Loren Bliss: Dispatches from Dystopia

"Premonitions of the Twilight": I had  intended to illustrate this essay with a red-hued variant, but decided -- for reasons I can't yet verbalize except to say they  relate to both the Celtic deity   Morrigan and the Norse notion of  Götterdämmerung -- the blue variant is more appropriate. A "sandwich"-- a photo collage -- the imagery is from some of my 1967 camera work. (Loren Bliss ©1968,1974,2025)  

*****

FOR ME, THE death of the American Republic and the threatened death of our Mother Earth called into question a notion that had been the one certain conviction within  my personal ethos of general agnosticism: that each and every atom in the entire cosmos contained within itself not just the known structure of nucleus, electrons and protons but an unseen, undetected yet overwhelmingly powerful inertial momentum toward consciousness. Influenced by collegiate studies in astronomy, I had concluded sentient life could not have come into existence -- could not have "evolved from the substance of the stars" (as one professor put it) -- without  such a positive dynamic.

Our matriarchal ancestors recognized this force and anthropomorphized it as the Great Goddess, the Mother of All Being, which to me feels more metaphorically apt than any other hypothesis about our cosmic source and often – in my younger years whenever I was amidst wilderness or at sea or otherwise beyond urban distractions -- felt objectively real, as it ever-more-frequently does now in the meditative solitude of my final years. 

But I would be dishonest were I not to confess that the outcome of 5 November spawned the most painful doubts I have ever known. For a terrible few weeks I believed the election’s ultimate message is that our undetected atomic dynamics are in fact ruled by a much stronger negative force, an antithetical inertial momentum that redefines the universe itself. It tells us what we foolishly view as the inexpressibly beautiful choreography of creation is instead a maliciously seductive dance of destruction, the final revelation of which -- our last lesson as a doomed species on a dying planet we ourselves have fatally wounded -- is naught but its unspeakable hideousness.

Such was my own woundedness, challenged at last by phenomena I could not ignore: near-nightly dreams of intellectually and emotionally supportive, physically affectionate young women, each woman a stranger, yet each eerily familiar; two wide-awake occasions when, while sitting alone amongst this apartment-building’s courtyard gardens, I was joined by a solitary raven who perched on a branch less than an arms length distant in comfortably shared contemplative solitude; and then finally a wide-awake, seemingly coincidental encounter with a young woman of skill and wisdom, whose interpretation of these events -- all the more meaningful because she did not know my cardiologist says I'll probably be dead by September -- was phrased in modern English but identical to the promise contained in an ancient lay of magick cited by Robert Graves in The White Goddess, his life-changing epic of spiritual and aesthetic revolution: “Thus shalt thou be fetch-ed hame.” 

*****

DESPITE OUR SPECIES' rightfully terrified, head-in-the-sand refusal to acknowledge it, Trump's victory in the 5 November election makes permanent the U.S. government’s formerly undeclared policy -- first publicly exemplified  by President Carter's endorsement of the viciously misogynistic Hyde Amendment -- of reversing all the humanitarian advancements that resulted from the U.S. Civil War and World War II. It is now as if the Confederacy won in 1865 and Hitler triumphed in 1945 -- and with every passing day, it becomes more undeniable we must soon anticipate the methodical reversal of every humanitarian gain our species ever achieved.

Meanwhile, given the new regime's brazenly public affirmation of the nation's  rejection of all moral, ethical and constitutional restraint, a renewed Holocaust – the zero-tolerance, no-exception extermination of all "enemies within" – becomes ever more likely, not only in the U.S., but throughout U.S. capitalism's neoliberalism- nazified global empire.

With the Soviet Union slain, its Red Army disbanded and every nation terrified to submission by the U.S. empire's bipartisan "Better-Dead-Than-Red" intent -- its pledge to fulfill Hitler's last-minute yearning to destroy the world -- Trump and his like-minded predecessors, whether overt (Reagan et al) or clandestine (Truman, Eisenhower, Johnson, Carter, Clinton ad nauseam), have already achieved der Führer's intended subjugation of  the entire planet. What we are witnessing now is not the conquest but its consequence -- the triumph of Absolute Evil.

Protected by modern technology in fulfillment of the doomsday purpose that is the sole motive for its invention, it is increasingly possible the Christonazi Reich cannot be overthrown. The promised thermonuclear enforcement of “Better Dead Than Red” guarantees no nation will ever dare attempt Trump's overthrow from without, and it seems increasingly probable We the (Humanitarian) People are congenitally unable to evolve the courage, solidarity and discipline to subverted it from within. This would mean Christonazism is literally "forever" -- that is, until the end of human time itself. Or at the very least, that it will reign supreme until some apocalyptic event neutralizes the weaponry that perpetuates its terrorism. In either case, our species is not likely to survive. Neither is our Mother Earth, already threatened with reduction to a world uninhabitable by any conceivable life form and thus to permanent Precambrian lifelessness. Those are the horrors to which we unconditionally submit if we surrender. And that is precisely why we must fight on even when it seems hopeless.

Perhaps the words of Jean-Paul Sartre can help us find our own strength:

“We were never more free than during the German occupation. We had lost all our rights, beginning with the right to talk. Every day we were insulted to our faces and had to take it in silence. Under one pretext or another, as workers, as Jews, or political prisoners, we were deported en masse. Everywhere, on billboards, in the newspapers, on the screen, we encountered the revolting and insipid picture of ourselves that our suppressors wanted us to accept. And because of this we were free. Because the Nazi venom seeped into our thoughts, every accurate thought was a conquest. Because an all-powerful police tried to force us to hold our tongues, every word took on the value of a declaration of principles. Because we were hunted down, every one of our gestures had the weight of a solemn commitment... And the choice that each of us made of his life was an authentic choice because it was made face to face with death... And here I am not speaking of the elite among us who were real Resistants, but of all Frenchmen who, at every hour of the night and day throughout four years, answered "No.”

Or perhaps we will find inspiration in the wrenching example of the courageous defenders of Fortress Brest, whose valiant resistance is here accurately portrayed in a 2010 historical-reenactment film. The Brest garrison was as doomed as that of Wake Island, and like that sadly forgotten stand by U.S. Marines, the Red Army’s defense of Brest was one of our species’ greatest epics of bravery and heroism. It is entirely appropriate the Brest film has earned “best-such-work-ever” ratings from a number of European critics; and it should vex us severely the equally courageous Wake Island fight is not similarly memorialized.

Perhaps too, after the fate of the Martyred Minnesotans leaves no doubt We the (Humanitarian) People are mortally jeopardized by badge-protected gangs of run-amok thugs – no matter whether they are assassins disguised as cops sicced on us by Christonazi Obersturmbannführers or the real cops and soldiers likewise conditioned to robotic obedience and ordered by Trump and his MAGAstapo Chief Kristi Noem to “liberate” any cities allegedly compelled by “socialism” to defend its residents’ Constitutional rights -- we will at last awaken to the magnitude of the Evil that assails us.

And perhaps we will even re-awaken to the lesson taught us by the Deacons for Defense and Justice. Perhaps – realizing we are all now potential targets of roving Christonazi assassins – we will at long last unshackle ourselves from the pseudo-left’s suicidal, useful-idiot collaboration with Christonazism implicit in its fanatical, “all-gun-owners-are-fascists” insistence on forcible civilian disarmament, repeal of the Second Amendment and the vindictive, “politically correct” imposition of mandatory pacifism and compulsory victimhood. As my Distinguished Rifleman father often said, “It is far better to have a firearm but not need it, than to need a firearm but not have it.” To which I, a military-qualified Expert with the M1911 .45-caliber service pistol, will add only that, “it is far better we have trained and practice-sustained skill with firearms, but no immediate need for it, than to discover – often terminally – we desperately need the skill but tragically lack it.”

Additionally, given the unprecedentedly grim future that looms – an astrologer friend tells me the planetary configurations on the U.S. Sibley Chart are like the American Revolution, the Civil War and World War Two combined, and many psychics claim Trump is the actual reincarnation of Hitler – I have three categories of cautions for my fellow activists.

• First is an axiomatic statement by Lev Bronstein, the “nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn” known to history as Leon Trotsky: “In every gathering of three revolutionaries, there is at least one agent of the Okhrana.”

• Second is the axiom that governs the craft of intelligence analysis: Once is coincidence; twice is suspicious; three times is enemy action.”

• Third is a five-point body of self-protective, keep-your-head-down advice that can be as life-saving for non-violent protestors as it is for soldiers: (1)-Learn and practice the mindfulness necessary for situational awareness – that is, the art of paying attention, of knowing at all times what is going on around you – which is an acquired skill (one that, thanks to my father, I learned in childhood); (2)-Learn first aid; consult local service centers for information about free courses; once trained, never forget its three basic principles, still the same as the U.S. Army taught me 66 years ago: “keep ‘em breathing; stop the bleeding; treat for shock”; (3)-Learn to identify cover (that which will turn bullets and maybe even grenade or shell fragments) and distinguish it from concealment (that which merely hides you); note that contrary to Hollywood, motor vehicles are not effective cover; (4)-Learn to do the low crawl and other individual movement techniques, which can save your life if protests come under fire; (5)-Learn these additional self-protective techniques for surviving gunfire in urban areas.

(I offer the above with unapologetic acknowledgment the pseudo-left is sure to be antagonized by the sources of some of its content.)

*****

TWO HEADLINES WE will never see in mainstream media:

Assured of Pardons, Gleeful Christonazis Run Amok,
Slaying, Beating and Jailing Führer Trump's Opponents

and

Trumpites Weaponize Social Security, Veterans Benefits,
Medicare, Entire Safety Net to Enforce Christonazi Theocracy

As usual, the true significance of these atrocities is methodically suppressed, not only by the mainstream media, but by our alleged leaders as well. 

In the first instance, it is now axiomatic the penalties for opposing der neu Führer include extrajudicial murder. (Given the 100-percent corruption of the nation’s law-enforcement agencies and military-command structure by Christonazification, were I a gambling man, which I am not, I’d have bet substantial sums the Minnesota murderer would be allowed to escape. Now that he has finally been captured, I’d bet the Trump Regime ensures he escapes punishment with an insanity plea and then later, when no one is looking, grants him a full pardon.)

Meanwhile, let us not forget there is no question Vance Boelter was doing the regime’s intended work.

Apropos the second headline – and very much an extension of the first – do not for a moment doubt that Trump and his cabal of Christonazi/Neoconfederate terrorists are now able to vindictively stop federal disbursements including individual Social Security checks literally at will, thereby silencing (and no doubt murdering by the resultant starvation and homelessness) any stipend-dependent retired or disabled person who dares criticize the new Führer by whom We the (Humanitarian) People,  our nation, our species and our Mother Earth are now cursed. The real story – the terrible truth too many of us are too naive, too stupid or simply too deluded by fear to acknowledge — is that there is literally no limit to the horrors that are to be inflicted on us. Hence a third headline we will never see in mainstream media:

MAGA Is Christonazism’s Renewed Holocaust: It Repeals
Many People’s Right to Live – or Even to Survive Beyond Birth 

But that is the ultimate truth of it, displayed with murder-weapon potency by 18 June's sure-to-be-fatal Supreme Court ruling that transgender people have no right to be born or continue living in the United States. It was predictably announced with all the smirking, pridefully self-righteous sadism that historically defines Christianity as manifest Evil, and it just as predictably furthers the process of turning the Christian cross into a symbol as ominously threatening as the Original Nazis' swastika. It is the most genocidal triumph yet of Trump’s adaptation of Hitler’s master plan, the subjugation of a nation by capturing its judiciary, and the victors are gloating accordingly.

The most our so-called progressive leaders are doing -- in all probability the most they will ever do – is  suppress or downplay the unmitigated horrors of Trumpite intent. Beyond that -- and I am speaking of the entire “Democratic” (sic) pseudo-opposition -- all they do is rationalize their submissiveness and whimper. Were they not irremediably compromised by their (morally imbecilic) terror of fomenting anti-capitalist revolution,  they would recognize they owe us the service of at least acknowledging our true plight. But they have abandoned us to the conquering Christonazis as surely as they have forsaken their sworn duty to defend our (former) Constitution.

Of course the Mainstream Media Monopoly— the world’s first (and no doubt last) privately owned, for-maximum-profit variant of Goebbels’ Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda, the infamous Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda — has downplayed or suppressed these facts entirely, and most of the so-called alternative media does likewise due to  amateurish incompetence, demographic isolation,  masochistic faithfulness to the Fifth Column Democrats  or some combination thereof. 

Whether by intention or ineptitude, such censorship perpetuates the submissiveness and denial fostered by the national cults of mandatory optimism and prideful ignorance and the Trump Regime’s open encouragement of genocidal bigotry. It camouflages the regime’s murderous intent. It also hides the appropriately terrifying fact the regime’s illegal but permanent termination of public-assistance privacy renders us all vulnerable to ruinous political ambush of the sort that was inflicted on me in December 1982 by a vengeful disciple of Hitler who was protectively closeted in the Washington State Department of Employment Security. Remembering me as one of the leaders of the group of male and female GI Bill students who got her fired from Western Washington State College in 1971 for illegally attempting to expel us in  retaliation for our anti-Vietnam-War activism, she deleted my entire unemployment-compensation file, leaving me without any income whatsoever, destroying a promising career-change in mid-process and forcing my return to New York City, where I found immediate re-employment in the working press. 

In response to my enraged protests -- I repeatedly badgered every Washington state politico I knew -- the department (eventually) paid me the thousand-plus dollars of unemployment compensation I would otherwise have received. But by then I’d been back in the City six months, so the money hardly mattered. And cashing the check formally ended my ability to seek the revenge I was due for the Hitlerite’s ruinously felonious malfeasance, which thus went entirely unpunished.

Such is capitalism in action even during the best of times, with favoritism guaranteeing the bureaucrats are often as corrupt as the politicians themselves. What now threatens us is infinitely worse -- for many inconceivably so.     

****

LET US THEN review our situation:

Recent history proves the “Republican” (sic) Party is -- both literally and figuratively -- operating under a false flag. Its proper name is implicit in its  Christonazi/Neoconfederate identity. Its true flag is therefore most assuredly not the Stars and Stripes of our slain Republic. Its true banners -- brazenly displayed during the attempted coup of 6 January 2020 and in Charlottesville, Virginia in the 11-12 August 2017 prelude to the martyrdom of Heather Heyer  -- are instead  the swastika of the 17-million-victim Nazi German Holocaust and the Stars and Bars of the 750,000-casualty Confederate mutiny that would have set the South  apart as the slavemasters' white male supremacist Christian theocracy. 

Its ideology is  a nightmare symbiosis of methodically resurrected  Ku-Klux-Klan bigotry intensified by Christianity's self-righteous murderousness sharpened to conquering lynch-mob fanaticism by the cunning application of strategy and tactics perfected by Adolf Hitler and refined into the Mein-Kampf equivalents of the  Powell Memo and Project 2025.   The result is an avowedly ecogenocidal  manifestation of Absolute Evil maliciously vectored by a political party that has become a white Christian version of the Taliban. It has made itself unstoppably powerful by its conquest of the entire federal apparatus, at least 28 of the 50 state governments and every law-enforcement agency in the nation.

The same history proves the “Democratic” (sic) Party, irremediably compromised by its role in the coup of 22 November 1963, is actually the  Fifth Column – that is, the clandestine subversion unit – of the Christonazi/Neoconfederate kampfbund. The resultant institutional reality is unalterable by anything short of genuine revolution because both parties, their elected officials and their supportive bureaucracies are the wholly owned properties and puppets of the capitalist ruling class. Government  policies whether federal, state or local are therefore the increasingly brazen expression of ruling class will, which -- as proven by its nauseatingly repetitive Triangle-Shirtwaist,  Blair Mountain and Bhopal atrocities -- is always the forcible extraction of maximum profit with minimal cost to itself and maximal victimization of its workers.

Now the ruling class is replacing us with computers, robots and artificial intelligence – exiling us to permanent unemployment,  fatal poverty and boiling revolutionary anger -- and in fearful response, with chaos and political sleight-of-hand to cover its intent, it is  obviously intent on eliminating those of us they deem "surplus" by  renewing the Holocaust,   with Trump as  Führer. The capitalists clearly expect him to Christonazify as many as he can,  exterminate the rest of us and march any survivors into  inescapable slavery. 

History also tells us this failed nation’s citizenry now has only a Potemkin Village of socioeconomic or political representation and is thus  reduced, de facto, to the disempowered defenselessness  that precedes enslavement. Many of our fellow citizens have been methodically battered to slavery's silent submissiveness by neoliberalism’s decades of social-Darwinism. Already they are too fretfully obsessed by the dire necessities of day-to-day survival to dare make any effort to restore the Constitution slain by the voters on 5 November 2025.  Many younger silent submissives  see no reason to try; their embittered  complaint -- "your Constitution was never protected us even when it was supposedly still in full force" -- is increasingly the defining truth of U.S. politics.

Though the slaying of the Constitution began with 1954's addition of "under God" to the "Pledge of Allegiance" -- the capitalized "G" is  de facto recognition  of the sadistic deity of Christian theocracy; the "under" declares him our omnipotent master -- its slow-motion murder did not become overwhelmingly obvious until Carter the Clandestine Theocrat declared war against women with his  comments about the Hyde Amendment in 1977. Here we encounter both a vivid example of  the party's post-JFK  Fifth-Column function and an apt prelude  to its present-day Neville Chamberlain treachery. Thus was misogyny made official federal policy, not by the nazified Republican Ronald Reagan, as we often incorrectly assume, but by a Democrat's controversial legislative ambush.        

Whether or not this sort of betrayal is a  silent submissive's  sole experience of political truth seems immaterial; the same hopeless sense of inescapable powerlessness afflicts even many citizens who are old enough to remember when the U.S. was -- at least for most whites -- a genuinely democratic republic and a notably comfortable realm in which to live. Who then are these persons? I suspect they're the dominant segment of the 36.1 percent who did not vote in November and the vast majority of the approximately 94 percent of anti-Trump voters who refuse to protest now. (See "largest protest" link, below, for an authoritative estimate of the demonstrators' numbers.) Though the submissives  include many who regard Christonazism as repugnant, it appears they are too abjectly fearful to ever find the courage to openly oppose the unmitigated horror of the Christonazi onslaught. Young or old, I suspect the degree of their submissiveness is a  measurement of the extent to which they've internalized the futility-of-hope factor paradoxically implicit in Ayn Rand's toxic ethos of  self-obsessed moral imbecility, the neoliberal credo  with which we're all perpetually dosed by mainstream media and the brain-policing that passes for education.

Undoubtedly by intent, neoliberalism is suppressing our individual and collective capability for humanitarian empathy. Robbing us of our ability to achieve solidarity, the resultant politically terminal deficiency was first exemplified by the gradual deterioration of '60s radicalism into the late-'70s Me-Generation avarice that would define the entire decade of the '80s. By 2012, this Ayn Rand poison  -- its aggressive self-obsession now bolstered by open scorn for empathy -- was strong enough to kill Occupy within a few months. The movement thus collapsed  into the spasms of egotistic clashes and identity-politics squabbling that enabled its defeat by  government forces. In retrospect, it seems obvious Occupy was destroyed to  clear  the way for Hillary, which appears now to have been the plausibly deniable guarantee of Trump's ascendance. 

Though Trump unquestionably spearheads capitalism’s inevitable transformation into hard-core nazism, his  buffoonish or erratic behavior makes it difficult for some people to recognize him as  a genuinely apocalyptic threat  It's not an uncommon ploy; the serial murderer John Wayne Gacy disguised himself as a clown. Too many people thus continue to dismiss Trump's genocidal rhetoric as political hyperbole, sensational but ultimately meaningless. Nevertheless, his predatory purpose becomes more undeniable with every outrage. Obviously he intends to complete the  nullification of the Constitution, thereby rewarding the vengefully white-male-supremacist Neoconfederates by forever reversing the outcome of the (first?) Civil War. He would  simultaneously reward the Christonazis  by enabling them to  transform  the nation into a theocratic American variant of Hitler's Germany. Their plan is to make the former U.S. a new Auschwitz,  invisibly fenced and policed by inescapable electronic surveillance,  a continent-sized death camp for exterminating everyone on their  hate lists – note again not only Boelter’s intended victims  but the approximately 300,000 transgender children the Supreme Court just added to their targets. Once the corpses have been ground and baked to fertilizer and the execution-complexes converted to Disneylands and shopping malls, the former Republic would become a theocratic re-education camp for  cradle-to-grave zero-tolerance  Christonazi mind-warping.

Given the regime's stated intent to weaponize science as a tool of theocracy, I cannot doubt its agenda includes research to determine if it is possible to genetically detect LGBTQ tendencies at birth -- with immediate extermination for any newborn in whom such tendencies are diagnosed -- and death as heretics  for any parents who dare protest.

Our masters and their puppets would have us believe the horrors inflicted on us by the 5 November vote are  an anomaly that will be undone by next year's congressional midterms. That is another Big Lie. Trump has repeatedly stated his election is to be the nation's last. Compelling circumstantial evidence indicates his emergence as Führer  fulfills the intent of  the Bankers’ Plot the retired Marine General Smedley Butler heroically interdicted in  1933. A Wall Street scheme to make the U.S. a satellite of Nazi Germany, its details still remain so classified we have to google at least half-a-dozen  sources to obtain even a vague indication of its magnitude and depth.  (Note especially the indications of ruling-class-mandated  grants of presidential and congressional immunity that in 1934 and early 1935 seem to have given the plotters the protected status of  a de facto permanent working group, a clandestine precursor to the infamous Trump/Musk Department of Government Efficiency.)  Ninety years later – precisely as we witness in the transgender atrocity – its outrages are routinely approved by a Supreme Court deliberately packed with Christonazis  specifically chosen to legitimize the new Führer’s will. As we of the (real) left repeatedly sought to warn the nation, this is  an especially glaring  example of how the Trump  applies the strategies and tactics his  messiah Hitler used to conquer the Weimar Republic.

Another adaptation of Hitler’s blueprint for subversion, the nazification of schoolchildren, has been accomplished by decades of psychological conditioning vectored by mandatory reading of Ayn Rand’s fictionalizations of the Mein Kampf/übermenschen ethos. The result guarantees Trump’s “Unified Reich” a new, official, easily metastasized, infinitely malignant national mindset. In its utterly merciless Trumpite/Christonazi/Neoconfederate intensity, it is a relentlessly ecogenocidal symbiosis of fanatical selfishness, prideful ignorance, sadistic bigotry and murderous anti-intellectualism that is tyranically hostile to any humanitarian instinct or desire for collective human kindness. Above all else, it is obscenely eager to manifest the public hatefulness legitimized by the Atlas-Shrugged (Elon Musk) variant of nazism. Thus it is not only absurd but clinically delusional to imagine the Trumpites have any potential for conversion to humanitarianism. The terrible magnitude of their triumph is in fact proven by the chronic absence of (effective) opposition; the silent submissives I described above are in actuality among the initial victims of  the Trumpite kampfbund's  weaponization of Ayn Rand's  brand of moral imbecility.  Though Rand proclaimed herself an atheist, the Christonazis sanctify her by filtering  her venom through their prosperity gospel, using her sociopathy to reinforce their assertion that  greed is good and ecogenocidal greed is truly godly. 

Thus the global aristocrats and their lynch-mob puppets celebrate with infinitely sadistic glee -- the aristocrats because they now have official permission to sedate themselves with a suicidal orgy of ecogenocidal avarice as terminal climate change hooks our species from the cosmic stage and drops the final curtain on the misogynistic war against our Mother Earth.  The Christonazis and Neoconfederates -- incorrigibles every one -- celebrate because they view Trump's “Unified Reich” as the obliteration of each and every humanitarian achievement, the reversal of evolution for which they and their doctrinal forebears have always so hatefully yearned. Make no mistake; this blitzkrieg of malignancy -- with unimaginably worse to come -- is what we face. Welcome to the suffocating darkness of our species' darkest most apocalyptic Dark Age --  precisely why I dearly hope my cardiologist's estimate of my longevity proves accurate.    

*****

MY PESSIMISM ABOUT the U.S. potential to evolve an effective liberation movement is by no means unsupported. In the 1920s, H.L. Mencken began lamenting the growing dominance of our national cult of prideful ignorance and compulsory stupidity. In the 1950s, Vance Packard documented the extent to which we were already conditioned to reliably abject conformity and submissiveness. In 1992, a year after the defeat and destruction of the Soviet Union, Canadian media ferreted out a particularly damning Soviet estimate that characterized the U.S. as lacking adequate revolutionary potential even during the allegedly radical 1960s and early 1970s.

As best I recall – I apologetically confess I have not yet recovered the requisite source material despite how carefully I originally filed it away¹ -- it was Maclean’s Magazine that so scooped the world. It reported the conclusion of the Committee for State Security (KGB) that while the U.S. minority communities of Blacks, Hispanics and First Nations peoples had indeed evolved the consciousness prerequisite to successful revolution, the revolutionary intent seemingly manifest by most of the Caucasians who supported the civil rights, anti-military-draft, anti-Vietnam War, feminist and environmentalist movements was merely a charade, a fad, a false consciousness that would vanish (or revert to existential-fascist norms) as soon as circumstances allowed. Implicit in the analysts’ view was their recognition most U.S. whites were even then too cowardly for the hazardous work of revolution and were already too aggressively self-centered to grow the requisite solidarity with other victims of capitalism.

The absolute correctness of the KGB’s dismaying hypothesis was proven beyond equivocation by the breathtaking speed with which U.S. whites abandoned all anti-war activism after abolition of the draft on 27 January 1973. Nearly all the white activists, most of them university students, instantly returned to the conventionally exploitative pursuits that define the capitalist elite, ignoring the fact the war raged on until 30 April 1975. The late Jerry Rubin, pseudo-revolutionary turned unapologetic Me-Generation millionaire, was typical.

White feminism reversed itself too, albeit less obviously. What had begun as an expansion of the anti-patriarchal mindfulness that defines Marxism was reduced to an ideologically reactionary campaign for individual achievement of implicitly white-supremacist petite bourgeois advantage and the fostering of anti-male hatred, all within the context of improving capitalism. Its hate-mongering built an impenetrable barrier to solidarity and served as the springboard for the identity politics that have since combined with neoliberalism-maximized moral imbecility  to thrust revolutionary socialist solidarity seemingly forever beyond U.S. reach.

Around the same time – a trend I witnessed as an adjunct-faculty photography instructor c. 1975-1981 -- environmentalism began rejecting its initial Earth Day diversity and deteriorating into an elitist, esoterica-segregated movement that in symbiosis with what might be termed Nurdism would achieve its ultimate notoriety with its belief – audible in the increasingly white-male-supremacist groves of environmental and computer-science academia nearly three decades before Eric Pianka made it public in 2006 – that a pandemic that killed off 90 percent of the global human population was the only way to save our Mother Earth from the permanent reduction back to the Precambrian lifelessness that looms as the consequence of our masters’ thermonuclear, biochemical and industrial follies. Though Pianka never urged such a Final Solution, nor identified its targets, it was always obvious the vast majority of victims would come from the working class, the 99.9 percent of our species who are forever dependent on paychecks for survival.

As for how the ruling class would survive any pandemic it would presumably unleash,  by the late 1970s, the bankers were already building bunkers.

Significantly, the sorts of ideological reversals that followed the ‘60s are a defining characteristic of U.S. political history: note the transformations of the Republicans and the Democrats, the former from Abolitionist to Conservative to Christonazi/Neoconfederate, the latter from pro-slavery stalwarts to advocacy of the New Deal and then their post-JFK retreat to functioning as the Christonazi/Neoconfederate Fifth Column. Note too the transformation of Reconstruction to Jim Crow, its relief via the (brief) Civil Rights interregnum followed by the (probably permanent) reversion to the genocidal racism of Christonazism.  These transformations illustrate how the effective the slavemaster-minded capitalist ruling class is – and always has been -- at conditioning the white majority to self-destructively shackle itself with hard-right ideology whenever its grievances intensify enough to threaten humanitarian revolution or even provoke attempts at significant reform.

It is something of an aside, but in the above pattern we witness history's unequivocal refutation of our species' ultimate Big Lie: the historically false notion the "moral arc" of the universe "bends toward justice." Bend it does, though any honest reading of the data proves its curvature  under patriarchy is exclusively toward ever-more-inescapably apocalyptic tyranny. We also see that as the arc of patriarchal history curves toward ever-more-advanced technology, it merges with and becomes indistinguishable from the curve of tyranny.

Was pre-patriarchal history any different? The misogyny-tabooed scholarship by Marija Gimbutas, Alexander Marshack, Gerald Hawkins, Barry Fell, Gavin Menzies, Barbara Mor and Robert Graves tell us it surely was – that in societies which evolved as extensions of motherhood, the source-model and psychodynamic  impetus of matriarchy, technological advancements were  shared for collective benefit rather than weaponized as assets of tyranny. Cooperation -- not competition -- was the primary means of survival.  Otherwise we  could not have sustained ourselves  through at least 300 millennia of ice ages and epic geological disasters. In profoundly alarming contrast, the imposition of patriarchy -- by talking snakes, burning wheels in the sky and self-proclaimed deities that descend to earth in thunderous clouds of smoke and fire -- has brought us to the brink of terminal apocalypse in a mere six thousand years, a terrifying nemesis that suggests patriarchy is indeed the cosmic equivalent of smallpox-contaminated blankets.  

The resultant lynch-mob nazism of the white U.S. working class is often affirmed in blood, as in the 1921 Tulsa massacre, or when an estimated 400 white construction workers and 800 white office workers attacked, savagely beat and hospitalized hundreds of peace demonstrators in New York City on 8 May 1970. That atrocity, encouraged by openly approving  cops, resoundingly applauded by leaders of both major parties and endorsed by most of the nation’s labor unions, is an obvious prelude to the present-day atrocities perpetrated – invariably with obvious police support – by the Neoconfederates, the Christonazis and the Trumpite kampfbund in general, the membership of which continues to grow. Aristocrat or lumpenproletarian, not  a one of their sort would ever accept socialism; the former have mandated the relentless indoctrination of the latter by their churches to reject  socialism as demonic, by their schools to fear it as enslavement and by mass media to regard it as a euphemism for race-mixing, homosexuality and emasculation.

Not only is their fanatical bigotry and methodically sustained ignorance irremediable; it has always been, as documented by Steven Hahn in Illiberal America (W.W. Norton & Company: 2004) – the definitive ethos of the nation's white majority. Now -- and probably forever -- it is the triumphantly official policy of  the federal government. Eventually it will the prescribed dogma  of all but a coastal dozen of the 50 states.  It is  irrefutable proof the U.S. is now as purposefully hateful as the Germany it inspired. Apropos which, see James Q. Whitman, Hitler’s American Model: the United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (Princeton University Press: 2017).

To understand the true bottomlessness of our enemy’s sociopathy, read “The Last Article,” here. As I have said elsewhere, the Lyudmila Pavlichenko formulation applies to the whole blood-thirsty lot, leaders and followers alike: they are indeed “fascists not humans.”

But now there may be a tiny defiant flicker of fiery hope within the all-smothering darkness. Trump's sneeringly sadistic, Pinochet-caliber "economic shock therapy" -- runaway food-price inflation sneakily imposed by tariffs and mass deportations  (lean ground beef up 68 percent in a single month) -- is growing the resistance with a speed as apparently unprecedented as the true-but-censored rate of inflation itself. Thus the 14 June anti-Trump "No Kings" campaign produced what are now said to be  the largest protest demonstrations in U.S. history. And as it says in "Biko," Peter Gabriel's evocative anti-apartheid anthem,² "Once the flames begin to catch/the wind will blow it higher."

__________________

¹In 2004, as a result of family treachery – the ultimate triumph of an older, now-dead half-sibling who had long despised me – I was evicted from the rural, forest-and-garden acreage I had been assured would be my home for as long as I chose to remain there. I’m now guessing that during the resultant move – of necessity made in great haste and under constant threat of violence – I accidentally disposed of the relevant file. But I am still searching for it – I have two four-drawer filing cabinets of material to sort – and if I do find it, I will post it as bibliographical references.

²A musically superior  "Biko," unfortunately marred by an intrusively discordant introduction of musicians following the performance, is here. 

(For M, in recognition and gratitude.) 

LB/30 January-20 June 2025

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Temple of Salvation, 14th St., NYC, August 1969. M4 Leica, 35mm Summicron, Tri-X at 800. Photo by Loren Bliss © 1969, 2025. 

***

Note: This post, originally published on 21 October 2009 (in the beginning weeks of this blog, when it was still named Outside Agitator's Notebook), was hacked to near death, undoubtedly by Christians who sought to destroy the above photograph. They damn near succeeded, contaminating it so prohibitively it took me nearly half a day to make it publishable again. I am not a Nurd, and I most assuredly cannot afford the $280-per-hour consulting fees charged by the local representatives of the Nurdly (Trumpite) Übermenschen, but I finally reasoned that -- having no way to distinguish between functional code and malicious code -- restoration of my ability to publish the photo necessitated removal of all its associated code. That plus multiple recopying of the photo from JPEG to TIFF and back finally restored it; prior to that, the best my "insert image" efforts would achieve was reproduction of its catalogue number. Meanwhile I learned to my utter vexation that resurrecting the hacked photograph forced my text to appear as a new post, which in turn necessitated (very minor) revisions in content plus my infuriating discovery three of the original four bibliographic sources have since been suppressed, undoubtedly by the ever-intensifying Christonazi censorship and/or book-burning.    Thus for the hacker(s), a special blessing: an ill death may they die.

***      

THIS IS A Bible story -- the kind most Christians don’t want anybody to tell. Its premise is something Jesus allegedly said -- words generally taken to mean, “by their deeds shall we know them.”

It starts with the fact that while I’d never claim Christ-like attitudes, I did witness what is being done to working-class United States citizens when it was only being done to working-class Southerners.

A half-century ago -- against my will -- I spent many of my adolescent and young adult years in the South. A New York City kid, I was bounced  between apprehensive, divorce-court mandated summers with my certified psychotic birthmother in Michigan and emotionally secure school-years with my genuinely loving father and stepmother in various parts of Dixie. But each locale included a Yin/Yang paradox.  Michigan's Au Sable River system -- in those blessed times its South Branch Country still mostly untainted wilderness --  was the beloved refuge from familial dysfunction that would  become my life-long spiritual motherland, while Dixie -- to which my Marxian father was permanently exiled by the 1947 purge --  was outside the security of our household a realm so malevolently alien I had to think like a spy merely to survive its schoolyard bullies. Later, working as a sportswriter  on a Knoxville daily -- I was married by then, and was there because it was my only post-military job offer --  I saw proven a thousand times over the truth of H.L. Mencken’s dictum that you’re better off a peasant in Brooklyn than a king in Tennessee.

While the South is many things including the surrealism of hideous poverty in beautiful landscapes, it is mostly the sociological laboratory in which the democracy-destroying cancer of Christian American theocracy was bred and perfected -- the political Petrie dish from which this malignancy metastasized throughout the nation.

I do not know if this metastasis was a clandestine part of the Republican Southern Strategy, though I strongly suspect it was.  

But I do know something of the general history of Christian depredations. I know the Christians began serial genocide against Jews, witches, unbelievers and so-called heretics in 305CE and are threatening to resume it even now. I know that to tabulate the death toll, you start with 6 million Jews and add the scholarly estimates of a million Albigensians and 9 million witches and everybody else killed in the name of “God’s Plan for Salvation,” and soon your list approaches 20 million murders in Europe alone.

I also know these numbers are hotly contested by Christianity’s defenders. But the figures become much more credible when you factor in the Christian-fostered genocide against the indigenous peoples of America.

At least one academic source (see links below) places the overall post-1492 death toll among First Nations folk at 97,500,000 (not a typo). That’s ninety-seven million, five hundred thousand murder victims.

Say it again: ninety-seven million, five hundred thousand.

Based on a guesstimated man/woman/child average height of 4.5 feet, that’s enough human corpses to ring the equator 3.4 times -- or (since we are all so in love with sports analogies) -- enough dead to fill the nation’s collegiate-size football fields endzone to endzone with 108,338 halftime displays of decomposing bodies.

Since all 97,500,000 are non-white, picture them as victims of an epic Lynching Bee, the dead displayed at one hundred and eight thousand, three hundred and thirty-eight Ku Klux Klan rallies -- 108,338 gridirons carpeted with American Aboriginal corpses as the obligatory fiery crosses burn where each of the goal posts normally stand.

Now recognize what we're seeing as an ultimate graduation ceremony for “The Saturday Night Men’s Bible Study Class” -- the standard southern euphemism for the Klan -- in which context the actual words attributed to Jesus make perfect sense: “by their fruits shall ye know them” (Saint Matthew 7:16).

***

For Big Business executives and banksters today, there is no greater virtue than infinite greed, no greater good than absolute power. The same values motivated post-Civil-War southern aristocrats. But there was one important difference -- the southern aristocrats had just been stripped of all their slaves.

How then were they to bring about their own restoration?

As learned in history as we today are mostly ignorant of it, the aristocrats understood perfectly the success of Christian brutality:  to those conditioned to believe, there is no greater terror than eternal damnation, no greater proof of divine favor than wealth.

Such fear and desperation, the aristocrats reasoned, might prove even more effective than an overseer’s whip.

Recognizing the potential for achieving the ultimate objective of monopoly capitalism -- an all-powerful ruling class served by hopelessly disempowered workers -- the suddenly missionary-minded Good Christian Gentlemen of the South financed the spread of biblical zealotry** throughout the region and so created the most savagely ignorant, self-destructively violent yet sullenly submissive society in North America. What rights the workers wouldn’t surrender in the name of “Fear of the Lord” were forcibly extracted by the Klan. Racial segregation and the most vindictive anti-unionism ever were relentlessly enforced by pulpit-pounding and lynching.

Big Business loved it: the best (cheapest/most obedient) workforce in the U.S.

By the late 1950s -- predictably financed by Big Business, fueled by Cold War fear-mongering and anti-Communist, anti-socialist, anti-intellectual hatemongering -- Christian fanaticism began spreading north and west. In 1960, only about 40 percent of all U.S. Protestants were of the bible-thump persuasion. By 2008, Pew Research put the zealots at 51 percent of all Protestants -- a powerful block of voters making up about 29 percent of the total electorate: more than enough to swing an election.

It is surely no accident this growth of Christian zealotry accompanies the methodical downsizing of the economy -- the nationwide imposition of economic conditions formerly characteristic only of the South.

***

To understand why the ruling class so venomously opposes real health care reform, we have to understand how the fear and desperation generated by Christian fanaticism combines with the horrors of ever-worsening real-world poverty to drive us to ever-increasing heights of production at ever decreasing wages.

Then we see immediately how genuine health care reform would go a long way toward easing the bottomless terror that -- articulated or not -- has become the core consciousness of every worker in the nation.

Which is precisely why the ruling class won’t let it happen.

As the reliably truthful news-site AlterNet reported on 8 October,  President Obama has long been helping the Christian fanatics sabotage health care reform:

“The Rev. Jim Wallis is sitting pretty these days. He's the evangelist the media love -- so much so that Democrats kow-tow before him. He says he's progressive, and has some credentials to back up the claim: anti-poverty work and opposition to the Vietnam War. But he's opposed to legal abortion and same-sex marriage. Nonetheless, eager for an evangelical partner, President Obama named Wallis to the President's Council on Faith-Based  and Neighborhood Partnerships, giving Wallis the ideal platform from which to try to subvert the debate over health-care reform for his anti-choice cause.” 

The Wallis affair is all the more damning given Obama’s appointment of the gay-bashing, anti-abortion misogynist Rev. Rick Warren to read the invocation that opened the president's inauguration and thus officially began his administration. As I said at the time -- particularly in light of how Obama defied the stunned protest the keynoting appointment provoked -- this was the new president’s gesture of fealty to the ruling class and an uplifted finger of jeering contempt at all the rest of us.

And let us not forget Sen. Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat who as majority leader will decide within the next few days whether health care reform includes a Medicare-like “public option” or merely makes us all slaves of the insurance speculators via  pay-or-prison mandatory insurance that gives these parasites a guaranteed windfall of at least $60 billion a year forever.

Reid is a Mormon, has been a Mormon elder -- a leader in a Christian sect fanatically opposed not just to reproductive freedom but to all women’s rights. Given that government insurance will give women access to birth control and gynecological services private insurors typically refuse to cover, how do you suppose Reid will rule?

“By their deeds shall we know them.”

Theocracy prevails, as toxic to liberty here as in the Muslim world.

So much for “change we can believe in.”

*********

Footnotes and relevant links:

*The headline, a Sun Tzu quote, is abridged from The Art of War, trans. by Samuel B. Griffith (Oxford University Press: 1971), pg. 84.

**I avoid the terms “fundamentalist” and “evangelical” because the Christians manipulate controversies over their meanings to distract from the fanaticism, misogyny and general hatefulness implicit in both labels. Likewise I use “Protestant” and “Catholic” only as required by circumstance, as in demographic data or Irish geography. Christianity is Christianity: though history includes many individuals who have risen above the Christian norm -- Albert Schweitzer, Dorothy Day, Mother Teresa, St. Francis of Assisi -- history also proves that Christianity itself is as murderous in one form as another.

These links provide estimates of the deaths inflicted by Christianity and methodological criticism of how the numbers were derived:  

http://www.religioustolerance.org/wic_burn2.htm

http://www.holocaust-history.org/~rjg/witches.shtml

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albigensian_Crusade

http://www.religioustolerance.org/genocide5.htm 

LB/21 October 2009

(-30-)lly update this blog every ternoon, essentially following the schedule of traditional weekly newspapers. But I will also put out a ed -- as 　

THOUGH THERE WAS was much to celebrate in the results of the 6 November 2012 balloting – especially the senatorial triumph of a woman who genuinely terrifies the One Percent – it was nevertheless the worst election night of my life: dread and circuses, with dread winning by a landslide.

That's because the voters of this Ayn Rand backwater to which I was long ago exiled by the gentrification of Manhattan are again using their ballots to sneer “Fuck You” at anyone who's dependent on public transport.

Not that I am surprised. Those of us who are transit riders, pedestrians and bicyclists have long been openly despised by a substantial majority of the wealthier suburbanites here, and now possibly we are being targeted by a majority even within the city limits of Tacoma.

It would not be incorrect to label this bigotry a movement – the Anti-Transit-User-Movement. Its well-financed hatefulness has coalesced into cultoid deification of automobiles and pickup trucks as ultimate symbols of “Americanism” and “the Pacific Northwest Lifestyle”: it is literally a car cult, as unique to the Puget Sound region as the cargo cults were to remote South Pacific islands.

Its disciples fume against bicycles, trains and buses as proofs of conspiracy against their imaginary “right to drive” – in ugly reality their self-obsessed, morally imbecilic compulsion to isolate themselves in mechanized armor and mercilessly bully anyone who is not similarly equipped.

The car cultists are road rage personified. They demonstrate their autocentric hatred by refusing to slow their vehicles for bicyclists or yield the right-of-way to obviously disabled people in crosswalks; they spew invective – “get a job, you lazy bum” – at those of us waiting at bus stops; most of all they flock to the polls at every opportunity to vote against transit and thereby continue their relentless assault against transit-users.

And yes it is that personal – as personal as a fist in the face. The insurmountable hardships these anti-bus-rider voters will gleefully inflict on me if they're successful – the lethal misery they will happily impose on anyone whose circumstances are similar to my own – robbed the election of all the joy it would otherwise have evoked.

Make no mistake: I applaud the victory of President Barack Obama, which – or so I desperately hope – has slowed the Ruling Class effort to impose a new form of Nazism on the United States. I am delighted the voters of Washington have apparently elected Jay Inslee governor – and have thereby beaten back the One Percent's attempt to turn this state into another Wisconsin.

I am pleased these same voters have endorsed marriage equality and legalized possession of marijuana, the latter a defiant protest against the federal government's sadistically punitive, implicitly racist War on Drug Users.

Above all else I cheer the election of Elizabeth Warren, the new senator from Massachusetts whose victory pledge – “I won't just be your senator, I'll be your champion” – promises a potentially revolutionary revitalization of the entire Democratic Party. (Perhaps that explains why slightly more than half her speech, including the pledge itself, is now being suppressed by the corporate news monopolies.)

Warren's apparent fragility paradoxically emphasizes her indomitable strength, a purely female manifestation of the emotionally compelling leadership traits that prompt soldiers to follow a commander through a harrowing of hell. Her proven courage and brilliance combine with her unapologetic womanliness to demonstrate a kind of magnetism and power that has remained relatively unknown in the adamantly patriarchal United States. But in truth it is ageless – witness the examples of Maeve in Celtic mythology and Boudicca in classical history.

Not only do I cheer the senator-elect. Verily, I salute her as well.

Indeed there is a quality of trustworthiness about Warren the like of which I have not sensed in a politician since the halcyon days of John Fitzgerald Kennedy and his brother Robert. That's why I believe she could become not just the new voice of a Democratic renaissance but the leader and conscience of an all-woman congressional insurgency that might actually free the party from its Wall Street captivity and restore the principles of the New Deal.

Admittedly that may be no more than the oft-disappointed yearning of a man who even in old age has never quite abandoned his conviction the Women's Movement would at last force this nation to be true to its stated principles of liberty and justice for all, much as my late father believed of the African-American Civil Rights Movement.

Though it may be a lot more than that. Ultimately it feels like another reliable prompting of journalistic intuition – the first real, instinctive, from-the-bottom-of-my-heart political hopefulness I have felt in years.

But on election night Warren's bright and blessed promise was ultimately meaningless – a phenomenon far away on the homeland coast from which I was long ago economically banished.

Here in real-time Tacoma the Anti-Transit-User Movement was proving the town and its surrounding Pierce County to be perfect examples of Moron Nation – my name for the USian worst, the most pridefully ignorant, venomously conformist, vindictively anti-intellectual, maliciously bigoted citizenry in the industrial world.

It was a realization all the more painful because I used to love Tacoma. There was a time, 34 years ago, when Tacoma was genuinely more cosmopolitan than Seattle, particularly in the welcome its people extended to “outlanders” like myself. But now the probable outcome of the transit fight was legitimately resurrecting the question once asked by a brazenly snooty Seattle tee shirt: “If God is on our side, why is there a Tacoma?”

Tacoma's vote is part of the Pierce County vote, and Pierce Countians were not only voting 51-49 to destroy the local transit system they had already ravaged at the polls in March 2011. Now in 2012 with Inslee headed for apparent victory, Pierce County was voting 52-48 for Rob McKenna, the homophobic, anti-health-reform, anti-Medicaid Republican attorney general who real Democrats feared was scheming to be another Scott Walker. And now, though marriage equality had won statewide, the locals were voting against it, 53-47 to withhold full citizenship from gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.

Because of Washington's absolutely reliable but painfully slow method of counting votes, the tabulations will continue for nearly another week.

If McKenna wins, Pierce County's closet-fascist voters can congratulate themselves. They will have made the difference between Washington remaining an officially progressive state or threatening – via gubernatorial powers of decree and paralysis-by-veto – to become another anti-labor, anti-woman, anti-gay Wisconsin. Likewise, had gay marriage lost, Pierce County could have lauded itself as the locale that swung the knockout punch of religious fanaticism against the LGBT community's yearnings for equality.

As a Tacoma-born colleague of mine pointed out in the context of a gay-bashing incident several years ago, what else can you expect from the town that has more churches and church-going zealots than any other municipality in the state?

But Tacoma and Pierce County also have the largest per-capita labor union membership in the state, which makes their citizens' calculated brutality toward transit-users all the more astonishing. It is a malevolence so intense the ballots have become like bullets – volleys to savage anyone who can't afford an automobile.

Once again, brandishing as they did in 2011 the Moron Nation shibboleth that “transit is welfare” (the corollary of which is “let's kill the bums by shutting down their transportation”), the Anti-Transit-User Movement was vetoing a last-ditch, save-our-system measure proposed by the agency that operates the local bus service.

Pierce Transit, as it's called, had asked voters to choose between two alternatives.

One is a tiny, three-tenths-of-one-percent sales-tax increase – that's three pennies on a $10 purchase – a sum even a pauper could afford.

The other is a 53 percent cutback in bus service: no service on weekends; no service after seven p.m. on weekdays; service on the few surviving routes reduced mostly to one bus per hour – utter devastation dealt those of us who depend on public transport.

Because the vote counts continue, it's logical to wonder if there's any chance for a last-minute reversal in the results. I asked two well-positioned sources that very question. Neither answered.

In other words, the Anti-Transit-User Movement of Tacoma and Pierce County has almost certainly won again – not really a surprise since its voters have rejected every other such proposal, whether from Pierce Transit or its Seattle-based regional counterpart Sound Transit, at least as far back as the middle '90s.

Even if by some miracle we pro-transit people manage to eke out a winning margin, our enemies – and enemies is precisely what they are – already threaten a Florida-type recount fiasco that could delay the decision for weeks if not months. Clearly their hatred knows no limit; seemingly, neither do the bank accounts of their financiers.

Nor is this unusual. The entire Puget Sound region has a uniquely anti-transit history that dates to 1968, when Seattle's first effort to build a regional light-rail system was easily defeated by a breathtakingly nasty campaign built around the assertion, never publicly proclaimed but often whispered, that “we don' wanna be like 'Jew' York.” Impossible to trace, it was apparently spawned by a faction of the One Percent that regarded adequate mass transit as a threat to its hegemony – an invitation to “undesirables” who might challenge local sweatshops and question the exclusionary privileges that make much of Western Washington a private country club for the super-rich.

Three more decades of xenophobic no-transit votes reduced the population's smugly arrogant claims of environmental superiority to undeniable proof of a hypocrisy so huge its only counterpart in U.S. political history is the fossil-fuel industry's Big Lie efforts to persuade us it's not Mother Nature's deadliest adversary.

Only in recent years has a huge influx of high-tech “outlanders” nullified Seattle's indigenous hostility to public-transport users. Compared to transit systems in other Pacific Northwest coastal cities, Portland to the south and Vancouver in Canada, Seattle mass transit runs at least four decades behind – deliberately kept so backward it cannot possibly catch up – an urban-area outrage even in the notoriously autocentric United States.

Now, as if in a race toward a new bottom, the Anti-Transit-User Movement of Tacoma and Pierce County is bidding to make its own bailiwick many times worse. What nobody in authority wants to admit is that downsizing of the magnitude being inflicted by ATUM voters will almost certainly mean the death of Pierce Transit. Nearly a fifth of its operating revenues come from the fare box. A service reduction of 53 percent will slash fare-box income to the proverbial bone, most likely enough to bankrupt the agency and shut it down permanently.

One knowledgeable transport-industry source says Tacoma/Pierce County thus will have brought upon itself the odium of being the largest urban area in the industrial world without public transportation. Thus too will it become a monument to greed, bigotry and miserliness, a nadir of anti-transit-user malice. Endorsed as the ATUM is by the Tacoma-Pierce County Chamber of Commerce and a deep-pocket coalition of local automobile dealers, it is already attracting the most negative sorts of international attention.

Clearly, its alliance with the rabidly Teabaggerish ATUM severely limits the chamber's ability to fulfill one of its primary responsibilities – promoting Tacoma/Pierce County as a forward-looking place in which to headquarter, expand or build business and industry.

Presumably the chamber represents all local business interests, but its emergence as a leader in the war against mass transit users suggests a much narrower (hidden) agenda. Has the chamber deliberately made itself an instrument in the One Percent's lethal subjugation of lower-income people? Is there some secret cabal of obscenely wealthy speculators eagerly awaiting the last run of the last Pierce Transit bus? Do they intend – once the transit agency is slain – to launch a for-profit bus company?

No doubt such service would be priced to exclude all save the richest commuters – the aggressively Caucasian autocentrics who loudly decry the area's ever-more-gridlocked highways even as their votes against transit make the traffic that much worse.

Why then do they vote as they do?

Only a boundless aversion to the implicit democracy of public transport – a bottomless loathing and contempt for racial and ethnic minorities and the urban poor in general – could prompt such self-contradictory voting. With Pierce Transit slain and a for-profit bus company operating on the commuter routes, the wealthy suburbanites – and let us not forget Tacoma's growing number of penthouse urbanites – would finally have their own de facto limousine service.

Plausible? You be the judge. But as we all know, privatization is almost always the ugly motive behind the deliberate downsizing and destruction of government services.

Perhaps some securely employed investigative reporter – if indeed any remain – will wrangle an assignment to explore these questions in depth.

Meanwhile there's no doubt the attack on Tacoma/Pierce County bus riders is class war of the most vicious sort. Those of us who are elderly, disabled, chronically impoverished and therefore dependent on public transport for medical appointments, grocery shopping and other life-sustaining errands are being handed the Ayn Rand version of a termination notice: "we don't want you here; hurry up and die."

LB/7-8 November 2012

-30-