Loren Bliss: Dispatches from Dystopia

Here we see the aftermath of an eviction, one of the innumerable ways governments in the United States serve the nation's increasingly merciless capitalist masters, in this instance by the forcible ouster of a formerly middle-class woman too old to be exploitable for maximum profit – that is, too elderly to be allowed another job in the capitalist economy, but probably a decade too young for the meager refuge provided by Social Security. After government goons forced the woman out of her apartment, they piled all her possessions in the building's side yard. The date of the eviction, 22 November 2013, was the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who had sought to make the U.S. a land in which poverty and its consequences were afflictions of the past. Top: scavengers, themselves desperately poor, began gathering within hours. Bottom: as it looked the next morning, after people swarmed all night to snatch away anything of value. Fujicolor 800, Pentax MX, Tokina 70mm-210mm f/4, exposures not recorded. Photographs by Loren Bliss copyright 2013.

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AS IF TO CELEBRATE the coup of 22 November 1963 – President John Fitzgerald Kennedy gunned down in Dallas, the United States set on the road to becoming the most omnipotently powerful and wantonly murderous empire in recorded history – the enforcers of capitalist governance in the seaport city of Tacoma chose the assassination's 50th anniversary to evict an elderly woman from a ramshackle apartment building. The irony is almost too perfect: the ruination of a human life on the date the man who increased Social Security stipends by 20 percent  and fought to end economic atrocities was slain by those One Percent aristocrats who would ruin us all – exactly as their sons and grandsons are doing today.

In this context it is not inappropriate to describe the personal horror inflicted by eviction, a toxic muddle of terror, shame, fury and woe, as an emotional microcosm of the horror inflicted on an entire nation by the assassination itself. Either is impossible to know unless you have experienced it firsthand. Both are terminal in the sense that whether you realize it or not, life as you knew it has ended forever.

In an eviction, whatever material or psychological assets remained in your life are ripped away as if by volcano or earthquake or tornado or bombing. It is, as I know too well, the same when you are victimized by fire. Everything you thought defined you as you, everything that sustained your identity, is destroyed without mercy, exactly as suggested by the above photographs. The devastation is total. Though post-traumatic recovery is possible, the worst-in-the-industrial-world economic viciousness of today's USian Empire guarantees your healing will painfully slow – if indeed it is allowed at all.

I do not know the evicted woman's name. I saw her only once. She was scurrying back and forth around her piled possessions as if she could protect them from the inevitable scavengers and thieves. She was alone, a slender and bespectacled woman in a long black wool winter coat that was trimmed with fur. It was a fine coat, something a self-assured professional might have worn to work. But now its wearer moved with the same bewilderment and terror I had once seen displayed by a little gray vole who darted in and out of my rural Washington cabin after I had discarded and burned an old armchair and unknowingly destroyed her nest and killed her brood of tiny young, an error for which after 18 years I yet grieve, an example of the harm we humans do even without ill intentions.

Journalistic instinct, powerfully alive despite decades of involuntary retirement, demanded I speak with the woman and photograph her with her belongings. Human instinct, equally powerful, restrained me from intruding on her wretchedness. But my day was already allotted to private errands via public transport, and the arrival of a city bus rescued me from the angst of indecision. Now, because I never talked with her, I know her only by the many books she was forced to abandon, one of which was a publication of the Princeton Science Library, The Miner's Canary: Understanding the Mysteries of Extinction, written by Niles Eldredge. Yet who, I wondered, would understand the mysteries of this woman's hopes and dreams? Who would unriddle the destruction inflicted on her by capitalism? Who would care enough to chronicle her fate?

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The victimization inflicted by assassins is usually as immediate as the victimization inflicted by an eviction. Whenever the assassins' purpose is the death of liberty and the imposition of tyranny, we the people are the ultimate victims. In Chile, for example, Augusto Pinochet's USian-trained and funded agents began torturing and murdering terrified mothers, fathers and children literally minutes after the death of the nation's democratically elected president, Salvador Allende.

But here in the USian homeland, where the capitalist masters of the world have proven themselves the most diabolically cunning tyrants in human history, they use a more gradual approach.

After they murdered President Kennedy, they liquidated all the other influential men for whom democracy was more than a convenient Big Lie. They killed Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. and Sen. Robert Kennedy. Then the killers stole our freedom gradually and by stealth, taking it piece-by-piece in the duplicitous and tragically accurate belief we were too stupid to notice and too cowardly to resist. The result is the malevolence that oppresses us today,  a perfect example of which is the eviction that was imposed on the old woman in Tacoma.

This is not, of course, what the government tells us. But any 99 Percenter who still doubts it is essentially the true story of what has been done to us needs only read JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, a genuinely pivotal work by James W. Douglass (Maryknoll: 2008). The antithesis of conspiranoid dreck, its text is an epic of historical analysis.  It details the long slow death of democratic process that culminated in the most destructive Big Lie ever fed the now hopelessly dumbed-down U.S. electorate: “change we can believe in” – as if, after 22 November 1963 and the events it facilitated, there might ever again be a new American Dream.

And now we are learning the dream is dead beyond resurrection. Now we are awakening to the fact that under capitalism there will never be an end to joblessness and inescapable debt-slavery and foreclosure and eviction and homelessness and death by untreated sickness and murder by government-inflicted starvation and everywhere the ruins of hope such as were left in the wake of this morning's ironically celebratory eviction.

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Because ammunition is expensive and shooting-related paperwork is a pain in the ass, the official goons who carry out evictions typically bang on your door before first light. They know there is much less likelihood you will fight when you are rousted from slumber and assaulted immediately thereafter. The goons flash their badges and force you out of your home, sometimes at gunpoint, often still in your pajamas or nightgown. Then they pile your cherished belongings helter-skelter in the yard, and if they are feeling especially sadistic, which frequently they are, they make sure your furniture grinds your best clothes into the dirt and food spills onto your books and papers.

Next they warn you that if you try to re-enter the premises, you will be jailed for criminal trespass, which used to be mostly a misdemeanor but now in these times of ever-worsening poverty is vindictively re-criminalized as a felony to help guarantee the masters of for-profit prisons an endless supply of slaves. Sometimes you're given eight or 12 or 24 hours to clear your property off the landlord's yard, after which everything you couldn't move is his. Finally you are alone and in bottomless shock.

The unthinkable is now real. You are homeless. Your entire consciousness is fear. And now in addition to the emotional horror, there is also the physical horror of life in the jungle of the streets – the total negation of everything you ever achieved or were. Now your only reality is the absolute certainty you will be victimized by everyone stronger than you are, that you will be raped if you are a woman however plain or man of less than obviously formidable strength and violence. You are no longer considered a person. Unless you have a damn good lawyer – and what homeless person can afford that – you are no longer allowed any of the rights and privileges of personhood whether individual or corporate. Now you are merely one of The Homeless, which means that under the Ayn Rand credo that now rules the USian Empire, the very best you can expect from your fellow humans is derision, rejection, contempt and hatred if you are very lucky, and savage beatings – especially by the teenage children of the rich – if you are not.

As it is done unto the least of us, so it is done unto us all – equally true whether said by Jesus or Marx, no matter in terms biblical or dialectic. But capitalism by its elevation of infinite greed to maximum virtue consciously rejects every moral and ethical precept our species ever dared assert. And because the capitalists are ever more in need of protection from their victims, soon they bribe the politicians into capitalist governance, which is absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation for all the rest of us. Such is our lot 50 years after the murder of President Kennedy, the assassination that killed both a man and a nation, hexed it and vexed it into the realm that hurls an old woman out into the merciless cold and the deadly damp of the zero-tolerance late November Pacific Northwest coastal streets.

LB/24 November 2013

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Long ago I tried to make a poem about what fall feels like deep in the back country of the northernmost county in western Washington state. But I soon doubted any words of mine could ever convey the quietly poignant resonance of a land where the Goddess remains so untrammeled and powerful even skeptics find it difficult to deny her presence. For despite the encroachments of patriarchy, here she yet reigns supreme, and whatever you might call her – Gaea, Mother Nature, Rhiannon, the Morrigan, Lada or any of the countless other names by which she has been invoked since the advent of our species (or whether you dismiss her as nothing more than delusion) – she is what she has always been, the cosmos and all its Yin and Yang potential, which in the Pacific Northwest is most often taken as synonymous with the natural environment: the densely forested mountains that run down to the emerald ocean; the ocean itself and the inland waters whether vast or small; the stately evergreens that sometimes, as if to challenge our notions of reality, inexplicably shimmer into ultraviolet; the long slow blue midsummer dusk that is the color of sensuality and revelation; the yellow moon of late spring and early autumn, pumpkin round and indescribably pregnant, humming softly as she rises above the jagged horizon; the northern lights that crackle and hiss like radio static, writhing like ghostly serpents or flaring across the heavens, ephemeral tapestries unfurled as if by some phantom weaver; the lethal magnificence of storms; the deadly energies of earthquake and volcano; that which we most love and that which we most fear. She is all this and more, every creature living or dead; all things inanimate; macrocosm and microcosm; matter and nothingness. To me the writer, she is the Pale Dancer whose flesh is lunar mist and whose anthems are the sound of wind on harp strings or of wind chimes when the air is without motion. To me the photographer, she is the ever-changing light and all its choreographies of shadow. But most of all and even in the spiritual dead-zones of the cities, she is the season of the turning leaves, vine-maple red and big-leaf-maple yellow and cottonwood orange ironically bright against the midnight-graveyard green of the conifers, and each year I cannot but wonder if sometime in the future she will kill me with her dark and dreadful loveliness. Fujicolor 800, Pentax MX, Sigma 35-70mm f/4 at 70mm, exposure f/5.6 at 1/250th. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2013. (Click on image to view it full size.)

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MOTHERHOOD IS THE one human quality that knows no borders. It has neither racial nor political identity. Its language is so wordlessly transcendent it is truly universal – which gives a new and profoundly deeper meaning to the notion of an original human Mother Tongue. Indeed, if matriarchy was the first and most enduring social construct of our species – and I can no longer doubt it – surely in the common exaltation of motherhood (and ultimately therefore the honoring of femaleness whether fecund or not), was the original solidarity that enabled our species' survival.

I write these words astounded it has taken me nearly 74 years of life to learn this lesson that is daily taught us by women everywhere. It is a lesson that now, after I have finally learned it, seems so utterly obvious I can only rail at my apparent stupidity. Observe any gathering of women with children – especially one in which the women are of diverse nationalities or castes or races – and almost invariably you will witness how the common processes of motherhood quickly, often literally within minutes, overcome all those barriers the males of our species find insurmountable. It is as obvious as sunrise: for women with children – and I have seen it more times than I can count – there is almost invariably an organic unity of purpose so powerful its participants need not consciously acknowledge it, a momentary state of harmony and peace so deeply instinctive it seemingly has no peer in human experience.

Oddly enough, I am not sure when I first began observing this phenomenon. Probably it was during my childhood, no doubt after the savage dysfunction that shattered my family during my fifth year prompted me to begin watchfully comparing my own notably abnormal circumstances as an unwanted child to the seemingly normal circumstances of other obviously beloved children. But that seems almost too glib, for on a deeper level it often feels as if I have always recognized the solidarity of motherhood as the sole human constant, the very quality of soul my own birthmother so violently rejected, never mind that for nearly all other women it is everywhere and every-when an ultimate form of immediate sisterhood.

Even so, for most of my life what I now think of as the Motherhood International was scarcely more than part of the background, something I noticed in the same way I might notice the advent of autumnal color or the sudden presence of a neighbor's handsome new dog, significant enough to prompt a momentary sharpening of focus but without any associated analysis. But then a couple of years ago, as part of my ongoing effort to find logical support for my growing conviction that patriarchy is a fatal mistake and confirmation for my near-lifetime suspicion that females are generally better people than males, I began closely observing women and how they interact with one another. Of course I have always observed women, but because I am a heterosexual male, most of my years of observation were beclouded by lust and lustful purpose, so it was not until I achieved the sexual neutrality of old age I was able to see beyond the (exquisitely beautiful) intellectual and physical sensualities of even the most allegedly “plain” women to the deeper implications of femaleness itself.

Here of course is one great advantage of the observational skills I acquired as a journalist and photographer. But the irony of those talents is the extent to which their application – mostly in official functions such as the enactment of legislation or the formal interviews essential to biographical reportage or investigative work – radically limited what I could watch and therefore might see. A woman in a forcefully patriarchal society – which the United States most assuredly is – must necessarily adopt the defining male qualities of aggression and ruthlessness if she is to achieve and maintain any sort of power or influence. Hence I spent most of my professional life observing women trying to function within the confines of a nation that is reduced to moral imbecility (if not manifest evil) by its commitment to capitalism – infinite greed elevated to ultimate virtue – and to capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for everyone else. What I typically saw was therefore scarcely representative of womanhood per se.

My first clear look at what might obtain beyond the confines of patriarchy was in the context of the old Counterculture. Though mainstream-media employment severely limited my ability to give myself wholly over to la vie boheme, I nevertheless managed several sanity-preserving interludes away from the world of deadlines and tweed-sportcoat conformity. Typically but not always these de facto vacations were in association with the alternative press. Hence I was able to observe a goodly number of women's collectives, which were an organic and influential faction within the Countercultural rebellion, particularly in the rural Pacific Northwest. Those with which I came in more than merely superficial contact all seemed possessed of a unity far more resilient than anything men alone or even men and women together were able to achieve.

But the real eye-opener came after my downfall, when the 1983 housefire destroyed all my life's work and the definitively USian, no-jobs-for-crazies odium of the subsequent clinical depression banished me forever from any sort of journalism save part-time or freelance work. Thus reduced to inescapable poverty, I spent (and spend) a disproportionate amount of time in welfare offices and other such realms of ruined lives, impossibly straited circumstances and irremediable dispossession. And there for the first time I witnessed how the very realities that had us men sitting as far apart from one another as possible and invariably in sullenly silent, utterly alienated mortification seemed to somehow free the women from the societal restraints that might otherwise have kept them divided. I saw it repeatedly: how women of diverse races and nationalities and even castes (many of them by their clothing obviously the newly impoverished victims of capitalism's most recent savageries), somehow as if by magic set aside their differences enough to freely converse, often with obvious empathy for one another, as each woman awaited the elaboration of whatever bad news had summoned her to Misery Central, the harshly lit, heartlessly managed offices of the Washington Department of Social and Health Services. And whenever these women were accompanied by their children, the sisterhood of motherhood – race and caste and nationality be damned – became overwhelmingly apparent in mere minutes.

But that beautiful and compelling solidarity of mothers was not just a phenomenon of the welfare office. I witness it time and again on public transport. First and long ago and before I realized what I was watching, I had seen it on the Knoxville Transit Lines and Grand Rapids Coach Company buses of my 1950s youth, women helping other women with children regardless of race or apparent social status. I had seen it on the subways of Manhattan and Brooklyn and on the Hudson Tubes and other rail transport in New Jersey during the 1960s and again during the 1980s, and in all probability had seen it as a child on the trains and trolleys I rode with my parents in New York and lesser cities during the first years of this lifetime. Now I see it regularly on crowded Tacoma buses: women who are total strangers to one another, as in “here I can hold your baby while you fold up that stroller,” a well-dressed young black woman helping a shabbily dressed young white woman, the black woman cooing to the white child as the white woman fights the perambulator down and under the seat as required by transit regulations, then the black woman handing the white child back to the white mother and the two women now talking about babies and children as easily as if they were sisters. I have seen as many as four young women – all strangers to one another, two white, one Asian, one black, the Asian and one of the whites barely able to speak English – collaborate to hold a tiny baby and find a fallen-off perambulator part to solve a problem that became obvious when the big pram which was fully laden with groceries and baby gear collapsed just after the mother had lifted her baby out. The four women worked together as if they had been teammates all their lives and within minutes they had repaired the pram, and the Motherhood International had triumphed once again.

That I can tell this story is the beauty of regularly riding mass transit. It enables you to witness every extreme of human behavior, from criminal selfishness to selfless humanitarianism. In this sense it's the same in Manhattan, where public transport is a civil right, as it is in Tacoma, where the Ayn-Rand-minded electorate publicly denounces transit users as parasites, damns mass transit itself as welfare and is maliciously downsizing an already inadequate bus system in the hope of socioeconomically cleansing the area of all the lower-income peoples who make up more than half of its population but vote in disproportionately small numbers because they believe, mostly correctly, that USian elections will make no meaningful differences in their lives. Local politics aside, there is probably no better or more thought-provoking sociological vantage point than a city bus, trolley or subway car, especially for a journalist whose inclinations run toward social commentary. And it was on a Tacoma bus just yesterday again watching with awe the international sisterhood of motherhood it came to me: first that motherhood has no borders, next that only the solidarity of motherhood is powerful enough to save our species from self-extermination.

LB/17 November 2013

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