Loren Bliss: Dispatches from Dystopia

The Fearful Heartbreak of Witnessing the Death of Mass Transit

ONE OF THE DARKER aspects of journalism is that it sometimes gives you access to enough information to make accurate judgments about trends and outcomes – judgments in which correctness is synonymous not with the joy of achievement but with the despair of defeat and impending loss.

So it is with public transport in the Puget Sound area of Washington.

I do not remember when I first realized the region's vicious xenophobia – its long history of bigoted and hysterical “we-don'-wanna-be-like-Jew-York” opposition to adequate transit – had doomed it, inescapably and therefore forever, to being the Third World of U.S. urban transportation.

Given that, globally speaking, the U.S. is itself the true Moron Nation of mass transit, Puget Sound's position at the imbecilic nadir – the bottom of bottoms – is surely a bête noire of grotesque proportions.

It is also the most outrageous example of electoral hypocrisy in modern history: a population that claims environmental supremacy yet despises adequate public transportation, damning it as an encroachment of alien values (the “Jew York” factor again) or a surrender to allegedly despicable and presumably criminal poor people who might otherwise be banished by the lack of transit.

Such is the area's 42-year record: six of eight regional mass transit proposals rejected.

Never mind the region's inside-the-city-limits populations in Seattle, Bellingham, Everett, Tacoma and Olympia are finally after all this time (begrudgingly) admitting they live in cities and not quaintly frontierish country towns – and that good public transport is as vital to urban wellbeing as clean water and functional sewerage.

No matter that Seattleites – formerly the Grand Dragons of regional anti-transit agitation – are finally recognizing that fossil-fueled buses merely perpetuate their enslavement by Big Oil and Big Automotive, that only electricity and rails might carry them to manumission.

Like the rancher alerted to rustlers by the rumbling hooves of his stolen herd, all these people have awakened too late.

The economy has been permanently contracted by the Ruling Class. The national job market cannot ever be rebuilt because the Ruling Class has outsourced all the materials required for its reconstruction.

“Jobless Recovery” is therefore forever.

The downsizing of government services will continue – and this is its malevolent long-range purpose – until governance as we knew it is entirely replaced by the zero-tolerance tyranny of Big Business corporate management.

One of the immediate results is that there is already not enough money, now or ever again, to complete the local transit projects already on the drawing boards.

*****

I think the first time I publicly wrote about Puget Sound's self-inflicted transit crisis was in Wolfgang von Skeptik, the blog that was porn-spammed to death after I pointed out that the impending apocalypse – the perfect storm of terminal climate change, fossil fuel bankruptcy and technological collapse – is a potentially species-killing combination that has no precedent in human experience.

We have survived dramatic climate changes – ice ages, for example – and we have survived various exhaustions of our resource bases. But we have never faced all these crises simultaneously. Because never until the present era was human technology based on such finite resources, we have never before lost our ability to provide ourselves with the essentials of water, food, fire and shelter.

And that is the true horror of our circumstances – the fact all of these essentials are now 100 percent dependent on the availability of petroleum products and the technologies so derived.

The truly eco-minded among us recognized at least 40 years ago that one of the keys to surviving the impending triple apocalypse is public transport that is not – say again NOT – dependent on fossil fuels.

Theoretically, this realization should have given the Puget Sound region a huge advantage: thanks to the New Deal – specifically the Bonneville hydroelectric project – it has the second cheapest electricity in the U.S. (The power generated by the Tennessee Valley Authority, another New Deal project, is the cheapest.)

But, no, xenophobia prevailed: despite the availability of 80 percent federal funding, the “we-don'-wanna-be-like-Jew-York” crowd in Seattle twice voted down electric-powered regional rail systems, 1968 and 1970, and then at the end of the decade strong-armed the legislature into killing a third proposal that sought to take advantage of the same federal assistance before it was slain forever by the advent of Reaganism.

Better dead than fed – never mind it was common knowledge the federal money was the dying gasp of the New Deal, a magnitude of funding never to be seen again.

Never? Absolutely: since Nixon's declaration of class war in an interview by William Randolph Hearst Jr. weeks after his 1974 inauguration, the historical baseline trend has been relentlessly downhill toward continued oppression by oft-concealed shrinkage of funding for government services, transit included.

The all-time classic example both of shrinkage and the tactics of concealment is the destruction of welfare: from 1970 through 1990 the welfare bureaucrats jacked up their administrative costs by 5,390 percent – NOT a typo – even as they slashed stipends and services to the poor by 66 percent.

Then the bureaucrats and politicians publicly blamed all these runaway costs on welfare recipients. Ruling Class Media responded accordingly: one of its Josef Goebbels clones created the archetype of the welfare queen – the Big Lie that hid the fact the true welfare queens were the bureaucrats themselves.

Meanwhile the (former) alternative press – now compromised to compliance by its allegiance with the Bill Clinton Democratic Blow-Job Party – refused to examine the real numbers or ask the poor (or even their advocates) about the worsening nature of life below the salt.

“O don't go there those people are dirty and violent and don't matter O yuk” – the new credo of the journalism school elite.

While transit operations are a lot less administratively top-heavy, they employ the same sort of class-war legerdemain – bourgeois reporter to bourgeois press officer and to hell with the people stiffed by service reductions or fare increases.

*****

Pierce Transit, the local agency upon which I am 100 percent dependent since my automobile died and I will never again have the money to replace it, is depressingly typical.

This year it raised its fares. Next year it's asking the voters to approve a tiny sales-tax increase, 3/10ths of one percent, 3 pennies on a $10 bill.

The smart way to do this would have been to raise fares AFTER the election.

Now by its fare increase Pierce Transit has given its enemies all the ammunition they need to defeat the slightly higher tax rate.

When that happens – as it surely will (especially with a 2/10ths of one percent save-our-transit sales-tax increase already defeated in smaller but demographically similar Whatcom County) – Tacoma will lose 57 percent of its bus service.

Is the pre-election fare increase merely tactical stupidity?

Or is it yet another manifestation – an especially cunning one – of the 70-year Ruling Class war on government services, in this case a transit agency downsizing itself by ensuring the defeat of a revenue proposal it cannot survive in present form without.

But no, that couldn't be happening. Not here: this is America. This is the Evergreen State, the emerald of the Pacific Northwest, Tacoma the City of Destiny.

Whatever, there's no denying this region is on its way to becoming a public-transport dead zone. Even the Ruling Class Media now admits it:

“Sound Transit can no longer fully deliver the package voters approved in 2008 for more light rail, express bus service and commuter rail.”

http://www.seattlepi.com/local/427268_transit23.html

“84 percent of all transit systems (nationally) report they reduced routes or raised fares in the last year.”

http://crosscut.com/2010/08/17/transportation/20046/A-coming-train-wreck-for-transit/

It gives me no pleasure I saw it coming. I wrote of it in WvS three years ago. I wrote of it several times (under censorship and therefore far more euphemistically) for the local journal that employed me as a part-time political reporter until I protested the infuriating irregularity of its paychecks once too often and was fired in early 2009. And of course I've written of it here in Outside Agitator's Notebook.

I depend on mass transit. And because of my dependence, I fear its reduction as my reduction; its death as my death. I had therefore hoped that somewhere, somehow – by the Santa Claus magic of some Easter Bunny miracle – naming my fear might prompt the changes that would make it unnecessary.

But the reality is nobody gives a shit – not even the victims of the cutbacks, most of us people who were long ago too beaten down to do much more than quietly whimper in the encroaching darkness.

Such is the imbecility of hope under capitalism: infinite greed as maximum virtue, limitless selfishness as ultimate good, government services in decline, more money than ever in Ruling Class pockets.

And the Ruling Class of anti-transit Puget Sound with a big head start in shoving us all into our graves.

LB/28 September 2010

-30-

After All Those Years of Effort, I'm Back to Writing Obituaries Again

Photograph and posterization by Loren Bliss copyright 2010: Sunflowers and squash from the land I gardened. (Kodak 400 color negative film, Pentax K-1000, f/4 Tokina 70-210 zoom, c. 1997 or 1998.)

*

THOUGH IT HAS surely been said before, nothing focuses the mind like impending death.

For years I dismissed a vaguely squirmy feeling of minor muscle spasms beneath my sternum as a symptom of the gastroesophageal reflux disease or GERD that had plagued me occasionally since my late 30s and turned severely chronic immediately after I quit smoking 15 years ago.

But last week I discovered that – while there's no doubt I have GERD – that mildly spasmodic sensation I've been experiencing all this time is atrial fibrillation – a killer heart condition that avoided diagnosis because it never before occurred in the presence of medically trained witnesses.

Yes I'd had two episodes of cardiac arrhythmia scary enough to warrant 911 calls, but these had ended before the paramedics arrived. I was hospitalized only because of my history of skyrocketing blood pressure – into the stroke-zone of 225/110 – though after a night or two in the hospital I was sent home to resume as “normal” a life as is possible given the limitations of official disability, poverty and the resultant pariahdom.

Based on the paramedics' attitudes during the second of these cardiac incidents, I am now forever damned in some 911 computer as a hypochondriac who phones in the medical equivalent of false fire alarms. Hence this time when I discovered my wildly irregular pulse, I spared myself another encounter with paramedical contempt and called a taxi, hastily borrowing money from a friend to pay the fare.

Because I am a member of Puget Sound's superb Group Health Cooperative – the sole reason I remain in this otherwise appalling region of xenophobia, ignorance and reflexive hostility to intellectuals (especially “Jew Yorkers” like myself) – I have immediate access to urgent care. Therefore I received instant treatment and was sent home a few hours later.

As long as my miserly Social Security retirement stipend and Medicare Advantage will allow me to pay for it, I will receive the best, most coordinated follow-up care available anywhere in the U.S.

But as is typical everywhere in this sweatshop Moron Nation of ever-increasing capitalist savagery, I soon found myself genuinely terrified by the prospect that what will actually kill me is not heart failure but the exhaustion of my (minuscule) financial resources.

This is because I have since discovered that anytime I eat more than a bite or two of food, what the medical people call “AT-fib” invariably follows, at least for a few minutes – never mind the now-mandatory abstinence from coffee that has reduced me to nearly the same brain-dead state by which I was afflicted for more than six years after I quit smoking.

The lack of caffeine makes writing so unpleasantly difficult I am literally back where I was after I smoked my last cigarette on 23 September 1995 – mentally paralyzed by dyslexia and able to assemble coherent prose only by the most tedious effort imaginable.

Denied coffee, it has already taken me six hours just to write these paragraphs – I who (with my dyslexia suppressed by cigarettes and caffeine) was the fastest rewrite man ever on the city desk of The Jersey Journal c. 1969-1970.

Obviously the darkest suspicion of my life is now proven: that because I am a dyslexic (and therefore was dependent on various chemicals to achieve any meaningful degree of verbal competence), all claims I might have made to being a “real” writer are entirely bogus.

Nevertheless – not that anyone gives a damn – I am toughing it out, inspired by a quote from Geronimo I encountered in one of the trash novels I fetch from the senior center to read for entertainment now that my television has died and I will never have the money to replace it.

The author, Patricia Cornwell, who writes her fiction with a vividness characteristic of old-time  journalism,  quoted Geronimo as having said, “I cannot believe that we are useless...the sun, the winds, the darkness are all listening to what we have to say.” After I confirmed the quote is real, it seemed as good a reason as any to continue to follow the advice Barbara Mor gave me a few years ago: “Try to proceed as if writing matters.”

Fortunately most of the rest of this piece is an editing job, assembling text I wrote before the coffee ban forever robbed me of my last defense against the genetically imposed idiocy I have battled all my life.

Tomorrow (assuming I'm still alive), I will dutifully report back to Group Health that the AT-fib is continuing, after which my life will become an unmitigated hell of almost-daily needles-in-my arm trips to the clinic essential to re-regulate a complicated litany of high blood pressure, cholesterol-reduction, GERD, anti-diverticulitis, scoliosis and arthritis medications to accommodate the addition of a blood-thinner that (maybe) will keep me alive a little longer by preventing the killer clots AT-fib produces.

This alleged “life” – now forever robbed of any work to gave it meaning (because to write with dyslexia uncontrolled by nicotine or caffeine is to expose myself as a moron and because I am too crippled to ever carry cameras again) – will continue either until I exhaust my (very limited) ability to make the $15 co-payments required for the clinic visits or until I drop dead.

I suspect it will be the latter, if only because my sense of impending death is so strong it intrudes not merely on my waking consciousness but on all my dreams as well. For example the interplay of light and shadow in my apartment keeps shaping grotesque caricatures of coal-black skeletons I can glimpse only out of peripheral vision, and some of my dreams are so comically Freudian – myself back in a news editor's slot giving the last ok on Page One of the Final Edition – I've awakened laughing.

The pain of treatment – the real agony of huge cardiac-catheter needles repeatedly jammed into my flesh during an often-fruitless search for adequate veins (a condition resulting from the uncontrollable weight-gain that has afflicted me since I stopped smoking) – frightens me much more than oblivion. Thus my reaction to death, once genuine fear, has been beaten down by long years of physical suffering to little more than curiosity: 

Is death the end we cannot bear to accept? Is all the contrary evidence – ghosts, near-death experiences, credible memories of past lives – merely an expression of an ultimate dementia into which we lapse when confronted by our own extinction?

Do we live again, children of the divine womb, micro-weavers in the macrocosm of some karmic loom inexpressibly beyond our conception?

Or are we trapped in a universe ruled by a divine sadist who hates women, despises nature and damns his enemies to burn forever in his ovens – God the Führer and his cosmos the original concentration camp.

Which formulation will prove correct? I am sorry I will not be able to file a conclusive report. 

*****

One metaphysical hypothesis in which I believe absolutely is Jungian synchronicity – the way seemingly unrelated events and experiences can combine into a meaningful and often revealing whole.

Take a recent discussion on Common Dreams, a 213-response thread – one of its best – prompted by a Guardian piece: “People can't eat hope...The electoral cycle demands more positive answers than the economic cycle will allow, and more positive answers than the Democrats or Obama can provide.”

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/09/13-4 

Originally I posted on this Common Dreams thread a short rejoinder I had written to some of the New Obama garbage appearing on Reader Supported News, one of the many pseudo-Left websites that behind the rhetoric are merely parts of the DemocRat betrayal machine. Not surprisingly, RSN censored my commentary – this was how I discovered I had been banished by yet another allegedly “progressive” site – but I saved the writing because I thought it might be useful elsewhere. As indeed it was on Common Dreams: eventually the ensuing discussion prompted me to detail the ugly truth – suppressed by the DemocRats and twisted beyond recognition by the GOPorkers – about Barack the Betrayer's war on Medicare and thus on lower-income elderly and disabled people.

*****

The following – written before the AT-fib diagnosis – is only slightly edited for inclusion here:

For me and everyone else of my age and caste (I am 70 years old, a near-lifelong journalistic activist and therefore bottom-level poor), the horrors being inflicted on us by the Obama Administration are real and immediate. 

Obama and his DemocRats are looting our Medicare programs, condemning us to the Moron Nation variant of the Final Solution: death by the untreated maladies and illnesses of poverty and old age.

They are getting away with this atrocity because U.S. citizens are the most reflexively anti-intellectual and incurious people on Earth. Therefore they remain indifferent to Medicare until they or a loved one – whether by old age or adjudicated disability – become eligible for Social Security and Medicare coverage.

This enables DemocRats and GOPorkers alike to lie constantly about the real impact of Obamacare on the public.

Knowing I have already lost 99.9 percent of our younger readers merely by mentioning Medicare – “O god there go those fucking whiny geezers again” – I will nevertheless try to explain the core of the “the Medicare issue” as concisely as possible:

Beyond all the confusion imposed by the deliberate opacities of bureaucratic language, there are two kinds of Medicare programs. 

One is labeled “Traditional Medicare”; the other is called “Medicare Advantage.”

Both labels are recently contrived euphemisms, each born of ongoing 'Rat/'Porker campaigns to engender confusion and foster illusions of democratic process. 

So-called “Traditional Medicare” is what is left of JFK's assassination-terminated effort to move the nation toward socialized medicine by building a socialized-medicine program for elderly and disabled people.

“Traditional Medicare” is what we got after LBJ and Congress scaled down JFK's original proposal. 

The scaling-down was to ensure Medicare's compliance with the Big Rhetoric/Little Change principle that governs all U.S. social services: programs designed to look good and sound good but do little or nothing for their alleged target populations. 

In truth capitalism allows such programs only two purposes: propaganda and jobs for the bourgeoisie. 

That's why the real “welfare queens” are bureaucrats not recipients: why – from 1970 through 1990 – the administrative costs associated with welfare increased by 5,390 percent (not a typo) even as stipends and services were slashed by 66 percent. 

It's why “Traditional Medicare” is a meaningful social service only if you're wealthy enough to pay at least half your medical costs out-of-pocket. 

It's also why "Traditional Medicare" gatekeeper fees – exactly what they are – are so viciously prohibitive they are literally a death sentence to anyone in the socioeconomic basement as I am.

With “Traditional Medicare” you have to be a competent enough bookkeeper and clerk to cope with billing the government, keeping your own medical records and above all else making sure you aren't killed by clashing prescriptions – a drug prescribed by one of your doctors interacting fatally with a drug prescribed by another.

Because of the prohibitive co-payments required by “Traditional Medicare” – the fact that nobody at the lower income levels can afford to shell out as much as $250 or even $375 every time we need to see a doctor – “Traditional Medicare” is really (yet another) taxpayer-funded government subsidy to the rich.

Which brings us to what was originally called “Medicare Plus” and has since been (maliciously) renamed “Medicare Advantage” – no doubt to imply that we lower income people who depend on it are “taking advantage” (god forbid!) of the largess with which capitalism rewards the rich. 

Contrary to present-day DemocRat lies, Medicare Plus aka “Medicare Advantage” was created by the Clinton Administration and rather brilliantly shoehorned through a GOPorker-controlled Congress.

The only humanitarian measure ever born of the Clinton White House, Medicare Advantage evens the health-care playing field, giving lower-income people like myself the same access enjoyed by the rich. It sidesteps the “Traditional Medicare” obstacle course by melding Medicare with non-profit health care cooperatives, non-profit HMOs and for-profit insurance-company HMOs.

Medicare Advantage benefits include instant no-fee access to consulting nurses; access to urgent care and scheduled appointments with minimal co-payments (typically no more than $15 or $20 as opposed to the $250 or $375 of “Traditional Medicare”); computerized record-keeping (the one sure protection against death by drug-interaction); and – above all else – a plethora of services like dentistry and eye-care “Original Medicare” deliberately excludes.

Again the contrast, this time in implicit messages: “Traditional Medicare” tells us that if we can't afford to pay out-of-pocket for dental care or eyeglasses, we don't deserve either, while Medicare Advantage provides us affordable access to both.

This is why Medicare Advantage costs the government about 15 percent more than “Traditional Medicare”: the price of providing low-income people with basic necessities like glasses and tooth-fillings the rich can easily afford. 

This is what Barack the Betrayer and his DemocRats are denying us. This – our access to eyeglasses, dental care, hearing aids – is what we are losing forever to Obamacare and its $500 billion Medicare reduction. 

Traditional Medicare – Medicare for the rich – is untouched. It is only Medicare Advantage – health care for the poor – that Obamacare is destroying. It is only those of us who are impoverished who will be exterminated as a result. 

This is the hideous reality behind the death-panel scare; this is the class-war savagery that gave the scare such traction among the elderly – even amongst those of us who voted, as I did, for Obama.

For me – an old cripple afflicted by a variety of ailments – Obamacare is literally a death sentence. Which makes any claim the GOPorkers would somehow be worse than the DemocRats utterly absurd.

LB/13-19 September 2010

-30-

Capitalist Grotesque: Symbiotic Tyranny of God, Greed and Governance

 
 Theocratic fear-mongering; photo and posterization by Loren Bliss copyright 2010. (Olympus RC; Kodak 400 color negative film.)

  *

A FEW DAYS AGO I became involved in a virtual discussion on the website Common Dreams that prompted me to revisit in unusual depth some of the core concepts I had first explored in the forever-lost “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer.”

As regular readers here already know, “Dancer” was a book of text and photographs, the culmination of a 24-year research project (1959-1983) that proved the 1960s Counterculture to be a genuine “revolution in consciousness”: the spontaneous resurrection of the ancient goddess-centered ethos seemingly reduced to insignificance by the sack of Knossos and notably without influence in human affairs ever since. The late and notably influential editor Cicely Nichols believed “Dancer” would revitalize the Counterculture by providing it the solidarity of definition and vocabulary it had hitherto lacked. But just as the work seemed on its way to major publication, it was obliterated by fire – almost certainly arson – and the resultant psychological devastation not only ruined my life but effectively silenced me forever.

Because the process of focusing on this material typically evokes so much of the anguish of the original loss – the fire destroyed all my research and interview notes and nearly all my photographs – I have long tended to flinch from the depth of reflection mandated by my contributions to this particular Common Dreams thread. But for the last few days, as I responded to Common Dreams' troubling disclosures about the latest atrocities in the U.S. war on reproductive and sexual freedoms, the process of recalling and refining the contents of “Dancer” was curiously pain-free, as if I had somehow been granted momentary psychological dispensation. The result – now further edited for additional clarity – is below; the Common Dreams thread is linked here:

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/09/03-2

*****

NOTE HOW -- as capitalism marches its entities forward to full constitutional personhood -- women are forced backward to nonpersonhood and total subjugation.

Coincidence?

I think not.

Just as Christianity and Islam are the direct descendants of the hitherto alien patriarchal savagery that conquered the planet by exterminating the inconceivably ancient cultural ethos we know today as Minoan, so is capitalism the direct derivative of the savagery embodied in Christian theology.

Note the progressions:

From Goddess as mother of us all to God the divine dictator, God the royal tyrant, God the heavenly Führer, God the chief executive officer whose egotistic favoritism, greed, hatefulness and sadism determine even the minutia of how we live and die.

God, king, Führer, CEO -- to facilitate His alien conquest and His triumphant tyranny, our human consciousness is methodically blinded: the Gaean reality of the cosmic and Earthly womb is tabooed forever; Nature is proclaimed the enemy; the physical universe once defined as the sacred living flesh of the Mother is not only purged of divinity but reduced to dead matter valued only for its profitability; the once superior female gender is not only overthrown and reduced to chattel but defined as the source of all evil.

Whether headed by priest, king, Führer or CEO, God appoints the übermenschen of His Select, the Communion of the Saved, to rule with zero tolerance over all of us He proclaims members of the Legion of the Damned. We are thus cursed as üntermenschen: all of us who are pagans, rebels, heretics, agnostics, witches, scientists, abominations, revolutionaries, disabled, unemployed -- all of us who dare question His edicts.

See the connections?

See how Christianity inevitably becomes Capitalism?

See how Capitalism -- infinite greed as maximum virtue; limitless selfishness as ultimate good -- inevitably becomes Nazism?

The Third Reich was the dress rehearsal for tomorrow, crushed not for its atrocities but for its revelations of true capitalist reality.

Yeats saw it all too clearly: "And what rough beast, it's hour come round at last..."

Comes now the Fourth Reich, God's War against Woman and Nature institutionalized. Forever.

Note how -- as capitalism completes its inevitable metamorphosis into the Fourth Reich -- women and Nature are forced ever backward to extinction.

*****

DUE TO SHORTAGES of time and space I omitted several important points from my original Common Dreams post. Ergo:

(1)--The transition from patriarchy through Christianity and Islam to capitalism and finally to fascism is historical proof that ideas have consequences. It is perhaps our most telling example of the idea-to-reality process in action. It is also a vivid illustration of the dynamic that fuels history – the interaction of cause and effect.

(2)--The pivotal function of the god-concept in this process becomes evident only when we are able to transcend the (deliberate?) distractions of conflicts over the existence of the divine. Distancing ourselves from the associated doctrinal warfare – and warfare is precisely what it is – is extremely difficult in a de facto theocracy like the United States. But it is well worth the effort; only from such distance can we view the concept of god – any god – with enough objectivity to examine its psycho-dynamic and psycholinguistic functions. Only then can we see that – no matter whether god is objectively real or not – god is a primary art symbol, an ultimate human symbiosis, a concentrate formed by the interaction of self and other, with “other” defined to include the entire cosmos and everyone/everything within it. God is therefore both a blueprint for society and an ever-evolving summation of what that society believes to be true. Descriptions of god or divine essence – Christendom's “I am the Lord thy God; thou shalt have no other gods before Me”; Islam's “There is no God but Allah and Mohammad is His prophet”; the First Nations' concept of “Great Holy Mystery”; Asia's “the Tao that can be named is not the true Tao”; Minoan society's presumptive “In the beginning was the Mother and She gave birth” – reveal not just the principles that shape our behaviors but the direction, intent and probable destination of the societies in which we live.

(3)--History, archaeology and anthropology show humanity's original gods to have been female. The original social and familial structures were matrifocal and/or matrilineal (if not matriarchal); the original human economies were various forms of proto-communism. Because the psycho-dynamic impulses that govern human consciousness seem to have changed very little (if at all) during our species 100,000-plus years of existence, we can hypothesize a mutually sustaining relationship between god, society and individual essentially identical to that prevailing today, with each of these elements – then as now – in their characteristic albeit gradual states of flux.

Our hypothesis is confirmed by what we know of the societies in question -- information gleaned via history, anthropology, archaeology, folklore and myth. Minoan civilization is especially relevant here because of the archaeological evidence that strongly suggests it was a widespread, possibly even pan-European fruition of the incalculably ancient tribal societies that preceded it. Thus – despite intensifying censorship by the capitalist Ruling Class – Minoan civilization has emerged as a definitive archetype of its era and kind. Though capitalist archaeologists are loathe to admit it, Minoan cities had neither slums nor mansions. The structures capitalist archaeologists deceptively label as “palaces” were more likely to have been administrative centers and are in fact so catalogued by researchers who are exempt from capitalism's overpowering need to propagandize greed and hierarchy as human norms. Meanwhile the existence of a powerful, effective and definitively humanitarian Minoan administrative apparatus – exactly the sort such structures might house – is proven beyond argument by the successful evacuation of Thera.

Indeed the Minoans' matrifocal, ecocentric religion and their proto-communist infrastructure are increasingly regarded as the apex of human achievement, not merely of the Bronze Age but of all time. The lifespan of Minoan civilization is genuinely breathtaking: despite a seeming defenselessness proven by its astonishing lack of fortifications and other military structures, the Minoan realm endured well over a thousand years before its fatal weakening by an inconceivably destructive volcanic debacle – probably the worst such disaster in all human experience. And Minoan governance may have extended far beyond the Mediterranean. Based on a combination of perplexing archaelogical evidence and a curious line of British poetry at least six centuries older than the Royal Navy – Taliesin's “I have sung before the ruler of Britain, abounding in fleets” – Bronze Age Britain may have been a Minoan province.

(4)--When we apply the same analytical principles to patriarchy – male supremacy symbolized by a male god (a concept that seems to have remained alien until the Theran debacle and its apocalyptic aftermath, which was no doubt taken as proof the goddess had failed or turned hostile) – we again see the importance and function of the god concept: how humanity defines god and how that definition shapes humanity.

Rejecting god as the nurturing mother who loves us all as children of her divine womb – the goddess whose body is the universe (a concept eerily reborn in the Gaea Hypothesis) – we emerge from the tsunami-drowned and Achaean-sacked ruins of Knossos to kneel in terror before a god who has become the ultimate abusive father: the Nature-hating misogynist who loves only his Chosen (those who have proclaimed themselves his children) and so despises all the rest he condemns us to eternal damnation – psychologically the most terrifying concept ever articulated.

God the Father thus becomes god the Führer; the collective humanitarian consciousness of proto-communism is overthrown by the malevolence of greed and hierarchy (contrast the evacuation of Thera with the abandonment of New Orleans); human society is divided into the anointed (and therefore Saved) aristocracy of god's übermenschen and the damned (and therefore infinitely exploitable) slave-pen üntermenschen of everyone else.

As I described above, capitalism is the inevitable consequence – just as fascism is the inevitable fulfillment of capitalism.

*****

WE ARE ALREADY OPPRESSED by Christian theocracy. We rarely see it because it is mostly theocracy cloaked in euphemisms and imposed with the same stealth used to gradually boil a frog. One especially outrageous example is the ongoing subversion of the separation of church and state, as by the malicious refusal of Christian pharmacists to sell birth control – their fanatical tyranny suddenly defended as “religious freedom.” Another example of encroaching theocracy is the extension of “free speech” to protect the lies and violence inherent in Christianity's war against science, secular society and liberty itself. No doubt to further obscure its intensifying oppressiveness, U.S. theocracy is also carefully camouflaged by “political correctness” – for example the taboo against speculating on the connection between Sen. Harry Reid's role in torpedoing health-care reform and his beliefs as a Mormon Elder.

No doubt all these disguises will be stripped away in 2012, when Moron Nation elects Palin/Beck and the U.S. experiment in constitutional democracy will be formally ended as a result, probably by the same emergency decree with which President Palin declares herself the de facto Führer of the de facto Fourth Reich. Congress, which by then will be as tautly controlled by the Teabaggers and GOPorkers as the Weimar Reichstag was controlled by the Nazis in 1933, will no doubt add its rubber-stamp of approval, at which point a New Inquisition will begin the nation's theological cleansing even as the more definitively secular Department of Homeland Security unleashes its geheime staatspolizei on all political dissidents.

Not that DemocRat victories this year and in 2012 would make any long-term difference; given the inevitable progression of capitalism – especially capitalism in a time of dwindling resources and ecological crisis – the transition of the United States to a Fourth Reich is as inevitable as death. The serial betrayals inflicted by Obama and the DemocRats are re-creating the hopelessness that fueled the rise of the Nazi Party and destroyed the Weimar Republic – now as then a process financed by U.S. Big Business and thus the obvious fulfillment of Ruling Class intent. Whether via the next two national elections or those of 2014 and 2016, there is no doubt the tyrannosauric forces of capitalism are terminating the American experiment in constitutional democracy and crushing forever the Working Class aspirations embodied in the American Dream.

In this context the economic purpose of theocracy is imposition and perpetuation of the slave mentality essential to ensure permanent submissiveness to oppression. Christian theocracy's primary weapon is fear – specifically the truly infinite fear of eternal damnation – psychologically the most abjectly terrifying concept ever articulated. Thus – cleverly abetted by the spreading cancers of permanent unemployment, destruction of government services and Moron Nation ignorance – Working Class expectations are methodically downsized to fit the slave-pens of the future: “will work for food and shelter.” 

Though theocracy itself is ancient, the effectiveness of its modern form was perfected in the U.S. South, where post-Civil War experiments in governance by the Ruling Class demonstrated how Christian theocracy could provide a near-absolute barrier to humanitarian activism and even to such aspirations, whether in the workplace or society in general.

Christian churches thus became brain-police installations. The consequences include:

--The South's unique history of racial bigotry, misogynistic brutality and savage resistance to organized labor (note the polite Southern euphemism for the Ku Klux Klan: “the Saturday Night Men's Bible Study Class”);

--The post-King nullification of the Civil Rights Movement – note not only the emergence of national racism in the wake of the Katrina atrocities but the Palin/Beck co-optation of the Civil Rights Movement;

--The nationwide metastasis of theocracy itself, proven by the spread of Christian fanaticism throughout the U.S.

Acknowledgement of the third trend was the real message in Barack the Betrayer's appointment of the rabidly misogynistic and homophobic theocrat Rick Warren to give the 2009 inaugural invocation -- the equivalent of the keynote address at a political convention.

(Relevant aside: Though the Left suicidally dismisses the capitalist Ruling Class as a cabal of greed-blinded dunces, history proves it to be the diametrical opposite: in truth the most diabolically cunning, selfishly malevolent, murderously adept elite ever. Now – because of its wealth, criminal skill and mastery of technology – it is empowered for the remainder of human time: that is. until our species is extinct.)

Meanwhile the true extent of present-day theocratic oppression becomes far more apparent if we examine how the DemocRats' economic policies abolish Working Class reproductive rights. While the GOPorkers launch legislative and judicial assaults on reproductive freedom, the 'Rats attack it economically, methodically exploiting the weakness inherent in the fact all U.S. reproductive rights are predicated on the availability of adequate health insurance – that is, insurance that supports female reproductive independence. While the Ruling Class is ensured by its inconceivable wealth, such insurance is available to the Working Class only as a condition of employment. Hence job-losses inflicted by the 'Rats' so-called “free market” policies are as effectively anti-choice as any outright abortion ban. Add the birth control prohibitions imposed by welfare regulations and Obamacare mandates plus Obamacare's implicit war on employer-provided health insurance and what emerges is a political truth the 'Rats try desperately to keep secret: the fact their pro-choice rhetoric is a Big Lie; that the economic consequences of 'Rat free-trade policies and domestic legislation – downsizing, outsourcing, welfare restrictions, Obamacare – prove the 'Rats every bit as misogynistic as the bible-thump GOPorkers. It is surely no accident that soon only the richest women – only the pampered daughters, wives and mistresses of the Ruling Class – will be allowed any reproductive freedom at all. 

*****

WHEN I CONTEMPLATE the history of patriarchy and its progression through Christianity to capitalism thence to fascism and ultimately to the extinction of all human life, I find myself wishing I were skilled at writing fiction, which I am not. No doubt because I am dyslexic, my successful flights of creative imagination are limited to visual media: these days chiefly photography and collage. But if I were a novelist, what an epic of science fiction I could write:

Imagine a universe policed by a humanoid species eons older than ourselves, inconceivably more technologically advanced (and therefore capable of light-speed travel), but a species that for all its scientific mastery is terrified by the long-term potential of any similar species emerging elsewhere across the galaxies. Indeed this species – call it “Forenazi” – fears any counterpart species exactly as post-Islamic-Invasion Europeans feared the inhabitants of other continents and sought to enslave these indigenous peoples as colonial subjects lest the indigents rise to invasive power exactly as the Muslims had done c. 700 CE. Hence the Forenazis patrol the cosmos, exterminating all potential rivals, and over the hundreds of thousands of years of their cosmic despotism, they perfect their Final Solution so that it becomes indistinguishable from “natural” causes. Eventually the Forenazis reconnoiter our own solar system. Mars is lush with life, including humanoids at the brink of interplanetary travel; the Forenazis somehow destroy the Martian atmosphere, reducing the planet to desert. But the Forenazi overlords remain fearful some Martian humanoids might have escaped to Earth; hence millions of years later another Forenazi reconnaissance mission discovers the limitless potential of humans as manifest at Knossos. The Forenazis then pick a handful of Earthling tribes to vector the terminal disease of patriarchy. The Forenazis appear as gods; they proclaim the supremacy of their New Order and anoint the subject tribes as divinely chosen conquerers. Patriarchy expands accordingly: the pains inflicted by the patriarchal sword vanquish the pleasures and ecstasies of matriarchal community. Finally when the time seems ripe, the Forenazis engineer an apocalypse. Callisté – Thera – explodes with the force of at least two dozen H-bombs; the patriarchal legions overrun the ruins and murder the survivors.

The Minoan ethos is exterminated.

Humanity is irremediably set on the road to terminal species failure. 

The Forenazis strut and click their heels and salute one another; they have eliminated yet another species that might have someday overthrown their cosmic Reich.

(But of course this is only science fiction.)

LB/6 September 2010

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