urine and feces dribbling down his legs but at the (female) nurses who have to clean up after him and ultimately at all of us who are not Tom-and-Barbie, image-of-god perfect. 

Does anyone really wonder why so many seniors believe formal “death panels” are next on the Ruling Class agenda?

LB/20 January 2010

(-30-)

As I Predicted, DemocRats Now Offer a New 'Change We Can Believe In'

Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2009

***

Politics are like mosquitoes in an Alpine bog – you can't escape save by hiking far away.

Hence instead of discussing the above image – a picture I made last spring of an old man no better served by Barack the Betrayer and his DemocRats than by the GOPorkers who preceded them – we'll look at the new culture war by which the old man's plight and all the other broken promises will soon be obscured.

The authoritarian reactionaries – Ruling Class GOPorkers and DemocRats united in misogynistic Christian fanaticism – re-ignited the war by manipulating bogus-from-the-beginning “health care reform” into a murderously real effort to further restrict women's reproductive rights.

Now the authoritarian “progressives” – an equally fanatical cult unique to the DemocRat faction of the Ruling Class – have predictably rekindled their own favorite campaign for “gun control” – nullification of the Second Amendment by forcibly disarming the civilian population of the United States.

Eventually, as in the manorial baronies of yesteryear, we the newly subjugated serfs of the neo-manorial United Estates will be allowed neither arms nor even the right to self defense.

Meanwhile, to understand the significance of present-day events – including how the unspeakably desperate circumstances of the old man in the above photo are again being hidden in the convenient smokescreen culture war always creates – it's necessary to look at the past.

Hence the significance of the DemocRats' newest forcible disarmament efforts won't be clear without a back-to-the-future review of the main GOPorker outrages of 1973-1976.

For those too young to have lived through them, these are collectively known as Watergate, the third syllable of which lingers on as the suffix my ever-more intellectually lazy professional successors use to title every political scandal since then.

While the Big Lie propagandists whether in mass media or the high school history books all claim Watergate demonstrated the supremacy of “our system,” what the episode actually revealed were many of the darker truths about life in the United States.

The worst of these – that the U.S. Ruling Class is as far above the law as any court favorite in Antoinette France – was proven by the fate of the arch-criminal Nixon himself, who not only escaped punishment for his crimes but was rewarded by a taxpayer-funded retirement so posh not even a gazillionaire could duplicate its militantly guarded comforts.

Another dark truth – the far more obscure truth relevant to our present discussion – was disclosed by John Ehrlichman, one of Perpetrator Dick's closest criminal confidants.

Asked during the Watergate hearings how it was a Seattle lawyer came to be one of Nixon's private mafia, Ehrlichman replied with the usual litany of GOPorker associations – a classic example of the byzantine relationships among the Ruling Class. But then Ehrlichman added a disclosure so startling it made headlines throughout Washington state and then – just as quickly (as if by some flip of the brain-police censorship switch) – was obliterated from public consciousness.

The essence of what Ehrlichman said is that whenever the national Ruling Class wants to test a new technique of oppression, Washington state is its favorite proving ground.

Of course I am forced to paraphrase Ehrlichman's admissions as my entire Watergate reference-file was lost in that same ruinous 1983 fire that destroyed my life's work. Moreover there is no way I can recover the Watergate material without research that would require more long-distance travel than I will ever again in this miserable lifetime be able to afford. But anyone with the time and money to peruse the record of Ehrlichman's testimony will find my recollection to have been accurate: it was one of those revelations so stunning it cannot be forgotten.

It's also – in a decidedly Machiavellian way – coldly logical.

This is because the state's population offers the ideal combination of sociological attributes. On one hand it is overwhelmingly middle-income and therefore archetypically “American”; on the other hand, the chief attribute of its cultural epicenters -- Seattle and Bellingham -- is a virulently hateful xenophobia that has no counterpart anywhere in the U.S. and therefore provides the perfect barrier against which to measure the strength of new strategies and tactics: bottom line, anything that can win in Washington state will surely win anywhere else.

Which brings us to Obama, the DemocRats and their resumption of forcible disarmament.

As most of you know, I voted for Obama as the lesser evil, my ballot accompanied by the profound and now fully realized fear he would prove to be yet another betraying DemocRat in the manner of LBJ, Carter and Clinton. I said so in dozens of on-line posts that predate this blog, and as soon as Obama began naming his appointees, I knew by their identity he was indeed Barack the Betrayer.

Hence – again in a number of on-line commentaries (chiefly via Huffington Post and Common Dreams) – I predicted that after the new president had thoroughly alienated his “progressive” supporters by total reversals on health care reform, Employee Free Choice, the Oil War, gay rights and any number of other liberal shibboleths of “hope” and “change we can believe in,” he would seek to win them back by granting them the forcible disarmament of the civilian population that since the 1980s has been the one uniform constant of DemocRat demands at all levels, local state and national.

Now, with Obama's popularity at an all-time low, that is precisely the resumed effort that surfaced this week in Washington state, which again has clearly been assigned the psych-lab role Ehrlichman acknowledged.

Washington's legislature is in session, ostensibly to focus on the ongoing financial crisis, but instead of ending the near-total tax exemptions enjoyed by the wealthiest Washingtonians, the DemocRat leadership has introduced a pair of measures -- Senate Bill 6396 and House Bill 2477 -- the intent of which is to begin forcible disarmament of the Working Class.

The proposed restrictions are as draconian as those already imposed on New York City or New Jersey, where the Working Class is not only disarmed but denied the right to self-defense and thus further subjugated by mandatory pacifism and compulsory victimhood.

What little firearms ownership is allowed in these slave-realms is subject to strict approval by the police.

The people officially prohibited firearms include anyone who has ever formally been evaluated by a mental-health professional -- even if only once, even if only to enroll in self-improvement therapy, grief counseling or any other such voluntary outpatient process.

Whether in New York City or across the river in the state of Jersey, it is literally “see a shrink once and lose your gun rights forever” – no exceptions, no appeal.  Its prohibitive significance is that at least 50 percent of the U.S. population will require psychiatric or psychological counseling at some point in its lifetime.

The Ruling Class, of course, can afford lawyers to find loopholes in the prohibitions. Just as the criminals, again of course, can get firearms as easily in these jurisdictions as anywhere else, with the result that the rest of us suffer accordingly.

Following the New York City practice, Washington state's SB6396 would effectively outlaw all semi-automatic firearms and also prohibit a number of pump-action and even bolt-action rifles and shotguns designed purely for sporting purposes. It would ban all these now-legal arms – which include a long list of guns used only for target shooting – by redefining them as “assault weapons,” on that basis declaring them contraband and – as in New York City a few years ago – imposing confiscation without compensation.

Worse, SB6396 would abolish the Fourth Amendment rights of firearms owners by opening their property – car, home, office – to warrantless searches by police.

HB2477 would bolster the Senate measure by requiring that all firearms transactions – including hitherto-private gifts between lovers, friends or spouses and from parents to children – be approved by state and federal authorities. This again duplicates NYC/NJ law.

The DemocRats of Washington state tried twice in the 1990s to impose NYC/NJ restrictions and failed both times. The 'Rats' first effort, in 1994, was defeated by Democratic Governor Mike Lowry's courageous and career-ending veto of a measure that would have forever terminated the gun rights of anyone who participated in any sort of outpatient therapy program lasting more than two weeks. Another NYC/NJ-type measure, Initiative 676, would have required that all firearms owners be licensed but was beaten at the polls in 1997 by a landslide margin of 71 percent.

Then as now, the core motivation of the anti-gunners is class hatred that originated in the Vietnam Era – the infinite malice of the draft-exempt elite for those of us, nearly all Working Class people, who either volunteered or served in response to the draft. (Disclosure: I enlisted Regular Army in 1959, spent more than half my three years of active duty in Korea and was honorably discharged mere days before the Vietnam reserve call-up began in 1965).

The hatred and contempt in which we Working Class folk are held by the elite – an elite now very much part of today's Ruling Class (for example the Assistant Majority Leader who is one of the sponsors of SB6396) – is every bit as intense and irrational as the racist malice characteristic of the Right. It forms a DemocRat mindset in which the issue of forcible disarmament is the ultimate litmus test: support it and you will be acknowledged as a Democrat in good standing; oppose it and – no matter your other views – you will literally be denounced as a “Nazi” and a “murderer": all the more vehemently if you actually own a firearm.

It was my own encounter with such “politically correct” venomousness – this and the (still-breathtaking) anti-male vindictiveness of a radical feminist and hence fanatically DemocRat welfare bureaucracy – that drove me to re-define my lifelong Democratic self as “libertarian conservative,” an identity I embraced, albeit often reluctantly, from about 1988 until 2004.

I had nowhere else to turn: it was the DemocRats themselves who insisted my endorsement of a 10-amendment Bill of Rights not only nullified my go-to-jail effort for civil rights and my never-ending support for organized labor and single-payer health-care, but also damned me forever as a “Nazi sympathizer.”

The selfsame hatefulness spawned the two forcible-disarmament campaigns organized by Washington state DemocRats during the 1990s. However, save for their general relevance to the clash between authoritarians and libertarians (and class war in general), neither measure provided a meaningful index to national politics.

But the political context of the current forcible disarmament effort is radically different.

The reality of Obama's political plight vis-a-vis the “progressives”; the parallel reality of the increasingly obvious betrayal of the Working Class by the DemocRats of Washington state (especially their refusal to make the wealthy pay reasonable taxes); the fact most of Moron Nation's alleged “progressives” are so intellectually enfeebled, ideologically bourgeois and boiling with hatred for firearms owners, they will fanatically embrace any forcible disarmament measure; the corollary fact forcible disarmament is Obama's only remaining alternative for re-energizing the master-hype of “change”; and finally the historic role of Washington state as a human rat maze – all these factors mark the Washington state effort as confirmation of my darkest post-electoral predictions.

If the Ruling Class succeeds in imposing these measures here in Washington state, you can bet they will be imposed on every other jurisdiction in the United Estates. As in post-Roman Europe, the final step in the subjugation of conquered peoples – our reduction to serfdom and slavery – is forcible disarmament.

Meanwhile the old homeless man I photographed last spring in Wright Park – a broken man so lonely his only companions were these sculptures and itinerant wildlife like this friendly squirrel; a cast-off man who despite his sufferings displayed such poignant gentleness you knew he had known a mother's love and perhaps other comforts as well; an age-wrinkled man  to whom I always yearned to speak but who seemed so timid I dared not approach him –  has  vanished from the quiet park he haunted and the jangling streets he wandered and since there was no place left for him save the grave, I fear he is almost certainly dead.

All of which provides yet another example of how the Ruling Class whether GOPig or DemocRat would rather make us criminals than do anything about the capitalist malevolence that is reducing all of us to the wretched circumstances that probably murdered the old man. 

LB/14 January 2010: sorry this is a day late; I've been down with the original Cold from Hell.

(The camera was an M4 Leica with a 135mm f/4 Tele-Elmarit probably at f/16, the film Kodak Color Print 800.)

(-30-)

Graffiti: From Agitation to Moron Nation, from Bullet Holes to Bluster

Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 1983

***

First my huge thanks to Tacomans Kevin Manley and Traci Kelly for the Kevin-built computer that brought me back on line after my HP Pavilion a1100y died of virtual old age on New Year's Day – the beginning of a year the I Ching tells me will be the  worst year of my life.

Next my apology for the unavoidable redundancy of the left-hand column on this page – that column is the summary and the access to the portfolio that includes the above photograph, while this text provides some details about how these photos came to be. The left-hand blurb will retain its position in the months to come, while today's post – after next week linked via the blurb – will fade into the archival past.

Essentially the story of these pictures is that when I returned to New York City in 1965 I was impressed by the contrast between the graffiti I had seen throughout the South and Middle West and what I saw in Manhattan. While the former brands of graffiti never seemed to possess any greater significance than exclamation points of malevolence or pride -- the human equivalent of random sprays of cat piss on convenient surfaces -- the form and content of the graffiti of Manhattan possessed a trenchant intellectual provocativeness I had encountered nowhere else in the United States. While all graffiti is sociologically important – I regard the medium as a semiotic indicator without peer – much of the graffiti of Manhattan was also profoundly appealing to my sensibilities, and within a very few days I began documenting it on 35mm and 120 film.

Because I was never moved to photographically collect the graffiti of the South or the Middle West, a brief description enlarging on the message of the opening photo (Gun Graffiti) is required to set up an either-or contrast. The Southern graffiti was always violent, whether implicitly or explicitly, often racist, and usually – even a century after the fact – defiantly secessionist: a single word (niggers) venomously paintbrushed mural-sized black on the formerly spotless white siding of a Mississippi church; more likely a large-caliber bullet hole blown in a stop sign at some lonely rural intersection (the “o” drilled dead center of course) or a scatter of buckshot penetrations defacing the yellow diamond that warned of a curve or a steep grade. The Middle Western counterparts of these cultural expressions were often less starkly minimalist but – surprisingly given the fact the post-Civil-War South was the original Petri Dish for the virus of Moron Nation – often more obviously illiterate though surely no less hateful: the political message scrawled on a Michigan wall (beateniks suck Commie cock), the misogynistic boast (Sheila has tight pussy) gouged into an Illinois park bench. All of which merely elaborates on the information relayed by Gun Graffiti.

By contrast, precisely as befits James Baldwin's description of the City as Another Country, the Manhattan graffiti of the 1960s was obviously the product of an entirely different ethos, clever – often bitingly so – and always iconoclastic: King Kong died for our sins (neatly lettered on an Ale Place wall c. 1965); George Metesky is alive and well in the White House (in Stanley's, a Lower East Side artists' bar, written a few weeks after Peace Candidate LBJ – the prototype of all subsequent DemocRat betrayers – began bombing North Vietnam); My mother made me a faggot, and the response, a notably different handwriting:  If I get her the sticks will she make me one too? (in the decidedly heterosexual Lion's Head with – of course – the proper punctuation characteristic of a saloon frequented by writers and editors); and the ultimate rejoinder to the long-running subway-poster ad-campaign built around the slogan “I got my job through The New York Times”: the retort carefully lettered -- perhaps by an architect or an art director -- across the wall just above the framed poster: If you can piss up here you should apply to the fire department. (As I remember, this graffito was on the downtown-track side of the 23^rd Street Eighth Avenue IND station).

The same sensibilities enhanced by painterly aesthetics were evident in the much larger graffiti I found outdoors: originally limited by technology (the 1960s was the era of the Magic Marker), two decades later the advent of spray paint would expand its significance from mostly ignored local epigraphy into the substance of an art war between increasingly defiant Working Class taggers and ever-more-enraged (and therefore ever more vindictively punitive) Ruling Class tyrants.

Sadly though as the politics of graffiti intensified, its political content deteriorated – almost proportionately, as if the Working Class people of the United States were being mentally remodeled by psychiatric engineers, with anger uniquely becoming the suppressant rather than – as it had been throughout all previous human history – the accelerant of political consciousness. Again, Moron Nation.

The images shown here reflect this transition even though all but three of the hundreds of photographs I made of Manhattan graffiti c. 1965-1970 were destroyed in 1983 by the same mysterious fire that now with the retrospective wisdom of nearly 70 years I freely admit effectively destroyed my life. The lost images – Revolution Now (a graffito ubiquitously brush-painted, often with painterly attention to the visual geometry of its surroundings, on walls throughout the Lower East Side); Turn On the Cops (in Magic Marker on the side of a police van); Manikin People (an insult that defaced the promotional posters of musicians deemed counter-revolutionary); Turf No Jitterbugging (a relic of the gang-rumble '50s that lingered in red paint on a white brick wall, East 11^th Street at Avenue B).

Guns Not Words revealed in situ the same obvious composition I preserved in my photograph. The eerie message of The Devil (on Staten Island) is included for some reason I cannot quite pull into consciousness. Though I am no devotee of the god of Abraham, that graffito gave me a such a bone-cold chill when I saw it in 1969, I knew I had to stop and photograph it if only to warn others of its sense of psychic menace, and the same haunting impulse prompts me to publish it here.

I stopped shooting graffiti pictures when I left the City in 1970 because – subsequently stranded in the Pacific Northwest (another story for another time) – what I found west of the Cascades was mostly a hybrid of the graffiti I had seen in the South and the Middle West: though the spray-paint sexists had taken up where the paintbrush racists had left off (Goddess Lives splurted on notably liberal Seattle churches), there was the same old misogynistic braggadocio (Betty gives the best head) and the same illiteracy: (If god is on our side, why is their a Tacoma?). Save for the bullet-holed car and the invariably crude vandalism-by-graffiti I photographed on maybe four newspaper assignments, not once in a dozen years did I see outdoor graffiti worth archiving on film. Indeed the region' s only memorable graffiti -- Eat a Developer/Save a Tree and Anyone can piss on the floor: be a hero shit on the ceiling (the former in Tacoma, the latter in Bellingham) – were indoors and written too small to record without the pain-in-the-ass technology of microphotography.

New York though truly still was Another Country when I returned to the City in March 1983, and I immediately resumed the graffiti project – that is, until the fire not only reduced my professional aspirations to ashes but (precisely because Manhattan is a place for Those Who Have Something to Offer) stripped me of any rational reason for remaining there.

Of course the graffiti of the '80s the was not the same as that of the '60s: its content was moving away from celebrations of anti-capitalist sentiment (Death to the KKK), embracing the burgeoning cult of apolitical celebrity, and finally devolving to nothing more than expressions of vapid egotism -- the transition evident in the use of band-names as icons (Modern Clix, The Peptides) and the preludes to the graffiti wars of the 1990s (Art War, Wart, 94).

While my favorite political image here is Death to the KKK, the picture I find most compelling is The Peptides, complete with its own Black Shadow – one of the innumerable, often ominous, sometimes playful black-paint images some unknown artist was painting on walls throughout the borough. The Peptides and its 1983 companion photographs grew out of my stupidly optimistic back-home-at-last contentment before my life's work – photography that began with my father's gift of a camera on my 12^th birthday; the journal I kept continuously from my 16^th year; the book of pictures and text that had evolved from a 1959 sociological quandary and now seemed on the brink of major publication; another book-to-be of photos and notes on Pacific Northwest archaeological anomalies – all went up in smoke.

Given that, I am tempted to say piss on the I Ching: 2010 couldn't possible be worse than 1983.

Could it?

Meanwhile I hope you find the photographs as compelling as I do – not the least because the Manhattan images are relics of a bohemian attitude that no longer exists, that will never be allowed to exist again, not here in the slave pens of the United Estates.

LB/6 January 2009

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The Geometry of Homelessness: Reflections on a New Year

Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2009 (Zoom down to view full image.)

***

Working my way through a list of errands via Tacoma city buses Thursday afternoon I was more than a little pissed off to discover the entire local transit system had been re-routed -- with predictable service disruptions -- by the closure of a major downtown street for a five-block-long “Happy New Year” celebration.

Given the vicious realities of jobless recovery, ObamacRat betrayal and looming GOPorker ChristiaNazism, it didn't take me long to figure out such an obnoxiously ostentatious gathering could only be a party for the fat-cat aristocracy -- the bourgeoisie, the rich and the super-rich, a definitively exclusive crowd limited  to those smugly powerful enough to publicly flaunt their status in such an abysmally dark time as this.

No wonder the party site was literally ringed by cops.

It hardly need be said my fellow bus riders and I -- all of us denizens of the depths below the salt -- were not happy with the results.

We were even more vexed by the fact the transit authority had demonstrated its ultimate contempt for us by not bothering to announce the route changes.

But of course like serfs everywhere and every-when, all we could do was grumble.

That’s because from the perspective of capitalism -- infinite greed redefined as ultimate virtue -- we are all either unprofitable or approaching the point we can no longer be exploited for profit.

Hence we are all throw-aways, or soon will be: the elderly African-American sitting next to me (his wrinkled features a quiet portrait of dignity; his cane -- like mine -- a proclamation of disability); the 50-something white woman seated across the aisle (her face a wan illustration of fading beauty, the Mc Donald’s uniform visible beneath her raincoat a discordant revelation of abject servitude); the red-cheeked fat man -- he's proudly bearing a pole-mounted parade-size American flag complete with chrome imperial eagle -- who makes us gag when a chunk of the candy he's munching falls from his mouth onto the bus’s rain-wet snot-filthy floor and he snatches the candy up, muck and all, and stuffs it back between his chocolate-smeared lips.

“Bus Shop. Connections with other routes…”

Such is public transport in a realm where to be without an automobile is to be a pariah.

***

I ride the bus knowing that given my age and zero-balance prospects I will never have an automobile again in this life.

On this bus as on any other bus in the domains of the Automotive Aristocracy my lengthening white beard and ever-more-tattered clothing are my symbols of solidarity with other riders.

Today I ride not just outraged by transit officials who bow to the aristocrats but boiling with anger at the state welfare bureaucracy which -- without notice or explanation -- is withholding the food stamp disbursements that normally accompany the Social Security retirement-pension payments to lower-income geezers like myself. Undoubtedly this is to earn maximum interest on welfare bank deposits -- that and a bureaucratic Fuck You (and fuck your holiday) to remind us the state considers us garbage.

Happy New Year from governments and governance ever more forcefully devoted to a single purpose: the expansion and protection of capitalism -- absolute power and unlimited profit for the ruling class; total subjugation, bottomless poverty and (on such occasions as tonight) maximum inconvenience to all the rest of us.

***

It was riding this New Year’s Eve bus that prompted me to chose the above image as my New Year’s photograph.

It is a picture that unlike most of my social-documentary camera work has borne a title -- The Geometry of Homelessness -- since the instant I saw its focal point, a person of undetermined gender asleep in a Sixth Avenue doorway early one chilly morning in late 1984.

The film is Tri-X (probably 800 ASA in D-76); the camera is a Leica (M2 or M4 I don’t remember) and the lens was almost certainly a 50mm Summicron. Given the light and the need for depth of field, I probably shot with an unusually slow shutter speed, which would explain the less-than-Leitz resolution.

Remembering this picture from my final years in Manhattan, remembering all too vividly the reality it portrays, remembering the overwhelming mortification and anxiety I suffered the two times I was briefly homeless -- thinking about all this on today’s Magical Misery Tour -- I decide I won’t participate in the self-hypnotic mass delusion of wishing my fellow slaves “Happy New Year.”

***

We are truly no bullshit being reduced to slavery.

We are enslaved both by the de jure slavery incrementally imposed on us since 2003 and the de facto slavery evident in the fact we in the Working Class have not been allowed a real raise in pay -- “real raise” defined as an increase in disposable income -- since 1973.

The threat of enslavement became evident in the Decade of Assassinations.

The language of enslavement resurfaced the moment Big Business began referring to all of us -- everyone in the Working Class -- as "human capital": a term the bosses resurrected from the slave markets of the antebellum South, an ugly psycholinguistic truth I have been pointing out for years, though like some male Cassandra I was always dismissed with jeers and accusations of paranoia.

And now the reality of enslavement is materializing, first in 2003 with the Medicare Part D Prescription Drug Lord Benefit (the mandatory submit-or-be-fined program that forces every one of us who is elderly or disabled to pay the Prescription Drug Lords whatever they decide to charge us for the medicines we need to remain alive); next in 2005 by bankruptcy “reform” (in fact the re-imposition of indentured servitude); now finally the dénouement -- mandatory health insurance that not only forces us to pay or go to jail but compels us to subsidize some already obscenely rich Chief Executive Officer any time he decides he wants a new Jaguar for his wife or a new mink coat for his mistress.

Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette must be laughing their ectoplasmic asses off, rolling on perfumed silk sheets in some posh boudoir of the Beyond: they sent their Marquis de Lafayette to liberate a band of rebellious colonists from Britain, and now the descendents of these colonists are re-creating pre-Revolutionary France, complete with a Congress that thinks itself the Estates Generale.

Such is the ultimate (and ultimately bitter) lesson of the 2008 election: that activism is pointless -- that hope is not audacity but imbecility.

The DemocRats and Obama the Betrayer were put in office by the greatest outpouring of activism since the Civil Rights Movement, with the hugely ironic result the nation's first African-American president is presiding over the formal reinstatement of slavery.

Meanwhile the GOPorkers are far worse: the notion of Palin as the reincarnation of der Führer is too literally skullfaced chilling to be mere hyperbole.

***

Revolution is impossible -- which is why anyone who advocates revolution (even peaceful revolution) is either an idiot or an agent provocateur.

Revolution is impossible for two reasons: because the technology owned and controlled by the Ruling Class has given the Ruling Class the vicious, real-life invincibility once ascribed to the god of Abraham, and because (even if the Ruling Class lacked such malevolent power), history proves that revolution has three prerequisites, all of which are permanently denied the U.S. population.

The historical prerequisites for revolution are:

(1)-a unifying ideology, or at the least a solidarity-building analysis; (note how the population of the United States has been so deliberately dumbed down -- so hopelessly reduced to the reflexive anti-intellectuality of Moron Nation -- that the development of any sort of ideological or analytical solidarity is now forever impossible);

(2)-a militarily trained population, essential for its collective discipline even in nonviolent rebellion (note the real reason the draft was abolished in 1972 was Ruling Class terror of the revolutionary potential of a militarily trained population -- one more bit of conclusive proof the present-day re-imposition of slavery was planned decades ago);

(3)-the assistance, typically both clandestine and overt, of a foreign power (note that since the defeat of the Soviet Union, there is no foreign power independent of capitalism's global slave-empire; note too that despite the USSR's failings, there’s no denying it terrified capitalism into a brief pretense of humanitarianism, a pretense now ended forever: that is, until Gaia liberates the planet by terminating the entire human experiment -- exactly as ever more environmental scientists now predict).

***

Admit it or not, politically our freedom is gone forever; there is no way it can be restored, not now, not in a thousand years.

This means that personally our only option is to emulate the Chinese peoples’ five-thousand-year journey into depths of mind: “Darkening of the light as with Prince Chi…held as a slave, he did not allow external misery to deflect him from his convictions.” *

Achievement of such inner freedom is the core purpose of Taoism and its much newer Buddhist offshoots, especially Zen.

Just as such practices sedated the peasantry of Asia through their endless and now obviously eternal night of tyranny -- I offer no public judgment as to whether enlightenment is illusion or reality -- so might these disciplines serve us in easing the anguish of our new serfdom on the inescapable corporate plantations of the neo-manorial United Estates.

Nothing will change the unspeakable horror of our reality, but as Lao Tzu noted  centuries ago, experiential knowledge of Tao could surely make our wretchedness easier to bear:

“You look for it and you see nothing special.

You listen for it and you hear nothing special.

You act according to it and you find no end.”**

That is, if we are even allowed such spirit quests.

Which -- since the Ruling Class has already opted for the malevolence of Christian theocracy -- we probably won’t be.

A New Year, yes -- but not a fucking thing to be happy about.

LB/31 December 2009

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*I Ching, “36^th Hexagram/Darkening of the Light; Six in the Fifth Place”; Wilhelm/Baynes translation, Bollingen Series XIX, Princeton University Press: 1967.

**Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu; “I Dao 35”; Richard Wilhelm Edition, Arkana (Routledge & Keegan Paul), London: 1985.

　

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