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April 2013

The (Very Real) Threat of Theocracy: How Christian Stealth Attacks Are Killing Our Reproductive Freedom, Nullifying Our End-of-Life Rights

Theocracy
Election day in Everson, Washington. This was sometime in the late 1980s or early 1990s,  close enough to the fire I was still distraught over the death of my career, hence  didn't bother taking notes or keeping records. But I remember the tech data. The camera was my Olympus RC – the best pocket camera I ever owned – loaded with Kodak 400 ASA color negative film. It was rainy and windy and cold, typical winter weather on the Pacific Northwest coast, near noon, yet so dark I was working at the lower limit of the RC's electronic shutter and lens, probably 1/15 of a second at f/2.8. Posterization with Gimp software adds an illusory sharpening to an image blurred by inadvertent camera motion. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2010.

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AMONG THE GREATER IRONIES of present-day politics is the fact those of us whose rights are most jeopardized by the One Percent's lavishly financed  efforts to impose Christian theocracy  on the United States are often the least likely to recognize the threat.

Whether because of misinformation, denial, fears of being labeled “politically incorrect” or some combination of all of the above, we who identify ourselves as secular-minded or spiritually independent tend to ignore or dismiss any openly religious assault against our hard-won freedoms of conscience. Though we instantly mobilize against identical attacks by seemingly secular politicians and political groups, we are profoundly reluctant to resist or even acknowledge the equally egregious threats that emanate directly from – and often in the name of – organized religions.

The fact so many of these these assaults happen far away – on the other side of the globe, in the former Confederacy or in some flyover state – makes it easy for us to brush them off as isolated events of no personal consequence, the random deeds of distant extremists. Particularly if we live in a great city, we can readily convince ourselves such fanatics could not possibly impinge on the liberties we enjoy in our island of civilization.

But our indifference is ultimately our defeat. It measures the success of our enemies' most perfect strategy – their skill at convincing us they are too intellectually remote or geographically far away to hurt us. That's how the Christian theocrats have already managed to deny abortion providers to the women who live in in 87 percent of the USian counties

Similarly we pooh-pooh Christianity's escalating assault on our right to dictate our own end-of-life circumstances. Yet Christian zealots do not hesitate to defy assisted-suicide laws or do-not-resuscitate orders and thereby condemn victims of permanently debilitating accidents or medical crises to years of “redemptive” suffering  – misery that, not coincidentally, pumps windfall wealth into the already overflowing coffers of church-owned hospitals.

We tell ourselves how happy we are to be exempt from such barbarism and dispel all further thoughts of what it might be like to endure such physical and psychological abuse. “It will never happen here,” we say.

But it is already happening. The barbarians are already inside the gates. Our islands of civilization are already being overrun.

And we are bringing our downfall on ourselves. It is happening because our secular-minded smugness has blinded us to the toxic reality of the theocratic incursion. We have failed to comprehend the awful strength and implacable dynamics of fanatical religion. We deny the totality by which it both shapes its adherents and is itself shaped by their fanaticism, how it shapes or reshapes the societies in which they live, how it is the ultimate historical proof of the ancient adage “ideas have consequences.”

Even now we remain blind to the stranglehold Christianity has on the USian population. Nor do we comprehend the savagery – real and potential – implicit in a people 63 percent of whom are fanatics by definition:  that is, they believe the Bible is not only the word of god but is literally, word-for-word true.

Many who claim to be Christians vehemently object to characterization of their religion as founded on the hatred of women, sexuality and Nature. Yet history proves that to be the quintessential doctrine of all the Abrahamic religions. In the case of Christianity, it is confirmed by a two-thousand year litany of victims. The contrary examples of the Christian Bodhisattvas – St. Francis of Assisi, St. Theresa of Avila, Albert Schweitzer, Dorothy Day, Fr. William Bischel, others of their kind – are rare exceptions indeed. Their humanitarianism is like a frail scatter of bright blossoms on a dark and bloody tide, its tsunami of carnage ironic fulfillment of the precept given us by St. Matthew, the fruit by which Christianity makes its true self known. As a dear friend and leading pagan scholar was wont to say before her untimely death in 1994, “the goodness of the saints is in spite of Christianity, not because of it.”

Moreover, the failure of the so-called mainstream churches to publicly denounce the fanatics who have emerged as the most powerful, influential and well-funded members of the USian Christian clergy proves – if only by default – such hatefulness whether Protestant or Catholic is as much the “true Christianity” today as it was at the height of the Burning Times

The fanaticism-supporting silence of mainstream Christianity is no doubt among the primary influences that prompt too many secular-minded or independently spiritual folk to reject all notions of a theocratic conspiracy to overthrow constitutional governance in the United States. “Religion is just not that important anymore,” say the secularists. “Only morons still believe in that sort of thing.”

Alas, as documented by Susan Jacoby in The Age of American Unreason, it is Moron Nation in which we reside. Read Chris Hedges' American Fascists: the Christian Right and the War on America; read Kevin Phillips' American Theocracy; then pull it all together by reading Jeff Sharlet's The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, which tells how Christians – Catholic and Protestant alike – have been working at least since the 1930s to subvert the constitution and replace it with Biblical law, the Christian counterpart of Sharia.

Also there are at least three websites vital to building an understanding of the magnitude of the theocratic threat. These are http://www.mergerwatch.org/, which probes the Catholic war against reproductive freedom and end-of-life rights as manifest in the church's leveraged purchases of the nation's secular hospitals; http://www.au.org/, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which documents the inroads Christian theocrats are making on government and USian society in general; and http://www.theocracywatch.org/, which exposes the doctrines and doctrinal interpretations upon which the thrust toward theocracy is based.

My sole criticism of these on-line resources is that Americans United and Theocracy Watch too often sidestep the bipartisan nature of the theocratic threat. TheocracyWatch – otherwise a veritable encyclopaedia on Christian subversion of constitutional governance – is especially misleading in this regard. It focuses on “the rise of the Religious Right in the Republican Party” but steadfastly ignores the identical danger within the Democratic Party, which keeps its collaboration with the theocrats carefully hidden beneath a deceptive cover of (apparent) secularism. As Sharlet reports in The Family, “Hillary (Clinton) fights side-by-side with (Sen. Sam) Brownback and others for legislation dedicated less to overturning the wall between church and state than to tunneling beneath it” (first edition, Harper, New York: 2008; p. 275).

Note also President Obama's dramatic expansion  of the Bush Administration's Faith-Based Initiatives,  which facilitate the privatization of social services and give religious organizations control – often zero-tolerance control – over who receives aid. It is especially telling how Obama applauds such (theocratic) programs as “a force for good greater than government.”

In terms of actually working to impose theocracy, the only meaningful difference between the Republicans and the Democrats is the extent to which the latter have thus far managed to conceal their commitment to an officially Christian United States – a point frighteningly demonstrated by Sharlet's research.

 

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While I have long recognized  and many times warned against  the theocratic threat, I was unaware of how the Catholic Church is using its near-infinite wealth to buy or affiliate with secular health care organizations as a means of terminating reproductive freedom and limiting end-of-life alternatives.

But then two Seattle news outlets, The Stranger and the on-line daily Crosscut, bravely published stories exposing the alarming local impact of this (typically devious) theocratic scheme.

One of these reports, “Faith Healers,” describes in general terms the attack on all such freedoms.  The other focuses mostly on the prohibitive threat to end-of-life choices.  Both are well worth reading.

Group Health Cooperative, the non-profit, single-payer organization I joined as a political statement when I was in Washington state during the 1970s and which now administers my Medicare program, sends its Tacoma patients to a local Catholic hospital whenever they need such services. The hospital is St. Joseph, part of the Franciscan Medical Group that operates in the Puget Sound area. Hence I immediately telephoned GHC's customer service department and asked whether St. Joseph would honor documented end-of-life wishes that conflicted with Catholic doctrine.

The response was anything but reassuring: “Since that is not one of our hospitals, we do not know what they would honor.”

A Catholic source who has personal experience coping with end-of-life issues says the situation is not as bad as the two articles portrayed – that the Franciscan hospitals will at least honor a do-not-resuscitate order. The source, a dissident who openly rejects the church's opposition to contraception, abortion and homosexuality yet regularly attends Mass, is therefore especially credible.

But the mere fact such questions now arise demonstrates the extent to which even avowedly secular Group Health – originally perhaps the most staunchly patient-rights-oriented medical institution in the Pacific Northwest and certainly amongst the most outspoken such organizations in the nation – is being trampled by the stampede toward theocracy.

The Stranger's Cienna Madrid reports the Catholic Church now owns 12 percent of the hospitals nationwide and a staggering 44 percent of the hospitals in Washington state, the latter a rapidly growing monopoly that already includes all the hospitals in three very large counties. It is an unprecedented – and unprecedentedly sneaky – assault on reproductive rights in the state that was first in the nation to vote for legalized abortion.

Anyone who has read the relevant works by Hedges, Phillips and Sharlet will recognize immediately how the dramatic expansion of Catholic hospital ownership is yet another manifestation of the obscenely well-funded corporate campaign to impose theocracy, via Christian fanaticism whether Catholic or Protestant, on the entire United States.

Its long-range objective is to subjugate us all beneath local variants of the theocratic ethos that rules the Bible-thumping (and often virulently anti-Catholic) South. As I know from the school years I (involuntarily) spent there c. 1950-1959, also from the years I worked for daily newspapers there (1962-1965) and my summer there in the Civil Rights Movement (1963), the South is a realm of Christian fanatics whether Protestant, as in Appalachia and the cotton-belt, or Catholic, as in the jungles of the Louisiana bayou country.

Imagine, if you will, a United States in which possession of Alan Ginsberg's Howl is a felony and the teaching of evolution is a gross misdemeanor, a realm where behavioral codes are enforced by Christian counterparts of the Islamic morality police. Such was the South – the land to which I was exiled by familial dysfunction. Yes, the copy of Howl lent me by a Knoxville woman in 1959 could have subjected either of us to five-year prison sentences. As for morality police, this function in Protestant communities was (and likely still is) fulfilled by the Ku Klux Klan, hence its colloquial name: "the Saturday Night Men's Bible Study Class." Rumor attributed a similar clandestine purpose to the Knights of Columbus in Louisiana and in Catholic communities elsewhere in the South.

(Though it begs the question, I should probably explain why I returned to Tennessee after I completed the three-year active duty portion of my six-year U.S. Army obligation. Because I had been a stringer for The Knoxville Journal and two community weeklies during my last year of high school and the 18 months between graduation and enlistment, Knoxville was the one sure place I could get work as a journalist – and thus begin building a viable résumé to get me back home to New York City as soon as possible. I have returned to the South only twice since then – in 1967 with Adrienne just after our marriage and in 1969 on a photo assignment that coincided with a younger sister's wedding.)

That said, why would morally imbecilic capitalists – especially given their enthusiastic adoption of Ayn Rand's principle of infinite greed as ultimate virtue – prefer rule by Biblical law? While the anti-environmentalist implications of Christian doctrine are obvious – see again the first item linked in my opening paragraph – the Southern brand of Christianity-protected capitalism predates the environmental movement by nearly a century. What did the the Southern One Percent discover after the Civil War that bound the Bible so inseparably to capitalism?

In the first place, the core ideologies of capitalism – the hierarchy of the rich over the poor; the ruthless exploitation of underlings and Nature; male supremacy and/or the supremacy of patriarchal values and methods – all originate from Biblical principles. (Those who doubt this should read not just Max Weber [The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism] but the works of Barbara Mor [The Great Cosmic Mother] and Rianne Eisler [The Chalice and the Blade]).

More to the present-day point, innumerable studies in what used to be called “industrial psychology,” all of which seem to have been carefully removed from public circulation, long ago concluded the combination of divine-right management, sexual taboos, misogyny and psychological terror implicit in all Abrahamic religion (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) makes for the most obedient, most productive, hence most profitable workforce possible. Abrahamic theocracy thus effectively reduces “human capital” to its original antebellum meaning, a euphemism for slaves and enslavement.

Studying the slavishly religious South, the industrial psychologists realized its practice of elevating the boss to the equivalent of a divine-right monarch and anointing him god's representative on earth ensures the unquestioning obedience of all believers in the workforce. The Christian Prosperity Gospel  reinforces managerial authority by defining poverty as divine punishment. Collective bargaining is thus implicitly condemned as wanton defiance of god's will – a deadly or mortal sin.

The counterparts of these Christian principles in the other Abrahamic religions structure their respective societies in recognizably similar ways. The rich and powerful are portrayed as god's chosen; the poor and/or the non-believer as his rejects; males as made in the image of god and therefore superior to females; structures of gender, class and caste as divinely ordained and therefore inescapable; Nature as god's gift to man to be exploited however man chooses. Replace “fear of the Lord” with der führerprinzip and you have Nazism – particularly its core concept of übermenschen and üntermenschen – hence the intimate connection between Abrahamic religion, fascism and imperialism.

Borrowing from Freud and again studying the South, industrial psychologists also discovered the bottomless frustration resulting from strictly enforced prohibitions of sexual expression outside  heterosexual marriage is typically sublimated  into frantic productivity and endless frenzies of trinket materialism. Later events – most notably the expansion of the USian empire – proved the result is the same whether the workers are Christian, Islamic or Jewish. For the One Percent, theocracy thus means more profit at less expense.

The notorious oppression of Southern women – best illustrated by the South's intense opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment –  reflects another defining characteristic of Abrahamic theocracy. But denial of female personhood – though obviously prompted by the Jewish/Christian/Islamic patriarchy's envious fear and hatred of women's sexuality – also seems to have economic motives. In today's world it is apparently yet another expression of the One Percent's infinitely despotic intent, an especially vivid example of the new paradigm of global governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for everyone else.

Semiotics gives us our most important clue as to why the One Percent so relentlessly supports theocratic male supremacy. Throughout Occidental history, liberty is invariably personified as female, no doubt in (mostly unconscious) tribute to the central but oft ignored role of women in innumerable revolutions. The history so symbolized begins at least with Boudicca's rebellion against Imperial Rome c. 60-61 CE; it may have originated 1500 years earlier in the Minoan resistance to Mycenaean conquest. The storming of the Bastille in 1789 was triggered by the women of Paris protesting the price of bread. The Russian Revolution of 1917 was sparked by the women of the Lesnoy Textile Works, who boiled into the streets of Petrograd to protest the firing of five organizers. The fierce activism of women in New York City after the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist fire gave the U.S. labor movement one of its greatest and most pivotal victories.

These histories and others like them suggest women may be notably quicker than men both to develop revolutionary consciousness and to evolve the cooperative solidarity essential to successful radical action. If true – and you can assume industrial psychologists and intelligence analysts alike have had this matter under investigation for years if not decades – it gives the One Percent an obvious motive for excluding women from the workforce and methodically reducing them to the abject powerlessness so horrifically prophesied by Margaret Atwood in The Handmaid's Tale.

Once again, we witness how the oppressive functions of Abrahamic theocracy provide capitalism with profitable mechanisms of oppression: not just opiate, but brain police as well.

The imposition of Islamic theocracy on Iraq and its seemingly permanent disempowerment of women is therefore probably no accident. Likewise the theocratic takeovers that followed the so-called Arab Spring in Egypt and Libya. Indeed the USian military is relentlessly drilled in Christian-crusader ideology  Its ultimate proverb – “kill 'em all; let god sort 'em out” – is the perfect facilitator of the imperial war machine's true function as the One Percent's international goon-squad.

Sectarian warfare over which fundamentalists will control the power structure of a given state – Protestant versus Catholic, Shiite versus Sunni, one Hasidim versus another – ensures the disunity that perpetuates the power of the One Percent even as  theocracy subjugates the workforce. Whomever wins, once the fundamentalists rule,  the quest for progressive change becomes blasphemy if not heresy, just as it was in the time of the Inquisition, in the time of the Sultanate, in the times of Franco and Pinochet, just as it is now in Saudi Arabia and Iran and much of Israel and in the 87 percent of the United States where women are already denied local access to abortion. God is watching. The intelligentsia are silenced; the masses are shackled by cradle-to-grave orthodoxy; in some realms the disobedient are publicly tortured to death and they are everywhere cursed with eternal damnation. “God remembers how you vote.” 

Can it be coincidence the model societies of the Bible and the Qur'an so closely approximate the burgeoning reality of the USian surveillance state?

Verily, we are ever more a conquered people. When O when will we awaken?

LB/16-25 April 2013

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A Photograph to Contemplate Until I Return to the Keyboard

Karle Mottet 03 1 Aug 08-06 (copy)
When I'm photographing,  the process is entirely visual and often Zen-like. Hence any moral I might read into a picture is always after the fact. But it seems to me the moral here is obvious: those who assume "elderly" is synonymous with "feeble-minded" prove themselves to be morons. This was part of an extended essay on the life of a retired scientist, a project on which I worked from 2006 through 2008. The traditional veracity of black-and-white was achieved via Kodak BW400CN and commercial C-41 processing, the subtle purplish tinge reminiscent of what you got when you selenium-toned DuPont Varilure, the finest photographic paper ever made. The camera was a Leica, probably an M4, the lens most likely a 50mm f/1-point-something Voigtlander. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2013.

OBVIOUSLY I'VE MISSED my self-imposed Thursday deadline. This is because I've been sick all week with an especially nasty upper respiratory virus – yet another bellicose bug the government neglected to include in last fall's flu shot. I'll be back to the keyboard as soon as possible, Meanwhile my apology for any inconvenience.

LB/19 April 2013

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Obama's Ayn Rand Zealotry Makes Government the Enemy of Us All

Loren05-r1-011-4 (copy)

A plea to everyone: an Occupy Tacoma activist rests with his picket sign after a long march in the rain, October 2011. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2013.

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I WAS TRUDGING home in an unseasonably frigid surprise downpour, my mind awash in hot anger and cold fear provoked by President Barack Obama's smirking betrayal of Social Security and Medicare recipients, when I finally understood what is surely the most bitter truth of the post-American-Dream United States: that its governments now serve only the One Percent.

This epiphany was so startling I'd normally have stopped whatever I was doing and written of it the little pocket notebook I always carry, a gift from Adrienne that can often grow an initial realization into more detailed exposition. But the April weather made any writing impossible. The hard rain of this unpredicted terminal-climate-change storm was pouring off the broadly protective brim of my brown felt Akubra, the sudden cold north wind had already numbed my wet fingers beyond any ability to legibly use a pen, and in any case the proverbial light of comprehension had flared from my subconscious just as I was hobbling with my hickory cane across a busy street, watchful lest some sadistic Tacoma motorist use the gloomy afternoon as an excuse to play vehicular dodge-em with a crippled old man.

By the time I got home and was exchanging my drenched jeans and sweater and jacket for the sensual pleasure of a warm and dry sweat-suit, I had recognized that perhaps the most self-constraining intellectual error of my adult life was my chronic failure to recognize that government – all government (precisely because what used to be at least presumably our government has been captured and turned against us by the One Percent) – is now ironically the enemy the Right always claimed it to be.

The underlying truth of this new U.S. paradigm is that government whether federal, state or local no longer fulfills its original constitutional purpose. It no longer enables us to do collectively what we cannot do individually. Instead – exactly as it did to the Occupy Movement and is doing now to Social Security and Medicare recipients – it aggressively obstructs us. Thus what was once notable as government by, for and of ourselves (even given its socioeconomically limited definition of “we the people”), has become indistinguishable in purpose from the governments of pre-revolutionary France or pre-revolutionary Russia. Antoinette France, Tsarist Russia or the present-day United States, such government exists only to protect the Ruling Class, to perpetuate its wealth and power and to subjugate all the rest of us.

Coincidentally – or perhaps not coincidentally at all if you believe in Jungian synchronicity or telepathy – an old friend on the opposite side of the continent was having similar thoughts and emailed me a long but stunningly relevant quote by the 19th Century French revolutionary Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

To be governed is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is it's justice; that is it's morality.”

Reduced to sound-bite simplicity and translated into modern terms, what Proudhon is telling us is that beyond the smokescreens of rhetoric, there's no real difference between the government of North Korea and the government of the United States.

The North Korean rulers claim to be Communists but are in fact an (allegedly nonexistent) Ruling Class that governs by old-fashioned despotism. Anyone who dares criticize the dominant Kim Il Sung/Kim Jong Il/Kim Jong U personality cult is denounced as an ultimate political criminal and liquidated in the traditional manner: killed by a bullet to the back of the head or worked to death in a slave-labor camp.

United States leaders are figureheads who enact the clandestine decrees of an (allegedly nonexistent) capitalist Ruling Class. These leaders whether Democratic or Republican claim to be defenders of constitutional liberty but are, like their Ruling Class masters, fanatical Ayn Rand fascists. The ultimate USian political criminal is therefore not one who has broken any written law but rather one who is no longer exploitable for capitalist profit and/or whose poverty embarrasses the Ruling Class by revealing the underlying savagery of its Ayn Rand dogmas.

Because death camps are still considered unfashionable in today's United States – “O what would the (international) neighbors think?” – capitalism's undesirables are eliminated by more subtle means than are used in North Korea. Our jobs are abolished, our unemployment compensation is terminated, we're evicted from our homes, our gardens are bulldozed, our schools are closed, our public transport is shut down, our pensions are looted, our medical insurance is canceled, our welfare is cut off, we're denied disaster relief and we're abandoned in every other way conceivable. Thus we're slain by whatever mechanism fate decrees: starvation, sickness, suicide. In the end we're just as dead as the victims of the North Korean secret police.

Even the reactions of the two (allegedly nonexistent) Ruling Class hierarchies are undoubtedly similar.

The North Korean commissars damn their victims as “enemies of the people,” shrug self-righteously Maoist shoulders and say “otso commen jo so wah,” which is in their native language Hangul and means approximately “what can you do?” Such dismissals are no doubt followed by the exclamation “hiyu” and a Hangul phrase that would translate into English as “these criminals brought their punishments on themselves.”

In the United States, which has the planet's largest numerical and per-capita prison population, the One Percenters who are the masters of the Democrats and Republicans damn their victims as “failures who chose the poverty lifestyle,” shrug their self-righteously Ayn Randite shoulders and say, “the poor will always be with us; better to let them all die.”

Perhaps if we were to see all this as clearly as I saw it that afternoon in the rain, we could purge ourselves of our traditional (and obsolete) belief in government as a servant of the people and replace it with recognition that today's USian government has become the goon squad of the One Percent and will never again be anything else. Then maybe Left and Right could together build a solidarity based on common grievances and open ourselves to evolving an ideology that might enable us to effectively resist what is being done to us.

But that's not likely. The directional momentum of the USian population, controlled as it is by the One Percent, is toward ever-deepening ignorance, which means ever-intensifying subjugation.

Never in human history has the creation of a dark-age mentality been so methodical, so sustained, so perpetuated by zero-tolerance methods and technologies of oppression. After a half century, our ignorance is already an inescapable prison. Note again the example of Occupy: how the toxins of induced ignorance – anti-intellectuality, selfishness, distrust, class hatred, bigotry – destroyed the movement from within even as government storm troopers were crushing it from without.

To understand what looms – to know why I am ever more thankful my one child did not survive outside his mother's womb – you need only look at the horrors of the post-Minoan and post-Roman dark ages, each of which lasted at least a thousand years and by some estimates continue into the present. But no matter your view of history, this darkness that approaches now is undeniably forever – that is, until the United States is torn asunder by the baronial feuds of the One Percent and the fallout whether literally or figuratively renders our species extinct.

 

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Real Obama (I): New Deal Rhetoric Hides Ayn Rand Economics

To strip away the Big Lies by which Barack the Betrayer disguised himself as Obama the Orator and twice scammed us into electing him president, it's necessary to apply only two principles. One is that deeds reveal what words conceal, or as the Bible puts it in the book of Saint Matthew, “By their fruits shall ye know them.” The other is Occam's Razor, which tells us the simplest, most straightforward explanation of a mystery is usually the closest to the truth.

In 2008, presented as the antidote to eight years of despotic misrule by George W. Bush, Obama ran as the personification of “change we can believe in.” A compelling orator, he promised restoration of the constitutional rights nullified by Bush, promised single-payer/public-option health care and promised to revitalize the union movement via the Employee Free Choice Act.

But Obama's key promises, like “change” itself, were soon proven to have been Big Lies

Once in office, Obama refused to reverse Bush's nullification of our constitutional rights. In fact he escalated it Now, given the resultant omnipotence of the U.S. surveillance-and-murder apparatus, we are far closer to serfdom than we were in pre-revolutionary 1774 as subjects of King George III. Our closest political and economic counterparts are the officially powerless proletarians and peasants that characterized Tsarist Russia.

Meanwhile, even before Obama took office in 2009, he had engineered health-care reform into what may be the greatest financial betrayal in U.S. history.  Making secret deals with top executives of the pharmaceutical and health insurance cartels, he deliberately eliminated the possibility of competition between for-profit insurance and any non-profit single-payer/public-option health-care system like Medicare for All.

Obama also used his (Republican) brand of health insurance to further abolish the remnants of our liberty. Via the so-called individual mandate – the requirement we all buy insurance – Obama reduced the entire U.S. population to chattel.  We are now – each and every one of us – de facto serfs required to labor for the trillion-dollar enrichment of our masters, the prescription drug lords and the for-profit insurance-industry's sultans of sickness.

By the beginning of the 2012 presidential election campaign season, Obama's serial betrayals raised grave questions as to whether he could win a second term. But the One Percent arranged for him to be opposed by George Romney and Paul Ryan – a terrifying ticket of avowed Ayn Rand fascists even the more rational Republicans found repugnant. Barack the Betrayer then obscured the ugly realities of his presidency by once more donning his Obama the Orator persona. And once again he deceived the forgetful, frightened and hopelessly ignorant electorate with a new set of promises, among which was the protection of Social Security and Medicare – the biggest of his 2012 Big Lies.

 

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Real Obama (II): the Most Effectively Anti-Labor President Ever

If we apply Saint Matthew's deeds test, we discover Obama is the U.S. One Percent's most effective class warrior ever. His signature triumph is his methodical destruction – almost entirely by stealth – of the nation's labor movement. He has thus arguably done more to imprison the 99 Percent in permanent poverty than any other politician in U.S. history.

In 2009, Obama killed the Employee Free Choice Act, thereby terminating any possibility of a union comeback. In 2011, despite his earlier promise to walk picket lines,  Obama ruinously back-stabbed all unionized workers in Wisconsin and Michigan. In 2012 – no doubt to ensure the labor movement will never arise from its grave – he neutralized the National Labor Relations Board by the most maliciously cunning political sleight-of-hand I have ever witnessed.  He filled NLRB vacancies by the legally questionable tactic of recess appointments, thereby ensuring the support of organized labor in the 2012 election even as he invited the post-election judicial challenge that not only overturned the appointments but shut down the NLRB. 

Given political reality – the near certainty Republican control of Congress will continue indefinitely – the closing of the NLRB is effectively permanent. This means there is no longer any federal mechanism for enforcing union contracts  or otherwise protecting workers from the ever-intensifying malevolence of capitalism.

Thus Obama again revealed himself as Barack the Betrayer. He stripped organized labor of its last remnants of power, giving lethal credence to the anti-labor stooges who now argue it's a waste of money to continue paying union dues when – thanks to Obama – unions are no longer defended by the government. And tragically, there is truth in the stooges' claims. Though unions were gravely diminished by the vicious realities of the post-American-Dream economy, they nevertheless retained their legal role as the (only remaining) defender of USian workers' rights. But now with the de facto death of the NLRB so cleverly arranged by the president, the entire concept of legally recognized workers' rights is in jeopardy.

Verily, it is as if Congress has repealed the Wagner Act,  as if our (African-American) president has (ironically) reversed the nation's departure from slavery and indentured servitude by signing the Wagner Act's repeal, and as if the Supreme Court has ruled this disempowerment of the entire 99 Percent to be precisely what the Founders intended.

What unites all of Obama's betrayals,  whether of our constitutional rights, of our pleas for adequate health care, of our right to Social Security or of our need for jobs and unions – what proves each betrayal to be no more than a separate outrage in a single unprecedented economic atrocity – is the manner in which the total package strengthens the paradigm of capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation for all the rest of us.

Obviously here is the real Obama: a man who has nothing but hatred for unions and contempt for the entire 99 Percent.

 

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Shaving Away Deception (I): Questions about Obama's Education

While the Right's “birther” arguments are beyond absurd, another of the Right's questions – how Obama was able to overcome the prohibitive barriers of racism, caste and economics to attend Columbia and Harvard and teach at the University of Chicago – is well worthy of investigation.

Because I was an exceptionally bright child whose academic ambitions were blocked by economic obstructions that by the late 1950s were again becoming as insurmountable as they had been before World War II, I know from painful experience that even when you're a male Caucasian of acknowledged talents, no combination of drive and intelligence is by itself sufficient to unlock the gates of academe. No matter I had my first daily newspaper reporting-and-writing job at age 16, no matter my verbal skills and reasoning ability tested in the topmost percentiles; where I dwelt with my father and stepmother in Tennessee, either your parents were rich enough to pay your tuition, or you somehow raised the money yourself. Otherwise you were locked out; you either enlisted in the military or waited to be seized by the draft.

By 1979, when Obama reached college age, the draft had ended, and the Ayn Rand, admission-only-by-ability-to-pay standard that defined higher education in the South had been imposed on the entire nation. But beyond the obvious economic segregation, the requirements for admission to such aristocratic realms as Columbia or Harvard were much the same as they had been in the 1950s or are now: you must either be to the manor born or you must somehow acquire influential sponsorship by a member of the One Percent. To achieve the latter, as Obama did, you must repeatedly prove yourself to be unquestionably politically reliable – never left of center if you seek a career in public service or journalism, avowedly apolitical if your aspirations are in the arts and/or literature.

The same system functions at the lower levels of the United States – that is, at the financial gateways to state universities and even community colleges. At this level, the unofficial guardians are the ministers, priests, rabbis and local business executives required as references or endorsements on applications for scholarships and most other forms of student aid. Given my political history – perhaps more importantly given my father's political history and my mother's psychological history of spectacular and therefore scandalous matrimonial dysfunction – no such testimonials or endorsements were ever forthcoming. Thus even when I was on a dean's list for academic excellence, I was never able to obtain more than the most minimal work-study supplements to the already miserly Vietnam Era G.I. Bill. Indeed, without the G.I. Bill, I would not have finished college at all, not even at the small, inexpensive, relatively obscure state school that (reluctantly) granted me a bachelor of arts degree in 1976.

At the higher levels, Columbia and its ilk, the required endorsers are far more exalted: Big Business chief executive officers, major newspaper publishers, senators, bishops, cardinals, distinguished alumni and the like, people so far above me I would scarcely be allowed to collect their garbage, much less set foot inside their clubs and mansions.

How a person of Barack Obama's socioeconomic status managed to pass such impregnable barriers thus remains a legitimate mystery even considering his mother's subsequent rise in academic and governmental circles. Where did the money for her education come from? Was her long employment by the U.S. Agency for International Development a cover for a clandestine Central Intelligence Agency career? Is this – and USAID's notorious association with far-Right politicians abroad – perhaps the back-story to Obama's own ascent?

The Obama example is all the more mysterious given the huge number of equally promising USian youth of all races and genders who are marginalized merely because of their socioeconomic status and thus cast forever into the cesspools of poverty, welfare and prison.

In this context it would be especially enlightening to know when – and by whom – the plebeian Barack Obama was first singled out for his future service to the One Percent. Clearly it was long before he matriculated at Harvard. Who paid his prohibitively expensive tuition at Punahou? Who arranged for his admission to what is authoritatively said to be the most selectively elitist private school in the state of Hawaii and amongst the top ten such institutions in the entire U.S.?

Clearly, the choice of the young Obama to eventually be the perfect facilitator of all Ruling Class intentions suggests a level of long-range psychoanalytical skill and human probabilities-analysis available only in the CIA.

Moreover, as his post-2008 conduct demonstrates beyond argument, a core part of the conditioning that elevated him first to Columbia, then to Harvard and finally to the White House reduced Obama to a moral imbecile – the perfect One Percent operative – a man unable to empathize with anyone other than the obscenely privileged aristocrats he now so obediently serves.

Which leads us to the pivotal question: is Obama the ultimate creation of the shadow government that has ruled the U.S. since the coup of 22 November 1963?

 

***

 

Shaving Away Deception (II): Questions about Obama's Intentions

Whatever else Obama might be, there is no doubt that behind his Afro/Democrat camouflage, he serves the One Percent as the perfect restoration of Richard Nixon, the man who (before the still relatively free press exposed his tyrannies),  was probably slated by the One Percent to have been the nation's first true dictator.

But how was Obama, an African-American man of apparently modest background – a person one would assume would have great empathy for the 99 Percent – trained to become such a startlingly Machiavellian tyrant?

Was Obama's initial conditioning gradual and subtle? Was there then a point at which his lily-white proctors sat him down and described to him the devil's-bargain he (or more likely his mother) had made with those who now effectively owned him for life? Was he told the ugly truth that his color would forever bar him from the arrogantly white-supremacist Caucasian aristocracy? Was he then informed he could earn for himself, his family and their descendants the privilege to live as aristocrats, complete with limitless wealth and impenetrable defenses, if he faithfully served the One Percent's schemes?

Was he taught that as an African-American, his color was the perfect cover behind which to impose the One Percent's tyrannical agenda – that even after the most glaring betrayals he could still use race to silence or marginalize his opponents and discredit even his most legitimate critics as closet racists?

Was he made to understand how as a Democrat he is a symbol of all Democrats, and that his lies and betrayals will thus besmirch the Democratic Party for decades to come? Is this indeed one of his clandestine purposes?

Was he cautioned that as an African-American in a white-racist nation, he is a symbol of his own entire race? Was he warned the blame for his betrayals will thus unjustly fall on all African-Americans – that the resultant re-inflammation of racial antagonisms will set back the cause of black civil rights for as much as a century? Is this another of his clandestine purposes?

Was his childhood rejection by blacks and his parallel rejection by whites manipulated by his proctors into his adulthood's haughty disregard for the 99  Percent – the deftly concealed malice that so obviously defines his policies? Is this the emotional basis of his indifference to lower income peoples, of his obscene favoritism toward the One Percent?

Did his tenure at the University of Chicago – which because of its economics department should be renamed Ayn Rand Memorial University – include his training in the Ayn Rand ideology he falsely denies even as he imposes it on the nation and the world?

Did the aristocrats of the One Percent thus anoint Obama as their perfect tool, the man who behind his Afro/Democrat cover would at last complete their 80-year effort  to turn the United States into a one-party fascist state? Did they hire him as the one man who would at last build their USian empire into the global equivalent of a Fourth Reich, thereby fulfilling the dreams of countless Nazi war criminals? Do the caricatures of Obama as Hitler  thus ironically and unwittingly point to a terrible truth?

Occam's Razor suggests the answers to most if not all of these questions are an ominous yes, confirmed by Obama's betrayals, underscored again by his declaration of genocidal war against elderly and disabled Social Security and Medicare recipients like myself.

But why would Obama target us now, when our prepaid pensions have no part in the deficit he and his masters so loudly decry?

I think it is more than the money. I think it is because the One Percent regards us as dangerous, even subversive. We remember when this nation, in spite of its flaws, was truly the hope of the world, with a representative government and a healthy economy and all the promise and potential implicit in real constitutional democracy. We tell stories of better times; we inspire grandchildren and great-grandchildren with the possibility they could bring such good times back again. Because of what we remember, the Ruling Class wants us dead.

And when we are gone the true story of Obama's ascent and his eradication of the last vestiges of USian freedom will no doubt be suppressed. It will become the most terrible story never told – an unchanted lamentation, an unsung dirge, an unspoken epic of the brief flame of liberty that o-so-rarely brightens the endless centuries of patriarchal darkness and how methodically that flame was extinguished forever.

LB/6-11 April 2013

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From My Memoirs: 'The Woman on the Hill'

Dancer 1981 blue (copy)
Moonlight in the Meadow. Photographic collage by Loren Bliss copyright 2013.

*

IT WAS LATE fall, maybe two weeks before Hallowe'en, and the wind was full of leaves and the prophecy of winter. I was still living in Whatcom County on the Sumas River at the foot of Sumas Mountain, and I had driven into Bellingham to listen to some people I knew play live music -- mostly original stoner blues with acid-rock undertones -- at a place called Cal's: an improbable tavern peopled equally by gnarly commercial fishers of both genders and the more genuinely adventuresome younger bohemians -- nearly all of them female -- from Western Washington University and Fairhaven College. An interesting mix, both intellectually and visually: older men with heavy beards and pirate ear-rings and the weather-beaten faces of years at sea and somewhere decades back abandoned degrees in literature and philosophy, older women with the kind of untamed Rhiannon-long hair that has all but vanished since the '70s and the easy loose-limbed joy-in-their-bodies grace that comes from the delicious and uninterrupted flourishing of pagan shamelessness -- most of the men and women people who came here as back-to-the-landers and after their individual communes fell apart took up salmon fishing -- some as couples working gill-netters, others as crew members on seiners, one of the women ranked among the best boat engineers in the entire fleet, in any case everyone enjoying a permanent divorce from the bourgeois ratrace, and the young women from the college watching the men with distant and mostly unrequited lust and watching the older women with unabashed envy ("I wish I was free enough to arch my back and fling my arms and swirl my hair like that") and sometimes one of the younger women asking, and the older women actually saying to the younger women, “okay, honey, here let me show you how to do it,” and everybody despite the age differences united and snug in contented noise and smoky amber beerlight and most of all bound together in a vaguely coital mass of dancing bodies joined by throbbing chords and outrageously apt lyrics:

“Gotta find me a womin
with a chain saw
Cause winter is a-comin on...”

My dogs Sadie and LeeRoy always enjoyed nighttime trips to town -- even if they had to spend three or four hours locked in my pickup or car -- partly because they loved the ride, partly because they knew it meant a two-mile run down the bay and back after the tavern closed, or maybe a walk of nearly the same distance on one of the paths that traversed the nearby wooded ridges: in either instance the means by which I regained pass-the-tests sobriety before the 25-mile drive home. So Sadie and LeeRoy were there in the cab of my yellow Datsun truck when last call moved the party from Cal's to various private residences -- I had been invited to one such gathering but was in a strangely hollow mood and chose to be alone with my dogs instead -- and because the moon was aging but still swollen and astonishingly gibbous and sailing through broken clouds and undeniably charged with the potential of magic, I chose not to walk along the bay past the tolling gong-buoy at Post Point but rather to climb the path through an abandoned apple orchard to a hilltop meadow that a century ago had held a farmhouse and there amidst the weeds and overgrown foundation rubble listen to the wind roar and bluster in the nearby evergreens and watch the shadows dance in the hide-and-seek light.

It felt very secure there, welcoming even. I let the dogs run free knowing they would soon return and after I had been there maybe 15 minutes they came back as expected and took positions to my left and right, darker sentinels invisible in the dappled darkness. Now absolved of any need for watchfulness I sprawled on my back amidst the seasonally crumpled bracken. I was delighted by the unusually large moon and the erratically alternating ice-dark/snow-bright light-show of the clouds, and suddenly I wished I dared undress to be closer to the earth and air and darkness, perhaps even to dance in the curiously wavering light, but I thought about the chill and about all the headline reasons I dast not yield to pagan whim (“old drunken pervo claims religion prompted nakedness on college hill”) and so begrudgingly I submitted to the weather and the tyranny of civilization.

I had lain thus for maybe another half hour when Sadie and LeeRoy suddenly stood and LeeRoy grumbled and Sadie muttered and chuffed, not the low infinitely menacing seismic rumble with which they warded off known threats but an almost interrogatory sound: "we are dogs and as you can tell by our voices we are very big dogs and we are here and we don't think you mean us any harm but we're not sure and its our job to find out so please tell us so we don't have to bite you." Mutter; chuff; then again the deeper Rottweilian grumble of LeeRoy; by the focused intensity of their ears and noses something directional, perhaps coming up the slope from the opposite side of the ridge. I now sat up and scanned the unstable darkness with peripheral vision -- the old military night-operations trick -- but saw nothing and could hear no other sound than the dogs and the omnipresent wind: perhaps it was another dog, perhaps I should put them back on their leashes. But -- very uncharacteristically -- I did nothing; I sat motionless waiting to see who or what might come out of the adjacent trees and cross the tangled meadow that had been the long-ago farmhouse lawn, now under this indecisive sky one moment all moon-bright shining autumnal cobwebs and phantom-white clumps of blown thistle and pearly everlasting, the next moment again one with the forest in undifferentiated darkness.

A long cloud covered the moon. The woman who came from the woods moved along the path so quietly I never heard her at all, and when the moon was again unveiled she was standing to my left no more than a car's length away, and while Sadie was holding back skeptically, LeeRoy was already stepping forward swinging his strong proud undocked tail, the fresh moonlight flaring gleefully in his eyes, momentary green fire, a normal canine phenomenon some nevertheless regard as Satanic, hence the fundamentalist Christian missionary housewife who rebuked me one evening in my own front yard: "I saw it. I saw it. Your dog showed me his demon eyes. You really are a witch." But of course there was nothing like that from this woman who emerged from the darkness: she saw LeeRoy's eyes and laughed, a warm sensual inviting laugh, and said "your bigger dog's eyes are really heavy they could be very upsetting to some people."

It was a chilly night and the woman wore a long thick shawl, dark, probably wool, over her head and shoulders, and the wind tugged constantly at its fringes. Beneath that was a dark sweater and a heavy dark dress, probably also wool; the dress came nearly to her ankles, which I could see were booted in high soft leather moccasins, the lighter beads in their beadwork reflecting warm little pinpoints of the ambient light: in such footwear a woods-person can cover ground with absolute silence; no wonder I had not heard her approach. She had some kind of shoulder bag too, like a large purse on a diagonal strap, its bulk apparent beneath her shawl. I briefly wondered if maybe she was one of the local homeless people.

Now she spoke with the dogs, her voice a musical murmur, her words carried away by the wind. After she had at last persuaded Sadie to kiss her outstretched hand she turned her full attention to me. Her face remained in shadow beneath the shawl, though I could see she had dark hair, decades uncut like the older women at Cal's, and I wondered if perhaps she had been among them.

"Okay if I hang around?" she asked.

"Certainly," I said.

She sat perhaps eight feet away on a natural chair I had not noticed, its cushion a slight elevation that might have been an abandoned gopher mound overgrown with bracken already crushed, the chair's back a dark lump, perhaps a section cut from the trunk of a big maple, a round of firewood lost years before when the path was still a road into deeper forests and finally into the mountains themselves.

"I usually come here at night to think," she said. "I've been coming here for a couple of years and this is the first time there's been anybody else."

"I just came up here to run the dogs and mellow out a little before the long drive home -- I live out in the county but I came in tonight for the live music at Cal's. I hope I didn't frighten you."

"No I actually watched you for quite a while before I let you know I was here. But I saw your dogs right away and as soon as I saw them I knew you were fine. Besides I'd seen you earlier at Cal's. We know some of the same people. But I had work to do tonight and you got there just as I was leaving.”

LeeRoy was by this time lying beside her, his great black bulk as close to her as he could get, his chin resting on one of her feet.

We talked about dogs for a while -- a dog she had raised from puppyhood had recently died of old age, and she was hoping another dog would soon find her. We talked about what we each did for a living -- she said she was a painter and a sometimes college student and she worked freelance for several Bellingham printers doing commercial art, and I knew at least the painter part was true because I was downwind and intermingled with her subtle perfume -- a hint of sandalwood and perhaps some musk I could not name -- I had caught the tell-tale scent of turpentine, and when I asked if she worked in oils, she said yes not many people do anymore, how did you know?, and I told her. A little later she asked me if I had a wife or a lover waiting at home and I said no I had been alone for ten years and she said she had broken up in June with someone she had been with for a long time and thought it would be a long time before she allowed herself such vulnerability again. "It's lonely," she said, "but lonely is less painful than misunderstood and mistrusted." Shielded by the variable night we began sharing parts of ourselves we normally would not have disclosed without the prerequisite of weeks and months of familiarity.

Then she said she had brought cookies and wine for herself because the moon was so huge and low and strangely shaped and she wanted to consume the cookies and wine as a kind of offering and would I join her? Yes of course I said and she apologized that she had only one glass and did I mind sharing it and I said not at all that just makes it more sacramental which is how it has felt ever since you got here. You must be pagan she said and I said yes I am and she said "then you will understand what I am doing" and fumbled in her beaded shoulder bag and brought out a dark bottle of wine and a wine glass and a cork-screw. She uncorked the bottle and poured the glass full and re-corked the bottle and set the bottle beside her on the grass and stood and LeeRoy grumbled that he had to move. She switched the glass to her left hand and made an invoking pentagram over it and lifted the glass to the moon and flicked the wine onto the grass around us and turned to me and said "blessed be." Then she said "you'll have to come closer if we're going to share this glass -- here there's actually room for two of us against this log." We sat; it was as she had said and as comfortable as any sofa. Sadie and LeeRoy moved close to us: I pictured stone age people gathered with their canine companions at the edge of some primeval forest, then remembered the ruined foundation nearby and thought of some apocalyptic aftermath: Knossos, Albion, the Death of Electric Man, humankind driven back into the forest and rediscovering the Goddess. Meanwhile she poured the glass full again. She drank and I drank; it was a good wine, probably a valpolicella, seemingly black as ink even in brightest moments of moonlight, and she drank and I drank and we both ate her cookies which were round and thick and tasty and made of oatmeal and raisins and peanut butter and perhaps other more elemental nutrients and she drank and I drank and then drinking and eating we drifted into a long conversation that gradually became more molecular than verbal and then expanded beyond physical limits into a dialogue I am still convinced was pure telepathy: I remember it not as an impassioned sharing of words but rather as a mutually eloquent transmission of images so nakedly honest I was astounded -- and yet it was so dreamlike that the next day I could remember only the vaguest details of its content. In fact I discovered to my profound sadness I could not even remember her name.

I never truly saw her face, only the glimpses allowed by the peek-a-boo moon and the ever-changing veil of clouds. Nor, beyond holding hands as we talked, and embracing one another when we parted, did we physically touch -- of this I am absolutely certain -- yet it was as if we had been intimate to a mutual depth few humans ever imagine, much less achieve. I do not even clearly remember our parting: only that it was somehow both fulfilled and empty, as if each of us had passed some pivotal milestone, some turning point, absolutely vital yet forever unattainable without this strange encounter on a windblown October hilltop, an end and a beginning sealed in a passionate hug that is my only vivid recollection of the entire finale: my face briefly buried in her hair, my arms around the rough wool in which she was clad, the combined scents of sandalwood and musk and turpentine and even a trace of wood smoke that told me how she heated her dwelling; and most of all the shawl falling away to reveal the great dark sweet cloud of her hair itself. Yet I remember nothing whatsoever of my farewell words to her, and I have only the vaguest memory of her farewell words to me. I am certain they were powerfully positive, nurturing, strengthening, healing: I can feel their potency even now, 13 years after the fact, and I would love to be able to write them down and add them to this narrative, but they are beyond my reach, seemingly gone forever.

The night does not come back into clear focus until I was at the foot of the long hill. I was unlocking my truck and my dogs were waiting for me to open the door and I was again wondering if I was sober enough to dare attempt the lengthy drive home. It was very late. The sky had blown clear and the moon though noticeably more aged was now even larger and more yellow and westering toward the mountains far across the bay. Orion was already high in the southeast. I pulled the door open. Sadie climbed into the cab and claimed the seat under the passenger window. LeeRoy grinned, wagged his tail and flared his daemon eyes like some James Harris in quadruped. In my mind I heard again the hilltop woman’s laughter, and just for the tiniest instant it seemed there was a trace of sandalwood on the pre-dawn wind.

LB/ posted 4 April 2013 (Copyright 9 December 2005 reproduction without permission prohibited.)

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