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October 2010

"Autumn Here Will Kill Me with Its Dark and Dreadful Loveliness"

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PHOTO NOTES (click on each image to see it full frame without need to scroll or zoom): One late October morning in 1985, the last full year I was in the City, I walked from my home at West 89th and Amsterdam downtown through Central Park to my office at East 39th Street and Madison, where I worked as editor-in-chief of Art Direction magazine. The jungle-oppressive northeastern summer heat and humidity was finally in retreat and the morning was chilly enough for a black wool beret and a black turtleneck sweater beneath an earthen-hued tweed sport coat, and as always I had a battered tan canvas shoulder bag slung crossways from my left side.

Carefully chosen for the fact that whatever the bag might say to onlookers, it never so much as whispered cameras, it usually contained an M4 Leica with its 35mm Summicron mounted and a 90mm Elmarit “just in case” and probably a half dozen extra rolls of Tri-X, but today I had substituted one of my spare M2 bodies and loaded it with Kodachrome II and turned the in-park portion of the five-mile hike into a quest for images of the deciduous autumnal color that flares as a brief reminder yes even Manhattan is part of Mother Nature's domain.

The footpath I followed was predictably carpeted with fallen leaves that made a satisfying scrunch beneath my desert boots and reminded me of boyhood Octobers in Michigan and East Tennessee and the wonderfully tangy smoke of now-forbidden autumnal burning, but the park's colors were disappointingly diminished by drought and pollution and dust, and the only pictures I made that morning were with the 90mm lens of a solitary cardinal perched amidst bare branches, the bird's breathtakingly crimson male feathers a stunning contrast to the drab surroundings.

Nevertheless I remained on the path through the woods adjacent  Central Park West and as I approached the park's southern boundary I found that much to my surprise and with the full intensity I normally reserve for the three women who have been my true lovers I missed the damp autumnal chill of Western Washington, its intervals of rain and wind and fog and its wan yet seemingly golden sunlight and most of all the stark almost ominous interplay of colors, the dominant hard yellows of aspens and cottonwoods and big-leaf maples with occasional red flaming bursts of vine maple as if in counterpoint and all of it intensified by backdrops of evergreens of a hue so seasonably funereal it sometimes approaches the color of night even at high noon.

Then I remembered how the edges of the blackberry leaves seem to rust beneath the first frost, how the huge igneous boulders along the South Fork of the Nooksack River collect pools of rain in their irregularities, how the water turns black from the minerals in the rocks and how it looks with yellow leaves afloat on the blackness: a small but very special Gaian gift when you're casting Mepps spinners into the river's troutly depths for big Dolly Vardens or native rainbows, the yellow-on-black a visual haiku in a realm where – for just a few weeks – the whole environment becomes an indescribably poignant, unbearably sombre eulogy to the passing of another year.

When I reached the office that morning I gave my colleagues and employees their pro forma greetings and went straight to my typewriter, my mind still fixed on visual memories of Western Washington and overwhelmed by an intensity of realization. “Autumn there,” I wrote, “will kill me with its dark and dreadful loveliness, if not this year than surely some other.” Prophetic? That remains to be seen. Meanwhile the above two images – the uppermost with its momentary Gaian blessing of dappled sunlight maybe the best nature picture I ever made – capture some of that poignancy. Both are in the Cascade foothills of rural Thurston County, a bit south and inland from Tacoma. Each was photographed with a Pentax K-1000, a Tokina f/4 70mm-210mm zoom and Kodak 400 negative film, the top image probably in 1996, the bottom most likely in 2001. Photographs by Loren Bliss copyright 2010.

LB/27 October 2010

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First an Apology for Erratic Posting; Then a Kind of Manifesto

Momentary Exits TIF images 016
Self-portrait with pole beans, corn and sunflowers, 1989. Part of a series of pictures entitled “Momentary Exits,” specifically exits from the indescribably bleak depths of post-fire depression, with eternal gratitude to a Whatcom County librarian who blessed me with her late father's ancient Rolleicord II – and by so doing no doubt prolonged my life. I leave her unnamed only to protect her from the consequences of my politics. Kodak 120 color negative film, probably 100 ASA. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2010.

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SORRY FOR MY ABSENCE and the increasing unpredictability of when new posts might appear on this site. Various chronic ailments – mostly cardiac and intestinal malfunctions – are converging to shut me down for ever longer intervals ever more frequently. Because the oracles are uniformly negative – yes I admit I see no contradiction implicit in being a superstitious agnostic – I strongly suspect this seemingly relentless decline is in fact my journey down the last and ever-steepening slope that ends in death. I have no idea how long this odyssey into oblivion will take – I will probably have a somewhat clearer picture after (another) cardiological exam next week – but I can state now with absolute certainty (given that I am 70 and in irremediably poor health), any future medical news in my life will no longer be anything but bad news, modulated only by its degree of dire intensity. Meanwhile – not the least because it is the best painkiller I know – I will keep writing and maybe, on those increasingly rare days I can muster the strength to carry the equipment, even make a few more photographs.

*****

A recent Facebook dialogue – soon lost, like all such events, in the eternity of electronic oblivion – began with a YouTube link revealing enough to re-post here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHhQ71I_fwI

When I finished watching it – and despite the chemotherapy-strength (and thus gravely debilitating) antibiotics I had been prescribed for acute diverticulitis – I found myself inspired to an unusually multifaceted response:

(1)-Given that the video was made in 2007, it is obvious the extreme Right has since stolen the Tea Party motif. (This is a classic psychological warfare tactic for creating confusion; another example is the Right's theft of the color red, the color formerly associated with the Left. The ultimate example is of course the Nazis' use of "socialist" and "workers" – "National Socialist German Workers Party" – to describe a movement to impose capitalist tyranny from the top down, funded mostly by Wall Street and facilitated by the German aristocracy.)

(2)-The 9/11 Truthers may well be asking the wrong questions. Because I was in the City and a member of the working press when the WTC was being built, I can attest that there were widespread rumors of unprecedented graft and corruption associated with the project, including allegations of payoffs to officials and the use of substandard materials. Though these rumors were never proven -- law enforcement seemed to turn a deaf ear and the uptown dailies refused to allow their reporters to investigate – the use of substandard materials would nevertheless explain the structural-failure issues associated with the 9/11 controversy. Of course such malfeasance would be covered up -- hence the aura of conspiracy – both because of the magnitude of the potential lawsuits and the unprecedented international disgrace of the ultimate capitalist monument weakened to the point of incipient collapse by the greed of its developers.

(3)-It seems to me the one truly valid 9/11 suspicion is the probability the U.S. ruling elite knew the attacks were coming and allowed them as an American replay of the Reichstag Fire, not the least to facilitate imposition of the Patriot Act's de facto suspension of the Bill of Rights. This suspension had previously been attempted via legislation proposed by the Clinton Administration and written by Attorney General Janet Reno. But (ironically given present-day politics), it was defeated in Congress by a coalition of civil-rights Democrats and libertarian Republicans. Hence the Ruling Class had a real motive for allowing the 9/11 attacks: the fact the survival of capitalism in a world of increasing scarcity can only be accomplished by the creation of a slave state, which the (now totally nullified) Bill of Rights hitherto prohibited.

*****

The ensuing discussion prompted what is probably the clearest and most concise statement of political principles I have ever written:

Nullification of the Bill of Rights by Clinton/Bush/Obama proposals is among the cornerstones of my argument that there is no meaningful difference between DemocRats and GOPorkers: that because each party represents ONLY the interests of the capitalist ruling elite, the two play a Good Cop/Bad Cop routine in which rhetorical differences hide a singular purpose: the total disenfranchisement – and ultimately enslavement – of all the rest of us. Such is government in exclusive service to capitalism: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Big Bosses, total subjugation and bottomless poverty for the Workers.

I used to believe there was still some distinction between the parties locally -- that is, in municipal, legislative and gubernatorial politics. But watching the DemocRats and GOPorkers collaborate in Olympia to forever kill what was known colloquially as “Employee Free Speech” opened my eyes to the fact it's the same in Washington state as it is in Washington D.C. A relatively unbiased report in the nominally anti-labor Seattle Times tells the story:

http://blog.seattletimes.nwsource.com/politicsnorthwest/2009/03/18/the_e-mail_saga_continues.html

But even if there were still a few meaningful differences between the parties, the capitalists' deliberate contraction of the economy – which includes the termination of tax revenues to destroy government services that do not directly bolster profits – has nullified those distinctions as well.

The proverbial bottom line is that without revenues, not even the most ardent humanitarians can protect us from what is to come: the fact a new Final Solution – officially accelerated extermination of the surplus population by abandonment and neglect, the murder of all of us who are no longer exploitable for profit – may be no more distant than the next election.

Remember the slaying of surplus captives on the slave ships? Same thing, just slower and more euphemistic.

Such is the new paradigm – I call it "tyrannocapitalism" -- that is replacing the social contract.

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For all my 70 years (and for at least 40 years before that), the one real fight in the United States has been between the greed-powered cunning and solidarity of the tiny capitalist aristocracy on one side versus the pathetically fragmented humanitarian majority (its leadership variously labeled socialists, progressives, etc.) on the other.

For a painfully brief period – 1932 through 1945 – it appeared the humanitarians were winning.

But the capitalists immediately perceived the New Deal – essentially the grafting of a few socialist principles atop the Bill of Rights – as an unprecedented threat to their long-range plans.

The result, in 1934, was the so-called Bankers' Plot to overthrow President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and make the U.S. an Axis partner, unquestionably inspired by Mussolini and Hitler, guided by the latter to an extent that remains secret to this day. But because there was a huge Communist Party (the third largest, most disciplined, best organized political party in U.S. history), and because the Communist Party was backed by the formidable intelligence apparatus of the Soviet Union, the Bankers' Plot failed.

Even so, the capitalists recognized in fascism and Nazism the unfettered fulfillment of their greed, and their threat merely went underground – so terrifying to those in the know that an entire generation of gentile males were left uncircumcised lest we be mistaken for Jews and die in concentration camps.

Then in 1945 the capitalist threat again bared its fangs. First came the purges, which began literally the day the war ended and did not end until the socialist movement was dead beyond resuscitation and even the term "intellectual" had become synonymous with "traitor." Next was the Taft-Hartley Act, which destroyed the gains labor had made under FDR and thus ended, forever, any hope of U.S. economic democracy. Finally in 1963 came the murder of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the one president who dared try bring back the New Deal.

And with JFK's death (though we did not know it until years later), so died the American Dream.

What then of the Civil Rights Movement? What of President Lyndon Baines Johnson's War on Poverty?

Because JFK had already proposed the programs that became the War on Poverty, LBJ dared not oppose them. His reversal of JFK's pending withdrawal from Vietnam was well known amongst journalists, this in an era when the working press yet remained beyond monolithic Ruling Class control; another policy-reversal of such magnitude might have raised the simmering whispers of "coup" and "conspiracy" to a boiling revolutionary roar. Moreover LBJ knew he could deftly turn the War on Poverty into the War on the Poor it later became merely by structuring the anti-poverty programs to fail amidst ruinous scandals. Which is precisely what he did – the indescribably painful lesson of my own association (as a press officer and a social-documentary photographer) with the War on Poverty.

As to the Civil Rights Movement, ask today's younger African-Americans what they think of it. It gained them exactly nothing: it does not matter where you can sit on a bus if – because you are unemployed and will never be allowed to work again save as a prisoner on a chain-gang – you do not have the fare to get aboard.

This – the relentless thrust toward a slave state (think of an antebellum plantation with the slaves kept in bondage by today's surveillance and death technologies) – is the direction the U.S. has been going all my life.

The few brief interludes in my life when it seemed otherwise – as when Martin Luther King Jr. widened his definition of civil rights to include freedom from want, or when Robert Kennedy appeared destined to become our next president – I know now these were never more than delusions, swept away as quickly as the gun smoke that marked their terminal moments.

Now all we have is Moron Nation, the epitaph of the American Experiment in constitutional democracy.

And in history there are no miracles, no miraculous rescues; there is only cause and effect.

LB/25 October 2010

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EXTRA: Obama Grows a Spine (or Maybe It's Just More Theater)

ELLEN BROWN of the radical news service Truthout broke the story: that President Obama had at last sided with the hard-pressed Working Class – for once truly defending all of us who are not part of the Wall Street/Big Business aristocracy.

What the President had done, Ms. Brown reported, was block enactment of HR 3808, a sneaky congressional measure that would have made it nearly impossible to contest evictions and foreclosures based on the bogus paper the Ruling Class and their toadies have become so skillful at forging.

But the most infuriating part of the story – absolute, undeniable proof there is no meaningful difference between the parties I label DemocRats and GOPorkers – is in Ms. Brown's second graf:

“The bill passed the Senate with unanimous consent and with no scrutiny by the DC media.”

http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h111-3808

If you click on the above link, which Ms. Brown provided, you discover an even more embittering aspect of the story: that in April the House passed the bill by a voice vote in which “a record of each representative’s position was not kept,” and that on 27 September the Senate did likewise, approving the measure by unanimous consent, an action in which – of course – “a record of each senator's position was not kept.”

Thus we see how our alleged constitutional democracy truly functions – Congress hiding behind procedural anonymity in a perfect example of capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation and inescapable poverty for the rest of us.

Though Ms. Brown did not take her analysis quite so far – talented reporter that she is, her U.S. education no doubt robbed her of the concept of class-struggle (the definitive tool of objective analysis) – but she nevertheless proved herself infinitely more competent than the household scribes of Ruling Class Media.

She scooped both The New York Times and The Washington Post by nothing more than daily scrutiny of the White House website – something reporters of my generation would do instinctively, even without a nastygram from the telegraph editor via the capitol bureau-chief – and something she herself has obviously likewise learned to do. In my day it was simply working one's beat.

Ms. Brown's report – superbly detailed (readable even by those of us for whom the financial world is the scum of all revulsion) – is here:

http://www.truth-out.org/foreclosuregate63953

The White House link is here:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/10/07/why-president-obama-not-signing-hr-3808

Reader Supported News predictably picked up Ms. Brown's story later in the day:

http://www.readersupportednews.org/opinion2/279-82/3540-obamas-courageous-stand-on-foreclosure

Meanwhile despite the continuing Ruling Class Media blackout, our British colleagues at Reuters got on the story – unlike RCM, Reuters is not (yet) to the Ruling Class what Josef Goebbels was to der Führer – and Common Dreams linked accordingly:

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/10/08-3

Reuters also dug out the most breathtaking evidence of Congressional hypocrisy I have yet witnessed:

“The chorus of calls from political leaders for a suspension of foreclosures grew on Thursday, with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Representative Ed Towns, the Democratic chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, adding their voices.”

In other words, once their anti-Working Class malice was exposed, the very people who helped pass this measure now began to loudly repudiate it: verily, Hypocrites Я Us.

*****

Once burned twice shy, I cannot but ask myself if what we are seeing here is reality or illusion.

Applying Bill Moyers axiom – that present-day U.S. politics is nothing but theater (Goebbelesque deception to preserve the illusion of constitutional democracy ) – it is entirely possible this is merely another carefully scripted drama: a morality play intended to give Obama the aura of a Working Class hero.

But it might also be real; it might mean the Ruling Class puppets in Congress finally went too far – or at least so brazenly far the President felt he had no choice but to intervene.

Since Reuters claims to have beaten even Ms. Brown to the story (though not in the U.S. press, which Big Business controls as tightly as the Nazis controlled der Voelkischer Beobachter), it may well be the White House action was an “oh my god if this gets out we're fucked” response to pointed questioning by correspondents Caren Bohan and Scot J. Paltrow.

Reuters by the way inherited from the old United Press International many of the aggressive journalistic traditions and even some of the personnel that made UPI “the Marine Corps of wire services” c. 1960-1990.

Which makes me damn proud of my nearly continuous service as a UPI stringer (1963-1981).

And having myself experienced what may well have been the Bohan/Paltrow reportorial circumstances  – that's when you tell the editor “this time we got em by the balls” (but they still manage to escape) – I know all too well how swiftly the Ruling Class can respond when it needs to hide its own naked malevolence.

Yet for all my relentless criticism of Obama's betrayals of “change we can believe in,” I'd still prefer to believe the man for whom I voted in 2008 has finally grown a spine.

Pray the gods I am not again falling victim to the imbecility of hope.

LB/8 October 2010

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Obama's Prowling X-Ray Vans Boost Paranoia to All-Time High

26 - Portfolio Piece Destroyed by Fire (OAN 12.17.09)

Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2010. Click on image to enlarge; narrative and tech data in Photo Notes below.

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THE MOST TERRIFYING domestic political news I have ever read – this at age 70 with a career in journalism that began in 1956 – reached me yesterday via the radical news service Common Dreams:

If you have been feeling uneasy about having to be X-rayed by a Transportation Security Administration goon who can look under your clothes every time you fly, consider this: at least you can say no, and agree to be subjected to an old-fashioned full-body search.”

No opt-out for the latest in anti-terror technology though, with reports just out in Forbes magazine and The Christian Science Monitor that the Homeland Security Department has just purchased 500 mobile X-ray vans called ZBVs that can scan cars, trucks and homes without the drivers even knowing they're being zapped.”

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/10/04-1#comment-1631017

As we all know, over-exposure to X-rays is deadly. And what a perfect cover “Homeland Security” and “the war on crime” (whether as the search for terrorists and criminals or as protection against them) for lethally targeting minorities, elderly and disabled persons, impoverished peoples in general.

Before you dismiss such a notion as hopelessly nuts, reflect on the ever-more-obvious motives behind the capitalists' radical contraction of the economy.

One is the banishment of millions of workers into permanent unemployment – the real meaning of “Jobless Recovery.”

The other – the culmination of a war begun by Big Business/Wall Street reactionaries at least 77 years ago – is the destruction of all government services that do not directly contribute to Ruling Class profits.

But what to do with all the angry unemployed now condemned to inescapable poverty?

Recognizing that U.S. Big Business financed Nazism also that Wall Street's biggest objection to Hitler was his premature revelation of capitalism's implicit nature and goals we understand the logical next step for today's Ruling Class. This is to find some cleverly euphemistic Final Solution by which to exterminate the surplus workers those who cannot be forced into military service or diverted into Teabagger storm-trooping  before they rise up in rebellion.

Until now this has been accomplished by deliberate abandonment and neglect the present-day fate of those of us who are elderly, disabled or otherwise obviously no longer exploitable for profit.

It is why with the DemocRats writing the legislation and the GOPorkers providing noise-machine cover what is billed as “health care reform” contains a $500 billion attack on Medicare. It is also why the United States – malevolently unique amongst all industrial nations – steadfastly refuses to recognize health care as a basic human right.

In other words, the Ruling Class already employs the untreated or inadequately treated illnesses of old age, disability and poverty to serve as its executioners.

What then is to keep the Ruling Class from taking the next logical step of deliberately inflicting terminal illness cancer by overdosing allegedly “undesirable” segments of the public with X-ray radiation?

As horrible as it is to contemplate, it may already be happening: note the astounding incidence of cancer death amongst U.S. feminist activists.

Google “feminist dies of cancer” (no quotation marks) and you get 610,000 entries.

In my own very tiny circle of closest friends – never more than a half-dozen people – there are already two feminist activists tragically, prematurely dead of cancer. Both these women were internationally significant as scholars, editors and writers; each in her own way was steadfast in refusal to submit to the feminism-as-capitalism gospel of Gloria Steinem and her ilk.

Since we already know the U.S. government has no hesitation about testing chemical, radiological and biological weapons on the civilian population – Google “unethical human experimentation in the United States,” again without quotes – we also know there are truly no limits on how far the government will go in its service to the Ruling Class.

And since the Ruling Class immediately recognized feminism's potential for giving birth to a powerfully anti-capitalist alternative – a modern adaptation of the unknowably ancient ethos that died in the sack of Knossos – we can assume the Ruling Class response included methods of suppression far more deadly than the co-optation now evidenced by the subsequent perversion of U.S. feminism into gynocentric getting-and-spending.

Ergo, could some or all of these cancer-slain feminists be the victims of early government death-ray experiments?

Obviously I don't know.

But the question demands asking, not the least because these mobile X-ray spying machines – machines that could actually become the government's newest weapons of terror – were surely many years in the making.

Obviously too this newest governmental outrage provides a meeting-place issue for Left and Right.

But the issue is not the trustworthiness of government per se.

It is instead that here in the United States the functions of government at every level have been methodically narrowed, so that now the ONLY function of government is the protection and expansion of capitalism: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation and bottomless poverty for all the rest of us.

And what is capitalism?

It is infinite greed exalted as maximum virtue, limitless selfishness exalted as maximum good literally the rejection of every humanitarian value ever articulated.

Which makes capitalism and government in service to capitalism our species' closest approximation yet to real-world manifestation of the theological concept of Absolute Evil.

This is a point upon which we should be mobilizing entire legions, including from those justifiably angry ranks of the Working Class now self-destructively affiliated with the Right.

But of course the Left – save for obscure critics like myself cannot imagine doing any such thing. It is still paralyzed by the anti-blue-collar hatred generated by the Vietnam War the venomous contempt with which the draft-exempt elite regarded those of us who served.

Divide et impera: the same suicidally divisive malice is preserved today in anti-Second Amendment fanaticism and the hateful targeting of workers in extractive industries: loggers, commercial fishes, miners.

Thus the Left fails to understand a basic truth of the new paradigm that has replaced the former social contract: that now (save of course for the fat-cat capitalist aristocracy) we are ALL Working Class and therefore we are all equally subject to enslavement and extermination.

*****

PHOTO NOTES: This is from a ruined negative strip recovered from the ashes of the 1983 fire. Frame 26 was a favorite portfolio piece, made with my M4 Leica wearing its 35mm Summicron in a steamy Second Avenue laundromat on the Lower East Side, December 1969 or January 1970. I was there washing my own clothes; the camera's wonderfully silent shutter enabled me to photograph this elderly gentleman without intruding on his reverie, and I sorely miss the implicit dignity of the original image, intended (though never so published) as another of the portraits of the neighborhood and its people I made for Beth Israel Hospital. But the surreal destruction wrought by heat and water 13 years later added a nasty synchronistic twist I instantly recognized as symbolic of my own post-fire fate, and I printed it accordingly. Alas, without the maximum silver content of DuPont's superb Varilure paper – discontinued since the price of silver skyrocketed in the Nixon 1970s – it is impossible to even approach the tonal qualities and shadow detail of my original prints, themselves all destroyed by the flames – though I suppose the above effort is surely adequate to convey its now-sardonic message. (Tri-X at 800 for development in D-76.)

LB/5 October 2010  

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