Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2011 (click to see entire image).
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POST-ELECTION TRAUMATIC DEPRESSION has sorely oppressed my consciousness since last November.
It is a condition profoundly intensified by Arizona's atrocities. First there was disclosure of the murders – two and counting – committed by the state's death-dealing denial of organ transplants to the poor: any Arizonan who lacks the impossibly expensive insurance and/or the ready money essential to pay for such procedures. Next there was the Tucson Massacre: law-abiding citizens gunned down for daring to exercise their First Amendment rights of public participation in the ever-more-deadly U.S. political process.
Make no mistake: the budgetary edict by which Arizona's Republican governor and legislators have already exterminated two transplant-denial victims is direct fulfillment of their party's decades of hate-mongering – merely the first wave of gleefully inflicted right-wing genocide against all of us who are elderly, disabled, unemployed or otherwise impoverished.
Meanwhile the connection between the Republicans' lynch-mob rhetoric and the Tuscon Massacre gunman remains curiously ambiguous. But his maniacally random shooting slew six humans including a nine-year-old girl and a Federal judge, felled a promisingly populist Democratic Congresswoman with the near-certain permanent disability of a 9mm bullet through her brain, then wounded 12 others. And the gunman's crimes have undeniably added a new element of terror to public participation in the paranoid politics of capitalist America, the sole beneficiary of which is – as always – the Ruling Class.
Even so, the most debilitating aspect of my post-election depression is not the (predictable) trauma spawned by the Republicans, who after all make no secret of their malevolent agenda: brazenly tyrannosauric capitalist imperialism bolstered by theocratic fascism and supported, on occasion, by goon squad/Ku Klux violence.
Instead what grieves me to near mental paralysis is how President Obama – never mind the leadership he has (necessarily) demonstrated in the wake of the Tucson Massacre – proves the extent he played us for suckers in the most calculated electoral scam in U.S. history.
Having won the White House by falsely flying the faded flag of Democratic Party humanitarianism, Barack the Betrayer continues to give us all the political finger.
Thus we should be very careful not to let our grief and outrage over the Arizona atrocities distract us from the fact that just last week Obama again outed himself as a hard-right GOPorker (or at best an ultra-conservative Big Business DemocRat), this time with his most damning appointment yet: his replacement chief of staff, JP Morgan-Chase Midwest Chairman William Daley, former commerce secretary/capitalist factotum in the BJ Clinton administration – a gloating fat-cat bankster, the very archetype of the avarice that oppresses us all.
Obama's new bag-and-fixit man is the son of the late Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley, the unlamented despot who was the infamous capo di tutti capi (boss of bosses) of the nation's most notoriously mob-affiliated and corrupt political machine, the tyrant whose sneering mugshot was sardonically captioned “Beat the Press and Mace the Nation” by the 1968 Chicago-police-riot edition of Time magazine.
We already know William Daley holds the Wall Street aristocracy's leash on the president. But considering his heritage I have to wonder about his other functions: is this Daley now organized crime's man in the White House? Is he perhaps then also the Betrayer's ultimate protector?
Not that it matters; not that disclosing any of Daley's real functions could possibly make any difference in this land where – precisely as proven by the aftermath of the 2008 election – hope is not audacity but imbecility; where, exactly as confirmed by the electoral results last November (with never so many enslaving themselves to so few), Moron Nation reigns supreme: a bitter truth underscored by the vindictive idiocy of its atrocities.
Were I a Christian – which I most assuredly am not – I could easily believe I am trapped amongst multitudes who have sold their souls to the Devil, their post-pact masters a tiny coterie of demonic aristocrats: Satanic surrogates who now gleefully march their newly zomboid legions into a triumphant Hell on Earth.
Such is “change we can believe in.” And there is not one fucking thing we can do about it save pray that Mother Nature – the real divinity more god-powerful than all the hypothetical gods combined – will somehow be merciful.
At least now though nearly everything I was saying a year ago is being said by others – Chris Hedges, Henry Giroux, Robert Reich, sometimes even Paul Krugman – with far greater readership.
It was I who first wrote that capitalism is the deadly sin of infinite greed falsely transformed to maximum virtue – the moral imbecility of limitless selfishness elevated to ultimate goodness. It was I who first described the New Paradigm by which the United States is now governed at every level, federal, state and local: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class; total subjugation and genocidal poverty for the rest of us.
Because others with vastly larger audiences are now saying much the same thing, there is no reason for me to repeat this dire message yet again.
Besides which, I have sadly concluded Mr. Hedges and Mr. Reich and all their like-minded colleagues are irrelevant. Our elections permanently nullified by bribery and betrayal, we are effectively disenfranchised forever. Capitalism has robbed us of the means to enforce our political will, without which the potential of liberation by disclosure and protest are delusions. Even the revelations by WikiLeaks are reduced to meaninglessness: no polity anywhere on the globe has the power – never mind the courage – to prosecute the crimes so exposed.
Just as greed and selfishness were raised to virtues, now freedom is redefined as submission to degradation – the basic human right of travel made synonymous with abject surrender to naked body searches conducted by leering sadists. Ask any prison guard: such abusive humiliation has but one purpose. It is designed to rape away our selfhood, to strip us of all human dignity, to torture us into whimpering compliance, to condition our reflexes in the cringing obedience of the concentration-camp inmate – to prepare us for a tomorrow so hellish most of us dare not contemplate it.
The shootings in Arizona not withstanding, already the aristocracy is protected as never before, sustained by a brain-police apparatus infinitely perfected beyond its Madison Avenue/Josef Goebbels/Adolf Hitler precedents and guarded by kill-hardened mercenaries armed with technological superiority utterly alien to previous human experience – a regime of conformity and surveillance and death from which there is no sanctuary anywhere on what is now truly Slave Planet Earth.
Indeed it is precisely as James Lovelock has long intimated: naught save Gaian intervention can now rescue us from our shackles – and in her gift of planetary salvation may well lie our own species' extinction.
As under the (presumably) fictional Borg, resistance is futile; Evil has triumphed, now and forever amen.
Hence I will no longer waste my time with political commentary. It is pointless; it changes nothing. So deep is the quicksand of Moron Nation, political commentary no longer offers even the potential of change.
Instead, as befits a person approaching the end of a lifetime, I will devote this space to my memoirs – anecdotes and photographs sometimes interrupted by relevant correspondence, material akin to my post here on 1 December 2010. (These letters would surely also fit in such a format, but I am not brilliant enough writer to know how to formally include them – especially without the mental clarity formerly provided by the coffee now forever denied me by heart trouble.)
The memoir has a working title of “Encounters: a Latter-Day Odyssey”; for those unfamiliar with literary conventions, “working title” means a name possibly subject to change. The first installment, “Abutments,” will appear Monday. Because subsequent parts will be available only when I deem them ready, I cannot commit to a publication schedule but, with apologies, urge readers not included in my mailing list to periodically check here for updates.
Meanwhile thank you all; perhaps – if any of our species survives the ecopolitical damnation the Ruling Class is bringing down upon us all – some of these words might survive, if only to prove that not everyone in the United States shambled like zombies into the slave pens of tyrannocapitalism.
That said, it seems appropriate to begin this new work with a suitably Homeric invocation:
Grant me O Muse the Moon-bright wisdom
That I like bards and silversmiths of old
Their lives enraptured by your drum-counted dance
Exalt once more its choreography of light and shadow
A dumbstruck witness blest with eloquence and vision.
LB/4-11 January 2011
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I do agree with the sentiments expressed here but also would like to point out that the left is far from innocent in the fucking up of our planet and civilization, if one could even call it civil with a straight face) - of course this comes from an old ex-maoist and Catholic convert so I make no claims to objectivity but I have thoroughly studied both ends of the spectrum and have no illusions about the integrity of political solutions and their master minds - in the end I have much more in common with sincere Pagans than with self indentified dems or repubs, marxists or neocons et al...blessings on you, keeper of the flame...xxxoooxxx
Posted by: Melinda T | 16 January 2011 at 12:49 PM
Thank you, Melinda; a compliment from a musician of your talent is like a compliment from the writer Barbara Mor -- better than all the Sigma Delta Chi awards combined.
As you may remember, I have long reasoned from deep suspicion that today's "civilization" is a self-contradicting label.
My subsequent discovery of the ultimate agnosticism of First Nations peoples -- that the various terms said by patriarchal authority to mean "Great Spirit" (Manitou, Wah'kontah etc.) in fact all literally translate as "Great Mystery" -- merely confirms my sense our species has been on a downward spiral since the sack of Knossos.
At least some fragments of the original human wisdom survive in accessible form: the above (and much more of relevance) in a long-out-of-print anthology entitled "Literature of the American Indian" (Glencoe Press, Beverly Hills: 1973); Lao Tzu's "Tao Te Ching," which opens with what I regard as the most profound spiritual statement ever uttered, "The Tao that can be named is not the true Tao"; Mor's incomparable "The Great Cosmic Mother," a peerless restoration of Europe's ancient (and now almost totally suppressed) pre-Christian traditions; and of course "The White Goddess," Robert Graves' work that includes a body of literature strongly suggesting metaphysical kinship between ancient Europe (e.g., Taliesin's "there is nothing in which I have not been") and the vision that shaped the cultures of Asia and pre-Columbian America.
As to the guilt of the Left, you and I are surely agreed, though I am admittedly more inclined to rationalize much of it as the response of peoples under attack by capitalism literally from the instant they tore down the banners of selfish tyranny and raised instead the Red Flag, its color defiantly symbolizing the blood of slain workers. But there is no question the Soviet Revolution was as much co-opted by the deadly undertow of Russian history as it was subverted by capitalist promises of material self-fulfillment, just as there is no question the Chinese Revolution has deteriorated into yet another of the imperial dynasties for which the so-called Celestial Realm is infamous. Nor is there any question the U.S. Left irreparably destroyed itself by its cowardly and lazy-minded embrace of what nearly everywhere else in the world is recognized as the core culture of the entire United States: the most relentlessly savage anti-intellectual conformity ever known on this planet.
Indeed the associated betrayals of promise compel me to accept the Catholic notion of Original Sin as -- at the very least -- an unquestionably accurate metaphor for the genetic defect that has now seemingly doomed our entire species.
Meanwhile in the context of what is so desperately needed -- a combination of democratic locally governing socialism plus spirituality based on the collective solidarity of individual encounters with the de facto divinity of Nature -- our standard political labels (and more to the point our entire political vocabulary) are reduced to gibberish. Thus we remain hopelessly imprisoned, damned to asphyxiation in the self-perpetuating miasma of Moron Nation.
Thank you again, Melinda; XXXOOOXXX back to you.
Posted by: Loren Bliss | 16 January 2011 at 03:12 PM