Adjusting the rangefinder on my Leica, frame 2 of 5. (M2 Leica, 90mm Voigtlander f/3.5 Apo-Lanthar, BW400CN.) Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2010.
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After a two-week hiatus imposed by medical and economic struggles for survival, some relevant excerpts from correspondence with a dear friend, slightly revised for publication:
You are absolutely right the affliction I call “terminal communitis” – the anti-solidarity psychoses that killed the Back to the Land Movement – was at its core a utopian-minded selfishness indifferent to (and often disdainful of) broader human society.
It was therefore an early variant of the same Ayn Rand get-rich-quick capitalist savagery that afflicts the United States at every level, all of us methodically conditioned to embrace the Ruling Class values of capitalism – infinite greed as maximum virtue; limitless selfishness as ultimate good – so that even the personnel of the so-called helping professions (social workers, teachers etc.) are in their own way every bit as grasping as the most avaricious Wall Streeter: the 5,390-percent increase in welfare administrative costs inflicted on the United States between 1970 and 1990 – this in concert with a 66 percent reduction in stipends and services to welfare recipients – is a classic example.
So is the speedy transition from communard to capitalist made by so many of the Back-to-the-Land people themselves, of a kind with anti-Vietnam War protestor Jerry Rubin becoming a stock broker.
Meanwhile the term “communitis” first occurred to me in 1974 or '75 – I don't really remember the year (but I surely remember the conversation) – a discussion with the late Walter Crowley in Seattle over a pitcher of beer at the Central Tavern. We were pondering why the Back to the Land Movement failed, and the term quite unexpectedly popped out of my subconscious and materialized in a sentence, obviously a gift of the Muse. I can still see the startled expression on Walter's face. “Terminal communitis: Jesus that's apt," he said, and I thought he understood perfectly then to my disappointment made it clear he didn't understand at all – unusual for Walter because he was by far the brightest political activist in town – but he took “terminal communitis” to mean ideological failure rather than what it was: the psychological precursor to Moron Nation.
But I fear you are entirely too optimistic about correction by Cosmic Law. Most of the time I believe the Goddess or god or the gods or whatever have abandoned us, indeed that the Counterculture (especially the Feminist, Environmentalist and Back to the Land movements) was truly our last chance to make karmic amends: the core conviction – never articulated to anyone save the late Cicely Nichols (and then only with a tongue loosened by vodka or good whiskey) – that drove me to photograph and write “Dancer” and that made its loss in the fire so ultimately devastating.
Note too the older I get the more the only metaphysical statement I can accept is Lao Tzu's "the Tao that can be named is not the true Tao" – that and its exact parallel in the poetic language of my long ago and mostly unacknowledged First Nations ancestors for whom all comparable terms (the Manitou of the Eastern Woodland peoples, the Plains Tribes' WonkanTonka etc.) when literally translated mean not "great spirit" or “god” but "great holy mystery": “all things owe their existence to it...Tao is eternal without doing, yet nothing remains undone” (Lao Tzu again). No wonder the Christians exterminated the Indians: ignorant theocratic certitude can never tolerate the implicit anarchy of unapologetic agnosticism.
Hence my contributions to recent Internet debates are variations on a theme: expressions of my belief humanity as a lost cause:
Wake up, people: the only reason the Ruling Class can savage us like this is that we no longer have a viable Communist Party to teach and organize genuine resistance – and that the Communist Party is no longer backed by a Soviet Union with the threat of its Red Army to terrify the Ruling Class into submission. This is why – exactly as Vladimir Putin says (and not withstanding the fact the Soviet Union never lived up to the Workers' Paradise myth) – its demise is indeed "the greatest tragedy in human history." Flawed as it was, the U.S.S.R. was the last hope of humanity, and now without it we are being imprisoned in a capitalist darkness of such unimaginable Evil it will not abate until our very species is extinct.
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/11/24-2
And again here:
(Washington state Governor Christine) Gregoire's moratorium on regulations is of a kind with Obama's serial betrayals – the stealth-murders of Bill of Rights restoration, real health-care reform, Employee Free Choice, repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell – and of course the knife Washington state Democrats' stabbed in the back of organized labor to kill (forever) the employee privacy protections proposed in 2009 via Senate Bill 5446 and House Bill 1528.
Each of these outrages exemplify not just the Big Lie of "change we can believe in," but the death-beyond-resuscitation of the American Experiment in constitutional democracy – the now-permanent reduction of hope from “audacity” to imbecility.
When viewed as a whole, all of these acts of methodical oppression – and that is precisely what they are – demonstrate the new paradigm of governance and social relations now being imposed on the U.S.
Robert Reich calls this new ideology “supercapitalism,” but it should properly be labeled "tyrannocapitalism": its inevitable outcome a zero-tolerance hybrid of theocracy, fascism and imperialism – a high-tech tyranny that literally has no human precedent.
Under tyrannocapitalism, we-the-people are increasingly subjected to government that once claimed to serve us all but is now dedicated exclusively to the protection of capitalists and the propagation of capitalism: infinite greed as ultimate virtue, maximum selfishness as ultimate good.
All such governance whether federal, state or local has as its sole purpose the imposition of the tyrannocapitalists' vision of utopia: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class (the Wall Street banksters and their Big Business/Chambers of Commerce elites), total subjugation and the genocidal poverty of everlasting "Jobless Recovery" for all the rest of us.
Welcome to the genuine New World Order: Moron Nation (precisely as proven by last month's elections) now reduced to Slave-Pen America on Sweatshop Earth.
Maybe someday we'll wake up – not just to the fact there's no meaningful difference between Democrats and Republicans, but (far more importantly), to the bitter truth we now have nothing left to lose but those damn chains – the capitalist shackles Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels so prophetically decried 162 years ago.
To which, in response to another poster, I later added this:
What has no precedent is NOT the economic model, which you correctly associate with Franco and implicitly with Pinochet. The economic model actually dates to Mussolini, specifically his declarations that fascism is in fact "corporatism" – i.e. (and in today's terms), government that serves only the interests of Big Business and Wall Street (and does so in defiantly authoritarian opposition to the will of the people): precisely what the malicious, post-JFK collaboration of DemocRats and GOPorkers has deliberately imposed on the United States.
What IS unprecedented – and I regret I failed to make this point more clearly – is the irremediable technological superiority of the Ruling Class, which now has powers of surveillance and oppression that were hitherto considered divine. These powers mean this new tyranny can never be reformed nor overthrown, not even when Nature herself intervenes, as by natural disaster or environmental apocalypse. Even then (note the Haitian and post-Katrina examples of genocide by abandonment), the tyrannocapitalist Ruling Class will always prevail; its godlike powers of surveillance will now always interdict any organized resistance, including resistance that might be clandestinely pre-planned to rise up at a moment of crisis like an earthquake or a hurricane. Hence for the first time in human history we are faced with tyranny that is truly everlasting, made so by its technologies of terror and thus destined to remain so until our species is extinct.
Indeed I suspect this is the real message sent to the world by the imperial activities of the United States in the Middle East: whether in the New World Order or beneath the bootheels of the fictional(?) Borg, resistance is futile.
http://crosscut.com/2010/11/18/mossback/20380/Is-Gov.-Gregoire-the-new-Tim-Eyman-/?utm_source=Crosscut+Daily+Newsletter&utm_campaign=75e1481484-Crosscut_E_mail_11_18_201011_18_2010&utm_medium=email
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It has been obvious to me for a long while that collective resistance is no longer possible simply because anytime anyone attempts to organize it they are instantly compromised by the quasi-divine powers of the surveillance state. This is the core of what is unprecedented – the fact it is no longer possible to organize ANY effective resistance.
To understand how this is true, consider a short story in which the Nazis have conquered the world including India. When Gandhi continues his campaign of passive resistance against India's new rulers, the Nazis merely exterminate him and all his followers. Note too that after I repeatedly linked to this story a couple of years ago it has been disappeared so deeply down the Orwell hole, 30 minutes of Googling couldn't find a trace of it. Perhaps the story was suppressed because it illustrates the conditions we are nearing today; that we are allowed the illusion of freedom only because we no longer have the means to effectively resist.
Were we to somehow muster effective resistance, I think we would quickly discover we live in a concentration-camp word from which there is no escape – nor will there ever again be any escape – save death. For those of us not part of the Ruling Class, there is literally nothing left but but Hell on Earth, and it is literally eternal – that is, for as long as the human species lasts.
Which is why I lean ever closer to abandoning political writing. It is pointless. It solves nothing. Where once it pleased me at least as an egotistical mechanism for giving the Ruling Class the finger by solving its policy riddles, now it merely intensifies my alienation: even if I had a hundred million readers, no amount of determination would enable us to overcome our abjectly total and everlasting powerlessness.
Indeed if a hundred million people effectively rebelled against capitalism, the Ruling Class would either nuke us or murder us all with biological warfare, the macrocosm of what became the definitive Vietnam microcosm: "we had to destroy the village to save it."
Why then do I write at all? Because I follow Barbara Mor's excellent advice: "try to proceed as if writing matters," which I do even when I'm certain that writing (or any other art-making) does not matter at all anymore, that based on James Lovelock's projections (which I believe are accurate), when this civilization falls, there will be no other to take its place, at least not on this greed-hollowed planet.
But just as such conviction does not absolve any of us from the mandate to resist, neither does it absolve me from the fact I am an artist, that I make art for the same reason I breathe and eat: because I am.
And because in my present am-ness I am becoming too disabled to lug even relatively lightweight 35mm cameras around, am no longer interested in making paintings and (despite my open-mike traditional folk music stardom c. 1978-1982), have been for many years too crippled by arthritis to play guitar, writing seems to be the one sure mode of expression I have left. This lifts writing from its former function as mere intellectual exercise – public practice at overcoming dyslexia – and potentially transforms it, however awkwardly, into a surrogate for the passion that inspired my best camera work: “choreographies of light wrought in alchemical silver.”
The result is often as if I am back in school learning a new medium, a not-unwelcome condition even as I near age 71. Whether I can fulfill the new medium's potential I do not know; I still become so mired in fearful avoidance of dyslexic error, I have yet to give myself over to the Zen of writing in the wholistic way I surrendered so completely and with such ecstasy to the Zen of photography.
Meanwhile fate is kind. On the way to welfare office this morning – another story for another time – synchronicity brought me a book with its cover torn off: a discarded but complete collection of Flannery O'Connor's short stories, not just entertainment but expert instruction in technique from a writer whose work I have always admired.
Whatever happens next, the creative process remains the best painkiller I know.
LB/1 December 2010
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