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INTRODUCTION

  • For about 25 of my 64 years as a writer and photographer, newspaper journalism seemed a promising career. But as my colleagues moved stealthily Rightward, I moved ever-more-openly Leftward, until eventually I was Left...outside. Permanently. Hence "Outside Agitator's Notebook," which evolved into the more closely focused "Dispatches from Dystopia." Under either name it was originally a regularly updated anthology of reports, analyses, commentaries, photographs and other anti-Capitalist testimony from the ecogenocidal dystopia that Neoliberal Capitalism -- our species' newest euphemism for resurrected Nazism -- has made of our world. But the life-threatening shock of a censorship incident (see "Probable Final Dispatches, End of Dispatches," 17 April 2020) has reduced it to far less frequent publication. Meanwhile our species' dystopian epicenter remains the post-humanitarian United States of America with its self-inflicted Moron Nation and its empire of global-conquest malevolence, the de facto Fourth Reich, the true birthdate of which will eventually be recognized – if indeed our species somehow miraculously survives the present era – as 22 November 1963. (¶)-Dispatches will nevertheless continue -- albeit on a far more relaxed schedule -- to chronicle our relentless subjugation by Capitalism as it (inevitably) reverts to its traditional might-makes-right savagery. Just as Capitalism previously transformed itself into Italian Fascism and German Nazism, Capitalism now matures into a Nazism of uniquely USian form and content. By examining the details of what is occurring, DfD shows how ours is a Dystopia characterized as much by the mindlessness of Moron Nation's Zieg-Heil-equivalent chanting of “USA! USA! USA!” as by the brutality such chanting invariably celebrates – the ecogenocidal atrocities the Capitalist Ruling Class perpetrates in the name of “profit,” “growth” and USian “Exceptionalism.” (¶)-Why “USian” rather than "American"? Because to call this exceptionally fascist empire “America” is to slander as fascists or Nazis all humanitarian-minded peoples of North and South America who valiantly and often fatally resist USiaNazi enslavement. And, yes, “humanitarian” versus “anti-humanitarian” are the only terms that adequately differentiate the two now eternally hostile subspecies into which Capitalism has finally divided Homo sapiens sapiens. On one side are those of us who cling to the so-called Golden Rule and its variants, “do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” the ultimate form of which is Marxism's “from each according to ability, too each according to need.” On the other side are the moral imbeciles – Nazis, fascists, Ayn Rand disciples and all the other psychological zombies that are Capitalism's unique and uniquely apocalyptic spawn. (¶)-But what then is Capitalism? Though traditionally defined as economics alone, it is in fact the quintessential patriarchal ethos, the diabolical methodology of building a global empire by conquest and genocide both obvious and clandestine, with post-conquest world governance originally patterned after the despotic management of antebellum slave plantations. Capitalism is thus the forefather of fascism and Nazism, its only possible offspring. Behind its seductive cloak of euphemisms and Big Lies (“manifest destiny,” “easy credit,” “economic freedom,” “self-made man,” “entrepreneur,” “no down payment,” “rugged individualist,” “you too can be rich,” “free will,” etc. ad nauseam), Capitalism is the stench of burning flesh and rotting corpses; the shrieks of napalmed children; the despair of families evicted into the permanent degradation, filth, deadly danger of untreated disease and constant fear of enslavement by arrest or kidnapping that defines USian homelessness; the final agonies of maliciously abandoned patients condemned to death by the deliberately genocidal costs of health care. (¶)-Ultimately Capitalism is the boundless Evil of global dictatorship by the Christian white male One Percent, a tiny, ruthless cabal of Capitalist aristocrats for whom infinite greed is ultimate virtue and for whom the snuff-film sadism of class warfare provides the ultimate entertainment. Under Capitalism's Fukushima-deadly, Ayn Rand credo of serial-killer moral imbecility – absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent and its Ruling Class vassals, zero-tolerance oppression and bottomless poverty for all the rest of us – these obscenely wealthy despots now impose on us their increasingly overt paradigm of Nazi governance. Not that We the (formerly exempt) People should be surprised; the merciless regimen that is now ours is how the Capitalists have always tyrannized our sisters and brothers in America's First Nations, in the USian ghettos and in all the Capitalist victim realms abroad. (¶)-Moreover much of our plight is of our own making. We the People long ago surrendered to our Capitalist overlords. We submit to denial of health care that is everywhere else on this planet deemed a human right; we submit to enslavement by debt; to the outsourcing of our jobs; to bankruptcy; to foreclosure; to eviction and homelessness; to imprisonment in numbers hitherto unequaled in human history; and most of all to the biggest Big Lie of all – the suicidal delusion we somehow remain free despite the Capitalists' no-longer-deniable theft of our liberty and their snickering revocation of the few prefaces to economic democracy our now-powerless unions had once managed to win. Our confinement is ensured, not just by our cowardice but by the invisible but inescapable cage of total surveillance: the electronic barbed wire that has reduced our entire planet to a monstrous concentration camp. (¶)-Cast off as “surplus human capital” when we are deemed no longer exploitable for profit, we are then methodically exterminated. We are slaughtered as cannon-fodder in the empire's endless wars of profit and conquest; we are murdered by the bullets and truncheons of the federalized and militarized local police; we are fatally poisoned by Capitalism's malignant toxification of our environment; we are slain by denials of health care and social services that are in fact deliberate, euphemism-cloaked policies of slow-motion genocide.   (¶)-Meanwhile our overlords pornographically multiply their own wealth by knowingly destroying the planetary conditions upon which all sentient life depends. More recently – as if to demonstrate the infinite magnitude of their Evil by provoking unsurvivable thermonuclear apocalypse (and not coincidentally in fulfillment of a malevolent scheme by Adolf Hitler himself) – they have imposed on the Ukraine the anti-Russian war-mongering and anti-Jewish violence of an avowedly Nazi puppet government. And now, in the person of Donald Trump and his appointees, the USian tyrannosaur has come home to gorge on its final and terminally ironic meal, the denizens of Moron Nation itself, the people who by their prideful ignorance and hatefulness loosed this demonically insatiable monster on the entire world. (¶)-But in these times our ability to effectively resist is obstructed not only by the USian regime of inescapable surveillance, but by the dreadful undertow of Moron Nation's intellectual and psychological paralysis: the deliberate deceptions and outright ignorance fostered by the Capitalist “education” system; by Capitalism's “mainstream media” propaganda machine (which is owned by the same smirking plutocrats whose vassal politicians so gleefully oppress us); and by the physical and psychic terrorism of Capitalism's manufactured crises. (¶)-Yet resist we must. As always, art – sometimes even unwittingly – depicts our present circumstances and so foretells our future. And as it says in a breathtakingly apt, wrenchingly poignant anthem grown increasingly popular far beyond its video-game origin, “shadows fall and hope is gone; steel your heart; the dawn will come.”

For More Information...

Links relevant to Introduction

Fire Survivors

  • W. Eugene Smith, Seattle, 1976
    These are some of the very few photographs that survived the 1983 fire that destroyed my life's work, not just most of my pictures but nearly all my writing including three books in progress and all the associated research. Some of these photos shown here escaped the flames because they were with me in my portfolio case; others were produced digitally from negatives dug out of the rubble a year later. The images of obvious print-quality were made on DuPont Varilure paper, which had the highest silver content of all commercial papers and thus produced such intense tonalities, they often seemed illuminated by their own internal light sources. But that sort of photographic quality is now forever beyond our common reach, either gone like Varilure or so prohibitively expensive it is available only to the obscenely pampered dilettantes who produce the aesthetic pabulum favored by the One Percent. Photography as I knew it is dead -- as dead as my career was after the fire and its ensuing clinical depression -- but this body of work provides a glimpse of what was lost and what might have been. All photos copyright Loren Bliss.

Sandwiches for Mind and Spirit

  • Goddess emergent (1), 1968 (blue variant c. 2009)
    In photography, a sandwich is a collage made by printing two or more negatives simultaneously. Collage is a medium that has fascinated me for as long as I can remember -- probably since I was a child experimenting with finger paints, glue and newspapers -- but I never took it seriously until, sometime in my early 20s and still thinking myself a painter-to-be, I discovered the works of Jasper Johns. Now it seems to me making sandwiches is to conventional photography what poetry is to prose: not just an intellectual exercise, but the opening of a doorway to the Mysterious Otherness I know as the Muse, from whom (sometimes in fulfilment of that McLuhanesque notion of art as prophecy) the currents of real creation invariably flow, whether swift and startling as a lightening strike or slow and soft as cottonwood seeds adrift on subtle summer air. (Collage and photographic sandwiches copyright Loren Bliss 2009-2012.)

Graffiti: a Sampler

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

Faces of the Fight

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

RELEVANT WEBSITES

  • Americans United for Separation of Church and State
    A vital website that is often our only source of accurate information about the terrifying effort to impose zero-tolerance Christian theocracy on the United States.
  • Best Site for Suppressed Assassination Facts
    The late Mae Brussell was our most relentless researcher into the murder of President John Kennedy and many other such outrages. Her legacy is a damning list of the USian Empire's darkest secrets.
  • Best, Most Thorough Documentation on the CIA's Destruction of the 1960s Counterculture
    Ms. Brussel outdid herself in her nobody-dares-publish-it investigative report exposing how the CIA's Operation Chaos destroyed the 1960s Counterculture. (My assumption is the Agency, with its Ivy-League analysts and their knowledge of pagan mythology, recognized the Counterculture's anti-patriarchal, resurrection-of-the-Goddess direction, understood it as a far greater threat to Capitalism than Marxism and responded with the murderous efficiency inherited from Gestapo predecessors.)
  • Communist Labor Party
    Communism as it is evolving in the United States after the murder of the American Dream and the slaying of the U.S. experiment in representative democracy.
  • Communist Labor Party's Harry Bridges Club (Facebook)
    Communism as it is evolving in Tacoma, Washington.
  • Consortium News
    Superb reporting and analysis. Founder/Editor Robert Parry exposed Reagan's Iran-Contra scheming and has been persecuted by the capitalists ever since.
  • der Spiegel
    Mainstream German newspaper that is often a valuable source of news about Western European politics.
  • Global Research
    A genuinely independent news site -- neither definitively Left nor Right -- that often covers stories suppressed by U.S. Mainstream Media, which (let us never forget), is owned by the same One Percenters who own the Democratic (sic) and Republican parties and thereby control all U.S. governance at every level.
  • Gun Owners of America
    Fanatically hard-Right (and often ChristoFascist as well), it is nevertheless the best source for information about the One Percent's efforts to forcibly disarm the U.S. 99 Percent.
  • International Marxist Archive
    All of Marxism's defining texts defiantly uploaded to the Internet by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as its final contribution to humanity's eternal struggle for economic democracy -- without which there is no democracy at all.
  • Popular Resistance
    A daily newsletter featuring essential tactical and strategic analysis plus vitally informative reports of news suppressed by the "mainstream media" propaganda machine.
  • Rewire
    Probably the most in-depth coverage of women's issues, LGBTQ issues and general human rights issues available on the U.S. Internet today, bolstered by decidedly professional reportage and editing.
  • RT
    Formerly "Russia Today," it accurately covers U.S. news the "mainstream media" propaganda machine routinely suppresses. Its notable work includes the nation's best coverage of the Occupy Movement (2011-2012), and the ongoing struggles of Black Lives Matter, Water Protectors and other such groups against the Empire's now-openly-fascist policies of homeland governance.
  • Second Amendment Foundation
    Unmistakably conservative, it is also the best source on legal action in defense of our right to keep and bear arms.
  • Socialist Worker
    An informative Marxist website in the United States, with news reporting and analysis that is usually far superior to anything fed us by capitalism's "mainstream media" propaganda machine.
  • Southern Poverty Law Center
    Best source of information on the burgeoning plague of Nazi, ChristoFascist and KuKluxKlan-type hate groups in the USian imperial homeland.
  • TASS, the Russian Wire Service
    Vital reading, especially now that the USian Empire's plans for global conquest have rekindled the so-called Cold War.
  • Theocracy Watch
    Cornell University's in-depth source on the escalating campaign to impose zero-tolerance Christian theocracy on the USian Homeland. It is flawed only by its refusal to recognize the Democratic (sic) Party's mostly clandestine collaboration with the openly theocratic Republicans -- a collaboration revealed in frightening detail by Jeff Sharlet's "The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power" (Harper: 2008).
  • TruthOut
    Generally reliable crowd-funded news site sometimes featuring cogent sociological analysis by Henry Giroux. Discussion thread's potential limited by Discus, which discourages posting of comments written off-site.
  • Ultra Violet
    Perhaps the most powerful racially integrated gender-equality organization in the United States.
  • World Socialist Web Site
    The day's news, typically with the most in-depth Marxist analysis available on the U.S. Internet -- this despite constant interference by the Empire's privatized, for-profit censorship apparatus.
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Unless otherwise noted, all material herein is copyrighted by Loren Bliss and/or Dispatches from Dystopia. Reproduction for non-profit purposes is permitted as long as it identifies the author or photographer and includes a link to the original text. To arrange for-profit reproduction, contact Loren Bliss via the comment facility.
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10 June 2018

Democratic (sic) Party Kills All Hope of Progressive Recapture

New Hillaryite Rule Locks Out Sanders, Any Others the DNC Won't Ok as Real Democrats, Thus Formalizing the Party's Hatred of Reformers

'"We just came off a devastating presidential loss in 2016. It would seem to me the actual impetus would be to expand the Democratic Party. I just for the life of me don’t see any motivation for this beyond personal spite,' Mark Longabaugh, a senior adviser to Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign, told Yahoo News.'I scratch my head and ask why they would want to make the party more narrow and more exclusive.' Other progressives echoed Longabaugh’s critique of the new rule on social media, with many noting that such restrictions could demobilize large constituencies that are disaffected with both major political parties...'Democrats don't want Bernie-Most-Popular-Politician-In-America-Sanders running for President, but they're perfectly fine with Mark-Raise-The-Social-Security-Retirement-Age-Warner, because although he commonly votes with Republicans, he IDs as a Democrat...'''

See also: "The Democratic National Committee’s rules and bylaws committee adopted a new rule on Friday that would prevent outsiders like Bernie Sanders from seeking the party’s nomination in the 2020 presidential race. The move seems to be the latest salvo in the ongoing jockeying over the party’s future that emerged following the...bitter primary battle between Hillary Clinton and Sanders in 2016... the move could only have been motivated by lingering animus from the primary race between Clinton and Sanders."

Comment: despite the false pseudo-Left optimism by which these reports attempt to soften the Democratic (sic) National Committee's terminal blow to any rational hope for a progressive takeover of the party, by this new rule the DNC awards itself the absolute power to determine who is and is not a real Democrat. The rule therefore locks in ideological cement overshoes the party's suicidal, already thoroughly documented malice toward Sanders. It also radically expands the party's hateful efforts to exclude all would-be reformers, a brazenly pro-Republican purge exemplified by its maliciously triumphant slandering of Laura Moser. Thus once again we are taught our only possible exit from JesuNazi theocracy is the formation of a genuinely socialist -- and genuinely revolutionary -- party of the Working Class. Indeed the Democrats' fuck-you message to all of us in the 99 Percent was never clearer -- so unmistakable (and such an unmistakable endorsement of Capitalist malevolence) -- even those in the deepest depths of denial can no longer reject it.

*****        

And Here is Always Insightful Paul Street to Tell Us Why the Democrats So Ruled

"The reigning corporate Democrats would rather lose to the right, even to a proto-fascistic white nationalist and eco-exterminist right, than lose to the left, even to a mildly progressive social democratic left within their own party."

Comment: Street's essay -- though it is entirely too pseudo-Leftish for my taste -- was written before approval of the DNC's rule to exclude progressive reformers, but it explains perfectly why the rule was enacted and -- most importantly -- why those of us on the Real Left should forever abandon any (1930s/Stalinist) notion of infiltrating the Democratic (sic) Party and attempting to make it the mechanism of our national redemption.

Additional late-night insight:  today's Democratic (sic) Party -- in an exceptionally grotesque example of Orwelliano-Machiavellian deception proven by its ever-more-fawning obedience to its  Capitalist masters -- is now the Republican Party's most colossally ambitious false-flag operation ever. It positions the Democrats as a Fifth Column to bolster by discouragement the more obvious Republican effort to shrink voter turnout even as the illusion of two parties helps perpetuate the apocalyptic Big Lie of "American democracy." (Please remember where you read this hypothesis first: on Dispatches' weekend update, 9 June 2018.)

*****        

T/P Regime Resumes Obama's Anti-First Amendment War on Journalists

"Now we know that the Justice Department secretly seized the phone and email records of Ali Watkins, a New York Times reporter, in a leak investigation involving a former Senate staffer. It is the first time the Trump administration is known to have engaged in such an aggressive tactic against a reporter, and it is exactly the kind of press surveillance at which the Obama administration excelled. For years, conservatives attacked Obama for using such tactics to spy on reporters. Of course, there was no outcry from the right on Friday over Trump’s willingness to do the same thing."

*****   

Why We Must “Beware the Democrats and Their Good Billionaires"

"(Starbucks) Executive Chairman Howard Schultz...(fashioned) for himself a shining reputation as a moral capitalist... As a result, he’s become that favored species of Democratic Party hacks: the Good Billionaire...Schultz has political ambitions, perhaps presidential ones. He almost certainly would have been Hillary Clinton’s secretary of labor...And let’s be honest:The psychopathic acquisitiveness required to actively hoard $3 billion is a close relative of the titanic self-regard and absolute megalomania that drive most presidential candidates...On CNBC, Schultz worried that the Democratic Party has drifted too far to the left...and identified the national debt as the great crisis of our time...There you have it..(worsening) austerity, but with a few rainbow flags and diversity seminars. America’s shining, post-Trumpian future.”

*****        

G7 Summit Reveals Europe's Intensifying Hostility to U.S. JesuNazi Imperialism 

"This weekend’s summit of the G7 is the most contentious meeting in the body’s 43-year history. It has revealed deep and growing fissures between the United States and its European allies...Looming over the summit is Trump’s June 1 decision to impose sweeping tariffs of up to 25 percent on steel and aluminum imports from the EU and other countries...At the same time, Trump has opened the prospect of cooling off the United States’ two other major geopolitical conflict areas: with North Korea, including a US-North Korean summit scheduled in Singapore immediately after the conclusion of the G7, and with Russia, to which Trump held out the prospect of regaining membership in the G7 after it was ejected in 2014...However, as with the (Nazi) fractured geopolitics of the 1930s, the 'deals' offered by Trump to one or another country are merely the prelude to military conflict. War is on the horizon, though it is not yet clear between whom."

*****     

Poll Shows Seattle Citizenry's Growing Contempt and Hatred of Homeless People

"Seattle residents are not only deeply dissatisfied with how the Seattle City Council has addressed homelessness, but also less willing than they used to be to sign off on new taxes to address the problem, according to a poll of 800 likely voters conducted in March that Crosscut has obtained...Those familiar with the results, who requested anonymity to discuss private polling, were stunned: It’s the first time anyone can recall the usually generous Seattle voters being overwhelmingly skeptical of additional taxation...a shift from just 18 months prior, when voters responded more positively to the idea of increasing spending on homelessness..."

See also: "The campaign to repeal the recently approved (housing-for-homeless-people) tax has gathered more than 20,000 valid signatures...more than what the campaign needs to put a referendum on the ballot next fall, leaving it to voters to decide whether to keep or repeal the tax."

Comment: having had the profound misfortune to have resided in Seattle from 1972 through 1976, I know too well the malicious hypocrisy of the majority of its white residents. Thanks to the courageousness of the late Walter Crowley, I also know of the breathtaking racism, bourgeois socioeconomic bigotry and anti-Jewish malice exposed by the still-officially-secret polling that explained the self-destructive defeat of the Forward Thrust subway proposal as precipitated not as much by the so-called Boeing Bust as by the white Seattleites' decision to listen to their Inner Fascists. (Walter told me of the poll and its results during an otherwise-social late-1970s J&M Cafe conversation that for a moment became the deepest of what in journalism is known as "deep background" briefing. Thus I promised him I would never write about it as long as he was alive, but now that he is dead [and sorely missed], there is no remaining reason for me to keep silent about his disclosures.) Hence given how the old, clandestine poll results inadvertently predict the new poll's results, I would judge Seattle's alleged change of heart toward homeless people to be nothing more than a 21st Century version of the "we-don'-wanna-be-another-Jew-York/yeah-we're-closet-Nazis-deal-with-it-fuck-you" exclamation like the ones of 1968 and 1970, albeit without the never-more-than-whispered "Zieg Heil" asserted quite so loudly.    

*****     

How Elite Colleges Protect Their Young Aristocrats from Police-State Savagery

"American police...(are) militarized...occupying forces for America’s poor neighborhoods, not unlike the American military abroad. If one lives in America and is poor, especially black and poor, the police are your oppressor, not your protector...Encountering a police officer, let alone confronting one for their injustice, is a dangerous activity for many in this country. The poor have been abandoned by our government yet they are arrested for petty and necessary crimes done to survive. Once in the system it is even harder to make a legal living and people have no choice but to turn to alternative methods of survival. The police in this country consistently use a call to them as an excuse to hit the victim with a crime of their own. The right to protest is considered a criminal offense, as evidenced by Standing Rock and the protests against President Trump. ICE is becoming an increasingly insidious force that obtains people in extraordinarily inhumane conditions.On the other hand, you have elite college campuses that aim to protect their students of crimes at all costs."

*****       

New Evidence in RFK Murder Prompts Demands for Reopening Case

"Robert Kennedy was shot on June 5 and died June 6, 1968, fifty years ago today. A new examination of evidence is forcing human rights organizations -- including the (Organization of American States) -- to consider probing the case."

See also: "We now live in a country that would be unrecognizable to anyone who died prior to 1968."

*****       

The Empire Escalates Its Efforts to Drag Assange into a Death Chamber

"One day after Ecuadorian Foreign Minister María Fernanda Espinosa declared that her government would continue blocking WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange from all communications and deny him any personal visitors, she was elected president of the United Nations General Assembly...There is little doubt that the treatment of Assange...is the outcome of pressure and threats by the US and other powers. Washington is demanding Assange’s head...to silence him while Washington (seeks) his extradition to stand trial on espionage charges that potentially carry the death penalty.”

*****

Millennials Favor Unions Over Corporations

"Pew Research Center has just released its annual survey on public opinion and unions in the United States. As in the last few years, the general public views the decline of organized labor negatively.... Sixty-eight percent of people aged 18-29 said they have positive views of unions, while just 46 percent of young people said the same of corporations."

*****    

Last Words (I): Eulogies for Anthony Bourdain

"Anthony Bourdain was the only major American celebrity who succeeded in depicting publicly the Palestinians as rational, caring human beings rather than as irrationally angry 'inciters' to violence. He was the anti-Bernard Lewis. Lewis smeared the world’s 1.8 billion Muslims with the charge of 'Islamic Rage' (as though large swathes of humankind are angry for no reason). Bourdain said, 'The world has visited many terrible things on the Palestinians, none more shameful than robbing them of their basic humanity.'"

See also: "Anthony Bourdain, who was found dead  Friday in an apparent suicide, opened his viewers' eyes to issues within and beyond the borders of the United States through food. He also championed many of the communities that affected his work in the kitchen and on screen. Whether it was global poverty, systemic racism in the United States or sexual abuse of women in the workplace, Bourdain frequently used the publicity he earned through his celebrity to draw attention to the issues affecting the people behind the food that he brought into Americans' living rooms. Here are some examples..."

With heartfelt thanks to my dear friend and comrade Brie, who in a poignantly teachable moment told me of  Bourdain's significance in her own life and then opened my eyes as to his significance for the rest of our species.

And here is Brie's own tribute to him: "Anthony Bourdain taught me from a young age that food is love and a way to connect with others when language-barriers are present. It's a way to respect and honor your elders and your younger comrades too. He taught me that food is what can bring us together when we think that there is no common ground to be found. Food is also love, service, honor and much more. It's what binds us together and fuels our bodies, minds and souls for the fight we all face daily -- and I'll always treasure the ways Tony Bourdain taught me to serve my comrades and community with love, dignity and respect. For that alone I mourn the loss of a man I never had the pleasure of meeting."  

 ***                   

Last Words (II): Cossacks Dare Verbalize what All Warriors Secretly Know

"There's something dashing and soulful about Russian folk music, especially when it originates with the Cossacks, Russia's warriors of the steppe. This is perhaps the most famous Cossack song, sung at dinners, concerts and campfires. It's a song about a love that is always just out of reach, a strange mix of longing and recklessness. Listen to it. You won't regret it." (The lyrics translated to English are here.)

LB/9 June 2018

 -30-

Posted at 02:37 AM in Austerity as Genocide , Censorship, Current Affairs, Disabled People , Environmental crisis, Healthcare, History, Immigration, LGBTQ , Memoirs, Minorities, Misogyny, Music, Poor People, Religion, Science, Seniors , Television, Visual art, Weblogs, White Supremacy |

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