Loren Bliss: Dispatches from Dystopia

Fight Back: An Urgent Plea to My Unemployed Sisters and Brothers

Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 1967, 2010.  (Click on image for full-frame enlargement.)

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(For the UnemployedWorkers.org Blogathon)

Out of work since early 2009, I consider myself damn lucky to be past retirement age and have a miserly Social Security pension to keep me (barely) alive.

But that doesn't take away the emotional pain of joblessness. I did photography and journalism, and I loved the work. I started doing it in 1956 at age 16, and I had intended to keep at it until I dropped dead.

Now though am beginning to suspect what the Fat-Cat Media labels “Jobless Recovery” is in hideous truth a permanent nationwide lockout.

Worse, it's a lockout funded by government bail-outs: megabucks for the Wall Streeters, unemployment-compensation cut-offs and shredded safety-nets for all the rest of us.

And what's a lockout but a war against working families, a war against unions and living wages?

Think about it.

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Growing up in the United States we came to believe not just in our obligation to be self-supporting but in our right to a good job – to get paid a fair wage for our labor, to work without being fucked over by the bosses.

But now with more than 26 million people either thrown completely out of work or forced to accept part-time work – that's almost 17 percent of the national workforce – many of us are desperate for any paycheck at all.

Some are so legitimately terrified of bankruptcy and foreclosure and eviction, they've already surrendered to sweatshop wages, to bosses who treat them like slaves.

Unfortunately it's a surrender that threatens everyone who's still lucky enough to get a paycheck.

It also destroys our solidarity, undercuts our ability to bargain collectively, busts our unions, suppresses our resistance – exactly the purpose of a lockout.

*****

The fat-cats set it up so we've got to have money – a job – to feel like we belong in America.

That's why to be thrown out of work is to be deprived of a helluva lot more than a paycheck.

That's why the end of a job can steal our self-respect, rob us of our identity, crush the sense of who we are that guides our decisions and shapes our lives.

The fat-cats know all this. They count on it to break us down. To make us grovel.

It's a war – a class war, the fat-cats against all the rest of us.

Right now the fat-cats are winning.

But these days I think maybe that's because we've only just begun to figure out how bad things really are.

And maybe now in the solidarity of righteous anger we'll start fighting back.

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PHOTO NOTES: I made this picture on Manhattan's Lower East Side in the summer of 1967 -- a crowd of stunned bystanders watching the cops investigate the aftermath of a murder so brutal it was shocking even in the notably gritty neighborhood known as Alphabet City, avenues A, B and C. Though at this distance I'm not sure, the photo was most likely published in Town and Village, a neighborhood weekly I served as reporter-photographer. In any case the image seems especially appropriate here because unemployment is in bitter truth itself a kind of murder, a savage crime against our sense of what is right, and the trauma so inflicted is therefore horribly similar. This scene could as easily have been the aftermath of a plant closure, its work outsourced to cheap labor abroad and its employees discarded like obsolete machines: ever more frequently the definitive example of capitalism in action. (Canon VT w/35mm screw-mount Leitz Summicron; Tri-X at 1200 in Diafine.) 

LB/16 November 2010

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Reflections in the Newfound Freedom of Acknowledged Powerlessness

(With Thanks to John Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Bill Wilson)

Despite the petulant PollyAnna nattering of (allegedly) Leftist pundits, it is now obvious President Obama will never stand up to the Republicans – precisely because that is excluded from the job description of what the Ruling Class hired him to do.

If we look objectively at his Barack-the-Betrayer record, Obama's dual function – as the ultimate destroyer of any last remnants of U.S. humanitarian movements and the perfect hate-catalyst for U.S. racism – becomes undeniably clear.

In other words, the Betrayer's assigned purpose is to enable the Republican victories that will transform the (former) United States into the de facto Fourth Reich, thereby fulfilling what has been the GOPorkers' primary objective at least since the GOP/Mussolini and GOP/Hitler collaborations of the late 1920s and the 1930s.

Given Obama's obvious intelligence and erudition, no other explanation is possible.

Indeed no politician of his capabilities could “bungle” so ruinously unless the “bungling” were deliberate.

The Teabaggers' Ku Klux Karicature of Obama as Hitler thus contains – no doubt accidentally – a subtle element of revelation. Like the death-panel scare now confirmed by the Presidential Deficit Commission's lethal war on elderly, disabled, unemployed and otherwise impoverished people, the reference to Nazism contains just enough intuitive truth to further poison the already toxic effluvium of Moron Nation's (entirely legitimate) fears of looming dictatorship – even as maliciously misdirected as these fears are by Rightist demagoguery.

Not that we weren't warned.

Exactly as I predicted, the breathtaking betrayal implicit in Obama's appointment of the notorious theocrat Rick Warren to give the inaugural invocation – the equivalent of the keynote address at a political convention – has since characterized the Betrayer's entire administration.

Warren's role as a preacher of tyrannocapitalist gospel – wealth as divine reward, poverty as divine punishment – anticipated all of the Betrayer's economic policies including the final and permanent disenfranchisement of the U.S. Working Class inflicted by the Obama-imposed death of Employee Free Choice.

Beyond that, Warren's misogyny and homophobia foretold at least two of Obama's most outrageous betrayals: his multiple betrayals of women via the travesty labeled "health care reform" and his betrayal of homosexuals via Big Lies and the constant sleight-of-hand treachery to ensure Don't Ask Don't Tell remains the eternally hatemongering law of an ever more obviously hateful plutocracy.

Meanwhile Obama's own refusal to restore the Bill of Rights – indeed his expansion of its nullification to include a presidential right to murder on whim – has laid the now-irreversible groundwork for the zero-tolerance Christian theocracy Warren and his ilk seek to impose on the United States.

Presidents are thus given the Hitler-power to exterminate anyone who dares criticize their policies.

What a President Palin would do with such authority is the stuff of nightmares.

Lastly and in a sense that goes far beyond the symbolic, Obama's opening the inaugural door to Warren's ChristiaNazi theology is a perfect analogy for the manner in which the president has subsequently opened the doorways to the imposition of the tyrannocapitalist state: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, bottomless poverty and total subjugation via zero-tolerance theocracy for all the rest of us, with presidential death squads ever vigilant to eliminate any dissidents.

Again as I have so many times written (in comments on Common Dreams and Huffington Post and several other such sites before I began this blog in late 2009), the appointment of Warren was the dollar-sign-and-Jesucross banner of tyrannocapitalist theocracy raised on the electoral equivalent of Mount Suribachi – Obama's message of triumph to his financiers: the Wall Street robber barons who gave him twice as much in de facto bribes as they gave McPalin.

Wake up, folks. The Betrayer is not serving the people; he is providing the plutocrats with everything they ever wanted.

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As most of you know, I too fell prey to the imbecility of hope and voted for “change we can believe in” only to discover that the one genuine “yes we can” applicable to Obama is the applause of the tyrannocapitalist Ruling Class – this to celebrate the final victories in its relentless campaign to kill the American Experiment in constitutional democracy and replace it with theocratic fascism.

Think not just Adolf Hitler (and his hand-in-glove relationship with Christian authority) but more specifically Mussolini (who defined fascism as absolute rule by the Big Business aristocracy) plus of course Spain's Franco and Chile's Pinochet.

The domestic archetype for this sort of tyranny is the post-Civil War South, where the deliberately induced hateful ignorance of the white Christian multitudes – the prototype of Moron Nation – proved to be the perfect barrier against organized labor and all other forms of humanitarianism.

Note too the genteel euphemism for the Ku Klux Klan, the original U.S. death squad and storm-trooper organization: “the Saturday Night Men's Bible Study Class.”

But even these increasingly obvious forerunners fail to describe the unprecedented Machiavellian guile of what history will no doubt eventually label the Obama Ploy: Ruling Class selection (as proven by the financial details of the 2008 campaign) of a faux-liberal candidate whose victory would simultaneously destroy the humanitarian Left and re-energize the theocratic white racist Right, thereby – and this it seems is Obama's key function – re-creating the psychological conditions of despair and rage that (in combination with economic hopelessness) led to the downfall of Weimar Germany and the rise of Nazism.

The destruction of the humanitarian Left here in Moron Nation was much easier than in Germany simply because here the Left's ideological solidarity had long ago been destroyed by the post-World-War-II purges – a capitalism-as-usual event falsely portrayed as an anomaly by clever association with Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin.

In point of fact, the purges began the moment the war ended and continued well into the 1960s, long after McCarthy's death. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg head its list of martyrs.

Reinforced by Ruling Class control of education and mass media, these purges not only destroyed the once-formidable Communist and socialist movements but made even the term “intellectual” synonymous with “traitor” and “subversive,” thereby breeding the reflexive anti-intellectuality that has since become our identifying national characteristic.

This induced anti-intellectuality is no accident: it is precisely the condition that guarantees no binding Leftist ideology – and therefore no humanitarian solidarity – will ever again arise in the United States.

Thus Moron Nation: the self-sustaining, easily manipulated realm of ever-deepening ignorance, despair, racism and generalized hatefulness characteristic of the U.S. Working Class today.

Thus too the ruinous one-two knockout-punch aftermath of the 2008 election. One, the few remaining humanitarian elements, already forever robbed of ideological solidarity, now so embittered by betrayal they are reduced to the ultimate disenfranchisement of shock-doctrine paralysis. Two, the always-dominant white racists brought out of their proverbial closet, agitated to lynch-mob woman-stomping rage and encouraged to run amok precisely as in the recent Republican landslide.

The associated cunning of the Obama Ploy reeks of manipulative genius far beyond the diabolical brilliance of Josef Goebbels. But its stench is not so much of psychological warfare as of Madison Avenue marketing and capitalism's perennial quest (via behaviorism) for the perfect, one-size-fits-all motivational symbol or figurehead.

It cannot be said too often that no other explanation suffices – especially given Obama's obvious erudition and intelligence.

There remains only the vital question of how much longer will it take the Ruling Class to push Moron Nation the short final distance to an all-white ChristiaNazi theocracy – that is, how much time do we have to organize our escape from Holocaust II: the Fourth Reich's subsequent lynching of minorities and dissidents.

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As to Barack the Betrayer's personal motives, of course we can only speculate, though I suspect he believes his service to the Ruling Class will protect himself and his family – especially his family – from the racist horrors inevitably to come: never mind the dire fate of the tiny handful of aristocratic German Jews who fatally sought to guarantee their own survival by collaboration with the Nazi authorities.

I also suspect Obama might privately rationalize his behavior as facilitating a kind of backhanded karmic vengeance for the long and bloody U.S. history of genocidal murder: the white Working Class majority thus reduced to the inescapable poverty and zero-tolerance subjugation hitherto inflicted only on people of color.

Whatever. The one sure fact is that tyrannocapitalism's Obama Ploy has slain the American Experiment beyond resuscitation, just as its now-obviously permanent policy of “Jobless Recovery” reveals the American Dream to have never been anything more than a Big Lie.

Verily, the prophecies of Karl Marx and Frederich Engels are thus fulfilled.

LB/12 November 2010.

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The Urban Pacific Northwest in Late October: Tacoma's Wright Park

NORMALLY THE TREES would already be mostly bare and it would be much colder now – the nights in the 30s, the days seldom above the higher 40s. Normally the first killing frost would have terminated all but broccoli, collard greens and a few other winter crops at least a month ago. But terminal climate change has altered Nature's calendar so dramatically we are still sleeping with open windows, and the leaves of the deciduous trees are clinging to their branches far longer than usual.

All that remains unchanged is the Monsoon: the long months of rain that begin sometime in September or October (but always 90 days after the vine maple turns red) and continue – sometimes a shamrock-gentle drizzle, other times a jungle-harsh downpour – until the alders and cottonwoods and big-leaf maples and even the oaks are again fully leafed out and the Summer Solstice blesses us with its exquisitely slow blue twilight that far more than silver shadows of the moon is the true radiance of love and recollections of love, its subtle dance lingering always unto nightfall, whether of the year's longest day or of life itself.

Strange how even here in this smaller city I find that as I age I become ever more interested in photographing Nature and ever less inclined to photograph people.

Perhaps it is because after a lifetime in journalism and photography and all of it reportage on the human condition, I have given up on people, given up because I sense the terminal species failure implicit in Moron Nation, given up because I can no longer deny the extent to which capitalism has now forever reduced hope to imbecility and shrunken all of our aspirations to permanent despair.

Perhaps too that is why I now take final refuge in the comfort-Zen of Great Gaea, the Tao, even knowing the alpha and omega of Lao Tzu's truth, the most profound truth ever formulated by the human mind: “the Tao that can be named is not the true Tao.”

Which means – because the Tao that can be photographed is also not the true Tao – my work with a camera is now nothing more than personal ritual, the definitively insignificant output of a photographer who photographs merely because that is what photographers do, of a writer who writes merely because that is the nature of writers, the lingering reflex that prompts me to share these images and reflections here.

I made these pictures just before Hallowe'en in a few damp and cloudy moments between interludes of rain. The camera is my old f/3.5 Planar-lensed Rolleflex F mounted on a Tiltall tripod, the film Kodak 120 Professional 400 NC. Photographs by Loren Bliss copyright 2010 (click on each image to view it full-frame). 

LB/10 November 2010

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Election 2010: 'Unthinkable' Questions about Its Agent Provocateur

One of the most important functions of a journalist – a function now so tabooed in the United States it is all but officially forbidden – is to ask the sorts of questions the Ruling Class rejects as “unthinkable.”

Hence, with shame-faced admission it was a personal spasm of the imbecility of hope that prompted me to stupidly believe in the possibility of “change” and vote for Barack Obama when in fact I should have voted “none of the above,” here are a few relevant thoughts: impolite utterances by which today this space will surely live up to its name.

Witnessing the debacle of Tuesday's election – not just the extermination of the so-called “progressive” wing of the Democratic Party but in all probability the death of the party itself as anything more than a treacherous Father Gapon to an iron-fisted Republican tsardom – I can no longer doubt Barack the Betrayer is doing exactly as he was paid to do.

Not only does the legal bribery Obama received from his Wall Street benefactors have no precedent: http://www.opensecrets.org/pres08/contrib.php?cycle=2008&cid=n00009638. There are also the damning facts of Obama's post-victory behavior, which leaves no question his investors are getting their money's worth of anti-humanitarian duplicity.

Consequently I can no longer doubt the Betrayer's true assignment is to do exactly as he has done: to arouse the unique combination of hopelessness and racist anger that has combined to bring the United States one electoral giant-step closer to the formal end of the American Experiment in constitutional democracy.

Thus the Ruling Class – the now mostly hereditary elite of Big Business and finance – thrusts an ever more pathetically servile Moron Nation ever closer to unabashed Nazism: anyone familiar with the Holocaust knows that the deliberate stomping of women's heads (http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20020717-503544.html) is only a jackboot away from the murderous “cleansing” of ethnic, sexual and religious minorities.

In a sense such “cleansing” has already begun. Instead of rightfully blaming the perpetrators of the ongoing economic contraction, the voters of Moron Nation in definitive lynch-mob savagery have chosen to scapegoat the most impoverished and vulnerable members of society – those of us who are elderly, disabled, permanently unemployed – for the crisis imposed entirely by capitalist greed. And the voter vengeance inflicted by the resultant Republican landslide will murder thousands of us – probably tens of thousands, possibly millions – by deliberate denial of the social services that now (barely) keep us alive.

For example the state of Washington where I now live is already predicting additional and undeniably fatal medical-care cutbacks as a direct result of the voters' malicious “fuck the poor let them eat catfood and die” rejection of even the most minimal tax increases. The same miserly viciousness – “people who can't afford cars don't belong here” – is methodically destroying the state's public transit systems, all of them already Toonerville-sized absurdities due to the breathtaking bourgeois hypocrisy of a population that arrogantly claims maximum environmental enlightenment even as it repeatedly proves itself the most savagely anti-transit electorate in the United States and probably on the entire (dying) planet.

But now the story is similar coast-to-coast save within a few remaining realms of bold humanitarian resistance in the Northeast – literally the last vestiges of the mighty civilization the world once knew as the American Dream.

Everywhere eise is Moron Nation, its post-election glee a human parody of the feces-flinging triumph characteristic of the zoo and primate house.  Nor is its Weimar-magnitude shift to the woman-stomping Right surprising to the few of us who still (defiantly) recognize the historical truth of class struggle.

Just as the fathers and grandfathers of this same capitalist-pig Ruling Class sought via their 1934 Bankers' Plot to make the United States a full partner in the Nazi Berlin-Rome-Tokyo axis, so now do the sons and daughters and grandchildren of these robber barons seek to position their global empire as the de facto Fourth Reich.

Indeed this seems to me the only rational explanation – obvious and terrifying to anyone genuinely familiar with history – for the paradoxical behavior of the man these Fat Cat bosses chose for us to elect president in 2008.

And yes, exactly as proven by Tuesday's election results, Obama's brazenly serial betrayals of his own campaign promises has uniquely combined with his function as an ultimate figurehead of racist provocation to make him the perfect usher for herding us into the slave-pens of the new tyrannocapitalist paradigm. Surely this is no accident.

But given that Obama is undeniably our brightest, best educated president since John Fitzgerald Kennedy (and probably since Franklin Delano Roosevelt) – given too that I am still prey to the Kennedy-era delusion that superior intellect equals informed humanitarian conscience – I repeatedly wonder at Obama's personal motives.

How does he justify his monumental treacheries?

Is Obama merely attempting to ensure himself, his wife and his children a uniquely secure place in the genocidally racist, murderously theocratic, essentially neo-Nazi post-constitutional U.S. brought that much closer to hideous reality by Tuesday's election results?

Is he then merely following orders, doing the bidding of his tyrannocapitalist Ruling Class masters?

If so, how can Obama ignore the lesson of the relative handful of aristocratic German Jews who fatally believed they could ensure their own safety by collaboration with the Nazis?

Is he instead planning to acquire enough wealth to move himself and his family to safety elsewhere when white Christian neofascist theocracy triumphs to begin its final ethnic, sexual, socioeconomic and religious purge of the (former) United States?

Can Obama not see how the impact of racist fury at a Black man in a White house combined with the bottomless disaffection of his own serially betrayed supporters to enable Tuesday's Republican juggernaut?

Does he not realize he is ushering in the conditions that will reduce nearly all U.S. citizens to the inescapable poverty, ruinous socioeconomic degradation and irremediable powerlessness that formerly afflicted only minorities and poor whites?

Does Obama, in the privacy of his own thoughts, imagine his policies to be the vehicle of some long-overdue karmic justice inflicted on the United States for its centuries of racist genocide?

How else could he have justified campaigning for election as the embodiment of "change we can believe in" when it was instead the greatest Big Lie ever employed to deceive the U.S. electorate?

Alas we can only ask.

No matter. We journalists were long ago reduced to such powerlessness our best questions are invariably dismissed as naught but mental masturbation – granted no more public significance than the dying gestures of a doomed clique of intellectual onanists frantically diddling themselves to one last conceptual orgasm as their home is torn down and the ground opened beneath the ruins, the mass grave into which we are being disappeared forever.

LB/4 November 2010

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