Loren Bliss: Dispatches from Dystopia

The Notebook Redesigned: Logical Labels for Art and Political Madness

Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2011.

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REORGANIZATION: One of the (few) administrative tasks I'm (sometimes) truly good at is sorting stuff into logical categories. For example, when I was editor-in-chief at Art Direction in the mid-'80s, one of the first things I did was redesign our editorial format into accurately named divisions: Trends & Concepts, People, Notable Work, Departments (the latter including Letters, Book Reviews and a calendar of relevant events). The redesign served two functions: it gave our readers easy access to the material in which they were most interested, and it helped our art director and editorial staff (self included) by focusing our thinking more sharply on the job we had all been hired to do – that is, providing the international commercial art community with vital up-to-date information.

Alas – probably because the form and content of Outside Agitator's Notebook is very much a work-in-progress – it never (until now) occurred to me to apply those principles here. But when I awoke this morning I discovered I was already thinking about how to improve OAN's often cumbersome presentation into something presumably more reader-friendly. (Yeah, I've been aware of the problem all along, but navigation of the infinitely treacherous digital sea remains so very alien to me – so different from sailing the predictably Newtonian typographic oceans on which I learned my metaphorical seamanship – I was too focused on the waves to see the water.)

Hence, starting today, the division of OAN into five categories: Visuals, Nulle Bastardo, Dialogues, Glimpses and Miscellany.

Visuals will be primarily about photography, mostly my own, but it will sometimes venture into other visual media – for example collage – and it will occasionally feature works by other artists. Nulle Bastardo, from the schoolboy Latin nulle bastardo carburendum – don't let the bastards grind you down – will continue OAN's role as a modern-day Cassandra; often, as today, it will link to news reports the Ruling Class Media is deliberately suppressing. (The section title honors my father, the late Donald R. Bliss, who suffered greatly for his Leftist politics and for whom the Latin phrase was a sardonic slogan for everyday life.) Dialogues will link to relevant material and associated discussions on other websites in which I participate. My hope is it will solve the problem of visually tiresome expanses of type by including only the essence of my comments on each thread; those who are intrigued may then click on the link to pursue the topic further. Glimpses, which will appear only rarely (and of necessity take up most if not all of an entire edition), will feature excerpts from my memoir, a work-in-progress. Miscellany is self-explanatory: corrections, clarifications, occasional notices of forthcoming events, any other material that fits nowhere else.

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VISUALS: The image above is from an ongoing series of photographs I'm making of my neighbors. It was the summer of 2010, a bunch of us were sitting together on the patio enjoying the warmth and sun, and I had some leftover frames of Kodak 800 color negative film I'd been shooting indoors by available light. While the original was surely adequate as informal portraiture, I later posterized the picture to alleviate the Disneyland hues of the Kodak spectrum and give it some of the impact it would have had in black-and-white. The camera was a Leica M4, the lens a 90mm Voigtlander Apo-Lanthar f/3.5, probably at f/16.

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Directly relevant to my camera work is the fact there's a longer-than-normal collection of links in Dialogues today. This is because I was knocked completely off center and into a kind of intellectual and emotional paralysis by that thieving merchant – an archetypal capitalist pig – of whom I wrote in “Synchronicity Again” (19 April). I am not identifying him – yet – because I have unresolved complaints against him at the local Better Business Bureau and the office of the Washington State Attorney General.

The pain this merchant inflicted is not about the loss of money; it is about the destruction – forever – of a documentary project I had been thinking about and refining for nearly three years, a project now dead beyond any possibility of resurrection because the money he stole (by sending me worthless junk instead of the reconditioned Rolleiflex I ordered) is irreplaceable. I was able to raise that money only by selling a non-reconditioned Rolliflex to another (wholly reliable) dealer Back East – the intended transaction a kind of once-removed trade. Meanwhile my pension is so miserly I live literally hand-to-mouth, with no possibility of ever achieving any savings at all, and the events of the last few years make it clear I will never again be allowed to work except as an unpaid volunteer.

As a consequence there is absolutely no possibility I will ever be able to resurrect the documentary project, which was to have been a series of contemplative black-and-white portraits of my neighbors – images made possible only by the unique psychodynamics of the photographer-subject relationship that evolves from the photographer's use of a twin-lens reflex, which forces the photographer to seemingly bow to the subject during each exposure. Yes, I can do something vaguely like it in 35mm (and probably will), but the resultant pictures will be radically different from anything I envisioned; they cannot possibly approach – save by lucky accident – the originally intended psychological revelation and aesthetic validity. (This – how the psychodynamics of photographic equipment determines the images that result – is a topic we shall take up again very soon, though not today as we have a great deal of catching-up to do.)

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NULLE BASTARDO: My most heartfelt applause for President Barack Obama for finally giving the finger to the so-called “birthers” – the racist pigs who attacked his ethnicity by challenging the validity of his birth certificate, thus questioning his right (and ultimately the right of any African-American) to be a Black man in the White House.

As OAN readers know, I have huge political differences with the President; ideologically he is in fact a Republican (precisely as Ezra Klein of The Washington Post points out in one of the more important post-2008 pieces of Ruling Class Media political analysis).

But that does not alter the Ku Klux Klanishness of his Rightist opponents – the enduring bigotry the nation's whites affirmed in the 2010 elections.

Which Klein reveals, however indirectly, by disclosure of the true (and genuinely conservative) Obama ideology – indisputable proof the Republihonks and their electoral disciples hate the President for his race, not for his politics.

Again indirectly, Klein's reportage also underscores the magnitude of the President's deliberate betrayals – the ideological reality behind the Big Lie of “change we can believe in” and the deceptiveness of Obama's 2008 campaign in general.

It's all available here:

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/5745-obama-revealed-a-moderate-republican

and (though only for those who are enrolled WaPo readers) also here:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/obama-revealed-a-moderate-republican/2011/04/25/AFPrGfkE_story.html

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Last night I opened the angriest Leftist comment-thread I have yet read anywhere on the Internet, in this instance on the radical news-site Common Dreams.

The thread is in response to a not-very-enlightening piece entitled “Why Wall Street Is Winning” and is a perfect example of what to write on a website if you want Homeland Security to come knocking on your door at 4 a.m.:

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/04/26-0

As you read it, remember the dictum of Lev Bronstein: “in any gathering of three revolutionaries, at least one is an agent of the Okhrana.” Remember also the four requirements of successful revolution: ideology, organization, mastery of Ruling Class technology, the support of a major foreign power – none of which are possible in today's United Estates of Wall Street. Remember most of all that anger without ideology and organization cannot ever be anything more than anger – that a mob lacking even one of the four requirements cannot ever be anything more than a mob.

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News the Ruling Class wants to hide: “In an extraordinary uprising at the Tucson Unified School District board meeting Tuesday (26 April), Ethnic Studies/Mexican American Studies (MAS) students chained themselves to the board members chairs and derailed the introduction of a controversial resolution that would have terminated their acclaimed program’s core curriculum accreditation.”

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/04/27-0

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DIALOGUES: Thank you, John Douglas Marshall, for a brutally accurate portrait of the devastating reality of longterm unemployment.

I know you speak the truth because I have been there myself, though now at age 71 I am (bitterly) resigned to the fact I will never work again. Hence I have learned to live on a tiny Social Security pension, my now-faltering health sustained by the very Medicare programs our genocide-minded politicians seek to destroy.

The bad news for us all is that what is being done to you and has already been done to me is merely capitalism in action...That is why, regardless of our skills, we workers are evaluated as if we were machines – thrown away the instant our masters discover a person who can do the work cheaper and thereby put more money in the investors' pockets.

There is also the fact capitalism regards old people as dangerously subversive simply because we remember better times...

http://crosscut.com/2011/04/19/media/20809/The-P-I-s-death-two-years-later:-in-no-mood-to-mark-the-occasion/

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Three points on the Right's effort to ban all forms of contraception:

(1)-Pragmatic_realist is only about 25 percent correct when he cites the theological basis of the Judaeo-Christian-Islamic sexual taboo. Indeed the theology was almost certainly ex-post-facto embellishment, the patriarchs groping for a rationale to explain their huge terror of sexuality in general – especially the sexuality of the infinitely orgasmic female, which in matriarchal times – the first probably 96,000 years of our species' 100,000-year history – was the wellspring of the entire human social order.

But to overthrow the Great Goddess and the matriarchal (i.e., natural) order she symbolizes, it was necessary first to damn female sexuality as evil (hence the origin of misogyny), and then – because of the revolutionary power any sexuality acquires under patriarchy – to damn all sexuality as well.

Finally came the theological rationale. This is merely propaganda...Hitler did not invent the Big Lie, which is as old as patriarchy and originates from the fact male supremacy is itself a lie. The biological truth is we are all female at conception; a male is in fact a mutated female (which, by the way, makes patriarchy the one truly “unnatural act” and explains the length the patriarchs will go to retain power).

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(2)-The post-Civil-War South was, and remains, a theocracy. Christianity in the South's savagely capitalist society functions as the brain-police agency; it is the ultimate antidote to unionism, feminism and any other humanitarian values. Should anyone resist, there's always the Ku Klux Klan – the original U.S. death squad – to eliminate heretics and backsliders; indeed the colloquial name for the Klan is “the Saturday Night Men's Bible Study Class.”

Who can doubt this is the governing ethos the capitalists are now methodically imposing on the rest of the United States?

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(3)-How does the denial of contraception specifically aid the Ruling Class? Here is a short review: capitalism – infinite greed as maximum virtue/infinite selfishness as ultimate good – demands theoretically unlimited profit. Hence the most perfect form of capitalism is a slave economy, which is the final objective of all capitalist governance: absolute power and limitless profit for the ruling class, total subjugation and genocidal poverty for all the rest of us.

But how, under such circumstances – that is, the total absence of government social services – do the capitalists achieve an adequately large slave class? The answer is by forcing women into unlimited breeding and thereby increasing the birth rate until it exceeds the die-out resulting from the total absence of contraception and health care.

Hence the denial of contraception, which serves three (additional) purposes simultaneously...

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/04/25-0

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Wake up, people; we're in a war – a war of subjugation and extermination against all of us who are not part of the Ruling Class – and it is damn well time we started behaving accordingly.

But of course we never will – at least not in white America.

Meanwhile the capitalists are not “indifferent” to the fact 45,000 people are murdered each year by the (deliberate) withholding of health care. No indeed; the capitalists maliciously applaud each death!

Why? Because murder – or the threat of murder – is the quintessence of capitalism. Every one of us killed by denial of health care is one less non-profitable mouth in the capitalists' slave pens. Each of our corpses is an example to terrify the survivors into working harder for less pay.

Death is the primary function of health-care denials: the extermination of those of us who are non-profitable – that is, those of us too old or disabled or uneducated or too-long unemployed to be exploitable for profit...

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/04/21-5

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This time, Ralph Nader is dead wrong.

To strike a spark requires the hardness of flint and the combustibility of iron.

To start a fire with flint and steel requires a medium to catch the spark and tinder within which the fire-maker's soft steady breath then mothers the spark to flame.

After that it is as in Peter Gabriel's incomparable anthem “Biko”:

“Once the flame begins to catch, the wind will blow it higher.”

Moron Nation has neither the hardness nor the combustibility, much less the fuel...

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/04/19-4

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MISCELLANY: Correction of a (stupid) dyslexic error. In “A Pivotal Death: Reflections on the Post-FDR Suppression of Our Freedom” (12 April), I inadvertently added a zero to a vital number in a damning assertion of fact: “...the nearly 50,000 persons slain each year by denial of health care...”

Hence the correct number “nearly 50,000 persons” first appeared as a sum ten times greater. Not only did I mistype; I missed the error when I edited the text. I have corrected it here and also in its original:

http://crosscut.com/2011/04/10/history/20784/April-12:-an-important-day-for-reflection-in-the-U.S./?utm_source=Crosscut+Daily+Newsletter&utm_campaign=e20a09cbf8-Crosscut_E_mail_4_11_20114_11_2011&utm_medium=email

One of my worst most mortifying failings is my dyslexic inability to spot errors in my own work. The fact this is a common problem amongst all dyslexics does not absolve me from its associated flares of self-contempt. But when I wrote for newspapers and magazines, I trusted sharp-eyed editors to protect me from such mistakes; when I was an editor, I routinely had my writing double-checked by a trusted colleague.

Now of course I have no such help; my inadequacies are thus all-too-often publicly displayed.

To be reasonably assured something I write is free of mistakes, I have to re-read it 20 or 30 times over a period of several days or even weeks. When I have that kind of time, I can usually overcome my deficiencies, though even under the best of circumstances I am utterly helpless when it comes to spotting numerical errors, especially transpositions or extra digits.

In any case this is precisely the reason I wrote as I did on 19 April: “I am not a writer. I despise the act of writing; it is like trying to wrestle a washtub full of lubriciously writhing worms into a huge vase obstructed by an impossibly narrow neck. I am in fact a total fraud as a writer – a gravely handicapped dyslexic who has merely learned to (mostly) hide his abysmal failings behind a smokescreen of eloquence.”

But I said then (and repeat now for emphasis), it is as a photographer I come alive. I am enchanted by the dance of light and shadow; I am obsessed with sculpting its choreographies in alchemical silver.

LB/27 April 2011

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Synchronicity Again: Coping with Futility whether Personal or Political

The image that inspired a project I will never be able to complete: I made this picture with a Rolleiflex F and Kodak 400 portrait film in 2008. The extent to which the submissive posture of using a waist-level viewfinder instantly relaxed my subject started me thinking about making similar portraits of my neighbors here in the senior housing where I live. But I began to fear my Rolleiflex F was getting old, sold it to finance the purchase of a reconditioned Rolleiflex T and was thus victimized by a thieving merchant, who took my money and sent me worthless junk instead of the camera I ordered. This terminated not just the portraiture project (which I had intended to do in black-and-white) but several others as well, all permanently canceled because the theft-loss combined with the meagerness of my pension forever prohibits me from purchasing another professional quality medium-format camera. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2011.

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THE STRANGE REALITIES of synchronicity are often beyond my abilities to describe or even exemplify, but the synchronicities within this moment are undeniable.

I awoke today intending to write about why after 59 years (my father gave me my first camera for my 12th birthday), I am finished with serious photography – not because I am suddenly willing to give up the greatest most dependable joy and passion of my inner life, but because I am now hopelessly obstructed from ever experiencing that ecstasy again.

Meanwhile Franetta McMillan has addressed a matter that is as politically relevant to the conflict that rages all around us as it is personally relevant to my own now finally abandoned struggle against the lifetime curse that has so eerily blighted all my photographic efforts – a jinx so powerfully devastating I can no longer deny that my commitment to photography (or for that matter to any visual art) was the most pointless, wasteful and self-destructive act of my entire life.

Yes, mine was always a history of photo-related tragedy – inexplicable malfunctions of equipment and chemicals, picture credits omitted by “accident” nearly every time my photographs appeared in major publications, work lost or maliciously stolen – a pattern established long before the irremediably ruinous denouement of the 1983 fire.

But now a thieving merchant – that consummate archetype of capitalist greed and malice – has inflicted a genuinely terminal wound: he has stolen the money I paid him for a reconditioned Rolleiflex.

What he sent me instead is worthless junk, not even an approximation of the camera I ordered.

Due to the crippled condition of our once-formidable consumer protection laws here in Washington state – another depredation of capitalism – there is no possibility I will recover my money, never mind the offending business is less than a hundred miles distant.

The money is gone forever, and my tiny pension – my sole remaining source of income – leaves me no way to replace the loss, which means that no matter how much longer I might remain alive, I am denied forever the tools to do the medium-format work I had envisioned as the grand finalé of my memoir.

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I am not a writer. I despise the act of writing; it is like trying to wrestle a washtub full of lubriciously writhing worms into a huge vase obstructed by an impossibly narrow neck. I am in fact a total fraud as a writer – a gravely handicapped dyslexic who has merely learned to (mostly) hide his abysmal failings behind a smokescreen of eloquence.

But as a photographer I came alive, in love with the sensuality of light and shadow and the ecstatic Zen of recording it. According to my parents, the first word I ever spoke was “light”; in one of my attempts at writing poetry – usually a ludicrous even lugubrious waste of time – I described photography as “light sculpted in alchemical silver,” one of those (rare) lines so apt it could never possibly have come from my own defective brain and must therefore be absolute proof the Muse is real.

The medium-format photographs that now thanks to the thief will never be made were to have been not merely the concluding images of my memoir but its very post-fire core, just as the photography destroyed in the fire was to have been the backbone of the original “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer.”

Such is my accursedness.

In other words, the thief has murdered not just my photography but my memoir too and therefore all my work – any (slight) remaining possibility I might have achieved even one scintilla of immortality.

Thus the curious but undeniable timeliness of what Franetta wrote this morning in response to the piece entitled “Barack the Betrayer: Glib Enabler of Wall Street's Republican Despotism.”

“There's just one question that's been nagging at me for the last few months,” she posted. “If predator capitalism has already won, and resistance is futile, do we still have a moral obligation to resist? I still haven't figured out the answer to that one.”

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Good morning, Franetta: again your comment inspires not just a quick response but an entire essay.

Your question is really three questions. What is the nature of capitalist victory? What is moral obligation? And what is futility?

To adequately address any of these issues, it seems to me we need an entirely new vocabulary; the relevant buzzwords – used here in the positive sense of a buzzword's function as a source of epiphany rather than as a pejorative implying mindless agitation of Moron Nation's omnipresent rage – have all been rendered so meaningless they put most of us to sleep: not the sound slumber of satiated comfort but the desperate narcolepsy of powerlessness and escapism.

Such is the reality of Moron Nation, the former United States of America now transmogrified by greed and selfishness into the United Estates of Wall Street, the Big Plantation on which Massa Obama is the present overseer and – in all probability – the Machiavellian nemesis of any hope the African-American liberation movement might yet have saved us from ourselves.

To talk or write or photograph or paint the dread reality within this realm of consummate moral imbecility – to name or portray “racism” or “class struggle” or “progressive values” or “economic democracy” or “collective bargaining” or even “the social contract” – is now most often merely to convince the listener to change the channel and the reader to look elsewhere.

Capitalism – all capitalism is innately predatory – won here by dumbing us down, jamming our dunce caps on so permanently most of us now reflexively think like peasants: note again what I said about “hope” at the conclusion of “Glib Enabler” (15 April).

Worse, we think not just like “peasants” per se but like the most notoriously reactionary peasants in human history, the Mujiki of Russia, so savage in their theocratic proto-Teabagger conservatism they murdered even the doctors, nurses and teachers the Soviet government sent into their communities to lift them into wellbeing. (This is part of the background – conveniently omitted by capitalist censors – of the deadly policies subsequently imposed on so much of rural Russia during the 1930s.)

But here in Moron Nation, with its neo-peasantry of selfishness-addled and celebrity-seduced troglodytes, the capitalists did not need their characteristic bayonets and rifle volleys, though there was that too, the blood shed at places like Coal Creek and Everett and Ludlow and Kent State University and Jackson State College – just as there is bound to be much more of it spilled in the years ahead as our few remaining humanitarians are finally pushed to the point of active resistance.

And “humanitarians” – women and men moved to action by deep concern for our fellow humans and therefore the environments in which we live – is what we truly are and what we should begin calling ourselves. (Note too the term “Leftist humanitarian” is redundant, while the terms “conservative humanitarian” or “Rightist humanitarian” are self-contradictory.)

In any case we are not really “Marxists” or “Communists:” or “socialists” or “progressives” or “organized labor” or even “liberals,” much less a genuine resistance. To claim one or more of these labels, we'd have to at least have an ideology and an analysis of our grievances if not a full-fledged party or a movement. But in fact we have neither a solidarity-sustaining manifesto nor – as the increasingly obvious failure of the Midwest labor protests prove – any effective organization. Yes some of the most brutally fascist Republicans are facing recall elections, but as we have already seen proven in Wisconsin, who controls the government controls the outcome of the vote-count.

Meanwhile the reflexive anti-intellectuality in which every resident of Moron Nation is conditioned from birth guarantees we will never again be allowed to evolve a manifesto or an organization, each of which are quintessential cornerstones of rebellion and resistance.

As I said said here on 24 June 2010 (“The Stolen Prerequisites of Liberation: Why Change Is Impossible”), history proves winning revolutions whether peaceful or violent have four absolute requirements: ideology; organization; technological mastery; the backing of a major foreign power.

Every revolution good or bad that lacked even one of these elements – from the various rebellions in ancient Rome through the French Revolution of 1789 to the Fascist and Nazi uprisings in Europe and Pol Pot's anti-urban bloodbath in Cambodia – has been defeated; every revolution that had all four elements – ours, the Russian revolutions of 1917, the Nazis and Italian Fascists prior to World War II, Franco's, Gandhi's, Mao Ze Dong's, Ho Chi Mihn's, Fidel Castro's, Pol Pot's, Pinochet's – has won.

(Note the Nazis and Fascists were winning until their premature assertions of capitalist brutality became so gory, their original enablers, which include Wall Street, were forced to repudiate them. The same applies to China's support for Pol Pot. The fact these revolutions have all been overthrown by subsequent events is also true. Note too the deadly demise of the “good” revolutions proves – just as surely as the murderous duration of the “bad” ones – the historical reality of what the Catholics call “original sin”: a theological explanation for the psychologically undeniable malevolence of the human mind.)

Thus we are trapped in what is surely the ultimate manifestation of an ancient Chinese curse: “may you always live in interesting times.”

And our time is indeed unique in human history. We are oppressed by tyrannies the totality of which have no counterpart in our species' experience even as we have communications capabilities that are themselves unprecedented. But the former always outweigh the latter. Because we are the subjects of capitalist governance – absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class; total subjugation and genocidal poverty for all the rest of us – the (formerly divine) powers of retribution given the tyrants by their technologies of surveillance and death will always trump the theoretical powers implicit in communications. Our Bradley Mannings will always be imprisoned and tortured to death if not murdered outright; our Martin Luther Kings will always be gunned down and the true assassins always hidden.

Our error – a genuinely suicidal failing – is that we refuse to accept just how absolutely dis-empowered we already are.

And until we truly dare open ourselves to that acceptance – which given the intellectual and psychological strictures characteristic of Moron Nation may well never happen – our powerlessness will merely worsen until the now-metaphorical slave-pens again become absolutely real: antebellum horrors maintained not by men on horseback but by cameras, death rays and other high-tech supremacy – capitalism turned fascism in fulfillment of the patriarchal mandate.

On the other hand, were we to collectively acknowledge what has been done to us, there is always the possibility we might evolve an adequate response.

But until we do, resistance – as under the jackboots of the (presumably) fictional Borg – is indeed futile.

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What then is “moral obligation”?

And what is “moral obligation” when all hitherto-proclaimed moral standards have been overthrown, when infinite greed is exalted as ultimate virtue and limitless selfishness proclaimed the greatest good?

More to the point, what is “moral obligation” in a time ruled by moral imbecility so aggressive it has reduced resistance to futility?

I think the sole pathway out of this conceptual cul-de-sac (and here I can speak only for myself) is to (again) discard our (deliberately) perverted language and replace “moral” with “human,” the term “human obligation” not just lifting the discussion beyond ever-contentious matters of creed and dogma but psycholinguistically relating it to the notion of humanitarianism as deep concern.

My personal sense of human obligation was defined in boyhood by the almost-paradoxical combination of my father's Marxism, my aunt Alecia DuRand's tutelage and artistic encouragement, my own resultant commitments to the visual arts and the Boy Scouts of America ethos of “leave the campsite in better shape than you found it.”

The fact all my efforts to improve the campsite have been totally nullified by the accursedness that plagues my life does not invalidate the definition. (Note that according to every mythology I have read, accursedness such as mine is the fate of anyone conceived as a sacrificial victim then rescued from the preordained  death – apparently the very sequence of events that concluded on the Summer Solstice Eve of 1945, when my father rescued me from my mother.)

Nor is the notion of improving the campsite – in this instance our nation and our world – invalidated by the fact I failed totally at my self-appointed task or by the corollary fact my accursedness has finally reached the point the associated anguish has become unbearable.

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Any a piece of art whether visual or textual or in other media is implicitly an expression of optimism, but such exaltation radically intensifies the torment when one's work is doomed by circumstances beyond one's control.

A prelude of optimism – especially this-is-well-within-my-grasp rational optimism – elevates our expectations and therefore deepens the awful plunge into despair inflicted by the destruction of the art itself (the fire) or the permanent loss of means to make art (the theft).

The resultant emotional see-saw has finally proven so agonizing I have no choice but to admit total defeat: the realization nothing I have ever done, nothing I will ever do, will ever be seen by enough people to even possibly make a difference, whether in my own (nearly finished) life or in anyone else's.

Bottom line, I can no longer deny that from 1945 on, my entire life is nothing more than an expression of futility.

Knowing now my efforts will always come to nothing, I am sorely tempted to sell my remaining cameras, all of which are 35mm, certainly adequate for snapshots or the sorts of happy-face society-page clichés one finds in today's newspapers but utterly useless for the infinitely more somber work I was doing and planned to do. I could even apply the money I would get for the sale of these machines – about 35 cents on the dollar – to paying off my dental bills more quickly.

I am also tempted to destroy what little remains of my extant work. That way I would not be haunted by might-have-beens every time I look at my apartment walls and I could damn well use the additional space in my file cabinets.

But I probably will neither sell nor destroy: though I will never again dare imagine fate might allow me to do anything of even minimal significance – as I said at the beginning I will never again be able to afford a reconditioned Rolleiflex (or any other professionally useful medium-format camera) and therefore cannot even finish current projects – it is also true that 35mm photography (which is otherwise definitively useless to me), will at least function as aesthetic masturbation – a final defense against visual decay analogous to the elderly man's or woman's last physical defense against terminal loss of sexuality.

Which brings us to the matter of moral obligation – human obligation – in response to futility.

It may be that we as a species need to admit something John Paul Sartre and Albert Camus strongly hint at in their recollections of life under Nazi occupation: that the ecstasy of momentary freedom we experience by resistance in the face of hopelessness is a powerful stimulant – perhaps the most powerful stimulant we will ever experience – and that such ecstasy is its own reward, sufficient unto itself whether our lives continue or not.

It is a concept I suspect my some of ancestors would have understood instantly, especially those from the misty domains of the Goddess Danu or the Great Forest of the Iroquois.

LB/18 April 2011

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Barack the Betrayer: Glib Enabler of Wall Street's Republican Despotism

The young woman in this image of oppression always makes me think of how Joan of Arc might have looked as she was led through the marketplace at Rouen on 30 May 1431. Though their fates were far different – this woman beaten and jailed, Saint Joan burned alive – each was nevertheless a victim of tyranny. The picture feels iconic; I remember it did so the instant I framed it in my viewfinder. But not until the advent of Outside Agitator's Notebook was it seen by anyone save those who read the East Village Other in May or June of 1967, perhaps too by the photo editors at The New York Times, Newsweek and Paris-Match and of course the few friends and colleagues familiar with my fire-doomed book “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer.” The picture originally appeared in the extra published by EVO immediately after the Memorial Day police riot in Tompkins Park. (The extra was a project on which the late Walter Bowart and I were among the chief collaborators: he was EVO's founding editor and wrote the text, while most of the inside photographs were mine.) Alas that one edition – which today would be an invaluable Lower East Side historical document – has since been disappeared, neatly sliced from the New York Public Library microfiche files, obviously by a librarian, obviously on the orders of some Ruling Class censor. Though my entire 1967 journal was destroyed by the 1983 fire (and with it most of the year's photographic notes and technical data), the film was undoubtedly Tri-X, developed at The Times' darkroom in whatever was their stock developer, probably D-76; the camera was either a Leica IIIG or a VT Canon, the lens a 35mm F/2 Summicron. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyrights 1967, 2009.

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AT ONE TIME President Obama's budget speech last night would have had me applauding and maybe even cheering. But now after more than two years of his serial betrayals, my response is limited to muttering “bullshit” and changing the channel.

Everything Barack the Betrayer promised in his 2008 campaign – even his campaign slogan itself – was a lie. So why should I believe him now? Or for that matter, ever again?

More to the point, why should I stupidly embrace the optimism implicit in a positive response to his newest batch of promises? Why should I set myself up for more anguish? Pessimism not only spares me additional pangs of betrayal but gives me the opportunity for at least a small private smile if things don't turn out quite as badly as I now assume they will.

Which – with that curious synchronicity the personal and the political so often demonstrate these days – relates directly to the remainder of this piece. Begun as a response to comments posted a couple of days ago by Franetta McMillan and Sheare Bliss, it quickly morphed into an entirely new essay.

Here – reprinted from 12 April – is the dialogue that inspired it:

Franetta: I wrote one of those pour-your-heart-out letters to Obama, too, while he was deciding what to do about the war in Afghanistan. I must've spent a couple of weeks on it, trying to get every word perfect, like I was actually going to convince him to do right thing. When he announced he was going to escalate it, I felt personally betrayed. I think I might have cried. I was done with him after that.

You know, when Obama first began his run for the Presidency, almost everyone around me was excited, but I didn't trust him -- which, being a black woman, was a positively heretical position for me to take. Too much like a motivational speaker, I thought. It wasn't until after his speech on race that I began to get on board, because it wasn't until then I sensed he had some depth. Oh well. Turns out my first instinct was right.

Sheare: Franetta, I wept on election night, and it was because I truly had not expected that history would be made in my lifetime and with someone that, at the time, I genuinely believed had a strong ethical viewpoint and would bring that viewpoint to action. I should have been weeping for other reasons. I never, ever, ever expected that I would be calling Obama Bush 2.0, and long after other people were expressing concerns, I tried to support him despite my increasing doubts.

I should have been listening to my uncle.

*****

Thank you both.

My skepticism about the president I now call Barack the Betrayer grew initially from the overwhelming support given him by the Wall Street banksters and the barons of Big Business in general, for which see http://www.opensecrets.org/pres08/sectorallc.php?cycle=2008.

It was unprecedented for a Democrat to receive Ruling Class financial support of this magnitude; note how – for the first time ever – the Big Money mostly went not just to Obama but also to the Democratic Party rather than to the Republicans as in years past. To me, schooled as I was in objective analysis (thanks mostly to my father/Sheare's grandfather, the late Donald R. Bliss) – it was obvious the fix was in.

My doubts about Obama were intensified by a foreign policy paper which – published in the Council on Foreign Relations journal Foreign Affairs (thereby implying Obama was the Ruling Class presidential favorite as early as 2007) – argued the United States should expand its role as global tyrant: http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/62636/barack-obama/renewing-american-leadership

Thus Obama aligned himself with the Johnson/Nixon/Ford/Carter/Reagan/Bush I/Clinton/Bush II military and economic policies the United States imposed immediately after the murder of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy on 22 November 1963. I hardly need point out these are the policies that – especially in the eyes of the international Working Class – define the United States as the de facto Fourth Reich: an identity surely underscored by the Nazi-style helmets the U.S. military adopted during the Nixon years, began wearing during the Reagan presidency and has worn ever since.

Lastly there was the alternative-press report that noted the glaring difference between the Obama who spoke to Ruling Class audiences and the Obama who publicly campaigned for the presidency. I regret I can't provide a link; indeed I no longer recall the source save that it was a credible and definitively Leftist publication – the same journal that tried to make Obama's 2007 pro-tyranny piece part of the 2008 campaign debate. (Interestingly, the Foreign Affairs article, “Renewing American Leadership,” is now price-tagged to discourage public circulation.)

Nevertheless – obviously this was before I fully absorbed the chief lesson of the 2008 campaign (that hope is not “audacity” but imbecility) – I clutched at an Obama presidency much as a shipwreck victim clutches desperately at flotsam: Obama might not save us from capitalism's inevitable march toward fascism, but surely he would do a better job of protecting us from its innate savagery than John McCain and Sarah Palin would do.

Indeed it seemed a McCain presidency might follow the pattern established by the aged and terminally ill von Hindenburg even as Palin would thus be positioned to achieve power much as Hitler had done in the wake of von Hindenburg's death: the historical parallel, which a year later helped inspire my Palin/Hitler collage (in “Sandwiches for Mind and Spirit”), was genuinely terrifying.

As a result, though I never formally volunteered for the Obama campaign, I talked up his candidacy at every opportunity and probably won him as many as 30 or 35 votes. My contribution was surely nothing significant, but it was far more presidential-campaign political enthusiasm than I had felt since the murder of Robert Kennedy, whom I (correctly) recognized as “the last man who could have saved us from ourselves.”

And of course I myself voted for Obama.

*****

The post-election denouement that elevated my Obamanoia to its present level has two parts.

First was Obama's appointment of the avowed Christian theocrat Rick Warren – a JesuNazi misogynist and gay-basher of the first order – to give the inaugural invocation, the liturgical equivalent of the keynote address at a political convention. That was the instant I knew we'd been had, the Big Reveal “change we can believe in” had never been anything more than a Big Lie, the sleight-of-hand moment by which Barack the Betrayer reassured his capitalist masters he was theirs and theirs alone and would govern precisely as they demanded.

Then came the exegesis – the explanation – of Obama's treachery: Bill Moyers breathtaking admission our exalted democratic processes are nothing but a charade, sham and scam to opiate the masses much as panem et circenses did in Roman times and religion – particularly in the ever-more-theocratic United Estates of Wall Street – still does. That revelation is chronicled here:

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/blog/2009/07/bill_moyers_michael_winship_so.html

This was nothing new to real journalists. Most of us learned the hideous truth our first years on the job. (Why do you suppose we are so bitterly cynical? What else explains why so many of us become hopeless drunks?) But until Moyers bravely spoke up, we never dared publicly admit the American Experiment in constitutional democracy was itself a now Big Lie, that the genuine article had been murdered long ago, on 22 November 1963 if not earlier.

*****

Largely because (again thanks to my father's tutelage) I never committed the suicidal error of underestimating the capitalists' cunning, it took no real intellectual effort for me to recognize Obama might well be the fulfillment of a stunningly Machiavellian  scheme that dates at least to the 1933 Bankers' Plot (for which Google).

The plotters' intent – a classic example of the innately fascist values at the core of capitalism – was to overthrow President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and replace his New Deal government with a Ruling Class cabal allied with Hitler and Mussolini. But the conspiracy had apparently been infiltrated by Soviet agents – probably Red Army Intelligence (Glavnoye Razvedyvatel'noye Upravleniye or GRU), since nothing related to this episode has yet been disclosed in the huge post-Soviet publication of KGB files. In any case, the plot was soon exposed via the nation's Leftist press, much of it Soviet-guided and at the time almost unimaginably influential.

Though it is an aside, here in the thwarting of the Bankers' Plot is most likely the reason FDR so thoroughly trusted Stalin: the agency that was later to become Hitler's nemesis in Europe seems to have made its global debut by saving the Roosevelt Administration and checkmating the bankers' scheme to turn the United States overtly fascist. (For more on GRU, the files of which have never been opened to public scrutiny, see The Red Orchestra by V.E. Tarrant, published in 1995 by Wiley & Sons Inc., New York.)

Here too is almost certainly the motive behind the vicious anti-Communist, anti-socialist, anti-intellectual purge the capitalist Ruling Class unleashed inside the U.S. literally the instant World War II ended. Nor is it any coincidence the purge and its longterm aftermath gave birth to the abysmally ignorant (and therefore infinitely submissive) U.S. electorate of today: Moron Nation.

Returning to the notion of Obama as the perfect fulfillment of longterm capitalist scheming, all we need do is reason from the premise of class struggle: in other words, apply the principles of objective analysis.

The Bankers' Plot, nearly lost to memory down the Orwell hole of revisionist censorship, is undeniable proof of the long-term Ruling Class intent to impose capitalist governance on every level of the United States: absolute power and unlimited profit for the aristocracy, total subjugation and genocidal poverty for all the rest of us.

Having failed to achieve despotism by coup, the U.S. Ruling Class – bolstered by the huge postwar influx of Nazi war criminals – applied the Josef Goebbels lessons of mass manipulation. Beginning with the purge, Ruling Class Media and public schools operated in conformity with Ruling Class mandates to indoctrinate the entire population in the credo of infinite greed as absolute virtue and limitless selfishness as ultimate good.

By so popularizing a shallow version of the ethos formerly held by the aristocracy alone – by expanding it into the philosophical and theological cornerstone of the entire population – the Ruling Class manufactured and sustains Moron Nation as surely as it fabricates the demand for a new but nonessential product. (The works of Henry Giroux, often published by the radical website Truthout, provide a superb source for details of the moronation process. So do the works of Chris Hedges, regularly available through both Truthout and Common Dreams.)

And now – if we view the Obama phenomena and its related developments from the perspective of Moyers' disclosure all we are allowed to see of present-day politics is a theater of deception – a hitherto unthinkable possibility comes into sharp and dreadful focus.

Armed with its batteries of psychological research – capitalism has methodically applied the rat-maze principles of behaviorism since the days of the Third Reich – the Ruling Class seems to have understood that an unprincipled Chicago opportunist disguised as an Afro-Democrat was the perfect agitator to at last thrust the carefully crafted constituencies of Moron Nation into the 21st Century variant of fascism. Just as the droning chants of “hope” and the zomboid repetition of “change we can believe in” mesmerized the Democratic rank-and-file to vote for Obama – note though how “hope” is a sublime admission of abject powerlessness (a point to which we shall return) – so did the prospect of a Black Family in the White House enrage the 70-something percent of the Caucasian citizenry that remains malevolently Ku Klux at heart.

Thus Barack the Betrayer, the ultimate political fraudster: in service to his Ruling Class masters he cons everyone, Left and Right. His promise-everything/deliver-nothing strategy generates such a tsunami of alienation it drowns the Democrats in self-disenfranchisement. Meanwhile the Republicans with their Teabagger storm-troopers (and yes in 2010 a huge number of betrayal-infuriated Democrats and independents) are goaded by their racism to embrace the Wall Street/Big Business tyranny that is the newest and most insidious variant of fascism. With Obama's treachery at least rationalized and often wholly obscured by the resultant controversies, he gives the Republicans (and ultimately the banksters) everything they want.

If my analysis is correct, Obama will set the stage for a Republican sweep in 2012 much as he did in 2010, further alienating the Left with additional broken promises even as his mere presence continues to infuriate the racist Right. The electoral result will complete Moron Nation's transition to the sort of governance envisioned by the capitalist plotters of 1933. With both houses of Congress controlled by the Teabaggers, the GOPorker who takes the White House will be free to impose an openly fascist, unapologetically Nazi-like regime, extinguishing the torch of U.S. liberty forever.

Since the Teabaggers in Maine are now methodically erasing all traces of social conscience from state buildings – tearing down murals and changing nomenclature – I cannot but wonder if 2012's winners will demolish the world-famous statue we New Yorkers know as Our Lady of the Harbor, perhaps proclaiming her, as the victors of 2010 did the now-banished material in Maine, “counterproductive” to the New Paradigm.

Were the resurrection of the dead anything more than theological fantasy, old-time liberal Republicans like Fiorello LaGuardia, Jacob Javits and Nelson Rockefeller would be rising in shame from their graves. So would Robert LaFollette, the Republican who became the original Progressive.

Obviously our experiment in constitutional democracy is finished – and just as obviously our collective subconscious already knows it. The sad proof is in our unquestioning acceptance of “hope” as synonymous with empowerment when in fact it demonstrates the opposite. Hope is the emotion of serfs, of slaves, of prisoners and indentured servants who desperately yearn for their masters to treat them less sadistically. Those who have genuine liberty don't just hope for relief from their grievances; they demand it.

LB/14 April 2011

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A Pivotal Death: Reflections on the Post-FDR Suppression of Our Freedom

Perhaps because I regard Reaganism as a singularly Californian brand of fascism that was  metastasized by Ruling Class media throughout the United States and so became the primary means by which the capitalists terminally Californicated the entire nation, I found this scene on Second Avenue near East 5th Street so telling I raced back to my apartment for a camera. Appropriately enough it was 1984; I still smoked then and had gone out merely to buy cigarettes – a Manhattan neighborhood errand so quick and local I normally left my photo gear at home – but this time I was obviously wrong to have done so and blessedly lucky to have a chance to make the picture before the cops chased the sleeping man away. Nikon FM (hastily chosen over my Leicas because the FM was my only already-loaded body), probably the 50mm Nikkor f/2; undoubtedly Tri-X at 800. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2010.

*

TODAY IS THE 66th anniversary of the death of our nation's greatest president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the chief executive whose radical New Deal rescued us – all too briefly – from the depredations of capitalism.

With FDR in his grave, the capitalist Ruling Class immediately escalated its now-victorious war against U.S. workers; its first post-FDR victory was the Taft-Hartley Act of 1948, which – exactly as labor advocates predicted at the time – was unionism's death warrant.

Meanwhile the so-called “anti-communist” purge the aristocrats began immediately following World War II – this purge another atrocity facilitated by FDR's death – targeted not just Marxists but socialists in general, eventually making “intellectual” a synonym for “subversive” and even “traitor.”

The long-term result was the nyekulturniy domain of dunces in which we are imprisoned today, the realm I call Moron Nation, the one-party despotism in which the label “Democrat” is as big a Big Lie as the Democrats' 2008 slogan “change we can believe in.”

An e-mail from a computer engineer who is also my beloved niece Sheare Bliss – a copy of a letter she sent to the White House – provides a telling index to where capitalism has stranded us today, 66 years after the death that, as much (if not more) than the political murders of the 1960s, marked a dire turnabout in U.S. history.

Here's the letter, very slightly edited for style:

Interestingly, as I speak to people in my extended circle of acquaintance who are not Republicans (the Republicans are everywhere, like kudzu, but at least I don't know any Tea Partyists), I find that from liberals to progressives, the people who formed a good chunk of President Obama's voters are anywhere from disillusioned and cynical to bitter and betrayed. (I'm the latter, in case there was any question.) Even the progressives who saw him as a compromise, mostly because Clinton was a part of the political machine and somewhere to the right of Attila the Hun, speak with angry resignation, which has to be a very painful contradiction of attitudes. Why, sez I to myself, why are we all so ticked off. And lo, I found an article that listed the broken campaign promises, and the light dawned.

The biggest one, at least in my eyes: Health care for all

Hmmm, not only has that not happened – trust me, I haven't had insurance since before the election of 2008 – the so called compromise obtained from rapacious neo-cons and lackeys of the corporations is pointless and useless. As I said, I haven't had medical insurance since before the election. When I broke my foot in February of 2010, I used $500 of my savings to get an x-ray and a boot, and I don't believe it's healed correctly because it's not only very stiff, but feels like there is ground glass in there. Of course, I am 58, so perhaps the cuts in Medicare and the privatization of Social Security will help euthanize me early.

We used to be one of the richest industrialized nations in the world and our citizens were cared for the most poorly of all the industrialized nations. That's not only still true, it's about to get worse, as the compromise budget being bandied about by the President himself slashes aid for pregnant women and children and the elderly. Oh, wait, the elderly thing is next year, sorry, my bad.

Anyway, as someone who considers herself a Christian, although I hate to own up to it because of the wingnuts and lunatics thumping the Old Testament, I am willing to have my taxes pay for those cuts, but am far less willing to have my taxes fund bailouts and make up for corporations which effectively pay no tax, and after accepting taxpayer funds, pay their executives incredible bonuses. And then, the poor little Republican in Wisconsin complains that he can't make it on his salary of $174,000. Since I make a third of that – and thank God I have a job now and income – it's hard for me not to pick up a violin.

Then of course, there was all that “close Guantanamo and reform the Patriot Act,” also known as “Step Away From the Fascism and No One Will Get Hurt.” Right.

Not only is Guantanamo still open, President Obama's administration has extended and expanded the very laws he pledged to abolish or amend on his way to allegedly transparent government. Hmm, guess that hasn't worked out either.

Interestingly, the actual illegal activity and keeping surveillance on American citizens has not once been brought to the Justice Department. Things that make you go, hmmmmm?

I should probably have talked about the next with the above, but it really deserves its own paragraphs: End the wars

Okay, this is just mordantly funny. Instead of ending either, he's gotten into another one. As I said in an email last week: $550 million to get there, $40 mill for the first three weeks and a projected $40 mill per month.

We have the actual scientific evidence that violent criminals are produced by a lack of nutrition during the period of brain formation as well as brain injury caused by abuse. But by all means, lets spend the money on bombs instead of babies. It's so much more impressive. And hey, who cares if those poor working class or unemployed folk have babies that grow up to commit violent crime. If they just pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, everything would be fine!

Hell hath no fury like a voter scorned, and the contempt shown by this administration to the very people that put it into office is both tragic and immoral.

Okay, the last one: Defend labor rights.

Right. That's why in Ohio and Indiana and Wisconsin, public worker unions are being gutted. Let me tell you a little story: in 1870, my ex-husband's great great grandfather and grand uncle were working for the Black Diamond mines in Illinois. When the miners struck for a decent living wage, the companies brought in the only people more desperate than the striking workers, i.e., freed slaves. With unemployment where it is, and corporations gleefully riding on the backs of not only the working class, but what used to be left of the middle class, I think you see the parable. The desperate will take the work and break the strikes and President Obama's hands will never have gotten even a bit dusty. What a far cry from his campaign statements about walking the picket lines with the workers.

As a Christian, I think President Obama has some 'splaining to do, Lucy.

*****

Also relevant to FDR's death is my response to an essay by Ted Van Dyk on Crosscut, the Seattle online daily:

I deeply appreciate Mr. Van Dyk's commemoration of 12 April 1945, the date President Franklin Delano Roosevelt died at the health spa in Warm Springs, Georgia.

FDR was by far our nation's greatest president, and his demise – announced to my mother and me by the motorman of a Roanoke, Virginia streetcar – is my second politically significant memory; I had turned five years old just a few days before.

(Autobiographical aside: my first and earliest politically significant memory is from 1942: my father, mother and I viewing the Normandie as she lay crippled at the French Line pier in Midtown Manhattan; she had limped back into port after being wounded by a Nazi torpedo just off Long Island.)

Returning to the topic of Mr. Van Dyk's essay, its subsequent assertions unfortunately threaten to reduce it to an unintentional satire on itself.

First there is Mr. Van Dyk's linkage of FDR's untimely death with the secessionist South's 12 April 1861 attack on Fort Sumter. The synchronicity of dates was one of the pieces of so-called evidence in the absurdly conspiranoid claim President Roosevelt was poisoned by agents of a capitalist/die-hard-Confederate cabal.

The choice of 12 April for FDR's alleged assassination was said to be a coded message: the South – or rather the slave-keeping über-capitalist mentality of the South – was rising again, this time hand-in-glove with the Yankee industrialists.

Next, though Mr. Van Dyk downplays the breathtaking humanitarian achievements of the New Deal – policies that bravely confronted the malevolence of U.S. capitalism (whether North or South) and everywhere sought to blunt its savagery – he correctly notes the lingering influence these ameliorative efforts had on “Presidents Kennedy and Johnson and Democratic congressional leaders (who) were inspired by FDR and Eleanor Roosevelt, known in particular for her concern for women, minorities, and children.”

But then Mr. Van Dyk shows his true colors. He characterizes the subsequent, racism-and-misogyny-driven Hard Right electoral triumph that has killed both the American Experiment in constitutional democracy and the American Dream – the ignorance-fueled victory that has murdered Dream and Experiment beyond any possibility of resurrection – as nothing more than “revisiting the ways and means of our governance.”

And in complete indifference to the conquest's growing death toll – the nearly 50,000 persons slain each year by denial of health care, the millions more seniors, disabled and chronically unemployed people slated for extermination by the maliciously genocidal destruction of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security – Mr. Van Dyk claims “we are...doing it peaceably and proceeding from bases of law and custom – no shots being fired, as at Fort Sumter, or threats of totalitarian takeover...”

As to the “totalitarian takeover,” Mr. Van Dyk need but look around: the capitalist aristocracy – less than one percent of the nation's population – now owns or controls more than half the nation's wealth.

The former “land of opportunity” is thus now notorious for its ever-more-glaring socioeconomic dichotomy. And after two years of Barack Obama's betrayer-presidency, it is clear there are no longer any meaningful differences between Republicans and Democrats – that the United States has become a one-party nation in which there will never again be any real effort to ease the suffering inflicted by capitalist predation.

In other words, the “totalitarian takeover” has already happened.

As to “law and custom,” has Mr. Van Dyk forgotten the Nazis were produced by capitalism's manipulation of German “law and custom” – that the Teabaggers are spawned by capitalism's nearly identical manipulation of U.S. “law and custom”?

Is Mr. Van Dyk somehow unaware Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan's unapologetic war against the poor and the unemployed is – in its own cleverly euphemistic way – hardly less genocidal than Hitler's Final Solution?

Shame on Mr. Van Dyk. Surely he knows there is nothing “peaceable” about death from homelessness, starvation and untreated illness – which, of course (precisely because such fatalities are murder without “shots being fired”) – is the very sort of extermination program the capitalists love best.

Mr. Van Dyk's work (scroll to the bottom for my comment) is here:

http://crosscut.com/2011/04/10/history/20784/April-12:-an-important-day-for-reflection-in-the-U.S./?utm_source=Crosscut+Daily+Newsletter&utm_campaign=e20a09cbf8-Crosscut_E_mail_4_11_20114_11_2011&utm_medium=email

But I suspect we've already gotten the point: the fact we were infinitely better off with FDR in the White House than we are now 66 years later here in the deepening darkness beneath the ObamaBush.

LB/12 April 2011

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EXTRA: New Wisconsin Vote-Count Spawns Stunning Fascist Victory

WITH JUST ENOUGH votes magically "found" in Milwaukee to give David Prosser an unchallengeable margin, the avowedly reactionary Wisconsin state supreme court justice has won a seemingly irreversible victory.

Sadly – indeed tragically – if these new results are upheld (and Ruling Class media in Milwaukee says there is every reason to believe they will be), it will also prove the apparent Leftist surge allegedly provoked by Republican anti-labor tyranny is nothing more than an illusion.

It gives me no pleasure to point out this is precisely the reality I suggested four days ago in “Six Easy Reads,” when I dismissed the tattoo-activism of University of Wisconsin students as “the birth of a fad, not of a revolution.”

Overturning Assistant Attorney General JoAnne Kloppenburg's proclamation of a 204-vote win Tuesday night, the Prosser triumph – even reeking as it does of electoral thievery – is essentially what I predicted to two close friends who believed I was being unduly pessimistic.  

"As in Bavaria c. 1932,” I said, “so in Wisconsin in the 21st Century": the fascists will always win no matter what. 

And it is increasingly the same throughout the nation.

For those unfamiliar with German history, the Nazis won not just at the polls, but by flagrant manipulation of election results and – to ensure those results were upheld – by infiltrating and thereby controlling the Weimar Republic judiciary.

This is precisely what the Nazis' hard-Right counterparts are doing in today's United States: nationally via the Roberts Court, in Wisconsin by their re-asserted control of the Prosser Court.

The new numbers – an additional 7,582 votes for Prosser – give him a large enough margin to exempt his victory from any publicly funded recount.

Ironically the least ideologically slanted report I could find on the new vote count is in a Milwaukee business journal: http://www.bizjournals.com/milwaukee/news/2011/04/07/prosser-gains-7500-votes.html

Meanwhile other media both Left and Right were saying there is no possible way Kloppenburg can raise the millions of dollars required for a recount she would now have to pay for herself.

Moreover, with Gov. Scott Walker's re-established control of the state supreme court, there is a strong probability this U.S. führer's puppet-justices will follow the historical example of the Nazis and not only uphold the death-blow he has dealt Wisconsin organized labor but void all the pending recall elections as well.

No doubt the Robber Court will continue to rule likewise – as it already did in the Citizens United case – on any related national matters. Thus the New Paradigm of U.S. governance – absolute power and unlimited profit for the capitalists, total subjugation and genocidal poverty for all the rest of us – will be upheld at every level, local, state and federal.

MSNBC reports Koppenburg supporters are demanding the federal government intervene – seize the ballots and presumably secure them against meddling – but based on his past behavior, Barack the Betrayer will protect the Republicans by dithering until any such intervention is meaningless, thereby ensuring the Prosser victory even if it is based on stolen votes.  

Again we are being taught a lesson, the most wrenchingly bitter lesson of our lifetimes: this country is lost to the Teabagger variant of Nazism – and this time, because there is no Red Army to save humanity from the Nazis as it did c. 1941-1945 – the loss is forever.   

Because many of you are still young enough and healthy enough to travel, I urge you to begin making immediate plans to immigrate, at least to Canada, better yet to Europe.

Indeed I cannot urge you forcefully enough: escape before the exits are closed, as they surely will be.  

LB/7 April 2011

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Six Easy Reads: a New Anthology of Anti-Capitalist Agitation

Though this image would seem to have nothing to do with the text below, it is offered here as a kind of mandala, an object of meditation, an icon of intimacy with Nature and therefore a representation of our perceptions, our minds, our bodies, our world – everything that capitalism is methodically destroying. (An evening grabshot c. 2002 from the side yard of the cabin where I lived for 13 years in rural Thurston County, the exquisite blue shift of the slow Pacific Northwest twilight clearly visible thanks to the superb capability of the emulsion. The south-east position of the rising moon shows I made the picture near the time of the Summer Solstice.) Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2011; Kodak 800 color negative film, Pentax K1000, 70-210 f/4-f/5.6 Tokina zoom wide open, probably at 1/125th of a second.

 *

AS MOST OF you know, I am unapologetically and unabashedly a socialist, an ideology I embraced in my earliest teens at the same time my experiences in the workplace began teaching me the extent and magnitude of our oppression by capitalism.

But only within the past two years have I come to believe capitalism is genuinely Evil: that it is the closest approximation to the biblical notion of Absolute Evil the human species has yet produced and embraced; that capitalism's core precept of infinite greed as ultimate virtue makes capitalism the most deadly malignancy ever to metastasize throughout H. sapiens sapiens.

What then is socialism?

Contrary to what the capitalists would have us believe, socialism is not some pie-in-the-sky scheme for a Santa Claus utopia.

Instead it is genuine economic democracy – worker ownership and control of all business and industry – which is precisely how socialism defends the people of genuinely socialist nations against the Evil inherent in capitalism.

As to the nature of capitalist Evil, it is repeatedly demonstrated by Mussolini's Italy, Hitler's Germany, Franco's Spain, Pinochet's Chile and a long litany of other notorious despotisms including Saudi Arabia and post-Communist China. The hideous historical truth so proven is that capitalism will inevitably transform itself into tyranny, precisely as it is now doing here in the United States.

But the antivenin that heals the capitalist serpent-bite is much more than passionate speeches, provocative bumper-stickers and defiantly red flags and armbands.

Socialism demands an economically aware population collectively committed to one another's sustained well-being, a commitment that in turn requires that quality the Jesuits call “an informed conscience,” which typically means a great deal of ongoing work both mental and physical.

More than that, socialism necessitates Community – upper-case C – a quality hopelessly alien to the malevolently self-absorbed Walkman zombies, cellphone compulsives, psychotic car-huggers and suicidally stupid voters who make up the vast Moronic Majority that unforgivably handed the United States over to Wall Street (and thus to neo-fascism) via the 2010 elections.

Which is precisely why I do not believe socialism can ever be made to work in the United States.

As a people we are entirely too amorally greedy, too vindictively selfish, too ignorant, too anti-intellectual, too mean-spirited, too xenophobic, too petty, too malicious.

The ultimate proof of our collective malice is the radical shift to unabashed despotism overwhelmingly approved by the 2010 voters: the elevation of Big Business bosses to divine-right monarchs and the reduction of everyone else to abject slavery.

Now as a result of the 2010 election we have capitalist governance in action at every level, federal, state and local: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation and genocidal poverty for all the rest of us.

*****

Though I no longer consider myself a Christian – while I find much of aesthetic, moral and emotional value in the messages of Mary and Jesus, I cannot abide the Church's endless centuries of misogyny and hypocrisy – it is true that in recent years I have become a firm believer in the concept of Original Sin.

For those unfamiliar with Christian theology, Original Sin is the notion our species is inherently defective, that without some sort of intervention (the Church would say by divine grace; psychology would say by the superego), we are damned from birth to be nothing better than another Ted Bundy or Elizabeth Bathory.

In any case I regard the United States – the once-promising experiment in Constitutional democracy the voters themselves have reduced to the United Estates of Big Business (the Wall Street Plantation complete with Moron Nation slave quarters to breed an endless supply of cheap throw-away labor) – as the most damning evidence of Original Sin this pollution-ravaged planet has yet spawned. While Hitler's Third Reich can be attributed to the dark undertow of German history, the self-inflicted death of the American Experiment and the concurrent murder of the American Dream have no such obvious explanations.

For example, note how here in the United Estates, the Hard Right's terror of government and the Left's loathing of Big Business are equally justified by real-time atrocities. This is because the Hard Right's apostolic worship of the capitalist aristocracy and the Left's equally fervent adoration of government bureaucracy are each implicit endorsements of tyrannical intent – the same dread impulse that lurks at the epicenter of capitalism itself.

So much for the notion of individual liberty – or of Constitutional democracy in general.

Then there is the fact we have all, like Pavlov's dogs, been conditioned to drool at the sound of a bell.

The dogs associated the bell with food and drooled in intelligent hunger; we humans associate the bell with cash registers and drool in mindless greed.

Such is original sin, from which the species canus is obviously (and blessedly) exempt.

*****

The most brilliant strategy the capitalist Ruling Class ever devised was the methodical education of the entire U.S. population in its credo of absolute greed and limitless selfishness, which until after World War II was a system of moral imbecility exclusive to the moneyed aristocracy and a few criminals, many of whom in fact secretly worked for the aristocrats.

But by making greed and selfishness the nation's cultural cornerstones – by conditioning everybody in the Working Class to believe there is no higher virtue than greed and no greater good than selfishness (and therefore to be as viciously self-serving as the capitalists themselves) – the Ruling Class ensured it was protected by a new consensus, a consensus of useful idiocy: the same toxic consensus that destroyed the labor movement and now keeps us shackled forever in the slave pens of Moron Nation.

The resultant avarice and malfeasance perverts governance at every level in the United States and thus – exactly as the capitalists intended – so discredits government, it dooms forever the possibility of an emergent socialism. The following report, from the local Ruling Class daily, provides a classic example:

“A Tacoma man pleaded guilty Tuesday in federal court to illegally using his former job with the state Department of Social and Health Services to sell confidential information, netting himself about $108,000 over a decade.”

http://www.thenewstribune.com/2011/03/30/1605070/tacoma-ex-dshs-worker-pleads-guilty.html#ixzz1ITabInk9

For those of you who live elsewhere, DSHS is the Washington state welfare bureaucracy. It is more notorious for its vindictively self-serving arrogance than even the legendary New York State Department of Motor Vehicles, though in truth the perpetrator of this particular crime did nothing more than carry the unwritten DSHS ethos to such an extreme his prosecution was inevitable.

And just what is that ethos? National data leaves no doubt: the Statistical Abstract of the United States tells us that, from 1970 through 1990, the state and national welfare bureaucracies feathered their nests with a 5,390 percent hike in administrative expenses – and paid for it, in part, by slashing stipends and services to the needy by 66 percent.

From the perspective of its operators, the U.S. welfare system is therefore nothing more than (another) sinecure for the bourgeoisie: a jobs program that – even before the Ruling Class decided to shut it down completely – was already run at the expense of the people it was intended to protect.

Obviously – and contrary to decades of Ruling Class propaganda – the real welfare fraudsters, the true welfare queens, are the welfare bureaucrats themselves.

While the aforementioned Tacoma felon's behavior is surely glaring, the attitude that produced it – raking in often-generous paychecks by self-righteously pretending to help lower-income peoples – infests the entire Moron Nation welfare bureaucracy in every jurisdiction and at every level.

Yes, admittedly I bear the welfare bureaucrats a huge grudge: 24 years ago the DSHS 'rats not only maliciously denied me vocational rehabilitation but – when I protested the denial – retaliated by vindictively proclaiming me “permanently unemployable.” In other words they deliberately destroyed my life, condemning me to the hopeless and steadily worsening poverty that now makes death all too often synonymous with rescue.

What was done to me cannot be forgiven. It was so embittering my fury thrust me, for a time, into the camp of libertarian conservatism. Even now, that foolish apostasy long behind me, I remain angry; the fact my anger is so absolutely justified refuels its fires daily. It is an anger I will carry to the grave if not beyond.

But rather than let it gnaw away my flesh, I behave like the professional journalist I was for most of the the 31 years before DSHS completed the ruination begun by the fire that destroyed my life's work and the devastating clinical depression that inevitably followed: I channel my anger into photography and writing.

Hence this, Outside Agitator's Notebook. DSHS hurled me outside the workplace and forever locked the door, but it cannot stop me from agitating.

Hence too my personal slogan: In these times, survival is is an act of revolutionary defiance.

*****

Speaking of hard times, we should never forget the statistics that framed the welfare bureaucracy's viciousness toward me c. 1987-1989: not Reaganoid cutbacks (though those hurt too), but the 5,390-percent hike in administrative costs financed by the 66-percent shrinkage in welfare checks, food stamps, medical care and – yes – rehabilitative services.

The same thing is happening again: todays welfare bureaucrats – once more following the example of our capitalist overlords – are preserving their own jobs by looting the programs that helped sustain the millions of us who are denied work.

These 'rats are thereby functioning as would-be Eichmanns in capitalism's program of genocide by abandonment and neglect, victimizing those of us who are elderly, disabled or inescapably poor (I am all three) – those of us on capitalism's death rosters because we are no longer exploitable for profit.

*****

Meanwhile the capitalists themselves – and even more so the fawning functionaries who directly serve as the capitalists' lackeys – are every bit as malicious as the bureaucrats, to which I can attest from the many years I spent as a reporter covering consumer protection issues.

A typical example is an ongoing struggle with the Internet service-provider Comcast. Now though – no longer protected by my former Working Press status – I'm the victim.

Here's the story:

Until 2010, I paid my monthly Comcast bill electronically and always on time. But the locally owned bank with which I had banked since 1993 was driven into failure by the federal government. (The feds forced the bank to make sub-prime real estate loans through Fanny Mae, and then – catch-22 – shut down the bank for making those very loans.) And when an East Coast megabank took over, we customers lost our ability to make electronic payments; the East Coast megabank refused to provide a service we on the West Coast had long taken for granted.

As a result I had to start paying Comcast by snail-mail, which meant my payments – typically around $50 per month – were now always a few days late. My alternatives were to start paying a month in advance (impossible given the financial realities of life on Social Security and Medicare) – or to find a new bank (impossible because when you're on Social Security direct-deposit, changing banks means that – thanks to bureaucratic sloth – you run the risk of going at least two months without income).

When I explained my circumstances, Comcast refused to change my payment date but did waive its outrageous $7.99 late fee...until a couple of months ago, when I discovered I had been slammed with an $18.99-per-month service upgrade I never ordered. Of course I immediately and rather forcefully threatened a formal consumer-protection complaint, which scared Comcast into canceling the upgrade and adjusting my bill accordingly.

But now my newest bill again contains the $7.99 late fee – and this time when I telephoned to appeal it as before, the answer was a polite version of “fuck you” – a response later reiterated by a district supervisor who flatly stated “we are not going to waive any more late fees,” her Teabagger down-with-Social-Security-recipients/all-power-to-the-corporations attitude evident throughout our increasingly adversarial conversation.

Which is where things stand now. Either I figure out a way to pay Comcast a month in advance, or I'm off the Internet.

It's yet another example of capitalism in action: economic assault against a disabled, retired $14,000-per-year Social Security recipient, my merciless assailant the sneering representative of a company that paid CEO Brian Roberts a compensation package valued at $31.1 million in 2010, including a bonus of $10.9 million.

Thus life under capitalism increasingly resembles life in prison: the little guy – male or female – is always bent over a garbage can and forcibly raped.

No wonder the gangbangers seem so indifferent to punishment.

*****

Lastly, there is the appalling shallowness of the pseudo-Leftist bourgeoisie's response to the atrocities capitalism is inflicting on workers in the Middle West and South:

Andy Kroll, who writes for Mother Jones, recently argued in an essay initially published in TomDispatch and republished by Common Dreams and Truthout, that the clenched-fist tattoos now fashionable amongst University of Wisconsin students are proof of a mass awakening to class struggle.

Mr. Kroll's absurdly shallow reasoning – no it was not an All Fools joke – is available here:

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/03/31-12

In response I wrote the following:

I read Mr. Kroll's piece seeking some reason to be hopeful and instead found the opposite.

Indeed Mr. Kroll does answer his own question – "some... wanted to get tattoos of one of the most enduring images from the protests" – but he is too PollyAnna delusional to understand what he observed: the birth of a fad, not of a revolution.

Members of a serious resistance movement would not wear such identification (lest it give them away to the secret police), nor – more to the point – would a serious resistance movement squander its time contemplating such meaningless Britney Spears-type trivia.

Obviously the labor movement is dead: capitalism has destroyed it, and – in the inevitable transformation to fascism that is the ultimate fulfillment of capitalism – so dies the U.S. experiment in constitutional democracy. What we are therefore witnessing is not just the final murder of unionism but the methodical extermination of all remaining vestiges of U.S. humanitarianism.

Meanwhile, Moron Nation, as always, remains devoted to appearance over substance and clearly lacks (even in nuclear engineering mode) the knowledge and intellectual acumen to foster and sustain a new labor movement – or for that matter any kind of resistance movement at all.

Sadly I am reminded of the post-Soviet disclosures that are in fact the final repudiation of the so-called "revolution" of the 1960s: the formidable Soviet intelligence apparatus, devoted as it was to agitating Marxist revolution everywhere on the planet, closely scrutinized what was happening in the United States during the '60s.

The Soviet spooks – arguably the most skilled intelligence operatives in human history – concluded that the African-American rebellion and other such minority uprisings offered genuine potential.

But – prophetically it turned out – the Kremlin analysts then denounced the alleged "rebellion" of U.S. white youth as a mindless fad fueled by the same combination of willful ignorance, savage anti-intellectuality and unprecedented moral imbecility that spawned Reaganomics and is now ensuring the ultimate victory of capitalism the simpering Mr. Kroll refuses to acknowledge.

His delusion is our detriment: until we acknowledge the magnitude of our defeat, the true depth of our powerlessness and the unmitigated horror of the slave-camp future that awaits us, we will remain unable to formulate an adequate resistance.

And I fear that will never happen: apparently we are already too dumbed down – too moronated into Moron Nation – to distinguish between a tattoo and a manifesto.

LB/3 April 2011

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