Loren Bliss: Dispatches from Dystopia

“JERM/I Hate Whithe People!” Another addition to my extended essay on graffiti, I photographed this Tacoma scene in early 2008, then rediscovered it just two days ago while exploring “Old Data,” a hard-drive full of material a helpful Nurd acquaintance was kind enough to salvage from the ruins of a computer crash later that same year. Kodacolor 800, Pentax MX with 28mm f/2.8 SMCP-M, exposure not recorded; posterization by Gimp Image Editor. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2013.

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LIBERTY DEMANDS THE free and unfettered exchange of information, a truth most of us recognize so instinctively we seldom consider it in detail. Though freedom of information is amongst the most simple of principles, it is also one of the most profound, for without it, there cannot be informed discussion and debate, and without such exchanges of ideas, there can be neither democratic process nor justice. Therefore to measure whether liberty in the United States is real or bogus, we need only ask ourselves how easy – or difficult – it is for us to stay informed about the people and events that determine whether we live in relative comfort or in the fear and wretchedness that increasingly defines USian reality for all save the privileged One Percent. Remember too this standard is applicable to every aspect of our lives – including those socioeconomic matters over which we as workers are now, by capitalism's final maturation into Ayn Rand fascism, prohibited from exerting any influence at all. But what we are focusing on today is not economics per se; it is the prerequisite of an informed public to the achievement and maintenance of what we label “democracy.” And since we already know there is no longer any freedom of information at the federal level – witness President Obama's imposition of the total-surveillance state and his unprecedented war on whistleblowers and the working press – we are looking instead at parallel examples from other USian realms.

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Until 2009, when I received my last newspaper paycheck, I nearly always had the advantage of a ringside seat in the local and state arenas of politics and government, and even when I was not officially a member of the working press, my reputation gave me comparable access. I had a good long run with the media world's gift of super-citizenship: I became a professional journalist in November 1956, the beginning of the last third of my 16th year, when The Grand Rapids Herald hired me as both a copy-boy and a sports stringer, and its American Newspaper Guild local issued me my first union card, two milestones in which I took enormous pride. For most of the decades thereafter, staying informed was generally no more difficult than observing events and interviewing the participants. The techniques are essentially the same whether you're covering sports or reporting on public affairs. I debuted at the latter in 1958, the initial fulfillment of one of the goals that had been mine since my decision at age 14 to become what in those days was called a newsman. My first political story was a detailed report on that year's local elections, the facts gathered during an all-nighter in the vote-counting room at the Knox County Courthouse, an assignment that produced a half-dozen double-spaced typewritten takes for The Fountain Citizen, a prosperous weekly that served a sprawling, relatively populous but unincorporated suburb immediately north of Knoxville. It took me another five years, three of which were consumed by a Regular Army enlistment, to achieve my paramount goal – that is, to break into investigative reporting. My debut was published by The Oak Ridger in 1963 – Managing Editor Dick Smyser had assigned me to ferret out the facts behind a flare-up of gun violence in the East Tennessee coal fields – and I quickly learned that, just as I had imagined, here was journalism at its most demanding, particularly when you had to work under-cover or organize clandestine meetings in out-of-the-way locales to protect your sources. But even amidst my scariest and most challenging investigation, for The Jersey Journal in 1970 – a double-barreled exposé of the heroin-addiction epidemic inflicted on the United States by the Vietnam War and the federal government's desperate efforts to keep it secret – I never thought much about my right to know or my readers' right to learn the truth as best as I could report it. Like most of my colleagues, I merely took those rights for granted.

In other words, shielded as I was by my press card, I was pampered, probably blinded and perhaps even spoiled rotten by what I now know was, just as I said above, super-citizenship: an ivory-tower view of USian governance. As I am finding out in the Average-Joe status to which I have at last been reduced by official (albeit only partial) retirement, I have no de facto right to know anything, despite de jure assurances to the contrary. Public disclosure and transparency laws are thus meaningless – unless of course you can afford lawyers to enforce compliance. But I lack the requisite wealth, which means the only real right I have is to badger politicians and bureaucrats and other sorts of officials with emails and telephone calls they in turn are free to ignore at will. Unlike a daily or even weekly newspaper, this blog, with its national and international readership that numbers only in the upper hundreds, is insufficiently influential to compel even the basic courtesy of “no comment” responses. And “compel” is the appropriate verb: under the new paradigm of USian governance – unlimited profit and absolute power for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for all the rest of us – the politicians and bureaucrats serve only the One Percent, which means they now respond to any of us in the 99 Percent only if and when they are forced to do so. Thus their responses are either brazen lies (Obama's “change we can believe in”), Ayn Rand sneering (Romney's “47 percent who...believe that government has a responsibility to care for them”) or unapologetic violence, relentless onslaughts with truncheons, pepper gas and rubber bullets by the legions of federally militarized police that, in obedience to orders  from the White House and the Department of Homeland Security, mercilessly crushed the Occupy Movement. I doubt I need point out the brutality of the assaults indicates the authorities' intent was to forever suppress any further USian capability of organized dissent – much as Tsar Nicholas II sought to do on the original Bloody Sunday,  8 January 1905.

Obviously – a bitter lesson learned too late – I should have paid more attention to all those angry 99 Percenters who, particularly after 22 November 1963, repeatedly warned me that if you're an Average Joe or an Average Lisa, the politicians just tell you to fuck off. Stupidly, I always dismissed such protestations as hyperbole born of willful ignorance – mostly refusal to learn how the system works. But now, in official retirement, I'm an Average Joe myself. I'm the one who's being told to fuck off – though never in such honest words of course – and now I see it was I who did not know the system.

Which is all by way of preface to explaining why the controversial story I promised last week remains unreported. The politicians and their collaborators in a certain local non-governmental organization apparently know I sense incipient class-betrayal in their otherwise inexplicable refusal to discuss a proposal for mandatory paid sick leave that, were it to become law, would dramatically improve the quality of life for every woman, man and child within the Tacoma city limits. Now – never mind my long and award-winning history in local journalism – they won't answer my emails or telephone calls about the seemingly endless delays that, probably just as planned, are quietly drowning the proposal in a sea of forgetfulness. This non-response is a new development – a new experience for me, too – though it may also be retaliation for my revelations of the hatefulness behind the local war on transit.  Whatever, it portends the doom of the sick-leave proposal itself, which is a direct challenge to the anti-worker principles of Ayn Rand governance. Thus we can confidently assume it won't ever be formalized as a city ordinance, much less enacted. In turn this means the main question facing the NGO leaders is how to present their failure as success, while the politicians have to calculate how to disguise their obedient service to the One Percent as democracy in action.

Such is life in this Pacific Northwest seaport city of 200,000 people, where – despite the notorious anti-transit-user bigotry of the voters and elected officials – the local bus system may yet survive another year.  Meanwhile, the non-response to my inquiries tells me I'm now just like every other USian citizen who is not part of the Ruling Class, which means I'm viewed by the capitalists and their politicians and bureaucrats as an enemy of the(ir) (e)state.

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Apropos the intimate relationship between censorship and injustice, I do not understand why so many USian feminists steadfastly refuse to acknowledge the terrible and escalating danger of Christian theocracy in the United States. It is a definitively subversive threat that is lavishly funded by the One Percent. Its menace is credibly documented, including in several links below. Its rationale – that theocracy is most profitable means of achieving a slave-minded workforce – is well known. It's innate malevolence – particularly to women – is frighteningly portrayed in The Handmaid's Tale, a superb novel by Margaret Atwood that is arguably the feminist equivalent of George Orwell's 1984. In the real world, theocracy's Skinner-box prototype is the USian South, where the Ku Klux Klan functioned as the Christian equivalent of the Islamic “morality police” – precisely the reason the Klan is colloquially known as “the Saturday Night Men's Bible Study Class.” Theocracy's financial efficiency is proven there too: note the region's conditioned hostility to labor unions, its viciously substandard pay scales and its abysmal levels of educational achievement. Indeed, corporate executives rule the southern workplace by what amounts to divine right; throughout the South, to defy your boss is literally to defy god almighty. The attendant fear of eternal damnation – subconsciously the most terrifying prospect ever inflicted on the human mind – silences any who might demand living wages. It also dumbs down all but the most scholarship-oriented youths, who seem to require religious dispensation or other forms of protection by the aristocracy merely to advance beyond the level of high-school pregnancy. And now, with the theocratic South's Christian misogyny metastasizing throughout the United States, women in fully 87 percent of the nation's counties are already denied local access to abortion.  Then why – with the basic right of women to control their very selfhood at such grave risk – do so many USian feminists aid and abet the imposition of theocracy by refusing to speak out against it?

My guess is these feminists' suppression of their own voices is mandated by a combination of factors. One is the extent to which the USian feminist movement has been captured by the Democratic Party, itself an eager albeit far less publicized participant in the theocratic blitzkrieg, for which again see below. A second factor is so-called political “correctness.” To acknowledge the murderous threat of Christian theocracy is to confront the blood-drenched, anti-woman, anti-Nature horror that is Abrahamic theocracy in general, which includes the Hebrew theocracies of the Old Testament era, the new Judaic theocracy that is now overtaking Israel, the 1700-year reign of Christian theocracy in Roman and post-Roman Europe, and the Islamic theocracy that has ruled the Middle East since the late 600s. But the USian Left is not only in ignorant denial of the relevant history; it cannot abide any admission the aircraft-hijackers of 9/11 – regardless of what else might have been done to intensify the Reichstag-Fire impact of their atrocities – clearly believed they were heroes in the resumption of Islam's 1400-year war against Western Civilization. Were USia's self-proclaimed Leftists to admit the reality of that war, which is unequivocally proven by the very history they reject as irrelevant, they would be forced to set aside their (patently false) conception of Islamic terrorists as “liberation fighters.” Instead the terrorists would be recognized as what they are – murderous religious fanatics, the equivalent of Ku Klux Klansmen whose fanaticism is so extreme, it has prompted them to adopt suicide tactics. Hence, if USian feminism is to maintain its alliance with other Left-minded groups, many feminists seem to feel they have no alternative but to say nothing about theocratic encroachment – no matter the very specific hazard all forms of Abrahamic theocracy present to women's intellectual, sexual and reproductive freedoms. A third factor in this ongoing campaign of self-censorship is probably the arrogant indifference of many USian feminists toward religion in general, which they dismiss as irrelevant superstition – never mind that by their dismissal, they blind themselves to what innumerable polls prove remains the primary ideological force in USian life. In this context, it is relevant to note that author Atwood is a Canadian and therefore (presumably) free of the pressures for lockstep ideological conformity that characterize the entire USian political spectrum. All that said, because my own access to feminist perspectives is clearly limited by my gender, I yearn for someone with the honesty and courage of a Joreen Freeman  to address just why it is so many USian feminists are so loathe to publicly denounce the near-limitless peril the encroachment of theocracy imposes on women – and on all the rest of us as well. Thus my response to “Why the Relentless Assault on Abortion Rights in the U.S.?,” a glib but profoundly misleading piece  by the journalist and historian Ruth Rosen:

Why the relentless assault on women's sexual freedom in the United States? Unfortunately Ms. Rosen neither states the question correctly nor answers it truthfully. The answer, of course, is the One Percent has decided zero-tolerance Christian theocracy is the most profitable (and therefore most expeditious) way of controlling the 99 Percent – all the rest of us. And the vital first step in imposing Abrahamic theocracy of any kind – Christian, Islamic, Jewish – is the re-enslavement of women. (As for why women are the specific prime target, note the psychological and semiotic messages implicit in the fact that – whenever Abrahamic orthodoxy is rejected or transcended – Liberty is always portrayed as female.)

Those who doubt the theocratic threat are urged to visit the website Theocracy Watch, which – due to its lockstep allegiance to the Democratic Party, unfortunately suppresses the under-publicized involvement of leading Democrats, among them Hillary Clinton and President Barack Obama, in the ever-escalating push toward theocracy. (Jeff Sharlet reveals how 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.” See The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, p. 275.) Meanwhile Obama is forever willing to surrender women's reproductive rights  even as he shows his true theocratic colors  by radically expanding President George Bush's program of “faith-based initiatives,” thereby providing federal funds to religious social-service agencies that routinely discriminate on the basis of belief. Obama's betrayals, like Clinton's, are facilitated by Democrat hypocrisy – the Democrats' reflexive, often fanatical support of policies they would fiercely oppose if advocated or imposed by Republicans.

Two other sources are also especially useful in tracking the theocratic threat. These are Americans United for Separation of Church and State  and Merger Watch. The activities of the former, chiefly lawsuits against the more blatant incursions of Christian theocracy, are well known. The latter group, which is documenting the Roman Catholic Church's newest assault against women's rights – the malevolently cunning tactic of buying up health care organizations and terminating women's sexual freedom by imposing the church's zero-tolerance prohibitions – has mostly been ignored by so-called "mainstream media." Obviously the One Percent does not want women recognizing and mustering against the church's new, market-based approach to re-imposing total misogyny. Nevertheless, women in the state of Washington, where the church already owns and/or controls at least half of all health-care providers, have begun to react. 

In any case, as long as Democratic apologists and other clandestine defenders of Abrahamic misogyny continue to deliberately suppress information about the real nature of the theocratic threat, we all remain at huge and terrible risk – though none more so than women.

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Oh how I miss the complimentary tickets that came with being a member of the working press. Nevertheless, thanks to the financial beneficence of a dear friend, earlier this week I was able to watch a documentary film entitled The War on Whistleblowers: Free Press and the National Security State. Thought-provoking and informative, I recommend it to anyone who can find a way to see it, which may be difficult, as too many major theaters seem loathe to screen it. But here in Tacoma, the film's showing was facilitated by the bravery of the people who own and manage The Grand Cinema, a feisty independent movie-house that dares feature art films in a notably nyekulturniy town and, best of all, is only a short walk from my dwelling-place. But the film is also a bit disappointing. An unsparing report of military personnel slain, maimed or endangered in the name of profit and lives ruined by government oppression, it nevertheless ends on a janglingly inappropriate upbeat note, as if Director Robert Greenwald believes we've all been so brainwashed by the cult of positive thinking – picture a Smiley Face atop a mound of corpses (“Have a Happy Day”) – even bad news needs be given a Walt Disney ending to make it palatable to the USian consciousness. Though in fairness to Greenwald, I should point out the Whistleblowers footage was already in the can when the worst possible news broke – that here in the United States of George-Bush-cum-Barack-Obama and the One Party of Two Names,  there is no longer either a free press nor even much of a pretense of liberty. Our last remaining illusions of freedom have been dispelled by Edward Snowden's courageous disclosures of the relentlessly totalitarian nature of the USian state security apparatus, which is obviously aimed more at us, the increasingly alienated 99 Percent, than it is intended to counter any threat from abroad: once again, welcome to the Fourth Reich. Though now we know just how awful things truly are, there's a (tiny) chance we might begin to formulate adequate strategy and tactics of resistance.

But the reflexive denial of our ever-more-hopeless circumstances continues unabated. During the apres-flick discussion, somebody predictably quoted the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1964 statement that “the arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Alas, my admiration for the martyred King does not change the fact his observation, which has a long and illustrious genealogy dating at least back to 1810,  is nevertheless a blatant falsehood. The hideous truth of human history – at least human history since the fall of Knossos marked the ultimate triumph of patriarchy – is that justice, which cannot be achieved without liberty, is but a willow-the-wisp, a haunting, ephemeral, poignantly brief glimmer of conceptual light amidst a seemingly endless midnight of savagery. Yes, there have been moments of liberty, of justice as defined by democratic and quasi-democratic states, but the associated freedoms were mostly limited to a chosen few and in every case, including our own, were eventually swept away by the tides of tyranny that characterize the human norm. Thus our species' scant few attempts at building just societies are dwarfed by seeming endless millennia of despotism. Don't take my word for it; measure it yourselves: the centuries of oppression predominate by a ratio of at least 20 to one. And now – as proven by the ever-intensifying intrusion of Obama's zero-tolerance surveillance state – the darkness of injustice and enslavement is descending once again, quite possibly to imprison us until our species' self-imposed extinction marks the end of time itself. And there is scant hope for rescue or amelioration. Though the arc of the universe is indeed long – a span we can now measure by the same technologies that guarantee our enslavement – it bends not toward justice but toward ever-more-total subjugation.

LB/26-28 July 2013

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"Stop Corporate Abuse of Democracy; Tax the Rich": Yet another of my hitherto unpublished Occupy Tacoma pictures, as relevant now as in November 2011. Pentax MX, 100 mm SMCP-M f/2.8, Fujicolor 800, exposure not recorded. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2013. (Click on image to view it full size.)

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MY BLOGGING TIME this week was taken up by old-fashioned reportorial work – chasing a story via the telephone and the Internet. On Wednesday I thought I had it pretty well in hand, so well I was beginning to write parts of it in my head. But then yesterday I discovered what I thought I knew was mostly wrong – that not only was I ignorant, but I had a helluva lot more to learn before the story would be ready to write. 

Meanwhile here are links to three pieces by other writers I strongly urge you to read:

The first is old news – how the Occupy Movement was suppressed by the White House and the Department of Homeland Security through its command and control of federally militarized local police departments. But the report is worth reading again in the context of the most recent disclosures  about the total surveillance that now defines us all – the entire 99 Percent – as enemies of the global USian empire and all its corporate states.

Link number three is to a vital and closely related report from Europe – Former President Carter's admission there is no longer any “functioning democracy” anywhere in the United States.  That Carter's remarks were available only in a major German newspaper (and not only carefully excluded from its English-language editions but suppressed by all USian mainstream media), is more proof of the informational iron curtain that is being drawn down around the U.S. as it moves ever closer to becoming the genuine Fourth Reich, thereby fulfilling the dreams of the Nazi war criminals the federal government and its capitalist overlords embraced in 1945.

LB/20 July 2013

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Another of my hitherto unpublished Occupy Tacoma images, the woman's placard as apt now as in October 2011, when her smile reflected the joy and optimism that was all too soon crushed by USian governments at all levels. Pentax MX, 100mm f/2.8 SMCP-M, Fujicolor 800, exposure data not recorded. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2013.

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(Note: Vital medical procedures consumed so much of my time during the past seven days, this essay is again unavoidably late, and I again apologize for my tardiness. But the news is good. Contrary to what was first suspected, my eyes are free of glaucoma. Moreover, the latest surgical techniques bypass unrelated conditions that would have prohibited cataract surgery. Thus my eyesight – and therefore my ability to photograph – can be surgically restored, for which I am grateful beyond words.)

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THE TOTAL-SURVEILLANCE STATE is undoubtedly the most terrifying governmental application of modern technology that has yet been revealed to us. Its terror exceeds that of thermonuclear weapons or nuclear melt-downs, which we can always convince ourselves will only be inflicted elsewhere upon others. Unlike The Bomb, which save in Hiroshima or Nagasaki has not yet been dropped, or the homicidal reactor, which – at least so far as we're allowed to know – has run amok only at Three-Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima – the total-surveillance state murders us all by killing our ability to think and speak freely. It thereby makes us less-than-human. In other words, it reverses evolution, reducing us to the mind-crushed state of slaves or prisoners. And as we grasp what it does to us in the context of the additional fear generated by organized assaults against specific groups and individuals  – women; Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and food stamp recipients; organized labor; members of the working press; photographers whether professional or amateur; any other social critics whose disclosures or protests dare expose the unapologetic savagery of the new paradigm of USian governance – it should already be provoking massive, nationwide anger. The very concept of what it meant to be “American” has not only been ruthlessly violated but maliciously abandoned, as if the government itself has officially torn down our flag, burned it, urinated on the ashes and stomped them into filth. Might there then soon be the same public outpouring of humanistic, patriotic rage as followed the sinking of the Lusitania, the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the massacre of innocents symbolized by the numbers 9/11? Apparently not. The vast majority of the USian people are sullenly silent – and in all probability will remain so.

Yet what is inflicted upon us is not, of course, really a new paradigm of governance at all, and that – especially the associated guilt – may be one of the reasons we are thus far so submissive. To the aboriginal inhabitants of North America, to the subjects of the colonial empire the United States seized from Spain, sought to expand into Asiatic Russia  and imposed elsewhere including Africa and other parts of Asia, the sadism and brutality that now characterizes USian governance of its homeland is an old and ugly story. All that has changed is such imperial malevolence has now become the domestic policy of the dominant political parties (or, more correctly, the One Ruling Class Party of Two Names), which means it is now enforced by the entire federal government (especially by the secret-police apparatus of the Department of Homeland Security), as well as by all the state and local governments. But it has always been the policy of the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Department and the various other overseas extensions of the USian empire whether official (as in Vietnam), capitalist (as at Bhopal and Bangladesh) or mercenary  (as in Iraq, Afghanistan and New Orleans). It also means we of the USian 99 Percent are now potentially no better off than the Iraqis or even the First Nations people our ancestors genocidally displaced – perhaps the true meaning of Barack Obama's “change we can believe in.”  The only difference is we have yet to suffer our own Trail of Tears,  our own Wounded Knee. But we can be certain of one thing: equal horrors – or probably events far more horrible – are looming, and they are not on a comfortably distant horizon, which means they will occur within many of our own lifetimes. For that is the hideous truth of the total-surveillance state: it has no other purpose  than to facilitate maximum zero-tolerance tyranny. And the fact we have not already taken to the streets in massive resistance suggests we have already been conditioned to the reflexive submissiveness required of a conquered people.

However there is one flame-bright exception to this dismaying acceptance of what seems ever more likely to be our unavoidable reduction to permanent serfdom and slavery: a growing number of USian women, whose liberation movements I once believed might at last force this nation to be true to its stated principles, are again rising up angry. More than any other force within the 99 Percent – certainly more than we males whose identities are occupational rather than biological and have therefore been hopelessly shattered by permanent unemployment – these women seem closest to recognizing that the United States has been cunningly turned into the human equivalent of a Skinner Box. Though they have yet to connect the proverbial dots, I have no doubt they will soon understand how the dramatic increase in oppression – the atrocities summarized above – exemplifies the new Ruling Class methodology of forceful behavior modification even as the all-seeing god's-eye of total-surveillance enables the overseers to monitor and refine their techniques with a speed and efficiency hitherto imagined only by villains of the same Ted Bundy arrogance that characterized Adolf Hitler, Pol Pot, Augusto Pinochet and let us not forget our own Nathan Bedford Forrest, the founder of the Ku Klux Klan. In this repugnant context – especially given that history shows the grievances of women are often the hinge-issues in successful revolutions, the methodical assaults on women's hard-won sexual freedom – the avowedly misogynistic political efforts  and the growing epidemic of physical attacks combined with the institutionalized protection of the attackers  – reveal how the Ruling Class views the suppression of female independence as the key to the abolition of liberty and justice for all. Damning enough in its own right, the revelation is underscored by the associated treachery of the Obama Administration, typical Obama the Orator ploys of eloquently endorsing women's demands while Barack the Betrayer sneakily back-stabs  the very measures he falsely claims to support. The common denominator in all these outrages – just as the would-be victims themselves proclaim – is a concerted effort to force women and girls back into the de facto slavery demanded by patriarchy, explicitly by its Abrahamic religious offspring (Judaism, Christianity and Islam), implicitly by its economic fulfillment in capitalism's final transformation to fascism. Every time a woman is imprisoned by the (very rational) fear she will not only be raped but her assailant will be officially protected, the intended behavior modification has achieved its goal. Factor in the similar barriers and prohibitions inflicted on social critics, journalists, photographers, labor activists, anyone else of either gender who might be inclined to resist the blitzkrieg by which Ayn Rand fascism is conquering the United States, and our portrait of a nation ruled like a Skinnerian rat-maze is complete and undeniable. B. F. Skinner himself stated in 1972 what is obviously the key precept of USian governance today: "The issue is to improve the way in which (humanity) is controlled." To which women are responding with increasingly public defiance.  The question, of course, is what they will do when the state confronts them with the same combination of economic retaliation bolstered by truncheon-and-pepper-gas barbarism that has already hammered us men into submission.

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Nevertheless it is by viewing the war against women as a carefully scripted campaign of behavior-modification we gain our most sharply focused picture of capitalism's thrust toward Christian theocracy as its primary modality for controlling the USian 99 Percent. But the Left is as powerless as the Right to combat it. The secular and/or libertarian Right is of course nullified by the fact the imposition of theocracy is a major objective of the Right's capitalist financiers. The Left however is paralyzed by its own insistence on political “correctness,” in this instance its refusal to recognize Islam's history of imposing its own brand of theocracy – including the most virulent forms of misogyny characteristic of human societies today – wherever it ascends to power. To denounce theocracy is therefore – at least obliquely – to denounce Islam, something the doctrinaire Left and even the pseudo-Left cannot bear to do. Though it is something of an aside, no doubt the associated taboos explain why Socialist Worker refused to publish the following letter, my response to its (above-linked) report on how President Obama backstabbed women even on the hitherto (seemingly) long-settled issue of access to contraception:

While Ms. Schulte's reporting on how President Obama enabled the Religious Right to gain the tactical and strategic high ground in the reproductive-rights struggle is the best such work I have seen anywhere, it nevertheless omits a vital fact: the extent to which (even) Democratic Party politicians are (clandestinely) committed to the imposition of Christian theocracy on the United States.

Though it is fashionable for socialists of all sorts to underestimate the importance of Christianity (and Abrahamic religion generally) in USian life, a majority of at least 63 percent of the U.S. population is already fundamentalist as defined by belief in the Bible as "literally true" (see http://legacy.rasmussenreports.com/2005/Bible.htm), which itself indicates a looming danger to secular governance. Combine that with capitalism's historical preference for zero-tolerance theocracy as the most efficient means of ensuring a submissive, slave-minded Working Class, and the probable motive behind Obama's serial betrayals of reproductive freedom come into sharp and terrifying focus.

As for documentation of the Democrats' clandestine role in the imposition of theocracy, one source is especially useful. This is Jeff Sharlet's The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, (HarperCollins: 2008), which exposes Hillary Clinton's behind-the-scenes collaboration with Sam Brownback "for legislation dedicated less to overturning the wall between church and state than to tunneling beneath it" (pg. 275). The same sort of "tunneling" is precisely what was accomplished by the Obama “compromise” that added to the USian definition of religious liberty the alleged “right” of believers to impose their doctrines on non-believers, as for example in the case of Christian pharmacists who arbitrarily deny contraception to unmarried women. Given the president's oft-demonstrated Machiavellian skill, this staggering blow to church-state separation is clearly no accident.

Another excellent albeit more generalized book on the threat of theocracy is Chris Hedges' American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America (Simon & Schuster: 2006). But in most of the United States, the danger is already reality. The Bible Belt South has been a de facto theocracy since the Civil War: note the colloquial name for the Ku Klux Klan – “the Saturday Night Men's Bible Study Class” – which denotes its function as a Christian equivalent of the lslamic Morality Police. And – as proven by worsening restrictions on contraception and the near-total destruction of abortion facilities – the remainder of the midlands are not far behind. It is a risk we ignore at our own huge peril – a dire hazard that indeed we have already ignored far too long.

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It is perhaps worthwhile to note at this point that beyond history's seemingly endless series of isms, there are only two alternative forms of human governance. One alternative is tyranny: rule by a dictator, or dictators, whether overt (as in Nazi Germany or the theocracy of Iran), or from behind various pseudo-democratic facades (as in today's United States). The other alternative is liberty – the never-fully realized theory embodied in the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution: “We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this constitution for the United States of America.” During my elementary-school days, 1946 through 1951, all third graders not only learned to recite the Preamble from memory, but to give simple examples of its meaning, a requirement long ago repealed as dangerous to capitalism and deleterious to its objectives. But the Preamble is not as unique as we USians were typically taught, back in those halcyon days when fledgling minds were still entrusted with libertarian ideals. Similar sentiments are expressed somewhat more bluntly in the concluding lines of The Communist Manifesto: “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workers of all countries, unite!” Thus the greatest fear of the USian Ruling Class has always been that Communism (or some other form of socialism) would prevail here – a perfect fit with the purposes and principles of “we the people” as elicited by the Preamble and the Constitution itself. But in the Skinner Box United States, monitored as it is by total surveillance, all such potential is obliterated forever.

The limitless tyranny of the total-surveillance state is, perhaps ironically, the final result of the so-called “revolution” brought about by computers, which have given the global Ruling Class the godlike omnipotence it has consciously sought for at least two thousand years. The computer is thus irrefutable proof of the One Percent's defining purpose – the unspeakable lust for the zero-tolerance subjugation and total enslavement of all the rest of us, which it is now after 20 centuries of effort achieving via technologies against which there is no effective defense save re-adoption of seemingly obsolete machinery.  Meanwhile the popularization of the computer is the result of the most elaborate snake-oil scam in human history. It and its offshoots are peddled to the public as the apex of modern necessity even as society is methodically restructured to make all such gadgets essential – and damn those who cannot afford to keep up. Yet all the while, and from the very beginning, the profits so amassed are focused on perfecting the computer as the ultimate weapon of oppression. Nor could this story have ended in any other way; the computer as we know it grew not from humanitarian objectives but from the profiteering instincts of the capitalists  and the deadly necessities of modern warfare.  Indeed the computer and the manner in which it was thrust upon us is an object lesson in pure capitalism – the moral imbecility of infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue, and therefore the closest approximation to absolute Evil our species has yet evoked. The computer, given its vital role in creation of the global slave state, is perhaps capitalism's most definitive product. It is surely capitalism's most pivotal tool. For without the computer, the Ruling Class would never have been able to shrink all human society to a Skinner Box, with ourselves reduced to nothing more than laboratory rats in the One Percent's frantic, apocalypse-driven quest for wealth and power.

LB/13-14 July 2013

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“Human Rights Not Corporate Rights”/“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable”: another of my hitherto unpublished Occupy Tacoma images, as relevant now as when it was new. (The more conventionally journalistic pictures were published by Reader Supported News as the story developed in 2011 and 2012.) Pentax MX, 100mm SMC Pentax f/2.8, Fujicolor 800, exposure data not recorded; posterization by Gimp Image Editor. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2013.

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(Note: Apparently when I boasted last week of feeling too healthy to work, I called down the wrath of the gods. That very night I was smitten by a nasty bug, which kept me bedridden six days and for which I am still taking antibiotics.) 

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SOMETIMES WHEN I write a comment for some other website, the result is so relevant I have no doubt it should be included here. Far more infrequent is the comment that expands into its own Outside Agitator's Notebook essay, and the comment that does so in such a way it suggests its own illustration from my stock photo files is downright rare. But that is what happened when I involved myself in a discussion about capitalism that was sparked by Charles Pierce's most recent report on how the breathtakingly outspoken but tragically ineffectual Sen. Elizabeth Warren is living up to her poignantly defiant post-election pledge,  “I won't just be your senator, I'll be your champion.” Pierce's piece,  titled “Senator Warren Won't Be Taking Your BS,” was picked up by Reader Supported News from Esquire magazine on 5 July, and is well worth reading, not the least for its combative joy. But as I was quick to point out in the subsequent discussion – though I said it there in far more gentle terms – anyone who still truly believes capitalism can be reformed is either in stubborn denial of the past 80 years of USian history or is suffering from clinical dementia.

In this context, Sen. Warren's heroic efforts – and they are indeed so heroic, some of us who remember the fates of Sen Paul Wellstone and Sen. Robert Kennedy have already begun to fear for her life – are a morality play, (yet another) teachable moment in the nature of capitalism. It is capitalism, remember, that seeks its ultimate fulfillment via fascism and Nazism: think not just of Hitler and Mussolini, whom Wall Street financed into power, but of the imperial USian puppets Francisco Franco, Fulgencio Batista, Anastasio Somoza Debayle and Augusto Pinochet, not to mention Ngo Dinh Diem and the Shah of Iran. Now, today, it is capitalism matured into fascism that, albeit without the strutting dictators, has been elevated into the ruling ideology of the United States by the Mein Kampf equivalents written by Ayn Rand. (“Mein kampf” means “my struggle,” which beneath its specific historical identity is nevertheless the same theme of übermenschen versus üntermenschen that Rand later spelled out in her own tedious prose.) And now in its strident opposition to Sen. Warren's humanitarian courage, it is the Randite brand of capitalism-cum-fascism that is revealing itself by its ever-more-brazen embrace of the traditional fascist paradigm. Nothing more need be said about a federal policy that – as if to punish any youth of the 99 Percent who dares aspire toward a college education – deliberately condemns entire generations to choose between lifetimes of indentured servitude or “voluntary” service to the empire in its cannon-fodder legions.

Hence when a reasonably articulate poster on the Charles Pierce thread wrote of “peaceful protest” as a means of forcing capitalism to “respond to the 'priorities of the people,'” I replied with what to me is the most painfully obvious lesson of all USian history: that capitalism will never “respond to the 'priorities of the people.'” Why? Because capitalism, by definition, responds only to the priorities of the One Percent to produce more wealth at maximum profit – which invariably means maximum wretchedness imposed on the 99 Percent. Thus the only way to achieve the "priorities of the people" is to abolish capitalism. Which (necessarily revolutionary) step the USian 99 Percent is too viciously oppressed and fearfully bigoted and greedily self-absorbed by trinket materialism to ever dare take, peacefully or otherwise. Forget Occupy; stop fantasizing about progressive resistance movements that will never again be allowed to develop beyond the political equivalent of embryos, their partial-birth abortions the precise fulfillment of the domestic Gestapo purpose of the USian total surveillance state. Note instead the obvious examples of the South and the flyover midlands. Observe how so many 99 Percent USians cut their own throats economically by habitually voting for reactionary politicians and causes. And note too how the same trends have metastasized far beyond their signature domains.

The busy Pacific Northwest seaport city of Tacoma, Washington provides an especially repugnant example. I have lived here twice, the first time from 1978 through 1982, the second time since 2004, and I will no doubt die here. Though I have harped long and bitterly on the manner in which an overwhelming majority of Tacoma and Tacoma-area voters were persuaded by the meme “transit is welfare” to destroy their own local public transport system, it is a story that demands far more widespread notoriety than ever I can provide. The destruction was inflicted via two elections, the first in 2011, the second in 2012. The earlier election resulted in a 55-45 landslide defeat for pro-transit forces. It should have taught transit advocates the alleged pro-transit majority within the city of Tacoma is too Ayn-Rand hateful toward public-transport users to get off its socioeconomically bigoted arse and vote to sustain a service desperately needed by local lower-income people. Nor is this condemnation unfair; voting in Washington state takes only the physical effort required to mail in a ballot, and the class and racial conflicts inherent in the election were made obvious from the beginning of the 2011 campaign. But transit advocates remained blind to the realities underlying the defeat – a textbook example of how suppression of the historical truth of class-struggle cripples accurate analysis. Hence they merely hoped for the best in 2012, persisting in their refusal to acknowledge the bipartisan magnitude of local hostility toward lowest-income peoples – never mind the huge irony that most of the anti-transit voters are themselves only a little better off. While the second outcome seemed misleadingly close – in the unofficial results available to me on 25 November 2012, the anti-transit majority was only 695 votes – an additional 15,400 so-called “under-votes” indicate the real anti-transit majority is much larger. (Under-votes are otherwise filled-out ballots cast by people too disdainful of transit and transit users to mark a preference on the save-transit measure.) Not only do the under-votes echo the ruinously low turnout in the February 2011 results; for that very reason they seem to provide an accurate yardstick for measuring the true magnitude of anti-transit sentiment. That this is a valid hypothesis is substantiated by (A), the entire Seattle-Tacoma region's 44-year anti-transit history (at least seven of at least nine proposals rejected since 1968, a result documentably linked to xenophobia and bigotry), and (B), by various statements made by the voters themselves, typically to the effect “I won't vote against the poor, but I don't believe in coddling those people with welfare either.” Thus the anti-transit vote becomes a microcosm of the class hatreds that now characterize the USian political macrocosm. It is also probably the national unveiling of the newest and perhaps most vicious form of gentrification the Randite forces have yet conceived.

I have been told the local transit authority used the approximately the same reasoning about the significance of the unprecedented number of under-votes when it made its own determination that further electoral efforts are pointless. In other words – particularly given the region's anti-transit history (which, by the way, proves its haughty claims to environmental enlightenment are rank hypocrisy if not Big Lies) – there is no antidote to the class-warfare poisons stirred up by the “transit is welfare” meme. Despite the hardships characteristic of the (permanent) oppressiveness of the USian economy and the increasingly zero-tolerance totalitarianism of the total-surveillance state the Ayn Rand fascists have imposed for their own protection, the USian masses remain hopelessly reactionary. They continue to identify with the oppressor, imagining that with but a little good luck, they too can be magically elevated into the One Percent aristocracy, never mind even the mainstream propaganda media now admits entry to such circles is by heredity only. Thus – ultimately because its Working Class refuses to recognize itself as such – Tacoma and its environs have already become notorious for their lack of adequate public transport. Indeed their self-inflicted shortcomings are the worst in all the comparably urbanized locales of the United States – and therefore they are the worst in the entire industrial world. If long-range projections are correct, the area will within a few more years have no local transit at all. When that happens, tens of thousands of women, men and children will be forced to move elsewhere. The dispossessed will include students, low-wage workers, elderly and disabled people, any others who cannot afford the skyrocketing costs of automobiles and are not physically strong enough to ride bikes nor desperate enough to risk their lives pedaling amongst road-raging motorists already infamous for their deadly hatred of bicyclists. Which is – or so I strongly suspect – precisely the compulsory exodus the local Ruling Class intends.

Originally I intended to end this piece here, but then another poster on the Charles Pierce/Sen. Warren thread supposed I was too young to remember when the capitalists – terrified into a temporary false-humanitarianism by the Soviet Union and the socialist revolutions it represented and fostered even amidst its own huge failures – made sure “life was affordable.” Yes, I replied, I remembered that era very well, never mind the affordability was shared only by those who were male, heterosexual, Caucasian and/or not residents of some urban ghetto, rural shantytown, backwoods shack or First Nations reservation. Indeed, born in 1940 as I was, I lived at the apex of the so-called "American" Dream – the irony quotes demanded by the fact the Dream never much extended beyond the USian borders. Thus, thanks largely to my father, I was also educated in economic reality, which means I was taught to recognize capitalism as infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue (and therefore the closest approximation of Absolute Evil our species has yet evoked). I also learned to see the Dream for what it was: a capitalist Big Lie, the modern equivalent of the politically savvy Roman emperors' panem et circenses. Like the free bread and the spectacular events in the Coliseum and its myriad smaller-city counterparts, the Dream and its sequel the New Deal was intended only to opiate enough of the masses long enough to ensure the permanent brain-death of their revolutionary instincts. That's why – once the One Percenters had taken back all the power they lost during the halcyon years of Communism and socialism – the New Deal and the Dream itself were terminated forever, as was the so-called "American" experiment in constitutional governance. Now, with the capitalists once again free to be their innately savage Ayn Rand selves, it's back to business as usual: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for all the rest of us.

LB/6 July 2013

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