Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright
1967, 2010
I chose the above image because it is relevant to everything discussed below. It is another of the fire survivors – in this instance one of the very few frames remaining from the approximately dozen rolls of Tri-X I shot during the Tompkins Park Police Riot on Memorial Day 1967.
The riot illustrates perfectly a point made by historian Louis Fiset, that our rights of citizenship can “change on a dime” – revoked with neither cause nor notice. This is precisely what occurred when – without any provocation whatsoever – members of the New York City Police Department attacked a legal, permit-protected gathering of amateur musicians in the Lower East Side's largest public park.
While I have infinite respect for many individual officers of the NYPD, there is no doubt that on this particularly day the cops behaved like rabid swine, arresting anyone who looked even remotely bohemian or hippie-like, bashing heads and smashing faces in a frenzy that nullified a city-issued musical-event license and expressed the white male cops' nearly unanimous Cardinal Spellman fury at the ever-more-defiantly pagan Counterculture and the department's fuck-you hatred of Mayor John Lindsay for his efforts to impose a civilian review board.
And yes I saw this police riot from its very beginning. I was with my lover Adrienne, who that August would become my wife, and we were in the park with married friends, Ron and Joanie Shade, because Ron, a filmmaker, had asked me to still-photograph Joanie and their son Jason playing together in a sand box. I had a rangefinder camera – either my IIIG Leica or one of my two VT Canons (probably the latter as the Canons with their lever-drive film-advance mechanisms were much faster and therefore better tools than the knob-wind Leica for recording mother-and-child spontaneity) – and I have a vague recollection I also intended the project as an experiment with Panatomic X, an ultra-fine-grain ASA 32 film I was interested in using for 35mm portraiture.
The mood of the hour and indeed of the whole neighborhood was celebratory – Memorial Day is the real beginning of the East Coast summer – but the sudden and seemingly inexplicable arrival of huge numbers of cops turned the park as ominously gloomy as some Midwestern flatland hunkered down in fear of an approaching tornado. Ron and Joanie and Jason quickly and rationally fled – though normally peopled by families, the park had obviously become a danger zone – and I sent Adrienne back to our East 5th Street apartment with instructions to “bring me every 35mm camera, every lens and every roll of Tri-X in the place.” She did; I thanked her and after a long hug and several quick kisses looked down deeply into her wondrously blue-flecked Natasha-green eyes and said “now get the hell out of here.”
She confirmed the exact accuracy of these quotes while visiting a few weeks ago -- never mind we've been officially divorced since 1974.
Memory replays her departure from the park, Adrienne a willow-slender woman in her middle 20s walking away with danseuse gracefulness (her superb education had included ballet throughout girlhood and adolescence), and now again she navigates the scrambling confusion of an increasingly panicked crowd as if it were no more than a routine exercise in choreography. She pauses by the park's wrought iron fence, obviously considering whether to yield to the emotional paradox of loving disobedience, follow her instincts and return to my side. Then she waves once and – shoulders slightly hunched with concern and resignation – crosses Avenue A on her way westward to our home between First and Second Avenues. I breathe easy; presumably she will be safe. I fish out my press card and alligator-clip it to the left lapel of the bush jacket I like so many photographers favor for its abundance of gear-bearing pockets; I attach lenses to bodies and open film cans and begin loading, feeding leaders into take-up spools...and now back in the present distance of time and the much closer proximity of poetic truth, my mind's eye views the scene from a new and far more symbolic perspective – as if Adrienne's long mane of ash-blonde hair were somehow bright as pale fire in gathering darkness.
What followed was chaos, providing only the most limited technical data. I remember I worked
with all four cameras: the Leica with its 50mm collapsible f/2
Summicron I soon shot 36 frames dry and never had time to reload; the
Canons with lenses of 35mm and 85mm (the former also an f/2
Summicron, the latter an f/1.8 Canon Serenar, commonplace then and long since traded but
each today a prize for collectors); these plus the Pentax H1A with
its 135mm f/2.8 Spiratone lens that had become my standard telephoto.
As I said the film was all Tri-X; given the protocols of Manhattan
photojournalism I was allowed to soup it in the darkroom of The
New York Times using their stock high-speed developer. I
don't remember the ASA – I probably shot at 800, standard for the
stringing I often did in those days for United Press International –
but the negative densities suggest whatever NYT had in its
chemical bottles yielded twice that. Hence the loss of highlight
detail so evident in the digital image above – something I could
easily correct with a real print in a real darkroom, precisely as I
did with the original image.
The East Village Other published several of my pictures from that awful day. One of these photos -- not the above -- soon went Big Time: Newsweek and Paris-Match.
By its slightly compressed perspective, I suspect this image was made with the 85mm lens, though I suppose it could also have been the 135mm. Nor will I apologize for my fuzzy recollection: despite the fact I was prominently wearing a fluorescent-orange Working Press badge, the cop whose silhouette is exploding from right foreground spun around a millisecond later and smashed me in the face with his truncheon, shattering one of the lenses in my eyeglasses, and after that the entire event went somewhat out of focus.
The picture has an instructive post-riot history as well. While participating in a 1974 photographic seminar at the University of Washington, I submitted prints, negatives and tear-sheets (EVO and Newsweek; I never got a Paris-Match tear) as exemplary of reportage from an environment with a high pucker factor – and much to my astonishment was vehemently denounced for technical incompetence. I believed at the instant I released the shutter (and still believe now) that what makes this picture work – negative quality be damned – is the lockstep geometry of the cops carting away this man they have just beaten to submission. Several editors – and I agree – have said it is one of those photographs they can almost hear. But none of this matters to the Ansel Adams Zone System fanatics. Adams has become a cult figure in the Pacific Northwest, where (despite his vehement objections and finally to his own horror), he has been elevated into the photographic equivalent of the Buddha, Jesus and the Prophet combined, and his zone system – an admittedly useful tool – has become zero-tolerance creed and esoteric gospel.
As even now I reply to my critics: “yes I know these exposures aren't the best, but a riot is hardly conducive to contemplative metering – and it is actually rather difficult to get an accurate Zone 3 reading off a cop attacking you with his nightstick” or (as I would add later in the wake of another such police action) “a constant Zone 7 off a rapidly dissipating cloud of pepper gas.”
Meanwhile, back here in the old-age present, I hobble on, battling an ever-more-aversive reaction to the seemingly bottomless hell of problems with this new computer – something I recognized only a few moments ago when I responded to Adrienne's inquiry about my silence – and I am also still damnably unfocused by this lingering virus.
Therefore I am again (and again apologetically) offering comments I made on other websites rather than the promised piece on President Obama.
But let me reassure you this post is not really as long as it looks: actually it contains four separate stories, the remaining three each set off, like the first, by boldface introductions.
***
In a vital essay of national relevance, Seattle Crosscut Writer Judy Lightfoot notes how what the government did to U.S. civilians during World War II – how it locked up American citizens in internment camps for the suddenly proclaimed crime of being Japanese – makes todays fears “seem positively rational.”
I respond as follows:
Ms. Lightfoot's bravery in accurately linking the present-day climate of fear and anger with the forbidden history of U.S. oppressiveness is rare and commendable.
Left and Right -- labor activist or teabagger -- "our lives as American citizens can change on a dime," precisely as Mr. Fiset discovered.
Moreover it is something we all know at least subconsciously, our sense of dread underscored by the Bush/Obama suspension of the Constitution and a national history that includes not just savagery toward minorities but relentless efforts to suppress any cause unpopular with the Big Business aristocracy.
Thus the diverse currents of our collective memory include a dark undertow of atrocity: genocide against First Nations peoples; internment of Japanese Americans; (ongoing) persecutions of African Americans, Hispanics and homosexuals; the post-World War II purges of Marxians, all other socialists and ultimately all intellectuals; and a litany of massacres far too long for this space: not just Wounded Knee but Everett and Centralia and Ludlow and Columbine Mine and Kent State University and Jackson State College.
The Battle of Seattle lacks a body count only because of the bogus humanitarianism of allegedly “non-lethal” weapons.
For that matter, anyone who doubts the present-day existence of U.S. concentration camps need only visit any one of the poorer Indian reservations.
Such is the ugly truth of government in action, whether in post-Katrina New Orleans or the Upper Big Branch coal mine.
In which context Debbalee's accusation that Ms. Lightfoot's analysis "only stirs up ignorance and fear" gives us a glimpse of a frightening antagonism toward the First Amendment -- a dangerously growing sentiment on both Left and Right and yet another of the reasons our collectively libertarian fears are so chillingly rational.
In reality what Ms. Lightfoot does is courageously take another small step toward examination of the one pivotal truth of our time: that all of our ideologies are bankrupt and all of our systems have failed us -- that neither the Left (with all socialism now discredited by the selfishness of bureaucratic malfeasance) nor the Right (with all capitalism now discredited by the savagery of plutocratic greed) have any answers.
In the parlance of the 12-step groups, it is time for us to admit we are powerless – that our lives have become unmanageable.
Paradoxically, it is only by such admission we can begin to evolve alternatives that might indeed save us from ourselves.
Meanwhile Debbalee might investigate a certain Appalachian folk song, perhaps inquiring into the origin of its lament: “Well it's Coal Creek, well it's Coal Creek, well it's Coal Creek ain't thar no more.”
***
Also nationally relevant – especially given Watergate Criminal John Ehrlichman's testimony that Washington state is a favorite Ruling Class proving ground for the refinement of techniques of oppression – is the 5-4 state supreme court decision the governor can nullify state employees' union contracts.
http://www.thenewstribune.com/2010/04/09/1141054/court-says-it-cant-force-governor.html
What the news story fails to report is the decision sets a precedent that breaks the back of every government employees' union in the state and therefore – by extension (and in keeping with what might be termed the Ehrlichman effect) – no doubt marks the emergence of a tactic that will be used against unions throughout the nation.
Since government employment was the last U.S. stronghold of organized labor, this could mark the end of unions as we know them.
I wrote the following before I realized, a la Ehrlichman, the national implications of the ruling:
This decision -- a terrible loss to every worker or potential worker in Washington -- essentially nullifies all governmental employees' unions in the state, continuing at the state level the national war against the Working Class begun by President Nixon and carried on by every president, DemocRat or GOPorker, since then. That Governor Gregoire now applauds it merely proves her to be no different from most of today's DemocRats: another personification of why I spell DemocRat with a capital R, a truthful label for those who are merely GOPorkers disguised by a rhetoric of humanitarianism -- yet another example of the Big Lie of "change we can believe in." Meanwhile note how DemocRats and GOPorkers alike try to shift the responsibility for economic collapse and perpetual Jobless Revovery, absolving the obscenely greedy capitalists and blaming all of us who are its victims.
***
Most of us have seen the expurgated version of the U.S.-government-in-action video of a U.S. Army gunship crew exterminating an obviously terrified group of Iraqi civilians by spraying them with a ballistic firehose of 30mm cannon fire.
But the dauntless Larisa Alexandrovna – whose formidable intelligence makes her At Largely one of a very few blogs I read daily – posted the entire 17 minute 47 second video and thereby gives us an appalling glimpse – indeed the most horrifying such glimpse I have yet experienced – of the laughing, jeering moral imbecility at the heart of Moron Nation:
Ms. Alexandrovna appropriately questions whether the murder of the Reuters staffers was deliberate or accidental, a matter I address in the second of the two comments I posted on her site.
But my own primary focus is on the attitudes of gunship crew – not say again NOT as a reflection of soldiers and soldiering (I was a three-year Regular Army Cold War-Vietnam Era enlistee myself) – but rather as a terrifying portrait of the same definitively “American” mindset that spawns a plethora of horrors ranging from gang violence and school shootings to death threats against elected representatives and their families.
A number of commentators have obscured this point by equating the gunship crew's chilling behavior with that of video-game players. But this is a classic red herring, at best reflexive disingenuousness, at worst deliberate obfuscation: the true counterparts of the gunship crewmen are the Columbine High School mass-murderers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold.
Recognition of what might be termed the Harris/Klebold Syndrome is vitally important if we are to understand the politics of hate and fear that rule the nation President Obama seeks to govern.
Indeed I see now it was the missing element that – in combination with aversion and illness – was obstructing completion of my long-promised essay.
Meanwhile – with shamefaced contrition for my initial failure to acknowledge that the Harris/Klebold attitudes we see aboard the gunship are not just reflective of today's U.S. military but of the Ted Bundy ethos at the attitudinal core of Moron Nation – here are my comments from Ms. Alexandrovna's site:
The results of Madison-Avenue fostered U.S. talent for psychological warfare -- not just the skills absorbed from the untold numbers of Nazi war criminals given sanctuary after World War Two but the parallel and far more extensive expertise the U.S. Ruling Class (acquired) in its various exterminations and suppressions of First Nations aboriginals and (other despised) minorities -- are horribly evident in the sadistic malice of the killers in this Wikileaks video.
It is by just such deliberate psychological conditioning of U.S. military personnel -- the result a methodically induced Ted Bundy remorselessness -- that victims as far removed from one another as Ghost Dancers at Wounded Knee, Vietnamese at Mai Lai, students at Kent State and now unarmed Iraqi civilians have all been reduced to a state of "thinghood": equivalence to the inanimate moving targets on which U.S. soldiers learn and practice their notoriously imprecise shooting techniques.
Hence not only were these murderous soldiers "just following orders"; they were gleefully inflicting death and suffering on children and adults they had been conditioned to regard as subhuman.
The analogy to the mindset of the Nazi SS death squads is obvious; not so obvious but far more terrifying is the implicit prophecy of what (would) happen (were) these conditioned killers are allowed to unleash their Ted Bundy instincts here at home -- say on striking coal miners.
*
One more item, a memo to Ms. Alexandrovna:
Apropos the deliberate targeting of journalists, I have no doubt it happens, but knowing something of military protocols via a long-ago Regular Army enlistment -- active duty 1959-1962 including 18 months in Korea; (missed Vietnam by luck-of-the-draw) -- I suspect the orders are given at levels far above the pay grades of the gunship soldiers.
As I know from my own journalism career, "accidental" or "unpreventable" assaults on the working press have always been a final resort in local, state and Big Business efforts to suppress news coverage, so there is surely no reason to doubt the same tactics are used federally as well.
The pivotal questions in this particular atrocity are why the gunship was where it was and what were the contents of the operations plan and operations order ("OpPlan" and "OpOrder") that brought it there.
Pursue these threads and they might well lead to larger revelations.
However as journalists I think we should harbor no illusions that in the post-Constitutional United States we retain any of the legal protections we formerly enjoyed.
Indeed in the unprecedented and now-obviously permanent despotism of the American Imperium, the requisite inquiries would unquestionably entail fatal risk -- especially if the querient were to get too close to where the bodies are buried -- bodies either metaphorical or real.
In which context the Ted Bundy mindset of potential enforcers -- so vividly demonstrated by the Wikileaks video -- is especially relevant.
LB/10 April 2010
(-30-)
At last the fact about how America views the rest of the globe is out. Getting worked inside the previous for an American company, I am aware how insular they are, and are completely uninterested in anybody outside the US. They have by no means been an ally of the UK, just a consumer. Properly completed Wikileaks, due to the fact now that the media is within the pockets in the establishment, you are our only source in the reality.
Posted by: Lashaunda Honeycut | 30 November 2010 at 01:42 AM