Photographic illustration by Loren Bliss ©1968, 1974, 2012
(One of those sudden mysterious creative impulses prompted me during a night of darkroom work in 1968 to contemplatively sandwich a '67 negative of Hare Krishna dancers with a '67 neg of anti-Vietnam-War protestors; I impulsively added the moon with my photo-editor's punch in '74 while contemplating whether to print it for a Seattle gallery show, as I then did. It survived the '83 arson only because it was among the mounted prints with me in my portfolio case. Today, I am astounded by how relevant these images remain.)
*****
(Author's Note: because this is such a long post -- 8606 words -- I respectfully suggest
separate reading and contemplation periods for each of the eight passages
set off by the five-asterisk dashes [*****] as complete essays.)
*****
IRONICALLY, IT'S THE (Kapitalismus-uber-alles) Business Administration Department at (private) Duke University that has exposed our Masters' academese-obscured, price-censored, banner-headline-caliber abstract of horrifying (real) news soon downsized to a crisis-minimizing fourth paragraph predictably buried by the Republican Fifth Column at Politco.com,which -- despite obvious attempts by the authors of each text to discourage perusal by Working-Class1 readers -- proves beyond question how and why a tiny cult of deliberately chaos-fostering fake-news perpe-traitors are intentionally destroying the already dis-United States.
It also proves our Masters' choice of ecogenocidal psychopaths -- the potentially suicidal snot-bombers our Masters' vassals most likely sought in focus-groups and then probably recruited and paid to propagate with their Big Lies the deceitfully named "Neoliberalism" (sic) that euphemistically hides its mutated Nazism as "Neoliberalism" (again sic't) (each sarcastically quotation-marked sic as an entree to exposing how "Neoliberalism" (sic't once more) is now protected by a cloak of Goebbels-caliber disinformation) to conceal our Masters' thorough Nazification of "Neoliberalism" (sic) -- originally by the secret renewal and export of the apocalyptic ideologies of Original German Nazism and by OGN's ChristoNazi, NeoNazi and Neofascist pseudo-mutations, and thus sic't one last time in this essay.
My point is, "Neoliberalism" is neither new or liberal; it is every bit as much deception -- and therefore yet another proof of Ruling Class malevolence -- as "change we can believe in."
Meanwhile let us never forget Neoliberalism's sources include Ayn Rand's wretchedly written fictional popularizations of the Nazi ethos, all critically damned as literary garbage that would never have been published save for Plutocratic intervention and is now all-too-often-required reading in what are therefore falsely described as "literature" classes. These often-mandatory Ayn Rand studies invariably seduce Moronic-Majority types to embrace a Nazism they are thus often unable to recognize as such.
As I describe in a subsequent essay below, it is just such ignorance that enabled someone I had presumed to be friend for nearly 40 years to send me a deluge of pro-Nazi links (fake news included), and when I criticized the choices in a return email, the response was first a long silence followed by a denunciation of me in print as an enemy, the only mercy thus shown being the omission of my name, perhaps with the knowledge its publication might combine with the fact I am a known anti-Nazi, a position that today is becoming as dangerous as it was to have been an advocate of civil rights in the Jim Crow South, which I also was.
Too bad most of us have forgotten that among the parents and grandparents of today's Nazis were the murderers of 41 Blacks and civil-rights advocates, their courageous but fatal dedication to the quest for freedom now reduced by the moral imbecility of the present to little more than -- what? A struggle for nothing? Given what this nation has become, who can doubt the final triumph of their enemies? Capturing the government so all but maybe three solidly "Democratic" (sic) far-west states (with enough combined economic power to easily support themselves), and the much smaller (and therefore less economically able) eastern states, our Masters have already made of most of the national interior a potential New Confederacy, the ad hoc militias of which no doubt await our Masters' marching orders with the same insane eagerness that defined the Southron traitors of 1861.
The diametrical opposite of yesteryear's well-armed abolitionists, too many of us who oppose these traitors are cravenly disarming themselves -- an apocalyptic expression, I fear, of the cowardice that makes a soldier fling away his rifle and surrender to the enemy in hope of mercy that ends when the victorious soldier then kills the surrenderer, instantaneously by shooting if there's not an ammunition shortage; by much more grotesque and agonizing methods if ammo is in short supply. In any case it's a battlefield occurrence far more common then a lifelong diet of USian war propaganda will ever allow us to believe. (To my knowledge Hollywood has never made -- nor ever will make -- a genuine anti-war film, especially of the sort produced by the Soviet Union.) But that's an aside, another of our paths for future exploration. The critical point here is extent to which, thanks to the another Fifth Column service provided our Masters by the "Democratic" (sic) Party's anti-gunowner movement, the populations in those states that are mostly likely to be victimized by Nazi aggression are increasingly disarmed. Thus they are literally reduced to the mandatory pacifism and compulsory victimhood that defines slaves. Which is precisely how the Democrats are busily ensuring how once fuse of civil war is lit, any anti-Nazi stronghold is doomed, making the outcome of any future struggle to preserve the coastal states from Nazi conquest pathetically obvious.
Thus today the utter futility of the Civil Rights Movement and the ultimate sacrifices made by its 41 martyrs is accepted as proven fact; indeed today's Nazis hail the murders as examples of the proper response when any member of the üntermenschen demands recognition of rights the Supreme Court is busily nullifying, obviously intent on terminating every civil protection we the people have ever managed to obtain. In some instances the Nazis have actually used CRM and its subsequent undoing as proof of the rightness of white supremacy; they claim the Black quest for equality itself proved the Ku Klux Klaim that while Blacks are biologically human, their brains have never evolved beyond those of the apes by which they were ancestored. That such inferiors would dare rise up, say the Nazis, merely proves they were fools; the subsequent undoing of their foolishness, now 100 percent successful, is thus manipulated to further confirm their creed of white supremacy.
Having been a small but sometimes influential part of CRM -- the latter because I managed to remain a member of the working press during most of my remaining time in Tennessee -- the Klan made at least four attempts on my life -- possibly six, if I count two attempted vehicular assaults while traveling the era's two-lane blacktop highways, though these might only have been early explosions of road rage prompted by the obvious superiority of the machines that facilitated my escape, the Porsche whose emergency brake would later save my life, and a friend's Triumph TR-4 I was driving as practice for post-Porsche participation in a mountain-road rally.
In retrospect, and from an increasingly physically disabled old age, my escapes from martyrdom tend to seem ever-more-miraculous. In reality they were the due to a combination of factors, paramount among them the defensive prowess of a fine German shepherd, later poisoned in retaliation, and the killer-discouragement inherent in my own already well-known skill with firearms. While I was and remain a firm believer in political nonviolence, I have also always believed that when you are attacked as a lone individual, especially at home or while out-and-about as when grocery shopping, you should defend yourself with whatever force is necessary to remain among the living.
Knowing CRM as I do, I am ever-more-convinced it was the last genuinely enlightened mass movement the United States will ever produce. Its internal factionalism -- ideological differences ranging from gradualism to various intensities of belief in non-violent protest -- was always obvious during strategic and tactical discussions. But, by mutual consent, it was never allowed to overwhelm the intensity of our belief in our collective right -- "Black and White Together" was the era's slogan -- to fulfill the Constitution's supposed intent by achieving for Blacks and other peoples of color the same degree of freedom allowed us whites. For whatever reason, we have since shed what I now must suppose was merely a veneer of civilization -- the mutual tolerance that actually, for a brief period starting in maybe 1932 and undoubtedly ended forever in Dallas on 22 November 1963, enabled us to function as a unified modern society.
However, given how, thanks to my British/Canadian heritage, I knew from boyhood the so-called "American Revolution" was at its heart a reaction to the British judiciary's 1772 ruling that Blacks are fully human, the fact we as a nation seemed to be moving ever closer to to fulfillment of the goals of the few abolitionists who were among the Founders always felt, to me, like too much of a miracle to prevail. As indeed it proved to be, overthrown not by invasion, but by the most in-depth, all-encompassing, ultimately omnipotent program of subversion ever undertaken by any known human agency.
How did it win? It adjudged greed to be the only truly common human denominator, targeted its subversion accordingly and has been incessantly victorious ever since. Behind this I sense (but surely cannot prove) the same invisible force that reached out to me in 1983 to validate my life's work with arson at the exact moment I was meeting with the well-connected freelance editor who had pledged to bring its most important project to publication That all such hopes have since been slain by our Masters -- that the deaths of the movement's martyrs were now obviously all in vain -- pains me to such an extent it indeed makes my physical survival seem all the more miraculous. Perhaps, as even many avowed secularists are coming to believe, ours' truly is an accursed species.
Returning to present-day events, let us not allow our daily dosage of horrors real and fake to distract us from how the fake-news onslaught by ecogenocidal psycopathic liars includes doing whatever our Masters prescribe to further -- generally by concealment -- the terminally devolutionary terraforming of our earthly Motherland. Among the ever-more-obvious long-range purposes of the ongoing Fake News Onslaught is generating sufficient quantities of what we might term "crisis fog" -- i.e., the sense of bewildered hopelessness produced when self and community are repeatedly trashed by storms and evictions and other disasters even as the U.S. response to the pandemic makes it clear our Masters have unquestionably weaponized the virus to rid themselves of us "surplus workers."
Add in the ongoing threat of world war; the anxiety produced by looming Nazi victory and radically intensified by the probability the Nazis have already conquered the dis-United States; growing fears of runaway inflation, and of course Covid, which the permanently Nazified SCOTUS has weaponized into a sure nation-killer, which means the death rate will continue to soar accordingly. It's no surprise national anxiety is soaring.
As the mainstream media propaganda machine is showing its pro-Nazi bias by not telling us, Biden the Beguiler could quickly end inflation fears by re-creating the Office of Price Administration, the agency that kept Capitalism's top-hatted, silk-suited closet-Nazi predators from destroying the nation with their greed c. 1941-1947). OPA was created by executive order, which means Biden could do it again, which in turn means his refusal to do so is an excellent indication of the strength of the financial tethers by which our Masters have reduced all oval-office occupants to naught but obedient puppets. A new OPA to ameliorate the ever-more-apocalyptic spasms of our Masters greed? Not a chance; I think it safe to assume there is not a single professional politician anywhere in the United States who has not been enslaved by our Masters' bribery since the Supreme Court knowingly destroyed the nation with its Citizens United decision in 2010 -- about which more in a moment.
For now suffice it to say the court's traitorous redefinition of dollars as words and thus due the same constitutional protection made it legal for the plutocrats to financially enslave every politician in the land. As a result we now live under a de facto dictatorship infinitely more cunning and technologically powerful than any of its human predecessors -- a realm in which SCOTUS is now removing all the remaining obstacles to our Masters' final achievement of their fathers' and grandfathers' traitorous dreams of a Nazi United States, Hitler's ever-more-obviously anointed successor-nation fulfilling der Führer's of a thoroughly Nazi world.
One of the many indexes to our Masters' (absolute) power is the extent to which they're using the court's atrocities to distract us from our species' deadliest most pressing crisis ever. Our Masters have generated a crisis fog -- real and fake news included -- so thick it seems to have cloaked terminal climate change to invisibility. But in truth we have made it invisible for the same reason the anti-war movement is not even a shadow of its former self: war is another of the threats about which about which we are convinced we can do nothing whatsoever. And it is also surely true no anti-war movement in the post-JFK U.S. has ever done more than spawn a flurry of news reports that subsequent events proved were nothing more than introductions to obituaries, as at Kent State University and Jackson State College; and if we choose to close-focus this matter, let us start with Karen Silkwood, then expand our vision into all the other murders of heroic individuals and celebrities and then of folks who were unfortunate enough to have been somewhere at the wrong time, all these deaths linked by political undertones.
Obviously a long-ago lover spoke an ultimate truth as we watched Jack Ruby murder Lee Harvey Oswald; we were eating room-service breakfast and watching CBS News: "My god, we live in a banana republic," she said, her olive-green eyes flooding with tears. To which, 59 years later, I can only add, "You were right; and now Donald Trump intends to be top banana." Which awakens my investigative-reporter's mind just enough to make me wonder if maybe his seeming unstop-ability is ultimately just the result of knowing where more bodies are buried. Such is life -- and death -- in a plutocracy ruled by an invisible cabal of zillionaire moral imbeciles.
Meanwhile -- thanks to the combination of crisis-fog and the daily unfolding of additional horrors both real and faked -- our ultra-misogynistic Masters continue unchecked their ecogenocidal aggression against our Mother Earth, seemingly intent on reducing her back to the bug-ruled planet into which she properly began evolving in the Ordovican, a mere 480 million years ago. This is accomplished by any number of policies, court-edicts, toxins and diseases -- among the vectors the same tiny let's-inflict-globally-irreversible-chaos cult of (mostly) ChristoNazis and NeoNazis, the most obviously hateful of the anti-mask/anti-vax agitators.
Now perhaps it will also dawn on us the irremediably Nazified U.S. Supreme Court obviously shares the nation-destroying intent of the fake-news mongers. The court is, now and therefore probably forever, reduced to yet another of our Masters' most reliable puppets. It is ruled is by a sextet of ecogenocidal theocrats, a trio of whom began our Masters' Citizen United's SCOTUS-approved funding of the federal union's destruction. The fact of the court's lifetime appointments ensure its one remaining function is to legitimize whatever our Masters want done to complete the ChristoNazification of the entire nation.
The presence of solid pockets of continued anti-Nazi, anti-theocratic resistance in some of the coastal states -- see maps here and here -- is a threat our Masters obviously intend to suppress by more typical Nazi methods, for vivid previews of which go here and here. Warning: both these films have scenes of the mass murders by which the German Nazis proudly defined their rights as world-ruling übermenschen. Nevertheless I urge you to view them precisely because they show us what is sure to happen here in the dis-United States once our Masters' SCOTUS vassals have given them enough mechanism of control, the extermination of opponents becomes no more difficult than ordering a servant to take up a swatter and kill the houseflies that, thanks to terminal climate change, are descending on us in ever increasing numbers. (Note that in the polio era, the housefly was considered the deadliest disease-vector on the planet.) That servant is in all probability someone who recognizes such servitude as a modern form of enslavement but also recognizes our Masters' omnipotence and thus knows or at least senses our species has been reduced to such an oppressed state, there is no longer any nation in the world committed to slavery's overthrow; resistance truly is futile.
Meanwhile our Masters have knowingly dosed our obviously disintegrating nation's NeoConfederate rabble with deadly ChristoNazi lies and paranoia, much of it vectored by the fake-news snot-bombers. The Moronic Majority's impassioned belief in these falsifications has grown so imperative, SCOTUS is now making law of them. Hence their relentless edicts of anti-humanitarian subversion include an allegedly "Constitutional" foundation for an utterly terrifying expansion of the anti-vax/anti-mask suicidal snot-bombers' cult's alleged "right" to exterminate the entire global population by what is now undeniably our Masters' biological warfare weapon.
In other words, SCOTUS has unleashed de facto lynch mobs of murderously unmasked and suicidally un-vaccinated snot-bombers to infect us with the virus that has already proven itself the doomsday bug for at least 18 million dead women, men and children -- our Nazi-controlled government's most radical escalation yet of the deadly snot-bomber onslaught by which Covid's homicidal vectors have repeatedly attacked us since the pandemic got here in late 2019.
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BUT IS THE U.S. truly the world's deadliest failed state? Here are more links to help you decide for yourself:
The proto-Nazi exterminators of the North American First Nations literally built the United States on a foundation of rotting corpses -- the murdered bodies of at least 95 million native women, children and men -- as far as anybody knows, the deadliest holocaust in the 200,000-plus years of our species' existence. Nor has anything since ever quelled our national blood-lust: by 2007, the Empire's post-World-War-II body-count was already approaching 30 million.
In 2010, SCOTUS issued the Citizens United edict, about which -- inspired in large measure by the MSNBC-broadcast original of the above-linked Keith Olbermann video -- I wrote of the court's decree with properly prophetic harshness, the accuracy of my suppositions since fully confirmed, in small part by how maybe five years later the newly corporatized Typepad maliciously deleted this post from its 2010 archives. The same fate also disappeared another of my more controversial 2010 Typepad posts that again would have been forever lost but for its preservation by the Internet. Each piece was censored from my 2010 archive by the same plutocratic takeover that destroyed a mostly Left-leaning blogger-nest that made national news with its journalist-protecting Typepad "Bailout" in 2008 and '09. For whatever unknown reasons -- most assuredly not design considerations -- its new, avowedly Capitalist owners also reformatted the outlet’s type schedule, thus turning these two measured and visually proofed one-line headlines into a layout-besmirching two lines, with (as you will see via the links) the second line an obtrusively dangling single word – a visually distracting “widow,” as they were pejoratively (and correctly) labeled by yesteryear’s molten-alloy typographers.
In 2013, former State Department official William Blum declared our bogus "democracy" America's Deadliest Export. In 2017, we learned "how US imperialism continues to kill the people and planet."
On 5 September 2019 -- with the start of the pandemic disaster still at least three months in the future -- Newsweek ranked the U.S. as "Among Worst Countries in the World to Live In."
Come April 2020, Covid's skyrocketing body-count was not only proving to the world the deadly magnitude of our national failure, but doing so amidst a rising fog of above-confirmed suspicion our Masters were weaponizing the virus as part of their (final) solution to what they see as the only (real) threat to 21st Century Capitalism: a growing surplus of laborers -- that is, way too many Working Class children growing into way too many Working Class women and men making way too many more Working Class babies. Nor is such Ruling Class cruelty unprecedented; think not just of the obviously permanent termination of the child tax credit and the ongoing destruction of the socioeconomic safety net in general; reflect also on the fate of slaves deemed surplus or otherwise unwanted during the trans-Atlantic passage from Africa. Thus, at least to the observant, do our modern Neoliberal (Neonazi) overlords reveal their slave-trader lineage, ideological and often genealogical as well.
Now, in 2022, the fact our Masters deliberately sustain the world's highest Covid-death toll as a matter of policy not only underscores the extent to which the U.S. is a failed state but strongly suggests the failures are beyond reversal and thus will only worsen until the nation disintegrates completely.
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SCOTUS ALSO CONFIRMED, unintentionally of course, the scholarly hypothesis about secular art that so infuriates the theocrats.
Which -- if I may veer aside to acknowledge the one possible bright spot hidden in the court's infectious darkness -- surely does add to the already conclusive body of evidence amassed by Carl Jung and Marshall McLuhan2 that proves secular art far more usefully prophetic than its allegedly "sacred" counterparts, witness this Jackson Browne piece from 1974:
Some of them were angry
At the way the earth was abused
By the men who learned how to forge her beauty into power
And they struggled to protect her from them, only to be confused
By the magnitude of her fury in the final hour
And when the sand was gone and the time arrived
In the naked dawn only a few survived...
Yes of course I know the standard proof of secular prophetic art is "The Scream," but I believe the Supreme Court's ChristoNazi majority has now proven Browne's apocalyptic vision to be at least as accurate for the 21st Century as Edvard Munch's insights are known to have been for the 20th Century. The all-encompassing horror Munch portrayed in his 1893 paintings has long been recognized as our species' most accurate prelude to the 20th century, which -- were human societies still capable of recognizing historical truth -- we would know was shaped entirely by our Masters' body counts. It is thus hardly surprising the now-inescapable, probably bottomless trauma of the apocalypse Browne correctly foresaw is becoming the common though yet mostly unacknowledged denominator of consciousness for every one of us who has thus far managed to escape or at least resist the mental zombification imposed on us by today's ever-more-omnipotent GOP.
Originally "GOP" was an acronym for "Grand Old Party," the (formerly rational) Republican Party. It gave us a kindred synonym, "Grand Army of the Republic," for the U.S. soldiers who's epic courage and determination seemed for a time to have defeated the Confederate traitors.3 But today's GOP differs from the original to the same degree as humanitarian reason differs from homicidal mania; today's GOP is instead a growing Sturmabteilung of lockstep-obedient perpe-traitors led by a Hitler-worshiping cabal of Greed-Obsessed Plutocrats and their vassalage of Josef Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler and Adolph Eichmann emulators in the global economy, the mainstream media propaganda machine (MMPM) and planetary governance at each of its five levels: international, imperial, federal, state and local. Thus yesterday's (merely) Moronic Majority becomes the Murderously Moronic Majority of today.
The German Nazi hierarchy and their Capitalist collaborators -- wherever and however the U.S. protected them from rightful Soviet vengeance via Operation Paperclip and many other still-classified rescues during and after World War II -- would surely be proud to see how, 78 years later, their ideological graduates are completing the subjugation of the global population into a de facto Fourth Reich and -- as if they truly believe their rocketry can enable them to escape the consequences -- hastening the reduction of our species' planetary motherland back into the bug planet from which it evolved. The ecogenocidal magnitude of the geoengineering in question has already convinced a small but expanding minority we are being conquered by predatory extraterrestrials -- that our morally imbecilic human Masters were long ago bribed to submission by guarantees of eternal omnipotence and are now behaving accordingly, reshaping the global environment to the conquerors' specifications and forcing whatever remains of the Working Class into permanent slavery. Absurd? Let us hope -- but given the never-ending chaos of lies and disinformation by which the Plutocrats and their vassals began poisoning our minds in 1945, who now can distinguish truth with unassailable certainty?
Which is precisely why I shrug off, often with an uplifted social-finger, the "conspiracy theorist" slander invariably directed at any of us who dare point out how rapidly accumulating evidence at the very least suggests our world is now ruled by some top-secret but nevertheless all-powerful Nazi International -- perhaps the final form of the conjectural ODESSA organization.
Worse, given our definitively ecogenocidal post-World-War-II history, if such a Nazi International exists -- as the post-WW-II years (and particularly the decades after the murder of JFK) surely suggest -- it is ever-more-obviously sponsored by the U.S. government both domestically and abroad, and it is therefore also most likely headquartered in the United States, probably -- typical of all such U.S. intelligence operations -- hidden beneath the fake legitimacy of a benignly named bureaucracy, research foundation or other such organization.4
I suspect I need not point out how these developments thoroughly legitimize a formerly taboo question: was the preservation and propagation of Nazism the true purpose of Operation Paperclip? Is that why our Masters then infiltrated thousands more Nazis to protected havens in the United States?
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TERMINAL CLIMATE CHANGE or TCC -- as it should have been labeled from the beginning, but obviously wasn't, apparently because the Goebbels disciples in governance and on Madison Avenue rightfully feared the TCC-concept's confirmation of the looming apocalypse might terrify the increasingly subjugated Moronic Majority into open rebellion -- was instead disguised as "global warming." Thus our Masters' entire response to the looming ecogenocidal disaster was never more than a Disney-like effort to conceal its all-season magnitude and minimize its horrors by coating the deadly crisis with the emotional chocolate of an implicitly cuddly euphemism.
Which -- now the true body count and cultural cost of terminal climate change has become so overwhelming it's beginning to escape the censors -- should leave us all wondering to what extent our Masters' privately owned, for-profit versions of the Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda are censoring the pandemic reports.
Meanwhile, one of the less obvious issues of this increasingly apocalyptic era is the extent to which the content of our informational media, alternative and mainstream alike, is being reshaped by the evidence we -- our species and our planet -- are doomed. Have some of our Masters eased their censorship? It would surely seem so -- though my best guess is they hope to make the news so traumatically depressing, we can no longer bear reading, hearing or viewing it at all. Already it perpetuates (and often intensifies) the anguish generated by our helplessness. Even I -- for whom sociopolitical journalism was my financial lifeblood -- now regard the news as a prime depressant and avoid it more often than I can comfortably admit.
Truth is -- unless one is a Trumpite, or ranks among the plutocrats and plutocratic vassals who have been disguising Neonazi racial and ethnic ecogenocide as Neoliberal economic austerity at least since my late father helped defeat Sen. Barry Goldwater's 1964 Republican presidential campaign by cross-referencing Goldwater's ideology to its sources in Mein Kampf -- there is literally no longer any such thing as "good" news. Indeed, because of the hybridization of undeniably terminal climate change and the ever-more-probably terminal Covid pandemic by the Court's knowingly murderous and now irrevocable imposition of "herd immunity," it is increasingly likely there will never again be "good" news -- news that's reassuring or confidence-building -- for any of us in the Working Class.
As a direct consequence, an ever-growing number of us hide beneath whatever shields, real or metaphorical, we might find to protect ourselves; as best we can, we tune out the skyrocketing frequency of disasters that redefine the outside world exclusively in terms of its new Gaian deadliness, proving it more divinely capable of self-defense than we ever allowed ourselves to imagine and now -- as if vexed to terminal fury by six millennia of patriachal ecogenocide -- increasingly hostile to human survival.
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THE MORE ASTUTE amongst us -- at least those reasonably familiar with our species' history since the advent of patriarchy -- are at last beginning to realize the extent to which we've all been conned by the Christian notion the universe displays a "moral arc" toward "justice." This is indeed one of the most destructive Big Lies ever. The historical truth is the diametrical opposite; under patriarchy, any "moral arc" is determined solely by our Masters, who constantly refine their technology to compel ever-more zero-tolerance compliance. Thus "progress" inevitably leads toward ever more inescapable subjugation. The bloody physical trauma inflicted by the overseer's whips and the lynch mob's grisly extermination parties is replaced by the less obvious but demonstrably more crazy-making psychological trauma mandated by Neoliberal "austerity" and the inescapable 24/7 surveillance by which it's enforced; while the homeless camp may have replaced the death camp as the most obvious symbol of our Masters' intent, the Nazi ideology that sustains their underlying greed remains as impregnable as ever. No matter what we do, in the end it seems we cannot escape the down-pressing burden of our Masters' ever-more-crushing tyranny, the cause of its terrible permanence pointedly revealed by Audre Lorde: "The Masters Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House."
Often -- as a growing plurality is already doing -- we thus reject the entire concept of democratic process; we view its weakness and permanent failure as conclusively proven by the breathtaking speed with which the Neonazis are conquering the planet. Already they're reversing the humanitarian outcomes of World War II, nullifying the U.S. Civil War and even cancelling the positive results of our domestic Masters' violent exit from the British Empire. Nor -- given how the defeat of the Soviet Union has robbed us of the only historically proven antidote to Nazism -- can I rationally blame the dropouts; I nearly became one myself. Thus -- though no one has yet dared make public an authoritative analysis of the statistical proof -- it is clear there is within the so-called "progressive" community5 an accelerating trend toward what amounts to unconditional surrender: the abandonment of all political activity.
To me, the potential consequence of that likelihood is by far the most terrifying prospect facing us today. The ranks of us who resist the Plutocracy's campaigns to reduce us all to prideful ignorance and morally imbecilic self-obsession are rapidly dwindling; the why-bother shrinkage of the electorate combines with Biden the Beguiler's innumerable "change-we-can-believe-in" betrayals to almost certainly guarantee Christonazi victory in November and in 2024. For those of us who know enough history to foresee the looming horrors, our (entirely rational) anxiety is often so intense it cannot be accurately described in any known human language, though Edvard Munch surely did a proper job of communicating it as a visual artist.
Hence I'll say it once more: it is ever-more-probable there will never again be any "good" news for Working Class humans.
*****
DRIVEN BY A surprisingly relentless inclination to keep writing and photographing even in the face of what is obviously irreversible humanitarian defeat, I began contemplating nearly a year ago how I might radically minimize my reliance for Dispatches content on the endless litanies of disaster, lies and disinformation we're now routinely force-fed 24/7 by media whether Left, Right or center. Eventually I began weighing various approaches to transforming Dispatches into a grammatically disciplined and therefore more accessible anthology of present-day selections from the journal I began keeping in 1956, my 16th year; Dispatches' new content will henceforth be focused way more on aesthetics, social history and examples of something I think of as "indicative weirdness" than on politics per se.
It will also include factual descriptions of the often-curious, sometimes downright eerie events that inspired some of my most telling photographs, sustained my 24-year effort on "Glimpses of a Pale Dancer" and prompted a quest, inspired by discoveries on the East Coast, for Pacific Northwest archaeological anomalies; my success unearthed yet more of the sort of evidence catalogued by the New England Antiquities Research Association. If substantiated, this evidence resoundingly refutes our Masters' misogynistic claims of white patriarchal intellectual supremacy -- no doubt another reason why, as many of you know, my attempted contribution to this material -- my photos, drawings, site maps -- was itself among the potential forever nullified by the 1983 arson.6 But with this new Dispatches format, I may try to reclaim from memory a few of those losses.
My new content will thus include carefully selected passages of what ethics require I clearly label "speculation" -- never mind these are actually the same sort of insight -- its accuracy confirmed by subsequent events -- that underlay "Dancer." Spontaneous, fleeting and frequently unsought, these days it most often arrives amidst the near-daily meditation by which, thanks to more than two years of ongoing quarantine, I am finally naming, examining and (somewhat) ameliorating the ultimately unhealable trauma of being suddenly reduced to an emotional orphan, as I was, aged only a bit more than five years, by familial reaction to my birthmother's violent attempt at post-partum abortion, eerily on the Summer Solstice eve of 1945.
I have yet to determine which behavior is more representative of the traditional Midsummer-Eve rites: my birthmother's homicidal madness or the love for his son that compelled my father to rescue me and forcibly confine her violence to our living room floor until the police rescued us both by carting her thoroughly shackled self off to jail. But soon after that, my father fearfully concluded my mother's genetic legacy had reduced me to a "goon boy," his favorite pejorative, usually soon followed by the oft-repeated, always-deeply wounding accusation I was "just like my mother." Meanwhile all but one member my birth-mother's family -- my birthmother's older sister, the aunt whose beneficence literally saved me from the worst consequences of Dyslexia -- decided my existence was more threatening to the expansion of their already substantial life-insurance profits than even my privately institutionalized birthmother had been. Thus in 1957 they permanently ended my summertime visits by evicting me after I brandished a firearm to rescue my 79-year-old maternal grandfather from a club-wielding 18-year-old thug I feared would easily kill him. Apparently he -- and all the rest of my birthmother's kin save the aforementioned hero-aunt -- feared the odium of a never-more-than-hypothetical police response far more than they feared the threatened death of their patriarch, who did die maybe six months later, in '57's mid-November as best I recall. I attended his funeral only because there was no way I could escape it; afterward I was defiantly absent from every one of that emotional-orphan-making family's funerals; I couldn't attend my rescuer-aunt's 2004 funeral because my eternally hateful birthmother delayed sending me her obituary by two months, resulting in some metaphysical suspicions I will probably address in a future essay.
My subsequent adult life was thus inevitably shaped by so many epics of disastrous romance, I knew by 1970 -- my 30th year -- that reduction to an emotional orphan had rendered me permanently unfit for parenthood or marriage. Nevertheless, as age draws me ever closer to death, Covid has quite astonishingly granted me a privilege nominally denied all Working Class people merely by its prohibitive price: that of an extended interlude for the introspection and journal-writing without which I'd have never discovered the meditative self-healing potential U.S. for-profit health "care" typically tries to hide from Working Class discovery. Meanwhile anything approaching the requisite degree of therapeutic excellence is affordable only by the tiny minority that can afford it -- that is, the obscenely rich.
To repurpose my Zen-like cogitations for the new Dispatches, I had to relearn to trust my intuition enough I now in meditation keep pen and paper handy to record anything of apparent significance I might recognize; the results repeatedly confirm my suspicion it is only the theocratic stranglehold of Abrahamic religion that keeps our more adventuresome scientists from following their Soviet counterparts; liberated as they were from religious taboos, they were reportedly investigating all sorts of psychic-phenomena questions including whether there truly is some aquifer-like cosmic reservoir of collective consciousness accessible only via maximum mindfulness. In any case, I'd decided I would publish many of these internal visions as vignettes.
In my choices of what might be relevant I'll be strongly influenced by what I know of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. The population of Rome itself, estimated as at least a million (and possibly twice that) at the empire's height, had shrunk to about 25,000 by the 13th Century. This is among our best indications of the depth of Dark-Age reality forced onto the entire Occident; the magnitude of cultural collapse is also measured by the superstitious destruction of libraries and the church-enforced scientific and technological ignorance that led to the loss of central heating and the abandonment of aqueducts, running water, indoor plumbing and municipal sewerage -- so-called "modern conveniences" lost for the next nearly 1500 years. Such is the pattern by which our species waxes and wanes, the individual microcosm of birth and death writ large in the societal macrocosm of rise, failure and collapse, its universal truth repeatedly proven by the failed empires archeology has since unearthed on every continent save Antarctica.
While each of these discoveries tells us we humans could survive apocalyptic conditions in the past, that is clearly no longer true today. The cooperative skill and instinct that facilitated our survival through four ice ages and who knows how many other disasters is precisely the same skill and instinct that gives us socialism -- precisely why our Masters are doing everything the can to condition it out of us. Which is the ultimate reason both for Neoliberalism and its underlying Nazi content. At the same time our Masters' misogynistic hatred and contempt for our planetary Mother -- the ecogenocidal venom at patriarchy's core -- combines with their chemical, biological, radiological and thermonuclear weaponry to doom us all, even as their now-inescapable surveillance makes effective resistance impossible. Our Masters and their chosen vassals literally possess the omnipotence previously granted only to divinities. Thus when we finally recognize what Barack the Betrayer7 long ago prompted me to denounce as "the imbecility of hope," we are reduced, logically and correctly, to utter hopelessness.
Seems to me we now have but two choices: one is surrender (which my ethics and sense of personal honor forced me to reject); the other is the profoundly difficult task of ferreting out the faint, often nearly invisible traces from which we might yet evolve new pathways to Working Class liberation.
Among these traces are, or so I believe, the three extensively footnoted and now event-confirmed hypotheses upon which I built "Dancer." Firstly, I confirmed the spontaneous resurrection of the goddess-symbol, both as science (the Gaia Hypothesis) and -- via music, visual art and literature -- as alternative spirituality. Secondly, with an appreciative nod to McLuhan, I hypothesized from these developments and from the rise of the Counterculture itself the probable existence of some hitherto-unidentified human instinct to collectively organize ourselves for mutual protection and sustenance even when its prophetic compulsions are not consciously recognized; I was particularly impressed by the spontaneous emergence and explosive growth of the Counterculture's environmentalist, feminist and back-to-the-land factions, likewise by the popular rediscovery of primitive technologies. Lastly, I identified an anti-patriarchal aesthetic solidarity implicit throughout the Counterculture's creative output -- the one quality I felt might have transcended the induced ideological hostility by which our Masters keep us divided into warring factions. The late Cicely Nichols obviously agreed; she repeatedly said she believed "Dancer" would be "among the most influential works of the 20th Century." Apparently so did our Masters; no doubt that's what got "Dancer"and all the rest of my significant work burned.8
*****
THOUGH BY THE closing days of 2021 I had pretty much finalized my plans for resurrecting Dispatches, I remained unsure how to introduce the new format. As I sometimes do when I am genuinely perplexed, I consulted the I Ching, the Wilhelm/Baynes translation (Princeton University Press: 1997). The text is at least 3,000 years old and is -- as far as I know -- the only oracle ever thoroughly investigated by Carl Jung, after which he wrote approvingly of it in his "Forward" to the Wilhelm/Baynes translation. Jung's endorsement of this mode of seeking clarity has always been sufficient approval for me to make it my own; hence via coin-toss, I asked the oracle what might obtain "if I turn these stories and fragments" (that once went into my journals) "into Dispatches posts." It responded with the 46th Hexagram, "Pushing Upward," the judgement of which is "supreme success." The two changing lines elaborate:
"Six at the beginning means:
Pushing upward that meets with confidence
Brings great good fortune."
"Six in the fifth place means:
Perseverance brings good fortune.
One pushes upward by steps."
The changed lines create a new hexagram, in this instance the 5th, "Waiting (Nourishment)," its judgement as follows:
"If you are sincere,
You have light and success.
Perseverance brings good fortune.
It furthers one to cross the great water."
The appended "Image" is especially telling:
Clouds rise up to heaved:
The image of waiting.
Thus the superior man eats and drinks,
Is joyous and of good cheer.
So I opted to wait, sensing the possibility of some pivotal discovery or event. That was on 28 December 2021; then on Thursday, 13 January 2022, the Neonazi-conquered U.S. Supreme Court officially weaponized Covid-19 into our Masters' 21st Century equivalent of Zyklon B, a brazen, viciously ecogenocidal decree that forever rejects promotion of "the general welfare" as part of our national purpose. It does so by granting the Trumpites and other anti-vax contagion-vectors the right to inflict the so-called "herd immunity" that turns the un-vaccinated and never-masked moral imbeciles into -- it cannot be said too often -- potentially suicidal, obviously murder-minded snot-bombers. Far worse, it turns all of them into ambulatory Petri-dishes for the breeding of ever-deadlier Covid-19 mutations. It could spawn the ultimate doomsday bug and so exterminate our entire species. At the very least, the court's permanent Neonazi majority has smirkingly condemned who-knows-how-many-more of us to death and financial ruin -- which should tell us all we need know about our Masters' long-range intentions. It also reveals something of the treacherous intent behind the "Democratic" (sic) Party's post-John-Fitzgerald-Kennedy function as the ChristoNazi Fifth Column.
But its most damning message is that any pretense of U.S. humanitarianism is gone forever.
Instead we may soon discover we Working-Class humans are inmates of a nation become a de facto death camp, a place wherein it is now entirely legal for the defiantly un-vaccinated and anti-masked Neonazis and their Nazi and Neoconfederate collaborators to exterminate as many more of us as possible by deliberately spreading -- knowingly and therefore with murderous premeditation -- a virus that can literally mutate to slay us all. Nor -- thanks to the Neonazi-conquered courts -- will these bacteriological Ted Bundys ever again face even the most minimal forms of justice.
All of which marks the impact and consequences of Thursday morning's SCOTUS atrocity as tantamount -- both personally and societally -- to "crossing the great water."
About the latter I will for the present utter no more than two statements, firstly how I fear the court has inflicted a wound on our nation that, just as the Dred Scot decision did, is already solidifying our divisions to the point civil war is again inevitable -- this time with all the apocalypse-accelerating chemical, biological, radiological and thermonuclear horrors of modern warfare; secondly how it should be obvious to anyone with what in Appalachia is termed "a lick a sense" the post-JFK "Democratic" (sic) Party has quite deliberately and with Oberkommando der Wehrmacht cunning confined themselves (and us) to a political cage from which escape is impossible.
About the former, the personal, suffice it to say that, as if precursory to the SCOTUS decree, someone we'll call Person X -- someone I had for nearly 40 years foolishly presumed a dear and trusted friend -- denounced me as no longer worthy of companionship. I should have seen it coming; instead I dismissed X's occasional, invariably brief but always perplexing expressions of admiration for Ayn Rand's Goebbels-clever fictionalizations of Mein Kampf as situational rather than existential. My mistake; X finally tested -- I suspect intentionally -- my acceptance or rejection of the definitively ecogenocidal, anti-humanitarian, incipiently mass-murderous, morally imbecilic arrogance and elitist self-obsession known to be the psychological epicenter of Nazism, but which also lurks, often clandestinely, yet always with full Nazi potency, in the darker corners of the mental Draino that, in its pre-Esalen/pre-Charley-Manson forms, was already government-asset-brazen enough to pimp itself as "the human potential movement." Needless to say, from X's perspective I failed the test, even as from my own viewpoint I amassed a perfect score. And thus was, by this Person X, declared an enemy and irrevocably dismissed. And so, resigned to the traumatic fact my composition speed was radically reduced by the loss of neurotransmitter-nicotine's temporary anti-dyslexia medication when I finally permanently beat its addiction on 23 September 1995, I began this writing.
But as it turned out, the interval suggested by the "Waiting" hexagram was substantially lengthened, first by my de-nicotinized dysklexic difficults at writing, next by the nagging intuition I should continue my observant wait -- an intuition confirmed on 19 January by the Duke/Politico disclosures I discovered quite by surprise -- which discovery immediately compelled a total revision of my originally intended post, including rewriting six of the eight essays I had written in the wake of the SCOTUS Covid horror.
*****
MAKING ART, IT seems, remains the one activity most essential to my life, even as I approach my 82nd year. Having written, re-written and edited this essay, I feel as if I've stepped into a cloud of quiet joy: a sense of being bless-ed from without, a feeling as perplexing to my Newtonian/Marxian/agnostic self as it is encouraging to that atavistic wellspring at the core of my consciousness, the cauldron from which I sometimes guzzle the diverse but always thirst-quenching nectars of my Picto-Celtic, Norse, Saxon and Iroquoian genes. I guess I took that sense of blessedness for granted in my 60-odd years as a working professional; I realize now I'd have given up journalism long ago but for the encouragement of this hitherto unrecognized but obviously protective cloak. And amidst the hurly-burly of pandemic and quarantine and the political terrors the Nazis inflict upon us all, in my heart-of-hearts I tried to do just that -- but instead discovered I cannot. Which surely feels -- at least at the moment -- as a welcome blessing of its own.
I'm ending this beginning by introducing another new Dispatches topic: what might be termed "metaphysical" stuff, including material I had self-protectively excluded from "Dancer," among the exclusions some very compelling evidence the ancient liturgies of the goddess retain invocatory power even after thousands of years of concealment and fragmentation. But before anyone supposes I'm about to surrender to Moron Nation gullibility, let me reassure you all I'll temper any associated text both by my solid grounding in basic university-level science including physics, astronomy, geology and archaeology plus by my investigative journalist's tendency to distrust anything, my own personal experience included, that cannot be objectively confirmed. Those interested in a factual account of the incident I now recognize as the beginning of "Dancer" may read it here.
Also I do not yet know how frequently I will publish; I am leaning toward monthly or bi-weekly, though that is an ongoing decision-making admittedly influenced by the realization geriatric reality may make my production of new material somewhat random.
Another quandary through which I am working -- probably already obvious to critical readers -- is whether the (alleged) distinctions between Nazis, Neonazis, Neoliberals and fascists have any real validity in the face of their ever-more-unified and therefore ever-more-murderous assaults. While I'm leaning toward calling them all Nazis on the basis of their shared ethos and footnoting the reasons why, the question remains open, and I would appreciate any suggestions or observations you readers might choose to offer, for which my thanks in advance.
Meanwhile let us never forget that in times such as these, survival itself is a revolutionary act. May we all remain safe, healthy and determined.
__________________
1 The definition of "Working Class" used herein is that implicit in Marxism: like the statistically incorrect but nevertheless usefully descriptive "99 percent," it describes those of us who are neither plutocrats nor plutocratic vassals, are thus entirely dependent on wages or commissions and are thus never more than a layoff or firing away from potentially deadly disaster.
2 Until I began the memory-confirming research that generated the above links, I knew neither of Walter Benjamin nor of his valuable contribution to the implicitly anti-patriarchal quest to re-legitimize the prophetic functions or art and literature.
3The New York and Michigan cemeteries of my youth were filled with Grand Army of the Republic markers, most of them still bedecked with flags and repeatedly honored with fresh flowers.
4Two books and a Netflix film do a thorough job of documenting the Christonazi infiltration of USian governance at all levels. The books are The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (Jeff Sharlet; Harper: 2008) and American Fascists: the Christian Right and the War on America (Chris Hedges; Free Press: 2006). I heartily recommend each text. The Nexflix film, which I have yet to watch, has the same title as Sharlet's work and is said to be based on his reporting. Will I watch it? Probably. Will I review it? Maybe.
5Here I use "progressive" in its broadest sense, from Marxian to social democracy and thence rightward to the vast array of pseudo-Leftists who serve our Masters' by agitating the culture wars that foster identity politics and thus perpetuate the ultimately suicidal divisiveness that defines today's domestic and global Working Class. As to the U.S. "Democratic" (sic) Party, I believe it forever renounced any right to claim the "progressive" label when it unconditionally surrendered to the Warren Commission, thereby granting total victory to the (already Nazified) perpe-traitors of the 22 November 1963 coup.
6"Dancer" was a thoroughly footnoted manuscript of about 150,000 words illustrated by approximately 100 photographs; it and all the rest of my significant work -- clippings of published work, 31 years of photography, 27 years of journals, a near lifetime of reference files, awards etc. -- was destroyed by arson on 1 September 1983.
7It came to me last night while revising this piece that Obama's treachery may be the best evidence yet of our Masters' unprecedented cunning: how better, with maximum deniability, to legitimize the nation's infamous white racism than by electing as its first Black president a class-traitor whose subsequent betrayals hurled enough metaphorical gunpowder to explode the existential Nazism of the Moronic Majority's whites into today's now-obviously unstoppable Neonazi onslaught.
8In what was obviously a "fuck-off-or-die"message from our Masters, the fire was lit at the exact moment I was meeting with Nichols to finalize our working agreement; the ignition time was preserved by a melted electric clock adjacent the fire's point of origin.
LB/13-22 January 2022, with typographic revisions and minor editing 29 March 2022.
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