Suppressed History: 1967 Memorial Day Police Riot (Loren Bliss: Dispatches from Dystopia)

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Suppressed History: 1967 Memorial Day Police Riot

29 May 2011

Memorial Day Is About Remembrance, but 30 May 1967 Is One Memorial Day the Ruling Class Would Have Us Forget.

A group of young men and women – some of them professional musicians with a performance permit issued by the City of New York – were first illegally rousted, then attacked by NYPD riot cops for the “crime” of making music in Tompkins Square Park, on Manhattan's Lower East Side.

The episode was so outrageous I convinced Walter Bowart – founding editor of The East Village Other, (the newspaper of the neighborhood's then-burgeoning community of artists and bohemians), to put out an extra, which is where – along with a half-dozen images by other photographers – the above photos first appeared.

Walter then acted as an ad hoc agent for all of us who had contributed pictures; the topmost was published in Newsweek and, according to him (he paid me but never managed to get me the tearsheet), in Paris-Match as well.

I was in the park that day by accident – filmmaker Ron Schade had asked me to photograph his wife Joanie at play with their son Jason – and I had only one camera with me, probably my IIIg Leica and it most likely loaded with Panatomic X. My wife-to-be Adrienne, an art student who always enjoyed watching me work and often made useful suggestions, was with us.

But when I saw the confrontation developing, I sent Adrienne running back to our East 5th Street apartment with instructions to “bring me every 35mm camera body, every lens and every roll of Tri-X you can find.” (I normally kept as many as 20 36-exposure rolls of film in the refrigerator.)

Adrienne did as requested. I thanked her, hugged and kissed her, tried to reassure her I'd be ok, hugged and kissed her again, then said “now get the hell out of here while you still can” and sent her home.

I watched to make sure she got safely out of the park. Forty-four years later I still remember her reluctance to leave and how she repeatedly glanced back over her shoulder as she walked away, her green eyes huge with concern – Adrienne a slender blonde who like a smaller Veruschka moved with the leggy grace of a danseuse – her long hair bright as pale fire in the surprise gloom of an afternoon suddenly beclouded, as if Nature were hiding her face from the atrocity that was about to obtain.

Then I clipped my Working Press badge to my jacket lapel and – now thanks to Adrienne properly equipped for the job at hand (two VT Canons with lenses of 35mm and 85mm plus a Pentax H1A mounting a Spiratone f/2.8 135mm; probably a dozen rolls of Tri-X in my pockets) – I loaded the cameras and began making pictures.

At least 40 people were arrested that day. A pregnant woman and three men were hospitalized as a result of beatings inflicted by the NYPD's Tactical Police Force (the acronym for which, TPF, was ever after said to mean “Tasmanian Pig Fuckers”). Many of those arrested remained in jail for several days – the infamous Tombs for men, the even more infamous House of Detention aka “House of D” for women – while the Jade Companions of the Flower Dance, the neighborhood association for Lower East Side hippies and other bohemians, worked to raise bail money.

Then as now, poverty was itself a crime – in the eyes of the Ruling Class an offense perhaps even more heinous than chanting the Hare Krishna and making other sorts of peaceful music on a day of war memorials.

Alas the incident has been disappeared down the Orwell hole: as I discovered when I returned to the City during the '80s, the EVO extra has been carefully snipped from the New York City Public Library's microfiche file – which means the censorship was official, imposed by a librarian acting on Ruling Class orders.

And of course in my case there was also the fire; this work survived only because I had the prints with me in my portfolio case.

But ah the Jade Companions of the Flower Dance: how could such an exquisite name be lost to time and oppression and puritanical malevolence?

Say it aloud: Jade Companions of the Flower Dance.

Even now the words resonate with forbidden sensuality and resurrected sensibility, the lost rhythms of which we are reminded by Minoan frescoes and echoes of forgotten music, harps and flutes and drums, the choreography of a woman free enough to arch her back and swirl her unbound hair, of a man bold enough to join her – the Counterculture's breathtaking ghost-image remembrance of what once was and its implicit glimpses of what might have been and yes its premonitions of what might yet be.

LB/29 May 2011

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ADDENDUM 11 JULY 2024: The cover of EVO's government-suppressed Extra and my contributions to its photographic content have been very thoughtfully resurrected by Scott Orr, the Paris-based publisher of B Scene Zine, in that art magazine's Volume 1, Issue 9 (August 2022), copies of which are for sale at [email protected]. My deepest thanks to Mr. Orr for this welcome blow against censorship, particularly given how so much of my life's work was destroyed by the 1 September 1983 arson.

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Posted at 12:16 PM in Current Affairs, History, Memoirs, Music, Photography, Visual art | Permalink | Comments (0)

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INTRODUCTION

For about 25 of my 65 years as a writer and photographer, newspaper journalism seemed a promising career. But as my colleagues moved stealthily rightward, I moved ever-more-openly leftward, until eventually I was left...outside. Permanently. Hence "Outside Agitator's Notebook," which evolved into the more closely focused "Dispatches from Dystopia." Under either name it was originally a regularly updated anthology of reports, analyses, commentaries, photographs and other anti-capitalist testimony from the ecogenocidal dystopia that neoliberal capitalism -- our species' newest euphemism for resurrected nazism -- has made of our world. But the shock of a censorship incident (see "Probable Final Dispatches, End of Dispatches," 17 April 2020) has reduced it to far less frequent publication. Meanwhile our species' dystopian epicenter remains the post-humanitarian United States of America, which with its ruling cabal of morally imbecilic plutocrats, its hopelessly subjugated and often vindictively craven Moronic Majority and its Moron Nation empire of global-conquest racism and general malevolence, is indeed the de facto Fourth Reich, the actual birthdate of which will eventually be recognized as 22 November 1963 – that is, if our species somehow miraculously survives the terrifying thermonuclear/biochemical arsenal that maintains the Empire's ecogenocidal omnipotence. (¶)-Dispatches will nevertheless continue -- albeit on a far more relaxed schedule -- to chronicle our relentless subjugation by neoliberal capitalism as it (inevitably) reverts to its traditional might-makes-right savagery. Just as capitalism previously transformed itself into Italian Fascism and German Nazism, capitalism now matures into a nazism of uniquely USian form and content. By examining the more devastating details of what is being done to us, DfD shows how ours is a dystopia characterized as much by the mindlessness of Moron Nation's "zieg-heil"-equivalent chanting of “USA! USA! USA!” as by the brutality such chanting invariably celebrates – the ecogenocidal atrocities the capitalist ruling cabal perpetrates in the name of “profit,” “growth” and USian “exceptionalism.” (¶)-Why “USian” rather than "American"? Because to call this exceptionally fascist empire “America” is to slander as fascists or nazis all humanitarian-minded peoples of North and South America who valiantly and often fatally resist enslavement by USian nazis, whose obscene present-day skills at the imposition of tyranny and enslavement were perfected by the legions of German Nazi war criminals the government and its capitalist owners adopted as advisors and comrades-at-arms c. 1944-1947. And, yes, “humanitarian” versus “anti-humanitarian” are the only terms that adequately differentiate the two now eternally hostile subspecies into which capitalism has finally divided Homo sapiens sapiens. On one side are those of us who cling to the so-called Golden Rule and its variants, “do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” the ultimate form of which is Marxism's “from each according to ability, to each according to need.” On the other side are the moral imbeciles – nazis, fascists, Ayn Rand disciples and all the other psychological zombies that are Capitalism's unique and uniquely apocalyptic spawn. (¶)-But what then is capitalism? Though traditionally defined as economics alone, it is in fact the quintessential patriarchal ethos, the diabolical methodology of building a global empire by conquest and genocide both obvious and clandestine, with post-conquest world governance originally patterned after the despotic management of antebellum slave plantations. Capitalism is thus the forefather of fascism and Nazism, which are its only possible socioeconomic offspring. Behind its seductive cloak of euphemisms and Big Lies (“manifest destiny,” “easy credit,” “economic freedom,” “self-made man,” “entrepreneur,” “no down payment,” “rugged individualist,” “you too can be rich,” “free will,” etc. ad nauseam), capitalism is the stench of burning flesh and rotting corpses; the shrieks of napalmed children; the despair of families evicted into the permanent degradation of filth, untreated disease and constant fear of murder, enslavement by arrest or kidnapping that defines USian homelessness; the final agonies of maliciously abandoned patients condemned to death by the deliberately genocidal costs of health care. (¶)-Ultimately capitalism is the boundless Evil of global dictatorship by the Christian white male .01 Percent, a tiny, ruthless cabal of capitalist aristocrats for whom infinite greed is ultimate virtue and for whom the snuff-film sadism of class warfare provides the ultimate entertainment. Under capitalism's Fukushima-deadly, Ayn Rand credo of serial-killer moral imbecility – absolute power and unlimited profit for the .01 Percent and its ruling-class vassals, zero-tolerance oppression and bottomless poverty for all the rest of us – these obscenely wealthy despots now impose on us their increasingly overt paradigm of nazi governance. Not that we the (formerly exempt) people should be surprised; the merciless regimen that is now ours is how the capitalists have always tyrannized our sisters and brothers in America's First Nations, in the USian ghettos and in all capitalism's victim-realms abroad. (¶)-Moreover much of our plight is of our own making. We the people of the United States long ago surrendered to our capitalist overlords. We submit to denial of health care that is everywhere else on this planet deemed a human right; we submit to enslavement by debt; to the outsourcing of our jobs; to bankruptcy; to foreclosure; to eviction and homelessness; to imprisonment in numbers hitherto unequaled in human history; and most of all to the biggest Big Lie of all – the suicidal delusion we somehow remain free despite the capitalists' no-longer-deniable theft of our liberty and their snickering revocation of the few prefaces to economic democracy our now-powerless unions had once managed to win. Our confinement is ensured, not just by our cowardice but by the invisible but inescapable cage of total surveillance: the electronic barbed wire that has reduced our entire planet to a monstrous concentration camp. (¶)-Cast off as “surplus human capital” when we are deemed no longer exploitable for profit, we are then methodically exterminated. We are slaughtered as cannon-fodder in the empire's endless wars of profit and conquest; we are murdered by the bullets and truncheons of the federalized and militarized local police; we are fatally poisoned by capitalism's malignant toxification of our environment; we are slain by denials of health care and social services that are in fact deliberate, euphemism-cloaked policies of slow-motion genocide. (¶)-Meanwhile our overlords pornographically multiply their own wealth by knowingly destroying the planetary conditions upon which all sentient life depends. More recently – as if to demonstrate the infinite magnitude of their Evil by provoking unsurvivable thermonuclear apocalypse (and not coincidentally in fulfillment of a malevolent scheme by Adolf Hitler himself) – they have imposed on the Ukraine the anti-Russian war-mongering and anti-Jewish violence of an avowedly nazi puppet government. And now the USian tyrannosaur has come home to gorge on its final and terminally ironic meal, the denizens of Moron Nation itself, not just the Moronic Majority who by their conditioned ignorance and prideful hatefulness loosed this demonically insatiable monster on the entire world, but every last one of us, every child, woman and man who is not part of the ruling aristocracy. (¶)-In these times -- the darkest and most hopeless era of our species 200,000-odd years -- our ability to effectively resist is obstructed not only by the USian regime of inescapable surveillance, but by the dreadful undertow of Moron Nation's intellectual and psychological paralysis: the deliberate deceptions and outright ignorance fostered by the capitalist “education” system; by capitalism's “mainstream media” propaganda machine (which is owned by the same smirking plutocrats whose vassal politicians so gleefully oppress us); and by the never-ending physical and psychic terrorism of capitalism's manufactured crises. (¶)-Yet resist we must. As always, art – sometimes even unwittingly – depicts our present circumstances and so foretells our future. The pagan renaissance, its resurrection of our Mother Earth as the variously named Great Goddess and the emergence of the Gaia Hypothesis as the scientific endorsement of our planet as "alive, conscious and self-regulating" tell us that even now -- though the fires of liberation seem extinguished by Stygian darkness -- their embers yet glow hot beneath the ashes, there to be once more blown aflame should we somehow find the courage and will to do so. As is said in "Biko" by the poet/musician Peter Gabriel, "You can blow out a candle/ But you can't blow out a fire/ Once the flames begin to catch/ The wind will blow it higher." Or as is said in "The Dawn Will Come" by the poet/composer Trevor Morris, "Shadows fall/ And hope has fled/ Steel your heart/ The dawn will come." (Links to each work below.)

For More Information...

A far more complete and autobiographically detailed version of "Introduction"
was published as a regular blog post – its substantially larger type also making it much more easily readable – on 23 March 2017 under the title “New Name, New Urgency as Capitalism Bares Its Nazi Fangs.”

Links relevant to Introduction

"...actual birthdate of which will eventually be recognized as 22 November 1963 -- that is, if our species somehow survives...""
The late Mae Brussell was perhaps the world's most diligent researcher into the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, whose (technically unsolved) murder marks the beginning of the USian descent into its own form of nazism.
"...chronicle our relentless subjugation by capitalism..."
We the people of the 99.9 Percent are being methodically reduced to slavery and serfdom by capitalist governance -- absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent and their ruling class vassals, zero-tolerance oppression for all the rest of us -- and the CIA's Operation Chaos exemplifies capitalism's darkest and most malevolent aspects.
"Once the flame begins to catch/ The wind will blow it higher."
Peter Gabriel's eulogy for Stephen Biko, one of the martyrs of the South African anti-apartheid movement.
"Shadows fall and hope has fled; steel your heart; the dawn will come..."
Whether wittingly or not, composer/poet Trevor Morris has in this piece come closer than any human bard to answering an ancient riddle: "what song do the Birds of Rhiannon sing, and to what quest are we thereby summoned?"

Fire Survivors

These are some of the very few photographs that survived the 1 September 1983 arson fire that destroyed my life's work, not just most of my pictures but nearly all my writing including three books in progress and all the associated research, which I had stored with a friend in Washington state for safekeeping until I had achieved a permanent address after my return to New York City. Significantly, the fire was ignited at the exact instant I was meeting with the late Cicely Nichols, an influential book editor who believed my meticulously researched, photographically illustrated 150-thousand-word "Glimpses of a Pale Dancer" and its re-definition of the 1960s Counterculture as the first wave of a spontaneous revolution against patriarchy would be one of the most important works of the 20th Century; she had thus promised to mother it to mainstream publication. Some of the photos shown here escaped the flames because they accompanied me to Manhattan in my portfolio case; others were produced digitally from negatives dug out of the rubble a year later. The images of obvious print-quality were made on DuPont Varilure paper, which had the highest silver content of all commercial papers and thus produced such intense tonalities, they often seemed illuminated by their own internal light sources. But that sort of photographic quality is now forever beyond our common reach, either gone like Varilure or so prohibitively expensive it is available only to the obscenely pampered dilettantes who produce the aesthetic pabulum favored by the .01 Percent. Photography as I knew it is dead -- as dead as my career was after the fire and its ensuing clinical depression -- but this body of work provides a glimpse of what was lost both in "Dancer" and in my more general photojournalism. All photos copyright Loren Bliss.

Sandwiches for Mind and Spirit

In photography, a sandwich is a collage made by printing two or more negatives simultaneously. Collage is a medium that has fascinated me for as long as I can remember -- probably since I was a child experimenting with finger paints, glue and newspapers -- but I never took it seriously until, sometime in my early 20s and still thinking myself a painter-to-be, I discovered the works of Jasper Johns. Now it seems to me making sandwiches is to conventional photography what poetry is to prose: not just an intellectual exercise, but the opening of a doorway to the Mysterious Otherness I know as the Muse, from whom (sometimes in fulfillment of that Jungian/McLuhanesque notion of art as prophecy) the currents of real creation invariably flow, whether swift and startling as a lightening strike or slow and soft as cottonwood seeds adrift on subtle summer air. (Collage and photographic sandwiches copyright Loren Bliss 2009-2012.)

Graffiti: a Sampler

When I returned to New York City in 1965 I was immediately impressed by the contrast between the graffiti I had encountered "out in America" -- the South and Middle West -- and what I saw in Manhattan. While the form and content of graffiti is sociologically important – possibly a semiotic indicator without peer -- I found the graffiti of Manhattan singularly appealing, the intellectual and aesthetic equivalents of a long-overdue breath of fresh air, and within a few days I had begun documenting it with 35mm and 120 film. (The opening photograph of this series was obviously made far from Manhattan, but I included it to establish an essential contrast.) Many more details about this particular body of work, which I briefly resumed when I went back to the City again in 1983, then abandoned after that year's career-terminating fire, are in my post of January 7, 2010. Yes I regard the best urban graffiti as genuine art, but too much of it, alas, is nothing more than a human variant on the mammalian practice of marking territory with spurts of urine: "I wuz here." All photos by Loren Bliss, copyright dates as noted.

Faces of the Fight

Supporters of health care reform and a much smaller number of health care reform's opponents -- each faction identified by its picket-signs -- gathered for the "town hall" meeting called by U.S. Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA) in Lakewood on August 25, 2009. Originally set for Lakewood City Hall, the event was rescheduled and moved to Lang Stadium to accommodate an unprecedented mobilization of pro-reform people. Cops estimated the crowd at about 2500. Photos by Loren Bliss copyright 2009.

RELEVANT WEBSITES

People's World – Continuing the Daily Worker – Founded 1924
Only source for Marxist analysis focused specifically on U.S. national, state and local news. Published by the Communist Party of the United States, its vital coverage is an antidote to censorship, with information routinely suppressed by the mainstream-media propaganda machine.
World Socialist Web Site - Marxist analysis, international working class struggles & the fight for socialism
Marxist analysis of the day's most important international and national news. Published by the (Trotskyist) Fourth International. Flawed only by its ideological refusal to acknowledge the validity of joining united front campaigns in the global fight against capitalism's relentless transformation to Christonazism in the U.S., to other variants of fascism elsewhere.
Marxists Internet Archive
All of Marxism's defining texts defiantly uploaded to the Internet by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as its final contribution to humanity's eternal struggle for economic democracy -- without which there is no democracy at all.
Military Religious Freedom Foundation
The one protector of the constitutional guarantee of separation of church and state as it applies to the U. S. military. Covers all aspects of the multifaceted campaign to transform the military into a neo-Crusader weapon of forcible Christianization. Especially valuable for its heads-up exposes of Christonazi subversion.
Radical Reports
Excellent source exposing specific examples of the One Percent's relentless campaign to Christonazify the U.S. and its empire. Flawed only by its routine omission of the "Democratic" (sic) Party's frequent post-JFK function as the Fifth Column of the "Republican" (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party.
The Hartmann Report
Though Thom Hartmann is a social democrat, a pacifist and an habitual defender of the "Democratic" (sic) Party, much of his investigative reporting is nevertheless superbly valuable, as he dares cover many stories routinely suppressed by the mainstream media propaganda machine.
LA Progressive
A Los-Angeles-focused website, albeit similar to the pre-Murdoch Village Voice in that it often publishes censorship-defying reportage and commentary relevant to 99 Percenters everywhere in the United States.
Rewire
Probably the most in-depth coverage of women's issues, LGBTQ issues and general human rights issues available on the U.S. Internet today, bolstered by decidedly professional reportage and editing.
Best, Most Thorough Documentation on the CIA's Destruction of the 1960s Counterculture
Ms. Brussel outdid herself in her nobody-dares-publish-it investigative report exposing how the CIA's Operation Chaos destroyed the 1960s Counterculture. (My assumption is the Agency, with its Ivy-League analysts and their knowledge of pagan mythology, recognized the Counterculture's anti-patriarchal, resurrection-of-the-Goddess direction, understood it as a far greater threat to Capitalism than Marxism and responded with the murderous efficiency inherited from Gestapo predecessors.)
Theocracy Watch
Cornell University's in-depth source on the escalating campaign to impose zero-tolerance Christian theocracy on the USian Homeland. It is flawed only by its refusal to recognize the Democratic (sic) Party's mostly clandestine collaboration with the openly theocratic Republicans -- a collaboration revealed in frightening detail by Jeff Sharlet's "The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power"; Harper: 2008. NOTE (2024): site has not been updated since 2011, but nevertheless contains much vital information, particularly for researchers.
Global Research
A genuinely independent news site -- neither definitively Left nor Right -- that often covers stories suppressed by U.S. Mainstream Media, which (let us never forget), is owned by the same One Percenters who own the Democratic (sic) and Republican parties and thereby control all U.S. governance at every level.
Best Site for Suppressed Assassination Facts
The late Mae Brussell was our most relentless researcher into the murder of President John Kennedy and many other such outrages. Her legacy is a damning list of the USian Empire's darkest secrets.
Southern Poverty Law Center
Best source of information on the burgeoning plague of Nazi, Christonazi and KuKluxKlan-type hate groups in the USian imperial homeland.
Second Amendment Foundation
Unmistakably conservative, it is also the best source on legal action in defense of our right to keep and bear arms.
Popular Resistance
A daily newsletter featuring essential tactical and strategic analysis plus vitally informative reports of news suppressed by the "mainstream media" propaganda machine.
der Spiegel
Mainstream German newspaper that is often a valuable source of news about Western European politics.
Gun Owners of America
Fanatically hard-Right (and often Christonazi as well), it is nevertheless the best source for information about the One Percent's efforts to forcibly disarm the U.S. 99 Percent.
Consortium News
Superb reporting and analysis. Founder/Editor Robert Parry exposed Reagan's Iran-Contra scheming and has been persecuted by the capitalists ever since.

Loren Bliss

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