Loren Bliss: Dispatches from Dystopia

Relishing the morning sunlight, Tacoma, 2011. Fujicolor 800 in Leica M4 w/135mm f/4 Elmarit, no exposure data.  Desaturating the image -- rendering it in black-and-white --   enhances its timelessness. Photo by Loren Bliss copyright 2015.   

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PERHAPS THE BITTEREST lesson of old age is that – contrary to the mercenary lies of the USian psychology business (which revealed its true moral imbecility by its anything-for-profit service to the empire's torture-masters)  – the toxins of familial dysfunction never die.

Though I had assumed for nearly a decade I had finally resolved my conflicting emotions about my father – on the one hand his often contemptuous, sometimes hateful and occasionally downright sadistic behavior toward his children; on the other hand his admirable political courage, socioeconomic insight and Mensa-caliber erudition – the newly disclosed terminal illness of my oldest male half-sibling summoned all that presumably buried angst from its grave and sent it rampaging like some vengeful zombie through the (again) suddenly vulnerable structures of my selfhood and identity.

The immediate result was the intellectual paralysis that delayed this blog, for which – particularly since I see how many people checked in Monday looking for new work – my apology. But it is impossible for me to write the sort of material I normally post here when I am suddenly confronted with the realization that, as I said on the comment thread of Rebecca Solnit's superb essay on post-Katrina New Orleans,  Ms. Solnit is what I think of as a “real writer,” in comparison to which I am scarcely more than a presumptuous hack, and it would be dishonest of me not to admit I envy her talent. (Emphasis added.)

What I was actually thinking was infinitely more self-damning.As I admitted to a relative in a letter discussing the long-ago origins of the animosity between the half-sibling and me, whenever (economic or professional) circumstances compel me to define myself as a writer or an editor, it's always accompanied by an inner voice...shouting “Phony. You can't be a writer; you're a dyslexic.” That voice – obvious to the recipient of the letter but needful of clarification here – was the echo of a familial chorus of belittlement in which the half-sibling was one of the lead singers. But its choirmaster was my father, whose favorite pejorative for me until I was 11 or 12 years old was “goon boy.”

It was that same voice that prompted my desperate effort to escape the curse of dyslexia  by trying, from my mid-20s through my mid-30s, to abandon newspaper reporting for a seemingly dyslexia-proof career in photojournalism. But the barriers – despite photo credits that included Newsweek and Paris Match – eventually proved insurmountable. The first of these was Moron Nation's visual illiteracy, which almost invariably prompts employers and patrons to chose photographers on the basis of personality rather than talent or vision, and which – because I never learned how to be “a fun guy” – usually excluded me from serious consideration. At the same time there was the USian Empire's post-World War II taboo against social-documentary photography – the resultant censorship of any images that focus on the savagery of capitalism or on the deeper aspects of the resistance thereto. Then there was the cosmic finale of the 1983 fire, which destroyed not only my life's work – all my photographic prints (save the few in my working portfolio) and probably 98 percent of my 31 years' production of negatives and transparencies. Because of the post-traumatic clinical depression that followed – or more specifically because of Moron Nation's thoroughly documented loathing  of anyone who is even temporarily disabled – the fire ended forever any possibility I would ever again work as anything other than a (mostly unemployed) freelancer.

A further complication, which had actually become apparent seven years before the fire, was my inability to work outside specific environments, as for example my truly abject failure as a suburban newspaper photographer c. 1976-1977. I failed because, in the USian suburbs, which are to me the personification of Moron Nation, I could almost never find anything with which I could empathize. This meant I seldom found, apart from dogs and children, subjects I could photograph effectively. My one memorable image from that entire dismal period was a published but long-lost picture of workers in a ramshackle (and therefore visually intriguing) machine shop.

The real problem, of course, was that I was congenitally unable to come up with the Disneyland-type imagery my employers preferred. I had lived a big part of my teens in a suburb and knew its malevolent conformity and its enabling hypocrisies entirely too well. Hence I recognized the suburbs not just as a cultural, intellectual and emotional wasteland but as a behavioral sink – its superficial serenity yet another of capitalism's Big Lies – which means I knew the suburbanites themselves to be debt-slaves feigning happiness merely to alleviate the bottomless desperation of their hopelessly empty lives.

While that failure was meaningless in Manhattan, where my primary employer looked upon me as a latter-day Jacob Riis, potential employers  outside the City regarded it as definitively terminal. Hence in the job market west of the Hudson River, it nullified my three major photographic successes: the three years I was the social documentary photographer for Beth Israel Hospital's free-clinic program (photographing the peoples and neighborhoods served thereby); my on-the-spot coverage of the 1967 Tompkins Park (Police) Riot (which got my work into Newsweek, Paris Match and The New York Times); and my brief but productive tenure (1974-1976) as the founding photographer of The Seattle Sun, an alternative weekly organized and staffed by seasoned pros that as a consequence was second only to the old pre-Murdoch Village Voice in quality.

Visually The Sun was far superior to The Voice – Fred McDarrah was not that great a lensman – but my strip-away-the-camouflage imagery was lost on xenophobic Seattleites, who regarded Ansel Adams as the photographic equivalent of Jesus Christ and disdained human-condition photography  as an unconscionable waste of film. In a sense my career was therefore dead even before the fire.

Which – albeit indirectly – is precisely what made the fire so emotionally ruinous.

The photographic project on which I had worked the longest, 24 years in 1983, had evolved into a book, its working title “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer.” Though the work began as a 1959 journal entry describing an idea for a sociology paper, by the mid-1960s it had become an extended photo-essay, with the accompanying text birthed by the scholarship mandated by my need to understand what I was seeing and recording on film. Backboned by approximately 5,000 pictures – among them at least 50 of my iconographic “sandwiches”  (photographic collages made by printing two or three negatives simultaneously) – the carefully footnoted text argued that the untold (and perhaps deliberately suppressed) story of the Counterculture was its rebellion against patriarchy. Its main disclosures are summarized in a post-fire memoir here (for which I apologize because it so desperately needs editing by a real editor, someone whose competence far exceeds my own).

Thirty-one years earlier, when former Grove Press Editor-in-Chief Cicely Nichols confirmed the original “Dancer” was publishable and said she believed it would be one of the most influential books of the 20th Century, I immediately recognized it as the salvation of my career. And when Cicely offered to edit the text and mother it to publication, I not only accepted her offer, I did so with an intensity of job-related ecstasy I have never felt before or since. It was definitely what the comics would describe as a “WHEW!” moment. But its skyrocketing emotional uplift was the cruelest, most injurious prelude possible to the psychological nosedive inflicted by the fire.

The plan was that Cicely, a longtime friend, would unscramble the dyslexic dysfunction that had grounded my 50,000-word rough draft of “Dancer” on a reef of organizational problems, and I would edit the photography to eliminate all but the very best images, probably 100 at the most. Then as soon as I got my next paycheck from the trade journal for which I was working, I'd arrange to have the pictures, the manuscript, its accompanying research notes and all the rest of my files shipped to Manhattan from where I had stored them in Washington state. In my mind I was dancing with joy – something I was entirely too grotesquely clumsy to have ever done in real life. But on 1 September 1983, literally at the same moment Cicely and I were meeting to finalize our working agreement – 7:30 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time, 4:30 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time – came the fire. “Dancer” was dead. So was my career, not just in photography, but in the low-level, minimum-talent-required jobs in word journalism by which I had so often financed my photographic efforts.

Now, 32 years later, I still sometimes photograph, though – as I must now confess – I am able to do so effectively only when the post-fire terror of another such loss abates to the point I can pick up a camera and view the world through it without being visually hamstrung by the associated fears. Sometimes the result is actually a halfway decent piece of work, like the image above and some of the other pictures I have made  and continue making of my neighbors here in this senior housing complex.

One of the corporate names by which this dwelling-place is known includes the word “Commencement,” to which my infinitely cynical mind invariably adds the never-to-be-spoken-aloud tagline, “your first step toward the grave.”

But none of that really matters simply because at my age – 75 years old last March – there are no second chances. Yet I see now, in the bitter clarity of these reanimated familial hostilities, how so much of OAN's textual content was indeed nothing more than a desperate grasping at an imaginary second chance that would never materialize simply because, as I already said, there is no such thing, not the least because at my age and with my personal and political history, any notion of a second chance was never more than grandiosity, presumption and denial. More than anything else I was (obviously) still seeking to win the approval of my long-dead father – and perhaps the half-sibling as well.

Maybe now, in the renewed hope of having at last settled this matter, I will find some art-for-art's-sake way of rediscovering the pleasure and passion and usefulness I found in photography before the fire took it all away from me,. Perhaps my new digital single-lens-reflex, which came to me in affordable form only through one of those startling combinations of coincidences we know as synchronicity, is a genuinely positive omen. Perhaps fate is not setting me up for yet another encounter with the agony of loss.

And perhaps too my eldest half-sibling, a three-times Pulitzer nominee whom I fear was driven from journalism by our father's absurd but maliciously intended and therefore profoundly hurtful criticism of his work, will accept my turning away from OAN's previous format as a final conciliatory gesture. For it indeed marks my painful (but not begrudging) acceptance of my half-sibling's judgment of my own reportorial and writing skills: that they are – just as I so vividly saw when I compared my work to Rebecca Solnit's – mediocre at best. (Why not begrudging? Because, as I should have found the strength to say to him decades ago, any notion the writhing-spaghetti intellect of a dyslexic can produce “real writing” is patently absurd, our father's one slyly malignant claim to the contrary not withstanding – a truth I know perhaps better than anything else in this life.)

Until now my primary response to the self-hatred that is the inevitable and inevitably self-perpetuating consequence of dyslexia has been identical to my response to the horrors of my childhood: most of the time I lock them all away in a mental strong-box which I then hide in the most inaccessible corner of my alleged consciousness. The problem is that whenever I do this, I eventually lapse into self-deception, imagining myself to be normal rather than genetically defective and therefore capable of all sorts of impossible feats including being a “real writer” – a compensatory lie all the more easy to fabricate when (as had often been the case since the fire), there was not enough money for film and film-processing. No doubt the surprise entry of the digital SLR into my life, with its liberation from film and processing costs, is helping pull this pattern of self-deception into sharp focus.

Meanwhile I am left with the concurrent and no doubt final realization there is absolutely no escaping or even ameliorating the legacy of my childhood – a mother who so despised me she tried to murder me; a father whose early return from work saved my life but who nevertheless regarded my mother's toxic genes with such repugnance he soon afterward sought to abandon me in a state orphanage; maternal relatives who with but one exception thereafter regarded me as an unwelcome but legally unavoidable reminder of a socially embarrassing, potentially status-damaging and therefore wealth-jeopardizing incident that was never to be spoken of again; paternal relatives who were at best frigidly polite; a stepmother whose good intentions toward me were finally undermined by my father's relentless disparagement; four younger half-sisters who were subject to the same paternal conditioning (one of whom despises me, one of whom is indifferent and two with whom I am genuinely close); and the three older half-siblings, two male, one female, I did not meet or even know of until 1952, the children of my father's first wife.

The eldest of these was born a decade earlier than I and would become the primary role model of my adolescence, the man I so worshiped during my teenage years I sought to follow in his professional footsteps, the only male kindred for whom, even in adulthood, I ever truly dared feel love. I will mourn his passing, just as I have mourned the festering familial abscesses that so long ago drove us forever apart – conflicts neither my brother's fault nor mine and therefore eternally immune to such commonplace remedies as apology or forgiveness, unhealable wounds of enmity inflicted even beyond the grave by our father's everlasting malice.

LB/28-30 July 2015.

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BECAUSE THE CONSEQUENCES of U.S. aggression in Ukraine may well determine whether our species lives or dies, its most disturbing chapter thus far – the USian vassal-government's back-to-the-future renewal of Adolf Hitler's Nazi-Jihadi alliance  – leads this week's OAN though the story was broken on 7 July by Robert Parry via his Consortiumnews.com.

Astute readers will also note I added its link to last week's blog, replacing the earlier Ukraine report I had initially referenced. But I did not comment at any length on the U.S. puppet regime's resurrection of the Nazi-Jihadi alliance until Parry's newest disclosure was republished by Reader Supported News the next day:

Both the Wehrmacht and the SS had specifically Muslim units.

Moreover, the Mufti of Jerusalem – the Muslim equivalent of an archbishop or cardinal – was the prime recruiter for these units. The present-day politics of the Middle East cannot be understood without inclusion of this historical fact.

By forbidding the practice of Abrahamic religion (though not paganism or shamanism), Communist governments whether in Yugoslavia or the Soviet Union effectively outlawed the defining hatefulness of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Centuries of religious violence were thereby ended.

But the U.S., a de facto Christian Crusader-state (see Sharlett, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power), has always relied on religious hatreds to advance its schemes of global conquest.

Thus, in addition to capitalism's abject fear of economic democracy, U.S. hatred of Communism, socialism and intellectualism has always included primary religious motives. To be Christian, for example, is not just to "love your (Christian) neighbors," but to murderously hate everyone else.

Had the Soviet and Yugoslav governments lasted longer – say for perhaps another century – the religious warfare that now again characterizes Eastern Europe would have no doubt ended forever.

But the U.S., like Nazi Germany before it, could never abide such peacefulness.

 

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Greece as a Proving Ground for Militarization of U.S. Local Police

WRITING ABOUT THE recent, often tragic history of Greece, RSN's Steve Weissman touched, perhaps inadvertently, on an obscure but obvious connection  between the U.S.-organized military dictatorship that ruled Greece from 1967 through 1974 and the federally militarized local police who are killing and terrorizing U.S. residents today.

Back in the closing days of World War II, wrote Weissman, the British government of Winston Churchill moved brutally against the Greek Communists, who had led the resistance to German and Italian occupation. To oppose them, the Brits created Greek special forces...which pointedly recruited fascists who had dominated the Greek military and police ever since the 1930s...When the US declared its Truman Doctrine in 1947, Washington took on London’s imperial role in Greece and gave military backing to these same fascists...

In other words, the USian Empire – now that its capitalist overlords have reduced the U.S. Working Class to slave wages, perpetual unemployment and ever-worsening poverty – is now employing the same deliberately sadistic methods of control here in the homeland as it has hitherto employed in its overseas satrapies and vassal-states. Hence the skyrocketing incidence of killings by cops.  which, already at an all-time high, is beginning to disturb even the nominally pro-cop Right.  (Scroll down to “The Post report seems to suggest...”).

Nevertheless, the white-black divide on attitudes toward police brutality remain one of the best indices to the magnitude of U.S. white racism, however carefully closeted it might be.

An earlier but equally accurate index is the refusal by fully four-fifths of the white population to acknowledge the blatant racism  that characterized government policies toward the victims of Hurricane Katrina. (Scroll down to “As to the breadth and depth of white racism...”)

 

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Republicans Fear Trump's Outspoken Racism Is Too Revealing

WHEN RSN REPUBLISHED a Washington Post story reporting the Republican Party inner circle is worried Donald Trump's outspokenness is tarnishing their reputation, I could not resist the opportunity to point out that Trump was merely revealing the ideological truth the party usually hides behind a screen of code-words:

What is really embarrassing the Republican Party is that Trump is appealing to the same hatefully racist element in U.S. politics as Hitler appealed to in German politics.

This element in today's United States is huge and bottomlessly venomous – much larger and more malevolent than the Ruling Class dares publicly admit.

But if Trump wins the Republican nomination – and if the Teabagger grassroots retains control of the party apparatus, he surely will – the GOP will no longer be able to deny the fact it became the primary U.S. vessel of fascism during the 1920s and has remained so ever since.

Moreover, if Sanders manages to win the Democratic nomination, there is little question he will also take the presidency.

Candidate Trump's Teabaggers – the modern equivalent of Hitler's stormtroopers – would then almost certainly plunge the U.S. into a second civil war.

It is this – the (again) growing threat from the militant Right – that is finally awakening parts of the U.S. Left to the deadly danger implicit in forcible civilian disarmament – the same lesson that mobilized the Deacons for Defense at the height of the Civil Rights Movement.

 

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Charleston Sparks (Some) Acknowledgment of U.S. Racism

IF THE CHARLESTON atrocity prompts even a small segment of the white majority population in the United States to acknowledge its often-instinctive, culturally inbred racism, the deaths of the nine Charleston victims  will not be squandered, as so many other such deaths have been, by the nation's subsequent history.

Let us then say the names of the Charleston dead – Cynthia Marie Graham Hurd, Susie Jackson, Ethel Lee Lance, Depayne Middleton-Doctor, Clementa C. Pinckney, Tywanza Sanders, Daniel Simmons, Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, Myra Thompson – for it is by such roll-calls of the slain that we the living who did not personally know them when they themselves were alive might now sense our kinship with them, our late brotherhood and sisterhood implicit in the fact they like each of us each had their own experience of self and world that is now lost forever. Quoth John Donne: ...therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.

Meanwhile, the reality of U.S. racism remains painfully evident not just in the South, the region that is conveniently scapegoated for what in truth is a national phenomenon, but throughout the imperial homeland.

To those of us who regardless of our color know how to recognize it, it is especially obvious in the Pacific Northwest. For example, I cannot readily count the number of times during the past 33 years I have written of the white racism that underlies the maliciously inflicted and deliberately maintained wretchedness of mass transit in Pugetopolis, the colloquial name for the 5,872 square-mile (15,209 square kilometer) metropolitan area of nearly 4 million persons that's centered on the seaport cities of Seattle and Tacoma.

But I do know that – until the post-Charleston now – any such disclosure by any writer however accomplished was either suppressed or (if it somehow managed to get into print) was immediately and harshly denounced as untrue, never mind the obvious racism that repeatedly surfaced  during public debates over (usually unsuccessful) efforts to improve mass transit. (Scroll down to “In the Seattle Area, Racism Means Wretched Mass Transit.”)

Proportionally speaking – that is, in comparison to comparable metropolitan areas – Pugetopolis has the worst, most deliberately inadequate mass transit in the United States. Because the U.S. has the worst mass transit in the industrial world, this makes Pugetopolis mass transit the worst of the worst. Likewise, because the U.S. is the most outspokenly anti-mass-transit nation in the world, Pugetopolis is therefore the most anti-mass-transit (and anti-transit-user) realm on the entire planet. Only in Pugetopolis is mass transit openly defined as “welfare,”  a code-word that in the white racist vocabulary is merely a politically correct way of saying “used by niggers.”

But on 22 June, Knute Berger, a columnist for the Seattle on-line daily Crosscut, finally began chipping away at the taboo of silence that has prevented the region's mainstream media from acknowledging the 800-pound gorilla – or, more appropriately, the Ku Klux Klan klavern – that's right there in the Pugetopolis living room.

On 6 July, Crosscut Guest Columnist Christopher Eide took the process of acknowledgment a lot further  by asking, “What about NW's shortcomings on race.”

Then on 7 June, Politico swooped in from Washington D.C. to scoop the world on a blistering exposé of regional racism  the mainstream Pugetpolis press has deliberately suppressed for years – “Want to Meet America's Worst Racists? Come to the Pacific Northwest.”

Now reduced to playing catch-up, the next day Crosscut published Berger's much more detailed report on Northwest Front and its call for forcible racial cleansing of the entire Pacific Northwest: not just Washington state and Oregon, but also Montana (and maybe Alaska and Idaho as well).

Berger's 8 July piece was so thorough it prompted me to applaud via its comment thread:

Well done, Mr. Berger, with kudos to you, Christoper Eide (6 July) and Crosscut in general for at long last discarding the taboo against admission of Pacific Northwest racism. Now let's hope (1)-someone (besides me) has the journalistic courage to expose its direct connection to the wretched state of Pugetopolis mass transit, and (2)-that such journalistic bravery doesn't trigger an advertising boycott to kill Crosscut just as The Seattle Sun (1974-1982) and the original Seattle Magazine (1963-1970) were slain...

Given how the (hitherto-denied) racism of Pugetopolis has produced the transit crisis  that reveals the region's signature claim of environmental enlightenment to be nothing more than a particularly breathtaking brand of political hypocrisy, I cannot but wonder whether and to what extent unacknowledged racism is the hidden determinant of all U.S. environmental policy.

Meanwhile even Hillary Clinton now admits USian racism is a helluva lot more widespread than just “kooks and Klansmen.”

 

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Some Long Overdue Truth about Racism's Economic Origins

BRYAN STEVENSON HAS described during an interview with The Marshall Project  an historically accurate how-and-why narrative of racism's economic origins, linking it to both religion and class-struggle while simultaneously explaining its malevolent persistence.

Here from an on-line text of the interview are some of the highlights of Stevenson's analysis:

The whole narrative of white supremacy was created during the era of slavery. It was a necessary theory to make white Christian people feel comfortable with their ownership of other human beings. And we created a narrative of racial difference in this country to sustain slavery, and even people who didn’t own slaves bought into that narrative, including people in the North...

Lots of countries had slaves, but they were mostly societies with slaves. We became something different, we became a slave society. We created a narrative of racial difference to maintain slavery...so I don’t believe slavery ended in 1865, I believe it just evolved. It turned into decades of racial hierarchy that was violently enforced...

And so we are very confused when we start talking about race in this country because we think that things are “of the past” because we don’t understand what these things really are, that narrative of racial difference that was created during slavery that resulted in terrorism and lynching, that humiliated, belittled and burdened African Americans throughout most of the 20th century. The same narrative of racial difference that got Michael Brown killed, got Eric Garner killed and got Tamir Rice killed. That got these thousands of others — of African Americans — wrongly accused, convicted and condemned. It is the same narrative that has denied opportunities and fair treatment to millions of people of color, and it is the same narrative that supported and led to the executions in Charleston...

Stevenson has also launched an initiative to mark where lynchings took place in the U.S.,  which is explained by another of his statements in the Marshall interview:

“You can’t go to Germany, to Berlin, and walk 100 meters without seeing a marker or a stone or a monument to mark the places where Jewish families were abducted from their homes and taken to the concentration camps,” said Stevenson in an. “Four thousand African Americans were lynched between 1870 and WWII and none of us know anything about it. We don’t mark these places where these lynchings took place. Most of them took place on courthouse lawns that are now adorned with monuments to the Confederacy.”

Perhaps I am being overly optimistic, but I believe Stevenson has given us the core ingredients for a desperately needed antidote to the racist toxins with which we whites are so relentlessly poisoned – particularly by constant repetition of propaganda that deliberately omits from our official national histories any discussion of racism's Machiavellian, pre-Nazi, pre-Orwellian and most definitively capitalist origins.

 

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Supremes Hand Down Surprise Ruling against Economic Segregation 

NOTING TODAY'S U.S. is ever more segregated by income, Robert Reich says a Supreme Court decision – its impact unfortunately obscured by the mainstream media's focus on the marriage equality and health care rulings – has substantially bolstered our protections against discrimination. 

In a 5-4 ruling, Reich reported, the Court found that the Fair Housing Act of 1968 requires plaintiffs to show only that the effect of a policy is discriminatory, not that defendants intended to discriminate....The decision is likely to affect everything from bank lending practices whose effect is to harm low-income non-white borrowers, to zoning laws that favor higher-income white homebuyers.

This from the court that with its Citizens United  judgment knowingly destroyed the last vestiges of the U.S. experiment in representative democracy is perplexing indeed.

My immediate reaction is the justices are merely throwing us a bone, perhaps modeled after the Affordable Care Act –  which cleverly – and obviously for international propaganda purposes – creates the illusion of near-universal health insurance. But it simultaneously imposes such exorbitant co-payments and fees, only the rich can afford to use it, thereby fulfilling ACA's ultimate purpose – that of perpetuating the USian policy, unique in the industrial world, of health care as a privilege of wealth rather than a human right.

 

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Good News for LGBT Seniors in Supreme Court's Marriage Decision

THE SUPREME COURT'S legalization of same-sex marriage means that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual couples can now access the legal benefits of marriage no matter where in the United States they live, says the Alliance for Retired Americans “Friday Alert”  issued 10 July.

Elderly LGBT couples living in states where marriage equality was formerly outlawed now have the same rights granted heterosexual couples including Social Security spousal survival payments and state and federal tax benefits, the ARA reports.

 

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Have the USian Secret Police Marked Edward Snowden for Death?

A FORMER OFFICIAL of the Carter Administration wondered during an interview if one or more of the federal secret police agencies will try to kill Edward Snowden,  a courageous speculation that proves again the malevolent, Fourth Reich nature of the USian Empire.

 

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And Now, a Link to the Best New Writing I've Read Since the 1960s

HIGH POETRY DISGUISED as prose – that's Ta-Nehisi Coates' “Letter to My Son,”  a piece as poignantly angry as Ginsberg's “Howl” but infinitely more lyrical, as eloquently defiant as the concluding lines of Yeats' “Wanderings of Oisin” yet appropriately, even forcefully secular; as emotionally compelling as Kavi's “Black Marigolds.” Originally published by The Atlantic and republished by RSN, it is unquestionably the most powerful new writing I have seen in maybe the past 45 years. To read it is to relish it...and to want to read it again.

LB/6-13 July 2015

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  Somehow this oft-published, increasingly iconic war-protest photograph seems  appropriate as a  lament for the United States.  Tech data: Nikon F w/105mm f2.5 Nikkor; Tri-X at 800 ASA for development in D-76. (Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 1971)

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A READER WHO is a friend, a fellow professional writer and therefore also a trusted critic says my otherwise accurate portrayal of the present-day United States as a “fascist nation”  is incomplete without a formal definition of “fascism.”

Then as I was contemplating my response, synchronicity  provided me an all-too-typical example of U.S. fascism in action. Tacoma Mayor Marilyn Strickland had just postponed city council consideration of a proposed minimum-wage hike, thereby stuffing a procedural gag down the throats of about 200 workers who had intended to testify in favor of higher pay.

The hearing was later added to the council's July 7 agenda. But Max Hyland, a spokesperson for 15 Now Tacoma,  says the tactical intent behind the surprise agenda-change was to nullify the energies evoked by a pro-wage-hike demonstration  and simultaneously minimize the number of its supporters who would be able to address the council. Many had taken time off work to participate in the rally and testify at the June 30 meeting.

“A lot of these people,” said Hyland, “can't afford more time off their jobs – and Strickland damn well knows that.”

Having witnessed Strickland in action, I don't doubt Hyland's contention. Though she ran for mayor as a progressive, in office she has proven herself an obedient servant not of the public but rather of her masters in the Tacoma-Pierce County Chamber of Commerce, even unto her refusal to use the city's legal authority to protect residents from the chamber-supported radical downsizing of local bus service  imposed by openly racist white suburban voters in 2011 and 2012. (Scroll down to the paragraph beginning “Tacoma Mayor Marilyn Strickland...”)

By design, Tacoma city council meetings are already difficult for people with jobs to attend. As I know from my years covering local governments for various daily and weekly newspapers (1959-1981), U.S. municipalities that encourage Working Class participation in decision-making schedule their relevant public meetings during evening hours, typically at 7 or 7:30 p.m., as exemplified here,  here,  here  and here. 

But such meetings in Tacoma start at a deliberately exclusionary 5 p.m. – never mind State Rep. Laurie Jinkins has told me nearly 60 percent of the seaport town's 200,000 population is officially lower income – that is, below the federal standard of a family of four earning less than $45,000 per year.

U.S. Census figures  show that in 2013 – the most recent year for which data is available – fully18 percent of Tacoma's households eked out their existences with incomes below the official federal poverty line,  $24,250 for a family of four. That makes Tacoma the second most poverty-stricken municipality  in the state of Washington.

The tiny difference between the Tacoma poverty figures given by the census bureau and the University of Washington, 18 percent versus 17.7 percent respectively, is probably due to when the data was collected. Despite the claimed “economic recovery,” ongoing cuts in social services are forcing many Tacomans, especially those of us who are elderly and/or disabled, ever deeper into inescapable poverty.

Thus chamber-of-commerce vassal Strickland's rescheduling of the minimum wage discussion adds a new and obviously premeditated class-war injury to a deliberately inflicted and long-festering class-war wound – a topic to which we shall return.

Meanwhile, here are two points apropos last week's OAN edition: one, the incipient racism and class hatred in the comment thread attached to the Strickland/minimum wage story (linked again for ease of access) is yet another exemplar of the bigotry I described in “Fascist Nation”; two, the individual installments of this blog have become too long and too topically diverse for me to call them “columns” anymore. Hence “edition,” in acknowledgment of how OAN has evolved into a mini-journal.)

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MY FIRST REACTION to my friend's criticism was surprise.

That's because I cannot count the number of times I have defined fascism as the relentlessly logical, mature form of capitalism, which in turn is the direct, eventually extinction-level debacle thrust on us by what capitalism actually is: the morally imbecilic elevation of infinite greed into ultimate virtue.

Hence capitalist governance – absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent and its Ruling Class vassals, total subjugation for all the rest of us. That's the core reality of fascism, whether in today's United States and its imperial conquests, Ukraine included, or in fascism's earlier manifestations via Mussolini, Hitler and Franco.

Nor does it matter how the subjugation is imposed. In the U.S., with its ignorance-opiated electorate, it's done more often by political sleight-of-hand (as in Strickland's last-minute rescheduling of the minimum-wage discussion) than by the brute force routinely employed elsewhere. But there's brutality aplenty  whenever exceptionally brave U.S. citizens dare resist capitalist tyranny. 

And not only is such brutality a defining characteristic of fascism in action. It's also an expression of what has long been the uniquely USian form of Nazism, the antique but eerily Hitlerian philosophy of the U.S. as the Christian god's global übermenschen. Since World War II it has morphed into mainstream U.S. politics – probably with encouragement by all the Nazi war criminals  embraced by the government and private industry after 1945 – and it is now regurgitated as “exceptionalism”: the belief the U.S. has the divine right to conquer and rule the entire planet. 

Even without such (often censored) information, or so I said in mental response to my critic, surely everybody who took eighth grade civics remembers the working definition  provided us by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt – “ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling power.”

Moreover, you don't get out of junior high school – or “middle school” as they call it today – without passing civics. Right?

Wrong. Critics Left,  Right  and center  express grave concern about the abysmal ignorance of the U.S. citizenry, particularly its younger members. Which of course I should have recognized – not the least given my frequent condemnations of Moron Nation  (scroll down to “Understanding Media”). Nor can I count my denunciations of the dumbing-down that imposed Moron Nation, the induced intellectual deterioration I damn as “moronation.”

Indeed I had seen and recognized the results of moronation as far back as when I was teaching photography and journalism – mostly the former – at a couple of public colleges in Washington state. That was 1975 through 1981, truly another era. But already the induced political ignorance of my younger students exemplified the post-Vietnam, post-Civil-Rights-Movement, post-Counterculture curriculum-changes forced on U.S. public schools to ensure that never again would there be another era of protest and resistance as had erupted during the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s.

Don't teach the kids their legal and constitutional rights – or so the Ruling Class reasoned  – and then they won't know when those rights are violated or abolished.

Thus my older students, people who had graduated from high school well before the U.S. was routed from Vietnam,  were well enough versed in the democratic principles embodied in this nation's founding documents to see the infuriatingly vast and hypocritical difference between text and reality. As had I, they had been required to memorize the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution  and the Gettysburg Address,  and to be enough familiar with the Bill of Rights, the Emancipation Proclamation,  the 14th  and 19th amendments and President Roosevelt's Four Freedoms speech  to be able to discuss each in accurate detail.

But most of my younger students, the kids who got out of high school after about 1974, couldn't even summarize the First Amendment  – this in an introductory class about newspaper reporting.

I should have remembered this, if only because at the time of discovery it was so disturbing to encounter journalism students who didn't know their signature quest for information was protected by the U.S. Constitution. Sometimes though I get so focused on the proverbial trees – some of which were in this instance growing bitter-sweet seeds of memory and previously unexpressed emotion – I'm blinded to the metaphorical forest. And that's precisely what happened when I was writing “Persistent Racism Defines U.S. as Fascist Nation.”

My critic is therefore correct. (It's an aside, but that's why I so appreciate cogent critics and competent editors: they are often an oracular expression of my own subconscious, verbalizing that which I know or at least sense but have somehow ignored.) At the very least I should have included FDR's definition, which I have always cherished both for its get-to-the-point minimalism and its obviously prescient understanding of what the United States has become today. Here it is in full: 

The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism — ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.

Note how the late president's definition embodies the elements present in what I label “capitalist governance.” Indeed I use that term at least as often as “fascism” because the former does not always immediately evoke Moron Nation's (Pavlovian) closed-mind reflex.

 

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STRICKLAND, FOR WHOM I voted in two successive mayoralty elections and about whom I was originally enough enthusiastic I successfully pled her case to a number of neighbors, has turned out to be another example of what all (real) Leftists should by now in the era of Obama the Orator and his shape-shift into Barack the Betrayer recognize as a standard Ruling Class tactic.

A ploy Niccolo Machiavelli and even Sun Tzu would admire, it calls for recruiting a minority person who now as capitalism herds us into the age of inescapable poverty and de facto enslavement has special voter appeal because of his or her ethnicity.

Its false promise, though usually unspoken, is that because of minority ethnicity – Strickland is African-American and Korean – the candidate can readily empathize with the sufferings of all of us who are being crushed by capitalism, whether the oppression dealt us by the downpresser man  takes the form of joblessness, racism, sexism, class-ism, able-ism, ageism or the genocidal austerity by which such malevolence is enforced.

The tactic – yet another proof of the diabolical cunning possessed by our capitalist overlords – is enough effective at the ballot box to overcome the deep-seated racial animus that simmers beneath the (alleged) consciousness of four-fifths of the nation's white majority. Hence the deceptive anomaly of a black president as chief executive of nation that's murderously racist not just in the Charleston sense but also and far more often in the official, federally militarized context of Ferguson-type atrocities.

(For a brief but pointed discussion of our most revealing index to the extent of carefully closeted but nevertheless unreconstructed white racism in the U.S., see “Fascist Nation,” linked again here  for convenience, and scroll down to the last section, the graf beginning “In this context, the passage...”)

Hence too Mayor Strickland's little war of attrition against Working Class folk who wished to speak to the Tacoma City Council in favor of wage-hike measures that could literally enable us to vote ourselves a raise.

Obviously – as I have said repeatedly in recent weeks – the era of charade democracy is over, and the era of unapologetic tyranny is upon us.

 

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BUT IS IT really fascism?

Based on FDR's definition, it most assuredly is: private, for-profit greed vastly stronger than the democratic state, ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power, specifically the One Percent and its Ruling Class of executives, politicians, bureaucrats, generals and commanders of the federal and federalized police whether uniformed or secret.

The definitions given by Wikipedia – the one best compendium of definitions of fascism I have yet encountered on-line (its link repeated here for convenience and clarity) – mostly elaborate on the words of our late and still lamented president.

Since Wiki material is all in the public domain, I have copied and pasted herein some of its most relevant parts. Italic type indicates the material is copied word-for-word, complete with the variances in punctuation that distinguish computer-age texts from earlier works.

In his 1995 essay “Eternal Fascism”, Umberto Eco lists 14 general properties of fascist ideology. He argues that it is not possible to organise these into a coherent system, but that “it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it”.  (Emphasis added.)

Six of Umberto's 14 properties are as follows, copied and pasted as above with my comments in parentheses:

“Disagreement Is Treason” – fascism devalues intellectual discourse and critical reasoning as barriers to action; (Note the thoroughly documented cult of USian anti-intellectualism.)

“Fear of Difference”, which fascism seeks to exploit and exacerbate, often in the form of racism or an appeal against foreigners and immigrants; (Self- explanatory; see again “Fascist Nation.”)

“Appeal to a Frustrated Middle Class”, fearing economic pressure from the demands and aspirations of lower social groups; (Note in particular the envy and hatred methodically churned up against immigrants, union-protected workers and minimum-wage workers who dare organize to seek higher pay.)

“Contempt for the Weak” – although a fascist society is elitist, everybody in the society is educated to become a hero; (Note the official, tacitly genocidal hostility expressed in austerity policies that victimize impoverished and/or disabled people.)

“Non-truths & Lying/Spread of Propaganda”. (Situational synonyms include Iraq, Afghanistan and Ukraine.)

 

*

 

The Communist Third International in 1935 published the first definition of fascism I learned as a: child: “the open, terroristic dictatorship of the most reactionary, the most chauvinistic, the most imperialistic elements of finance capitalism”.

 

*

 

Leon Trotsky  wrote: “The historic function of fascism is to smash the working class, destroy its organizations, and stifle political liberties when the capitalists find themselves unable to govern and dominate with the help of democratic machinery.” (Emphasis added.)

 

*

 

Stanley G. Payne created a list of characteristics that identify fascism:

Positive evaluation and use of, or willingness to use violence and war...

The goal of empire, expansion, or a radical change in the nation's relationship with other powers...

Extreme stress on the masculine principle and male dominance...

Exaltation of youth above other phases of life, emphasizing the conflict of the generations...(Note how today's youth are conditioned to scapegoat seniors  for the dystopian state of human society.)

 

*

 

Emilio Gentile describes fascism as the “sacralization of politics” through totalitarian methods and argues that it has ten constituent elements:

These include: a police apparatus that prevents, controls, and represses dissidence and opposition, even by using organized terror... (For example the murder of Fred Hampton  and the slaying of protesters at Kent State University  and Jackson State College.)

(A) foreign policy inspired by the myth of national power and greatness, with the goal of imperialist expansion... (Precisely as mandated by USian exceptionalism).

 

*

 

The definition of fascism by Ernesto Laclau includes implacable hostility to feminism and socialism (as in the bipartisan war against women  and Obama's Janus-faced embrace of the formerly Republican demand to privatize the Tennessee Valley Authority ).

Significantly, Laclau's work explains why a fascist nation grants marriage equality and permits the legalization of marijuana: Fascists are pushed towards conservatism by common hatred of socialism and feminism, but are prepared to override conservative interests – family, property, religion, the universities, the civil service – where the interests of the nation are considered to require it. Fascist radicalism also derives from a desire to assuage discontent by accepting specific demands of the labour and women's movements, so long as these demands accord with the national priority. (Emphasis added.)

*

 

Then there is Robert Paxton, a professor emeritus at Columbia University, who defines fascism in his book The Anatomy of Fascism as: A form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion. (Emphasis added.)

All of which brings us back to the definition of fascism articulated by the man who, at some time in the future (if indeed capitalism does not reduce us all to extinction), will surely be honored as our greatest president ever: ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.

I rest my case.

 

 

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Time for Recalcitrant Whites to Admit Slavery's Horrors

ROBERT PARRY'S DENUNCIATION of white Southern recalcitrance prompted a lengthy discussion thread in which I made two contributions, each in response to other posters with whom I was generally in agreement:

When franpryor speculated on what might happen were the Germans to resurrect the Swastika, I noted:

The Swastika is being resurrected not by Germany but by the United States via its arming and financing of the U.S./Nazi conquest of Ukraine.

Moreover the U.S. puppet government that now rules the Ukraine flies not only the Nazi banners but also the Confederate battle flag and the flag of the Ku Klux Klan.

All of this is in keeping with the evil nature of capitalism, which – with its morally imbecilic ethos of infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue – inevitably matures into Nazism.

In this context, we see at last why the U.S. perpetually speaks with the proverbial “forked tongue,” claiming to defend liberty while in fact seeking global conquest to impose the zero-tolerance tyranny of a Fourth Reich on all the peoples of the world.

Which reveals the true (and truly horrific) reason behind the persistence of the Confederacy's emblems of slavery and genocide: they express the horrific truth of what the U.S. – or more specifically the U.S. Ruling Class – actually believes and intends.

Later when Granny Weatherwax wrote there is a “significant difference” between fascism and Nazism, I said:

Actually there's not. As Marx and Engels clearly understood, capitalism requires an “üntermenschen” – an allegedly inferior group – to maximize its profits and otherwise rationalize its savagery.

While the definitions of that “üntermenschen” often vary from country to country – Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, disabled people and Communists in Nazi Germany; communists and socialists in Fascist Italy; communists, socialists and non-Catholics in Fascist Spain; blacks, Hispanics, First Nations peoples, females of all races and ethnicities, lower-income elderly and disabled people plus all other lower income people in the “exceptionalist/under God” United States – the psychodynamic and socioeconomic reality is everywhere the same.

 

 

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No, Michael, It's Not 'a New America,' Not Yet

When Michael Moore claimed, “It is a New America,”  I was almost as outraged as I am by Hillary Clinton's ongoing, astoundingly dishonest effort to position herself – a war-hawk and an austerity advocate – as a latter-day Eleanor Roosevelt.  Hence I responded accordingly:

 

Mr. Moore's ignorance of history and the insufferable arrogance he shares with his fellow “Americans” whether Right or Left are surely on display in the above.

In the first place, the U.S. Working Class has NEVER been as impoverished – and as powerless – as it is now. In terms of the quest for economic democracy, there was never a better era than the New Deal and its immediate aftermath. Nor – without the total overthrow of capitalism – will there ever be again.

Secondly, ALL of the gains of the Civil Rights and Women's Liberation movements have either been abolished or are methodically being undone. Meanwhile the Environmental Movement, which might have saved our species from extinction, has either been co-opted by the capitalists or is paralyzed by its refusal to acknowledge the realities of the class war.

Thirdly, it is dishonest for Mr. Moore to claim “we have never been so free” merely because a wealthy, mostly white and often notoriously conservative minority has gained the right to marry. Though I applaud marriage equality, I also recognize it as a feel-good distraction that contributes nothing to the resistance against capitalism.

Lastly, the U.S. is not “America” and we are not “Americans.” We the People are USians, a people who unlike any other has wantonly discarded the potential of liberty and embraced the opiate of ignorance instead.

Thus to call ourselves “Americans” insults the inhabitants of every other nation on the American land mass.

Two post-expostulation points: one, the sentence “we have never been so free” appeared in Moore's original piece and was later changed, obviously in response to my criticism (for which thank you, Mr. Moore, as your revised version is much more accurate); two, my use of the inappropriate loudness of capital letters, a technique I normally deplore, is an index of just how much anger the original form of the comment evoked. (Yes, Moore is apparently at least an occasional reader of OAN.)

 

 

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Important Note to Readers on OAN Schedule Change

LIFE CHANGES, ALL positive, keep pressuring me to modify OAN's self-assigned schedule. Thus the blog's gradual but relentless transition to a Monday publication date.

But the most substantial change arises from the monthly newsletter I write, photograph, edit and produce as a volunteer for the 51-unit apartment complex in which I reside.

I began the newsletter project three years ago as a two-page, four-hours-per-month favor to the resident community, but it has expanded into a publication of at least eight pages with some color photography, a growing volunteer staff and readership that – because I make a point of including only stories of relevance – has come to depend on each month's edition of Community Chronicle for vital information as well as entertainment.

As a result its editorship has, throughout the second week of each month, become the equivalent of a full-time job. (As I have many times said, and not always approvingly, journalism is like organized crime in that you don't ever really get to retire.)

But that means there's not enough time left over for all the research that normally goes into OAN.

Hence starting this month and from now on, OAN will not – save as maybe a photograph or two or with such breaking news as in olden times would have demanded a daily newspaper print an extra edition – be published on the third Monday of each month.

Apropos the photography, thanks to the generosity of a friend, I now have a digital single-lens-reflex, a Canon Rebel T-5, so maybe – once I get past the mental mine-field of learning its computer-operation procedures – I can maybe at long last recover some of the passion for photography I lost after that 1983 fire destroyed all my life's work.

LB/28 June-6 July 2015

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