Loren Bliss: Dispatches from Dystopia

(That estimated reading time is for the full 12,689 words; the longest of these nine pieces, Part VIII,  is 2,138 words; the shortest, Part I, is 231 words. The entire text is sectionalized to be read like a book, a part or two at a time.  )

The second of two ruined A-frame dwellings at the wildly overgrown site of a wrecked and long-abandoned Back-to-the-Land commune I discovered while grouse hunting with my dog LeeRoy during a fall afternoon in 1992. The violence done to the communal structures before their abandonment and the extent to which they had already been reclaimed by nature suggest they were destroyed during the Vigilante War two decades earlier. Note the yellow Top can, inverted, as if in a final metaphor of the violence that sent so many of the rural Counterculture's unarmed pacifists fleeing back to the cities they had sought to escape. (Top was the era's universal choice for the most inexpensive tobacco and best dual-purpose rolling papers.) The density of the surrounding underbrush, nearly impenetrable even after it was stripped of foliage by frost, suggested no other human had visited the place since it was vacated.  Scroll to Part IX for more pictures of the ruins and the vaguely eerie story of how LeeRoy seemed to lead me to them.  (Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2023.)  

*****

Prelude: a Premature Expostulation

(I wrote the following in 2010 and have since revised it only with minor editing for clarity.)

SORRY I DROPPED out of sight: first there was the numbing despair of recognizing Obama truly is Barack the Betrayer, then there was an unforeseen frenzy including two all-nighters to meet a 24 May deadline, finally the four-day recovery mandated by old age.

The deadline problem was my fault, a classic example of the folly of assumption: Fairhaven College – of which I'm involuntarily a 1976 alumnus (long story for another time) – requested five submissions for a special edition of its lit mag to celebrate the school's 40th anniversary.

Without much thought I planned to send five photographs – the social documentary stuff I know I do well enough for inclusion in such a self-consciously artistic medium. Nobody of influence in this ever-more submissively fascist nation – least of all the academic bourgeoisie – gives a damn about the poor anymore, but if nothing else such work goads the local Ansel Adams zealots to heights of fury by its fuck-you retort to their morally imbecilic exclusion of the human condition from their Zone System cult of usable light.

But then when I queried the lit mag's editor for submission guidelines (jpeg vs. tif, pixel count etc.), I was told to my horror the magazine no longer has the capabilities to print photography at all – that it was text or nothing. 

This created  two immediate sets of problems: technical and psychological.

Though I have no doubts about my abilities as a visual artist – I was a painter before I was a photographer and have a strong (albeit pre-computer) design and graphics background too, and though my photographic ability was repeatedly confirmed by gallery shows and publication credits – I have always felt myself something of an impostor as a writer.  Never mind three-quarters of my lifetime income is from writing and editing: photography is my passion -- "choreography of light sculpted in alchemical silver" – while writing is never more than an intellectual exercise, personally compelling, yes, often even an obsession, but always tainted at its core by the fact I'm dyslexic. Just as photography for me is often a wild and Zenlike sled-ride on the Tao, at its very best a face-to-face encounter with the Muse, writing -- because of its implicit battle against dyslexia -- is in large measure a war against myself. 

As a result the whole “lit mag” concept with its oppressive hierarchy of values – “fine” art versus “commercial” art; “literary excellence” versus “mere journalism” – became again as hugely intimidating as it had been in my long-ago undergraduate years.

Plus atop this was as miserable a technological chore as I have ever experienced: the struggle to transform hyperlinks into footnotes without locking the result into formats unsuitable for transmission as manuscript: the necessary trial-and-error (which never really yielded the results I wanted) combining with other computer problems to burn up at least 60 of the approximately 80 hours eaten by this project.

The resultant rage of frustration lingers yet as elevated blood pressure, and once again I am reminded why the ruling class was so cottonmouth-quick to impose computers on journalism: computers reduced the intricate crafts of typographers, lithographers and stereotypers to the mind-numbing repetitiveness of minimum-wage clerical tasks, flung thousands of workers into permanent joblessness and afflicted us – editors, reporters and photographers – with oppressive doses of the insurance-office tedium we'd gone into journalism to avoid.

This was probably the greatest and most oppressive forcible workload increase in U.S. employment history – you either accepted it or got fired – and it was imposed without a penny's raise in editorial pay: its result not just the reduction of journalism to its present-day meaninglessness but a genuinely obscene boost in profits to the pigs who own the papers.

Here of course is the reason I so utterly despise computers and the clerical duties they inflict on writers – I am not a stenographer or clerk-typist nor do I have even a trace of the mandatory occupational submissiveness – and the fact I have to spend at least two hours wrestling with word-processing minutiae for every one hour of genuinely productive work never ceases to infuriate me. Nor is this 2:1 ratio even slightly exaggerated: I typically spend four to six hours writing my blog essays, then twice that time fighting the technology to post via my server: no doubt my neighbors have radically improved their vocabularies of vulgarity merely by listening to me bellow at my computer monitor.

So went most of last week, the entire weekend and all of this week through Tuesday morning.

But now I'm finally finished: four excerpts from Outside Agitator's Notebook revised into the lit-mag format plus something entitled “Doorways,” a condensation of experiences from several places into a text that evolved from a long piece of journalism, the result exhibited here if only to prove that even at age 70 one can encounter new dimensions of the creative process – or perhaps of new dementia to display one's utter foolishness – a possibility I cannot ever dismiss because I know as surely as nightfall that once we get into the lit-realm I am as hopelessly lost as London's doomed protagonist in “To Build a Fire.”

*****

My first recognition of the Back-to-the-Land Movement and its role in the resurrection of the Goddess was of course visual rather than textual. I made this sandwich in 1968 or 1969, I suspect the latter, though I no longer remember which; it was to have been one of the key illustrations in "Dancer" and escaped the fire only because it was with me in my portfolio in Manhattan. (Photo by Loren Bliss ©1969, 2923)

*****

I. A Door Slammed in My Face

THE BEGINNING OF  “Doorways” in its submitted lit-mag variant is essential for context, and so I have included it here. But it and its companion submissions were never so much as acknowledged by Fairhaven College; they were neither published nor returned, and thus were rejected and apparently destroyed without notice or explanation.

Abandoned farms always seem like cries of sadness arising from the chaos of their overgrown landscapes, most no doubt harboring ghosts and nearly all inviting photographic exploration, but none I ever visited were more haunted by palpable despair than the remnants of rural communes that had been emptied in such terror the communards had forsaken all their possessions – undeniable testimony to the relentless malevolence of the Christian vigilantes who played such a huge but plausibly deniable and therefore subsequently concealed part in the war against the Counterculture.

Most of those monuments to ruling class savagery are gone now, mercifully reclaimed by nature or buried as if in shame beneath sprawling development, but for maybe a decade after the suppression of the Back to the Land Movement, which was mostly dead by 1973 (though a few die-hard communes would linger into the very early '80s), I'd occasionally find such places in the back country and whenever possible I'd not only photograph them but speak my impressions into a tape recorder as I worked.

*****

II. Breaking It Down

(Note: I slightly revised everything beyond this point in 2012, and now in 2023 I have expanded it well beyond its original pre-lit-mag form.)

AS THE NOW-forever-lost “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer” took on its final form c. 1978-1982, the Back-to-the-Land material I had thus far collected became the core of its last chapter. Its sources included my research notes, photographs and tape-recorded  impressions of the histories of five abandoned rural communes in Western Washington and similar material about urban or suburban communes in locales as far removed from one another as Seattle and Madison, N.J. It was supplemented by notes on others' descriptions of at least a half-dozen more such endeavors including the story of how a  commune in the Cascade Mountain back-country preserved itself against repeated vigilante attacks in a night-long firefight that ended with the vigilantes captured and left in the custody of  local law enforcement, an incident that initially seemed destined to become countercultural legend but was instead quickly suppressed by pacifists -- a telling example of how despite its claims of humanitarian intent, pacifism most often serves the oppressors by minimizing or eliminating reports of successful resistance to oppression. Particularly notable in this context is the fact there is now good reason to suspect the vigilantes who terrorized the rural Counterculture during the late 1960s and early-to-mid 1970s were among the paramilitary forces of Operation CHAOS (capitalization as in original).

I cannot over-stress  that because “Dancer” with all its 24 years of notes and tapes and nearly all its photography was destroyed, the pre-1983  material in this work is of necessity reconstructed almost entirely from memory, with small portions of it confirmed by  papers that had accompanied me back to Manhattan and thus escaped the flames.  Its credibility has already been challenged in response to the condensations for lit-mag brevity and the disguises of locales  to protect the privacy of the present-day property owners that characterized its initial public presentation via this blog. Nevertheless each of these modifications -- disguising geography and shortening lengthy recitations of detail by condensation -- are forms of what might be termed truthful fictionalization, and when their use is announced to readers in advance, as indeed they were, they are therefore  legitimate journalistic techniques.

The protective rationale for disguise is so obvious it need not be repeated;  the rationale for condensation is usually brevity in the reporting of an event or series of events, and its journalistic success -- that is, its veracity -- is determined by how accurately it mirrors whatever actually obtained. In this regard, I cannot fault the lit-mag form in which I originally published this work via Outside Agitator's Notebook, as Dispatches was titled in 2010. I merely combined my experiences at several places and presented them as if they occurred in a single locale, itself a composite of their original venues. Essentially the same technique is often used without controversy by sportswriters in seasonal wrap-ups, as I know from my own sports-writing years, 1956-1959 and 1962-1964.

I can and do, however, severely fault myself for my failure to recognize the potential historical and perhaps biographical value of the Back-to-the-Land Movement material in its un-condensed form. For that I am most regretful. Thus, to make the amends demanded by any such act of contrition, the following restores as many of the omitted or disguised details as is possible given that its original sources no longer exist.

The result, even with my post-1983 discoveries included, is an admittedly far-from-complete chronology of a very small part of  the history of the  Back-to-the-Land Movement and the Counterculture in general. It is centered on events known to its local veterans as "the Vigilante War,"   a conflict since banished from public recollection primarily by two groups of ideologically motivated censors: the first group includes the disciples  of patriarchy, capitalism and Christian theocracy who also suppress the Counterculture's  often unwitting resurrection of the Great Goddess, its spontaneous embrace of Gaian paganism and its role as the first wave in a burgeoning global revolution against patriarchy and all its ecogenocidal offspring; the second group is made up of the pacifists and forcible civilian-disarmament fanatics  outraged by the lesson implicit in the local triumphs of armed Back-to-the-Land communards against the Ku-Klux-Klan-minded bands of  vigilantes.  That lesson -- the fact armed self-defense is sometimes our only effective antidote to right-wing terrorism --  is why the pacifists likewise scheme to eradicate historical memories of the Battle of Blair Mountain and the Deacons for Defense. Fortunately these histories are now documented by publicly available text and film; Blair Mountain is also defiantly immortalized in song so poignantly powerful its first hearing often evokes tears.

I began documenting the vigilante terrorism in Western Washington with still-photography and text, mostly the latter,  after the agricultural commune on which I was a long-term guest-participant permanently fended off a gang of vigilantes by armed resistance in the summer of 1970, a series of events in which I played a pivotal role, an intimidating but non-injurious display of rifle marksmanship.  Before year's end, I would come to recognize the anti-commune effort was genuinely nation-wide, targeting not just the Back-to-the-Land communes that were taking shape throughout the rural U.S., but also -- and with equal vindictiveness --  attacking their ideologically kindred non-agricultural urban and surburban counterparts. In retrospect, what we were witnessing was exemplary capitalist viciousness against any and all forms of collectivism --  against any effort by the working class, 99.9 Percent of our species' population, to socioeconomically achieve effective solidarity -- even on the most limited local basis. Years later, long after the commune on which I was a guest had fallen victim to internal political conflicts,  a man who had been a leading member of its ownership collective would publicly thank me for my vigilante-discouraging skill.

The significance of this work is thus that the fate of a single Countercultural commune -- whether a Back-to-the Land endeavor, a suburban housing enterprise or an urban collective of writers, visual artists and musicians  -- is quite literally a microcosm of the fate of our entire species.     

I should note too this is by no means my first attempt to compensate  as best I can for the fire's destruction of the relevant material.  I took it up first in 1985 while I was still in Manhattan, writing about the Vigilante War in a long poem the first line of which -- "It was that doorway, I guess" -- obviously shaped the present text. Much to my surprise, the poem, itself entitled "Doorways,"  was effusively praised by my Agence France-Presse friend Susan May Tell;  nevertheless I eventually abandoned it (and all attempts at poetry) as a foolhardy effort to tread in a realm I know now I am neither intellectually nor spiritually fit to occupy save via the alchemy of silver emulsion.  Later that same year I attempted it in prose, but abandoned that too in dyslexic despair, a reaction no doubt intensified by looming but then still unacknowledged post-fire depression. Though even at the depression's most miserable depth, my compulsion to write about the Vigilante War, however sporadic, retained its relentlessness. It was resurrected yet again by my apparently accidental yet pivotal  finding of the ruins of  another former commune, a place  not so isolated it escaped the vigilantes but back-country remote-enough I did not happen on its remnants until I was hunting grouse there in 1990. 

This (dare-I-say-it) Muse-driven process  -- my 1990 discovery and my equally unsought, unanticipated  discovery of another such out-of-the-way place during a 1992 grouse hunt -- often seems to have been so eerily guided, it still sometimes gives me a chill. In 1992 it led me to write a  free-form riff to accompany a quartet of pocket-camera images including the photograph above (Kodak Gold 400 exposed in the Olympus RC that served me so long so well), and it thus became the embryo of a belated eulogy for the Back-to-the-Land Movement. It is also testimony to the vigilantes' methodically pitiless  destruction of the  pacifist, foolishly unarmed, anti-gun and thus utterly defenseless faction of the Counterculture's self-proclaimed eco-agrarian revolutionaries. That in turn was the basis of the lit-mag composite I wrote in 2010, the rejection of which merely confirms the extent to which the once-educationally revolutionary impulses of my alma mater have since been utterly suppressed by the forces of national nazification. I therefore hope what follows will fulfill the imperative so often implicit in my discoveries. 

*****

III.  A House Filled with Pain 

WERE I TO CHOOSE the one detail that convinced me to explore and photograph the abandoned farmhouse and its tragedy-haunted environs, I would have to say it was the structure's doorway – its gaping darkness a rectilinear equivalent of Edvard Munch's Scream.

For years I felt drawn to the old place – I drove past it whenever I went north or south on the two-lane blacktop of the state highway, but it was a good 75 yards up a steep slope away from the road, and for most of the decade I resisted its summons. Now though, southbound in mid-July of  1978,  I saw how little time it had left: its cedar-shake roof half blown away by last January's blizzard and further deconstructed by April's storms, too many of its rafters already bare, some obviously broken, its walls striving ever more desperately to remain upright, their glass-less windows like eyes emptied by disaster – a perfect tableau of terminal urgency, as if before yielding to entropy the late Victorian structure demanded one last witness to its endurance.

I saw too that since I had driven past it two years before -- that is, since the last time Interstate 5 traffic was so unnervingly congested I chose to journey to or from Bellingham via the relative tranquility of back roads --  someone had built a one-room cedar-shake cabin on the far side of the yellow dirt road that seemed to promise access to both structures, its passage maybe 35 yards to the immediate north of the long-abandoned dwelling. Ascertaining the emptiness of the highway behind me, I braked, reversed and turned my red Honda Civic off the blacktop onto a roughly eroded, obviously mostly jeep-traveled two-rut climb into the wooded hills beyond. I downshifted to first gear for the ascent; noted by the cabin's  open-door condition it too had been abandoned; turned left into the adjacent and rapidly fading trace of the house's driveway, drove no more than five yards before my passage was  blocked by an outburst of blackberry brambles and exclamations of brash young alder; parked; dismounted; performed a just-in-case confirmation of the loaded-chamber condition of the .45-caliber M1911 Colt Government Model I legally carried concealed in a belt holster beneath my forest-green bush jacket; shrugged into a worn and faded World-War-II-surplus musette bag containing camera and tape recorder; cautiously and with upraised arms navigated another 25 or 30 yards through an overgrown plot that had obviously once been a substantial garden but was now a chest-high jungle of stinging nettle, thistles, the emphatic thorns of still more blackberries and of some aggressively ankle-grabbing species of vine I had not previously encountered.

Soon standing in the weedy clearing that contained the ruin of the house itself, I saw now that its entire front porch  had collapsed, that the rest of its structure was in far worse condition than I had seen from the highway. Long without paint, much of its exposed wood had weathered bone gray. Its  gaping, hollowed-out combination of  door and windows  suddenly reminded me of bleached skulls at backwoods crime scenes and left me wondering what dreadful memories it might contain. Reflecting on the skull image and the botanical obstructions provided by the thorns and nettles, I briefly wondered if this was the sort of place that preferred to retain its secrets undisclosed and was thus better left unexplored.

But I am journalist enough -- and agnostic enough -- to set aside such apprehensions, as indeed I did.  Wary of the fallen porch's  many protrusions of tetanus-rusty nails, I carefully stepped up over its rubble and through the doorway onto the erratically slumping remnants of the floor within. There I paused, fearing the planking might collapse even beneath the relative slenderness that was mine at age 38. To my left, most of the flooring in what had obviously been the living room was already gone, rotted, fallen into the crawl-space below; from between its ominously sagging joists the fungus-blackened corpse of a sofa protruded diagonally like a horror-movie creature climbing out of a grave,  its leather upholstery reduced to shreds of putrescence. To my right, the floor seemed intact, sturdy enough to support a huge rain-sodden mound of litter so diverse it suggested the malicious dumping of all the household's possessions in a single heap, perhaps as the prelude to  a somehow-thwarted plan for arson. The pile was waist-high; it filled nearly half of what had obviously been the dining room and seemed to beg for investigation. 

Thus curiosity once again overcame reluctance; I tested the surviving floor-boards by pressing them with my feet, carefully stepped further inside and began to mentally catalogue what I saw: a shattered Buddha, a cast-off sandal, a faded black silken slip with an East Coast label, other garments that suggested the place had housed at least two women and two men, a sodden, moldering pile of books obviously hurled from adjacent shelves – The Whole Earth Catalog shredded dead center by a close-range shotgun blast, Kahlil Gibran ripped apart at the spine –   contents that quickly identified the place as the former commune I had always assumed it to have been. Its walls were violently axe-marked, the windows likewise, their panes reduced to tooth-like shards in broken frames, the magnitude of rage that had fueled its destruction undeniable. The kitchen had been similarly trashed, its floor intact but its plumbing sledge-hammered into uselessness. I had never seen a dwelling that had been so hatefully wrecked, its devastation all the more grotesque in the happy-face afternoon sunlight shining through the remnants of its roof, a fury yet so residually frightful I felt a momentary surge of relief I was armed and a lingering sense of gratitude I could find no evidence there had been children amongst the victims of such undeniable terrorism.

For most of the next two hours I explored the ruined house and grounds; at some point  I fetched my 35mm-Summicron-lensed M2 Leica from my shoulder bag and began recording the heart-wrenching evidence on Tri-X I would push to 800 ASA; I shot one 36-exposure roll of film, what in those days we called "a heavy take." And heavy it was, in every sense of the word; though I had a half-dozen more rolls of film in my canvas shoulder-bag, one was not just all I needed to document what had happened here; it was also all I could emotionally bear to shoot.

Then I was done; I departed through the back doorway that led outside from the kitchen, climbed  further up the forested hillside to bypass the obstructive botany of the former garden and descended to cross the road and explore the tiny cabin. It was barely big enough to serve as a one-person bedroom. Its cedar-shake walls were yet new enough to yield a faint trace of their original perfume, but its contents -- a scattered stack of newspapers -- told me nothing about its builder or its occupant. The newspapers' dates indicated the place had not been occupied since mid-1977. I wondered if perhaps one of the ousted communards had sought to reclaim the land.

Back in my automobile I  groped my cassette recorder from a separate pocket I had sewed inside the musette bag's sturdy government-issue canvas, ascertained the recorder's  electronic  readiness, switched it on, placed it on the Honda's passenger seat  and -- as I resumed my drive south toward a blessedly lake-fronted dwelling near Seattle I would soon exit in the sad aftermath of a relationship destroyed not by incompatibility or spite but by the clash between my own scoop-the-world reportorial ferocity and my lover's equally fierce commitment to the feminist notion only women should be allowed to expose the misogynistic atrocities of Christian theocrats -- I began speaking unabashedly into its auxiliary microphone,  preserving without shame or any other self-censorship  my impressions of what I had documented on film and what I felt the ruin and the contents of its rubble-heap were telling me, a process that twice prompted floods of tears so dangerously blinding they forced me off the road to wait for my eyes to clear.

That night in my temporary dwelling I carefully stashed the tape in the filing cabinet that contained two drawers of research and the first but unintentionally final draft of a proposed Fairhaven College senior thesis I had written two years earlier -- a work ostensibly rejected in retaliation for my allegedly ignorant assertion the era's rock-festivals and be-ins should be viewed as rudimentary rituals -- but more likely because I had not realized the feminist members of my concentration committee felt I was trespassing in a realm that should be reserved for women. My ex-lover felt the same way about my latest scoop -- an investigative report that had ended a local Christian hospital's decades of bigoted, women-get-what-they-deserve  misogyny self-righteously inflicted as zero-tolerance refusal to treat rape victims in its emergency room. Even if a victim were dying of injuries, the hospital's Christian fanaticism demanded she (or he) be sent someplace else -- and the nearest elsewhere was a potentially fatal 20 miles away. Thanks to excellent sources in the police  and ambulance services, I had exposed the hospital's theocratic malevolence via a story banner-headlined across the top of Page One; within a day, the resultant public outrage forced the hospital to reverse its policy and secure rape-treatment training for its emergency-room doctors and nurses, bringing to a triumphant conclusion a hitherto-hopeless battle a feminist group led by my former lover had been fighting for at least five years. But for her and her fellow gender-warriors, the fact I was male rather than female turned victory to defeat; the astounding vindictiveness of their anger included the retaliatory termination of our relationship. Such was my eye-opening encounter with the identity politics by which our capitalist masters ensure the perpetual disunity of the 99.9 Percent -- and which, given the psycho-anthropological accuracy of my definitions of Woodstock and its related events as ritual, in all probability revealed the real reason my thesis was rejected. All of this -- facts, hypotheses, impressions, emotions -- would eventually coalesce into the final text of "Dancer."

*****

IV. Sorting the Debris

THE SOCIOECONOMIC RESEARCH  that became part of the contextual footings  of "Dancer" had already taught me how many of our nation's abandoned farms and rural dwellings had been confiscated by local governments for accumulated unpaid taxes dating back to the Crash of 1929 or even to the fatalities of the First World War;  given the stable, relatively inflation-free dollars that existed before Nixon destroyed U.S. currency by severing it from the guaranteed worth of its gold standard and thus reducing it to the implicitly inflationary fiat-money by which we of the 99.9 Percent have since been socioeconomically subjugated, these properties could often be bought for mere down-payments on the tax debt, which made them attractively easy purchases for  money-pooling collectives of otherwise-relatively impoverished young adults. Abandoned buildings in many cities and towns, including the gold-rush-era structures that became countercultural enterprises and a Back-to-the-Land community center in Bellingham's Fairhaven District,  were similarly obtained.       

On the formerly abandoned farms so purchased, the communards often built A-frame cabins to live in while they resurrected the land's long-fallow agricultural capabilities and restored abandonment-damaged but traditionally built and therefore structurally sound houses into their communal halls, often transforming them into  compellingly bright and comfortingly airy spaces for meeting space, kitchens, dining rooms, libraries and offices -- each project an assertion of their healthiest dreams and aspirations.  From the litter I found in the hate-savaged interior of the state-highway place,  I cannot doubt  this was the purpose of those who were ousted from it. But the vigilantes reduced it all to desolation, and so it had remained, every year slumping further into midden.

The relics in the isolated ruin I discovered while searching Cascade Mountain foothills for archeological anomalies in 1977 likewise revealed a former commune the violent denouement of which was indicated by the bones that shone palely in the obviously polluted waters of its antique well; killing communards' ubiquitous goats and chickens, then weaponizing the corpses to poison their wells was a favorite vigilante tactic

Maybe in 1975 -- I am no longer certain of the year, and the fire-loss makes it impossible to confirm -- I drove to a place colloquially known as "Hippie Hydro," where enterprising communards had dammed a creek and installed a water-powered dynamo to generate their own electricity, creating a notably troutly pond some eight or ten feet deep. A few friends and I had standing permission to (easily) catch that era's six-fish limit from the pond and afterwards feast accordingly, just as I intended doing on this particular day. But, as I would soon discover to my astonishment and dismay, the pond had vanished; now as if in lamentation the creek gurgled somberly between the steeply barren banks of its former depths,  and the adjacent house, though intact, was abandoned. The dam, I soon learned, had been dynamited by vigilantes, and its communal foursome had retreated back east to the more familiar oppressions they had sought to flee.

Urban communes and many related countercultural enterprises often suffered similar fates, inflicted not by vigilantes per se, but by vigilante-minded cops or so-called "developers" who often inexplicably acquired impossibly huge sums of money sufficient to enable their seizure of tax-indebted properties by paying the full balances owed and thus nullifying the time-payment agreements Counterculture folks had negotiated with the taxation authorities. This is how the countercultural enterprises of Bellingham's Fairhaven District were destroyed; a Bellingham police officer memorably informed me in 1972 much of this money came from "secret" sources. 

Given the combination of my Marxian politics, my professional background and my recognition of the revolutionary implications of the resurrection of the Great Goddess implicit in countercultural aesthetics, I was never  surprised by the ubiquity of anti-Counterculture  atrocities. In 1969, near the end of my two-year tenure as news editor of the Morristown, N.J.,  Daily Record, I supervised the coverage of the irreparable destruction inflicted by local police to make a Victorian-era mansion occupied by an emphatically drug-free housing collective permanently uninhabitable. During my first years as the founding photographer of The Seattle Sun, 1974 and 1975, star reporter Bruce Olson and I twice visited abandoned single-family Victorian-era houses that had housed urban communes shut down by mass arrests and vandalized by police to ruins fit only for demolition. Bruce and I also wondered if the perpetrators of such destruction had been bribed to do so by developers who wanted the properties as sites for more profitable housing, though neither of us ever unearthed any evidence of such scheming.   

Less obvious forces also plagued the communards. The Oyster Creek Commune south of Bellingham thrived on its commercial oyster-harvest until 1981 but was bankrupted by an unprecedented outbreak of red tide, an environmental affliction to which the Sailish Sea had hitherto been immune and which some folks thus suspected may have been environmental warfare. Other communes, including the one in which I was a guest-participant, were rent asunder by early manifestations of the carefully conditioned, self-obsessed egotism I would in 1972 label "terminal communitis" -- typically the irreparable divisions fostered by the bottomless contempt with which the class-traitors who cling to petite-bourgeois moral imbecility view those of us -- often Marxians -- who properly acknowledge membership in the 99.9 Percent is also membership in the working class. In its present-day, methodically intensified identity-politics form, I would watch the same conflict repeatedly undermine the potential solidarity of the Occupy Movement.  But just as there is no doubting the magnitude of the brute-force and secret-police campaigns the ruling class unleashed against Occupy, neither is there any doubt the vigilantism that destroyed so many avowedly pacifist  Back-to-the-Land communes was part of a much broader national assault against the entire Counterculture. See again the above link (in Section II) to Mae Brussell's disclosures about the aesthetic and spiritual warfare  implicit in Operation CHAOS; note also the more conventionally focused COINTELPRO (caps as in original). And for a potential shocker, contemplate in the context of Richard Belzer's disclosures in Hit List the number of feminist activists who have been slain by cancer.     

Since we are now briefly venturing into realms typically tabooed as outré, I should mention the Vigilante War was not without its psychic after-effects. In 1980, still a member of the working press,  I chanced to spend maybe 18 hours at a former commune as the   guest of a Tacoma woman, a social-worker friend with whom I shared a 1940 birth-year and an abiding interest in sociology. She had inherited the house, land and attendant outbuildings; they were accessed by a short drive off a graded dirt road just outside the western border of a Washington national forest. The dwelling was a well-maintained 1930s-vintage cottage beside a troutly creek and shaded by a pair of cottonwoods,  its good condition all the more surprising given how its communal occupants had been  terrorized into permanent departure by local vigilantes on a rainy June night seven years beforehand. My hostess's benefactor was the commune's founder, a close relative -- let's call him Huber -- whom she said had died under mysterious circumstances soon after he announced his intention to press charges against the vigilantes; the woman believed he'd been murdered. She said she had never been a member of the collective but was their guest "almost every weekend" and now as a kind of memorial to their efforts hoped to make the  house her vacation refuge. But she was well aware of the vindictive sadism of the white Christian fundamentalists who were the majority of the area's sparse population, and she wanted to be careful not to do anything that would attract more hostility. That's why, she said, she'd never invite more than one or two friends to accompany her to the place.  In fact I was the first man she'd ever brought there.

I thought her vacation-refuge plan a good idea, not the least because I enjoyed her company and relished the notion of fishing the creek. During our initial hours in the house, the warm glow of its fireplace and the comforts of its furnishings seemed to welcome us and encourage our already established intimacy, but as night came on,  we were each increasingly troubled by an ever-more-intensely eerie ominousness, its consequence one of the most fretfully sleepless nights I've ever experienced, after which she admitted she  never dared occupy the place alone because she believed it haunted by Huber's less-than-friendly ghost. But she'd hoped it was just her "over-active" imagination; she'd invited me, she said, not only because of our mutual fondness, but because she knew my agnosticism included sufficient open-mindedness and sensitivity to things unseen I'd let her know if anything was actually psychically amiss. Needless to say, I  warned her accordingly, admitting I'd glimpsed the ghostly figure of a child -- a boy maybe age six or seven -- pass through the kitchen when I'd gotten out of our bed to get us a glass of water.

Stunned and tearful, she told me something I could not have known; another of the communards, a divorced man,  had a seven-year-old son who'd spent most of July here the year before the vigilantes came. The boy "dearly loved the place," she said; "loved us all; we loved him too." But a couple of years later, she'd heard the boy had died.  "I never knew how," she said, explaining his father had moved "someplace back east" and she'd never met the boy's mother, who "lived in one of the big mid-western cities, Minneapolis or maybe Chicago."  

"So it's not just haunted by Huber," she concluded. "There's more than one ghost here. That's really what I was afraid of..."          

The next morning, before we left to return to Tacoma, the woman showed me the former commune's garden-space; a fenced square maybe 50 feet per side. She said its productivity had been "mind-blowing," its companion-planted beans, corn, pumpkins and squash had yielded three times the anticipated harvest; its tomatoes had remained free of the late blight that so plagues Pacific Northwest gardens; its beets and carrots had resisted both insects and moles. "Tastiest vegetables I ever ate," she said. But now every inch of it had been overwhelmed by nightshade beneath which, half hidden by its foliage,  were scattered chunks of jagged-edged white stone. I asked; the woman said the garden's centerpiece had been a concrete pedestal  topped by a marble statue of Venus, placed there "because, well...it just felt right." She hesitated, tossed her shoulder-length blonde hair, raised her sky-blue eyes to mine; "actually, it felt protective.  Powerfully protective. That's why we danced around it naked to celebrate the harvest" -- yet another commonplace example of the Counterculture's typically spontaneous  role in the often-unwitting resurrection of the Goddess and her ancient rituals. But the vigilantes -- "so very glad I was at a conference in California when they attacked," she said -- had sledge-hammered the statue to rubble. For a moment the anguish conveyed by the Venus-fragments seemed almost audible, stifled whimpers, pleas for help silenced by the red-berried toxins of poisonous green vines. I thought again of the violent hatred evident in the destruction of the state-highway abode;  such was the fury of patriarchal vengeance, agitated to maximum viciousness by a ruling class educated well enough in its private universities to be terrified by the revolutionary potential of the Goddess's return.  Quoth a then-favorite Pacific Northwest bumper-sticker: Goddess Is Coming and She Is Pissed.

*****

V. Once More Locked Out

BY 1987, I WAS essentially hiding in the rural Pacific Northwest; the previous autumn, post-fire depression had encroached to the point it was impossible for me to continue my work in Manhattan as the editor-in-chief of Art Direction, a top-quality magazine that had begun its multi-decade life as advertising's primary international trade-journal, dedicated to the learned exploration of the aesthetics and techniques of visual communication. Despite its history of excellence, it was in danger of  drowning in the ever-expanding extermination of print media that is one of the many apocalyptic  consequences of the intentionally fatal undertow of capitalism-cum-nazism's  methodically imposed ignorance and electronic-media-inflamed self-obsession and moral imbecility. The magazine's owner and publisher had together paid me the supreme compliment of hiring me to attempt its resuscitation, and I had at least been able to re-energize it enough to stop its circulation loss. Meanwhile the metastasizing intellectual and emotional malignancy of the wounds inflicted by the fire -- no doubt precisely as those who commanded the arson intended -- were making it increasingly difficult for me to sustain anything approaching the responsive mindfulness that had originally so impressed both the magazine's principals. Rather than fire me, in October of 1986 they had mercifully abolished my position. Though I did not know it at the time, it would be the finale of my 30-year working-press career. The magazine itself would die in 1993.

Now, surviving on New York State's uniquely non-retributive unemployment compensation, I was living in subsistence-gardening poverty as I sought to somehow patch my faculties back together enough to either turn my successful 1982-83 tenure as engineer/deckhand aboard a 96-foot seiner into another fishing-boat job or -- as I would unsuccessfully attempt two years later -- gain acceptance to a vocational-rehabilitation program I had learned was desperately seeking applicants to train as sonar operators to do salmon-counts and off-season bottom-studies for the state fisheries patrol; apparently most potential applicants were repelled by the job's requirement of two or three weeks per month at sea, a condition by which I would not have been the least bit troubled. 

Meanwhile the local economy remained so traumatized by Ronnie-the-Nazi's shock-doctrine Reagonomics, the former annual turnover in the fishing fleet had become nonexistent. And the venomously anti-male, anti-military-veteran bigotry of a feminist-dominated welfare bureaucracy was -- as a state superior court judge would reveal via The Seattle Post-Intelligencer in 1993 -- methodically excluding substantial numbers of eligible men from many of the government-managed rehab opportunities.

*****

VI. Summoned Through Another Doorway

LeeRoy and I c. 1988; born on the vernal equinox of 1987, in this picture he's a year-and-a-half old. A selfie made with the Olympus RC on a tripod. (Photo by Loren Bliss © 2023) 

ON THE 1990 AFTERNOON of what would become my penultimate discovery in the depressing series of violence-savaged communes I chanced to explore between 1969 and 1992 -- eight such places in all -- I was subsistence-hunting grouse with my beloved dog LeeRoy. It was mid September; LeeRoy was three years and six months old. Raising him from puppyhood, I had quickly discovered him to be an irrepressibly intelligent and perceptive creature with a playful sense of humor and so strong an impulse for voluntary helpfulness, he learned by observation to unload  groceries, laundry and many other such items from my vehicles. He was a half-Rottweiler/half-Golden retriever boarding-kennel accident; in his prime he weighed a muscular 110 pounds. He looked like a Rottie with an intact tail -- I consider tail-docking a form of sadism --  and somehow as if by seeming telepathy he had taught himself to flush birds and rabbits and fetch their carcasses as reliably as any hunting dog I've ever known.  

By then the ruin beside the state highway had vanished, its acreage cleared, graded, re-contoured and seeded with a carefully tended lawn to accommodate an attractively tidy manufactured house. Witnessing its transformation as I had driven past the site on the way back from a trip to Seattle the week previous, it  seemed to me the land itself had become forgetful, that perhaps what had happened there was such an accurate  microcosm of the apocalypse that now afflicts us all,  an event so dreadful, Nature herself had chosen to purge it from memory as quickly as possible, and as she sometimes does -- as she is so obviously doing in tolerating the 6,000-year-old patriarchal revolution and thus fostering capitalism's methodical extermination of our species by its relentless destruction of our habitat -- she enlisted human assistance. 

Even so, the fate of that one commune had come to represent for me -- as it yet does and probably always will -- the methodical destruction of an entire generation's solarium of dreams.   

And with LeeRoy I soon discovered fate would not allow me to abandon the story; my grouse-quest hauled the Vigilante War  back into sharp focus; our search for birds  brought us to a scarcely discernible former clearing surrounded by a stand of mixed Big-Leaf maples and Douglas firs on a hilltop that contained a mostly overgrown rectangle of charred and crumbling masonry and heat-cracked stones  I would later learn were the fading remnants of a Victorian farm-house that had been a communal dwelling when it was torched by vigilantes in 1968 or 1969.

Its communards -- about whom I could learn nothing (as 20-odd years later, my sources could recall only the scantiest details of the commune's fate) --  were thus probably among the Vigilante War's first Western Washington victims.   

The sad remnants of their endeavor were in the middle of a much larger tract of older second-growth mixed deciduous and coniferous forest near the Canadian border. I had driven my yellow 1981 Datsun pickup truck maybe a mile into its woods along one of the region's ubiquitous unpaved logging road and parked where the road ended at an earthen barrier; I had then  followed LeeRoy's eager nose-to-the-ground leadership along what I thought was a game trail northward through the roadside  underbrush and into the potentially grouse-productive forest beyond. Probably 15 minutes from the road, we emerged from the deeply shaded density of old second-growth timber to discover a surprisingly open-sky area of firs and maples  so  widely spaced they appeared to have been formally landscaped;  by their size they were probably at least a century old. Now  I could see what I had assumed to be a deer-and-elk trail was actually  the trace of a road so  long unused it  remained visible only as a slight linear depression through the curiously low-growing underbrush of its surroundings; the only traces of any structure's former presence were the foundation and a small, obviously ancient, grotesquely unkempt orchard, three pear trees and three apple trees  crouched over a  densely thriving patch  of weedy sod on the down-slope beyond the charred masonry and crowded together in a tangled embrace, their horror-show branches begrudgingly displaying a few specimens of prematurely rotten fruit, the area ominously silent and strangely  devoid of the  tracks and scat that normally evidence the irresistible attractiveness of pears and apples to wildlife of all breeds and sizes.

Suddenly the place felt not just forlorn but somehow malevolently so. My mind brought up repugnant images of the commune's demise that took shape much as D-76 would have retrieved them from photographic paper; I have no idea whether these were products of imagination or an actual reading of the site's history, though I have long suspected many of our so-called hauntings are the non-supernatural product of the environment's yet-unexplored ability to somehow record and spontaneously reveal pivotal events -- witness the more blatant examples of so-called psychic phenomena associated with Gettysburg or British highways built over Roman roads -- in any case a process in which individual belief (or non-belief) is seemingly irrelevant. 

Soon the elongation of  shadows as  the mid-September sun sank toward an adjacent ridge intensified the locale's aura of hostility; I briefly wondered if one of the communards had been murdered there, though I could find no evidence -- and believe me I searched for it -- of slayings committed during any of Western Washington's vigilante raids; there were said to be beatings aplenty, yes, and a few rapes, but no killings. Pondering what in the era's lexicon were called "bad vibes," I noted LeeRoy also seemed to feel the sense of menace, and I had learned in my boyhood never to dismiss canine perceptiveness. Now LeeRoy glared at me; reading the urgency in his eyes -- "nothing for us here but danger, boss; let's move on while we still can" -- I let him lead me back to more welcoming surroundings. We returned to the road, crossed it, found another path or game-trail through the woods, no doubt the trace of yet another long-forgotten route for hauling timber, its margins edged by bracken, blown thistles  and pearly everlasting.   

We continued our hunt, pausing at a tiny brook, crystal-clear water that bubbled from a nearby spring, murmured soothingly through rounded clusters of moss-greened boulders,  pooled briefly in a moss-free circular depression atop a flat gray slab as if to offer passers-by a refreshingly cold drink, then crossed the path in a colorfully pebbled passage scarcely a child's step wide and continued on its boulder-marked way to the river a quarter-mile distant. LeeRoy lapped the water as I mentally immersed myself in the wild beauty of the place. Looking about in the notably golden-hued late-afternoon light, it brought to mind poignant  memories from 1970; at that time, an emigrant from regions long ago settled, I had never before witnessed such prophetic autumnal color, so new and yet so eerily familiar, coniferous greens turned stygian by their stunning contrast with the implausibly bright yellow of the Big-Leaf maples, a cautionary vision of the encroaching magnitude of winter darkness, a summer-god's last warning before yielding the land to that vague sense of  post-Hallowe'en emptiness that annually declares the inevitable victory of his winter twin. Such was  my first autumn in the Pacific Northwest and the conclusion of  those blessed months I spent on the commune -- days gardening or fishing or cutting firewood or hunting, evenings conversing with my comrades, with Robert Graves' White Goddess as my bedtime reading and early morning  meditation.  Now a decade later I was momentarily startled by an eerie sense of having suddenly fallen backwards in time. I remember I glanced to see how LeeRoy was reacting and was profoundly relieved to note his demeanor was unchanged; he had finished his drink, gazed at me as if perplexed I too hadn't drank from the brook, impatiently awaited my signal to resume our quest. Which we did: by the end of legal hunting hours he had flushed two birds and we had scored a two-grouse feast.

*****       

VII. Inside a Tiny Sanctuary

THE FOLLOWING SUMMER, driving from Bellingham to my rented cabin near Nooksack on the Sumas River, I passed the more recently abandoned structures of a commune to which my comrades and I had sometimes transported hitch-hiking pairs of women during that oh-so-promising summer of 1970. I knew the place had survived the vigilante war, which prompts the supposition its members were armed, though I have no specific knowledge to confirm that; our conversations with the women were typically exchanges of information about subsistence gardening, places to cut firewood, that sort of thing.  

Wondering what its vacant buildings might tell me, I turned my Datsun pick-up truck into its still readily accessible driveway, left LeeRoy behind to guard my truck or alert me to any unanticipated arrivals and proceeded to explore. The main house was locked; there was nothing I could spot through its un-curtained windows save the uncommunicative barrens of empty wallboard walls and equally mute plank floors, and of course I had no intention of breaking and entering.

But a smaller dwelling behind it -- a place I vaguely remembered had been erected by some of the women to whom we had given rides --  remained accessible, and inside were a few indicative items that identified its former occupants as female but offered no clue to the reasons for their departures. One of these items was a white enameled crescent-moon earring made of some metal I could not identify, the sort of Goddess-symbol so many countercultural women had instinctively acquired and worn despite their conscious-mind's unawareness of its ancient significance. Recognizing it as a genuine relic, I plucked it from the floor and pocketed it,  cherishing it as a memento of a genuinely blessed time, thinking I would include it in the medicine bag I was contemplating making as a gift to myself, a private celebration of my discovery my mostly Celtic genes are seasoned by a long-ago First Nations ancestor, a maternal foremother who was most likely a Mohawk.  I did just that. Today, 32 years later, I am again wearing that same medicine bag, a comforting talisman that sometimes seems to ease this writing.      

Though it has no particular relevance to the conclusion of this story, eventually I would discover the property where I found the earring had been sold after a multi-year vacancy, that its structures were being remodeled by an obviously yuppoid man and wife  who had no notion of its history or of the women who had dwelt there in harmony eventually interrupted by the hostile forces that assailed us all. Remembering their smiles, their fearlessness in the company of fellow communards, the body language that spoke so clearly of so many female Back to the Landers'  characteristic combination of freedom and sense of obligation to our Mother Earth, I wondered what had become of them. For an instant my mind's eye saw them as they had been in 1970, clothed  in brightly colored  ankle-length homemade dresses reminiscent of far more ancient times and laughing in the heartfelt joy that follows the banishment of patriarchal shame. I wish them well; they and I and everyone like us shared that revolutionary  ethos first expressed by Nat King Cole in the 1948 song entitled "Nature Boy," its lyrics written by Eden Ahbenz and decades later performed more fetchingly by Cher, a seemingly secular incantation that  assures  us "the greatest thing you'll ever learn/ is just to love and be loved in return."  Some of us, myself among them, yet hold to it as our species' ultimate truth, wondering with no small degree of awe how a commercial enterprise in a capitalist world dared popularize a message so profound.

*****     

VIII. Back to the Land

I WAS AGAIN grouse hunting with LeeRoy when I found what would be the last of the abandoned communes I would discover. As I said,  this was in 1992, and the place yielded four telling photographs including the one with which this memoir opens. It was, I remember,  an encouragingly  sunny, comfortingly cloudless, emphatically azure-sky afternoon in early October when I  turned my yellow Datsun  southward up an unpaved,  sometimes steep but annually graded logging-truck route the era's topographical maps showed bore a name suggestive of suburban development and which climbed deep into the aged second-growth deciduous and coniferous forest on the northern end of one of the more westernmost Cascade mountains.  (Though the troubling fact the forest road  had been named suggested the region's potential reduction into the environmental toxicity of suburban housing, I write this in the past tense because by '93 it had been gated closed, seemingly permanently, and present day satellite imagery suggests it is no more.) But this was '92, when some of the mountain's northern heights were still being cleared  of timber and the road was regularly traveled on workdays by loggers, though we were there on a Saturday or Sunday, when there were no logging trucks to raise choking clouds of yellowish dust from its unpaved surface or crowd me off its single lane as they thundered past, the drivers often blasting their air-horns and jeering, cursing me for daring drive a rationally sized, responsibly fuel-conserving import into a realm presumably reserved for limitless consumption, run-amok xenophobia and triumphant anti-environmentalism. Perhaps two miles beyond the beginning of the road's ascent, it angled abruptly eastward to cross a bridge that spanned the five-foot width of a clear, cold, swift and dependably troutly creek; then the road abruptly turned due south again to continue its climb.  Just before the road veered onto the bridge, the deeply rutted remnant of an older, pre-bridge, west-side-of-the-creek version of the same route continued south but abruptly ended within 50 yards, permanently closed where a section of the  steep-sided valley's slope had collapsed into an already overgrown  barrier.

There I parked and locked the Datsun. The size and shape of the blockage indicated a smallish landslide,  a minimally disruptive example of much more ruinous disasters, substantial sections of barren slopes and sometimes entire mountainsides collapsed by the symbiotic combination of the region's sometimes-torrential winter-monsoon rains with the environmental ruin heedlessly inflicted by clear-cutting,  crippling highways and railroads for however many days, weeks or months it took to reconstruct them and occasionally obliterating entire communities. The height of the fir and alder saplings that had sprung from the obstruction suggested it was at least a decade old. Beyond the barrier, the old road had closely paralleled the creek for several hundred yards upstream, but now the mixed forest and its encroaching underbrush had  shrunk it to a path so overgrown I doubted even a dirt bike could have traveled it. With abundant deer and elk tracks evident in its few remaining bare spots,  it  seemed well on its way to becoming  a mere game trail, a common evolution for the region's abandoned roads, and -- no surprise --  its first maybe 300 hundred yards had  proven so dependably productive, we had never explored it further; LeeRoy and I had taken a half-dozen grouse  there in September, October and early November of '90 and '91, and this year it had already given us two birds and a rabbit. But in his eagerness, LeeRoy sometimes ignored my repeated reminders to "stay close." Today he'd flushed a grouse out of a path-side blackberry bramble too far ahead of me to shoot, and now -- as if in embarrassment and by way of apology -- his body-language made it clear he intended to find the bird again and this time flush it close enough for me to bag it.   

***

For those unfamiliar with firearms, I should digress a bit to explain that the effective range of a shotgun is determined by a quality called "choke," which controls how much its shot spreads sideways -- how it "patterns" -- in its passage down-range; that's why open-bored shotguns loaded with bird shot are useless much beyond 25 yards. I was 13 years old when my father began teaching me to hunt quail, grouse and pheasant with his traditional side-by-side double, a 12-gauge Fox Model B he'd mail-ordered from Montgomery Wards, which sold this excellent gun under its Western Field house-brand name; its right-hand barrel was choked slightly ("improved cylinder") and its left barrel moderately ("modified"); at 25 yards the right barrel patterned most of its shot into a 30-inch circle, the left into about 20 inches, and I quickly learned not to shoot at any bird flying much beyond that approximate range.  

Apart from a 1830s-vintage Hudson's Bay trade-musket I bought for  $15 in 1955 and often used during my high-school years simply because a couple of dollars worth of powder and shot would provide me the same season's hunting as $10 or $15 worth of modern ammunition, and a $50 Savage Model 24 over-under combination gun I used in rural Washington when I was an impoverished undergraduate c. 1971-1976  -- it had a modified-choke 20-gauge barrel surmounted by a .22 magnum barrel, the latter especially useful for shooting grouse perched in backwoods trees  --  I never carried anything but traditional side-by-side doubles on bird hunts.

Of all the shotguns I would own, the percussion Pedersoli 10-gauge with which I routinely hunted c. 1990-2003 was undoubtedly the most dependably accurate and versatile; charging it with genuine (never replica) black powder, I loaded it with number eight shot to (reliably) bust clay pigeons during wing-shooting practice; with number six shot for (reliably) taking grouse and/or rabbits;  and when both deer and small game were in season or news of local bear or cougar emergencies suggested LeeRoy and I might find ourselves on somebody's menu, I loaded the un-choked ("cylinder bore") right barrel with its usual charge of number six, but loaded the slightly choked left barrel (equivalent of modern "improved cylinder") with a 72-caliber, 1.25-ounce lead hollow-base slug cannibalized from modern shotgun ammunition or a .75-caliber, 630-grain patched lead "pumpkin ball"; the former projectile expanded to fit the bore, and paper-target work proved it usefully accurate out to about 75 yards; the latter was less accurate, and I'd not have attempted a shot beyond 50 yards. Though I never took a deer or slew an attacking predator with either load, comparative testing on  water-filled one-gallon milk jugs backed by seasoned fir planks indicated the slugs from the Pedersoli were every bit as devastating as comparable projectiles fired from  modern guns; the patched round balls were notably more so.

*** 

It was the obvious hope of flushing that same grouse again, this time within my shotgun's limited range, that seemingly prompted LeeRoy to urge me  much further up the mountain into an area I had not hitherto explored. Following the path another few hundred yards, I discovered the creek had cut itself a trench five or six feet deep, probably its response to the environmental disruption of a clear-cutting maybe a half-century earlier; the path that had evolved from  the road-remnant continued in close parallel until it reached the two-foot-diameter trunk of a fallen conifer that conveniently spanned the trench;  here, though a depression in the overgrown terrain indicated the abandoned road had proceeded upstream on the west side of the creek, the path itself now zigged eastward across the gully via the log. We followed its route; LeeRoy backed up a few paces for the running start of what became a breathtakingly graceful eight-foot leap; I crossed far more cautiously, balancing apprehensively on the barkless, treacherously slick surface of the log, using my shotgun like a tightrope-walker's balance pole. The path, here so frequently traveled by elk and deer it was suddenly  mostly bare earth, then zagged south again, once more paralleling the creek. 

Maybe another hundred yards up the mountain the path dwindled to its end amidst a stand of alders on a curious little hillock, a plateau  perhaps 50 yards wide and no more than twice that distance long. The creek at this point was in an open meadow maybe 75 yards to the west, flowing through a slight depression in a more serpentine version of the same sort of trench it had eroded for itself parallel the abandoned road, all traces of which had now vanished.

The alders seemed no more than three or four decades old; beneath them was a tiny pond, a near-perfect oval  maybe 10 feet long, four feet wide and no more than two feet deep, remarkably clear water with what its outer margins indicated was an always constant level; its depth apparently regulated by its source, as are some spring-fed pools I had known in Appalachia, it had no discernible outflow and was thus oddly well-like. Nor could I see any visible life-forms therein.  Its bowl-shaped bottom was coated by the same crop of brown leaves that uniformly carpeted the entire grove, its covering everywhere thick enough to prohibit the growth of any underbrush,  obviously several years' undisturbed accumulation of the foliage shed by these alders.

To my surprise I realized I could not dismiss a feeling this place had some unique significance, as if it were trying to tell me something I was yet too dense to comprehend. I repeatedly circled the little pond, wondering what its message might be and how it might appear or if I were merely being a foolish old man. The clear, slightly copper-hued depth of the pond evoked fond memories of how in the vernal months of my East Tennessee school-years, such realms were invariably the trysting-place of frogs, loudly loquacious subspecies that ranged from inch-long spring peepers to 18-inch bullfrogs and sang at truly astonishing volume,  their waters soon brimming with gooey tell-tale strings of frog eggs, then with tadpoles we caught and kept in Mason jars as they matured into frogs, which the peepers did in two or three months. I recollect I was vaguely disappointed this tiny body of water held no discernible traces of life at all. 

LeeRoy, nose to the ground,  moved down the slight slope into the dense underbrush that resumed east of the clearing; obviously he had not forgotten our quest for the grouse he had prematurely flushed beyond the range of my shotgun. And there amidst the brush just a few yards beyond him was the visual surprise of a ruined truck cab that appeared to have been painted in colorful psychedelic anarchy, an exclamatory relic I soon identified as the fully stripped remains of a full-sized 1940s-vintage pickup truck -- a vehicle I vaguely remembered as a driveable restoration proudly shown me by some Back-to-the-Landers in 1970. It was deeply perplexing too; search as I might, I could not find so much as a single trace of any passage to explain its presence. Then I discovered the collapsing A-frame I would soon realize had been deliberately wrecked; beyond it in even more dense underbrush I would find the second A-frame and the evidence it too had been trashed,  the pair defined by their contents as the former dwellings of communards. I groped into my shotgun bag for the Olympus RC I had adopted as an always-carry pocket camera; I photographed what I saw, silently cursing myself for having neither cassette recorder nor notebook and pen to preserve my impressions of the place.

LeeRoy watched me, obviously pleased, and when I shot the last of 24 frames and cranked the 35mm film back into its container -- the only film I had that day was the roll within the camera -- he turned about as if to go home, looking over his shoulder as if to ensure I followed.

The truck-cab to which I was led by fate manifest as LeeRoy's quest for a prematurely flushed grouse and what I then saw beyond it; forcing my way through the underbrush I encountered the first of the two vigilante-destroyed A-frames I would discover that sunny fall day in 1992.  (Photos by Loren Bliss © 2023)

As we returned to the Datsun, it occurred to me the fact the commune was adjacent to a named road -- that it probably had been accessed by that same road's earlier, landslide-obstructed route (which at the commune-site was merely so overgrown I could find no visible trace of it) -- suggested tracts of land along its length were already the properties of individual owners. As I said earlier, the fact a logging road has been given a name is often the harbinger of suburban development -- which means the communards may well have owned the property from which they were ousted. Whatever; Nature had made her message  undeniable: the land does not wish to remember. 

*****

IX. Epilogue

WRITING THIS AS I recover all-too-slowly from Covid in the summer of 2023 resurrects poignant recollections of all for which we yearned and all that was so hurtfully stolen from us.

As soon as I can muster up the determination to endure the gravely vexing tedium of typing it into electronic space, I will post here an intra-Dispatches link to the (foolishly) optimistic essay I wrote for Northwest Passage in July 1970. (Yes, "gravely vexing" is an understatement: for me, severely dyslexic, writing on a keyboard is relatively easy, but copying an existing manuscript by typing or longhand is an hour-per-page fight against genetic inferiority that invariably rekindles the conditioned self-loathing imposed by the capitalists'  hatred and contempt for any working-class person whose exploit-ability promises less-than-maximum profits -- which, dear readers, is precisely why the moral imbecility at the core of capitalism mandates we be taught from birth to despise disabled persons and culturally less-exploitable exploitable minorities.) Meanwhile, those of you who wish to undertake the chore of searching Western Washington University's public archives can find it here by scrolling to Page 16.  By-lined "Aengus L. Forsythe" -- a pseudonym I chose to honor my heartfelt empathy with the protagonist in Yeat's "Song of the Wandering Aengus" (here performed by Judy Collins) -- it is the only (serious) writing in which I  protected myself by a nom-de-guerre, which I did  because my creation of a fictional, more-dangerous-than-Weatherman, "crypto-radical Seismology Faction" intent on faulting the bedrock of patriarchy was a ploy to aggravate the omnipresent plague of federal secret-police agents into intensifying their already oppressive efforts and maybe thereby accidentally exposing themselves, and I preferred not to invite the reprisal of an alleged "heart attack," being given a lesson in terminal ballistics by some asset-vigilante or "accidentally" drowning while wearing a cement life-jacket.     

Recalling the above  brings to mind the incident I briefly referenced above in "Breaking it Down." The story as repeatedly told in the Bellingham area c. 1970-71 was a band of vigilantes recruited from fanatically evangelical churches  had attacked a commune of a dozen members -- six couples who'd bought substantial acreage deep in the backwoods near the vicinity so named. They had cleared it for a soon-thriving subsistence garden and a raised a communal cabin that included lumber hewn from the trees cut for the garden; the men were said to have all fought in Vietnam as members of the same U.S. Army Special Forces team, and like so many of their fellow veterans, they had returned convinced it was not only the wrong war in the wrong place, but that we were on the wrong side. They were also said to be so disgusted by the atrocities they'd been forced to commit and the additional horrors they'd witnessed, they'd adopted an Amish-like mode of living, rejecting modern equipment and appliances and even weapons, arming themselves with replicas of Civil-War-vintage muzzle-loaders and traditional archery gear instead.

It was the communards' choice of antique armament, or so the story goes, that prompted the vigilantes to assume they'd be easy targets and jeeringly attack them on a July night in 1970. But the response -- the lethal whimper of .58-caliber Minié balls, the splatter of buckshot, the rapidity of fire achievable with percussion revolvers and the flights of broadhead arrows the women arced from behind the dense clouds of white smoke generated by their men's firearms quickly convinced the vigilantes to attempt retreat -- only to discover they'd been trapped in what I've always supposed, assuming the tale were true, was a classic ambush formidably executed with well-known Special Forces skill. Then the smallest of the male communards called out the biggest, burliest vigilante, challenged him to a weaponless, man-to-man fight and gave him an ultimate "ass-whupping," the most merciless non-lethal thrashing of his life. 

The next morning, or so it was said, the local sheriff found the vigilantes on a grassy shoulder of a state highway; they'd been stripped naked and roped together neck-to-neck like prisoners of war, their hands bound uncomfortably behind their backs. Their clothing was supposedly nowhere to be found, their nakedness said to be vengeance for the vigilantes' forcible stripping of communards. The stories differed as to whether there were any wounded; most said the communards deliberately shot to frighten not wound or kill, but a couple of the versions claimed some of the vigilantes were wounded but all had been given emergency medical treatment adequate to preserve their lives, a skill in which Special Forces soldiers were in fact trained. 

While I was never able to authoritatively confirm  the story's details,  I've no doubt it is at least partially true, as I know from personal experience the vigilantes had by that year's August adopted a policy of carefully scouting the communes to determine whether we were armed,  and if we were, devising methods to test our skills with weapons. Hence the sequence of midnight alerts where I was a guest, our dogs warning  of multiple prowlers invading the commune's 33 acres and rousing us to arms.  A few days later a stranger showed up at a community-solidarity gathering we were hosting and challenged us to a shooting match the commune's men and women quickly won, my own display of rapid-fire accuracy with a straight-stocked  Marlin .30-30 Texas carbine a pivotal part of the victory. Afterwards, with our guns back on their racks and the stranger's .348 Winchester Model 71 returned to the trunk of his grotesquely tail-finned mildew-green 1959 Plymouth  sedan, he promised to buy us all a case of beer, then drove away supposedly bound for a local store. Of course he never returned. But neither did the midnight intruders. 

Too many other communes -- those that were denied the means of self-defense by pacifism or urban innocence -- were not so fortunate. While the .01 Percenters and their political puppets damned all communes as doorways to communism, I cannot doubt they were particularly terrified by the Back to the Land Movement, for there the resurrection of the Goddess was taking shape within a definitively communal agrarian context, which foretold the eventual coalescence of its seemingly disparate elements into not just the secular eco-socialism already embryonic in the cities, but a genuinely revolutionary eco-socialism rooted in the real-world spirituality of our species' oldest and and most spontaneously enduring religion. And if I, a largely self-educated journalist, could recognize what thus obtained, surely the far-more-officially educated members of the aristocracy could do likewise, especially those who served in the analytical branches of the national  secret-police forces, typically advised by Original (N.S.D.A.P.) Nazi war criminals. It is therefore highly probable the Vigilante War was agitated from somewhere on high -- and quite possibly commanded from the same level. The jargon of the anti-commune vigilantes identified them as fanatical Christian fundamentalists, their mentality that of the southern "Saturday Night Men's Bible Study Class," aka the Ku Klux Klan, metastasized throughout the nation.  And we already know the ruling class, having failed to nazify the nation via the 1933 Bankers' Plot, began in 1938 to co-opt white protestant fundamentalism as its future sturmabteilung. Thus the great likelihood the anti-Back-to-the-Land-Movement decrees I photographed on the reader-board of a Western Washington church originated from the same venomously nazi sources. "God Hate Hippies" was already a national proclamation; "Organic Is Satanic" and "Environmental Means Of The Devil" were merely the next logical iterations in the methodical weaponization of the fundamentalists' lynch-mob hatefulness. And that dreadful ruin I explored in 1978 --  a shattered Buddha, a cast-off sandal, a faded black silken slip with an East Coast label, a sodden, moldering pile of books obviously hurled from adjacent shelves, The Whole Earth Catalog shredded dead center by a close-range shotgun blast, Kahlil Gibran ripped apart at the spine -- is an unforgettable example of its intended outcome. Thus too the destruction of "Dancer" and all its source material, the aforementioned reader-board photos included; the tip of that particular dagger, which will pain my heart until it beats no more, is the undeniable message conveyed by the fact the fire was ignited at the exact moment I was meeting with Cicely Nichols, the book-editor friend who -- believing the manuscript potentially "the most influential work of the 20th Century" --  had pledged to mother it to mainstream publication. 

Cicely died of cancer in 2008. Perhaps curiously, though I often photographed her -- she regarded one of those pictures as the best portrait anyone ever made of her -- it is not her I see when I reflect on how the burning of "Dancer" was perhaps the final chapter in the destruction of the Counterculture and the suppression of its genuinely revolutionary significance. It is instead a total stranger, the young white woman whose image emerged in my mental vision as I examined that faded black slip I found in the wreckage of her Back-to-the-Land dream. I do not know whether she is a creation of my imagination or the photographically accurate product of an archiving process and mechanism of communication we have yet to discover. But my brain-cells have borne her  portrait since that moment in 1978, and it is always the same:  she crouches in midnight darkness on the grassy shoulder of a two-lane blacktop rural road; I see her only in glimpses  illuminated by the lights of passing vehicles. She has hooded and cloaked herself with an olive-drab wool army blanket, and she clutches it tightly in  desperate hope of concealing the bruised nakedness I somehow know is beneath its itchy comfort. She trembles; her face is Modigliani beautiful, but now it is rouged  with dust and streaked with tears; her nose has bled; her upper lip is split; her eyes are like windows emptied by disaster; her mouth gapes like the doorway that summoned me to the corpse of her aspirations;  she is the Goddess as addressed by Tim Buckley in “Phantasmagoria in Two,”: “If you tell me of all the pain you've had/ I'll never smile again”; for a dreadful instant I know her anguish as the personification of Edvard Munch's Scream.

And as always, as it has been from the moment I departed that roadside ruin, I hear her cry out to me: “O do not let our love be lost. O please...”

I have hitherto remained silent, and in my silence, her plea has become an albatross about my neck.  But now I answer:

"Yes," I say; "yes I will be your witness, yes until this land is healed of its anguish, yes until the time be ours again. Yes. Your witness. Yes."

--LB/28 May 2010 (revised 29 December 2011 and completed 18 August 2023) 

(-30-)

W. Eugene Smith, the late world-class humanitarian photojournalist, in Seattle c. 1976. A  fanatical Ansel Adams cultist had just shouted both of  us down for attempting to discuss how the nation's then-skyrocketing inflation was locking lower-income people out of the technology required for professional-quality photography.  The critic, an obviously wealthy white male, damned us for  "attempting to politicize art" -- a nasty, morally imbecilic  response that drew applause from everyone else in the room -- astounding Mr. Smith, but again confirming  what I already knew to be Seattle's most definitive trait, an existential-nazi viciousness compounded by the most hateful, often violent xenophobia I have ever encountered.   

*****

A POTENTIAL BOSS once asked me why I outspokenly affirm the intellectual value of mythology, archaeology, history and sociology even as I vehemently damn the study of philosophy as nothing more than an obnoxiously esoteric form of  self-aggrandizing academic mental masturbation.

What I told him was the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had proven Moses, Jesus and Muhammad to be malevolent enablers of ecogenocidal self-destruction. The Bomb, I hypothesized, is the One Percent’s ultimate terror weapon; it is their declaration of permanent war against humanitarianism itself. It reduces the formal study of philosophy back to modern counterparts of its medieval irrelevance, debating the number of angels that might occupy the head of a pin.

Asked to elaborate, I said the only metaphysics the Bomb had not reduced to irrelevance were Zen, Taoism, its First Nations counterparts and the resurrected paganism growing out of the merger of the Gaia Hypothesis with the folk renaissance’s resurrection of pre-patriarchal liturgical fragments and Robert Graves’ scholarly propagation of matriarchy’s earth-centered consciousness.

I later learned my truthful responses cost me my role as a leading, obviously qualified supplicant for a better paying editorial job. But I answered with equal honesty when a fellow comment-thread-respondent on a Scheerpost essay asked what seemed to me a closely related  question: "Where was Marx wrong?"

While I wrote my answer pretty much off the top of my head, my passion for scholarship compelled me to began re-investigating my own conclusion. Several days of research cemented that hypothesis into Occam-Razored certainty the radiation sickness generated by the atomic terror-bombing of Japan must now be reckoned to include our loss -- conceivably forever -- of the rarely acknowledged but nevertheless vital existential optimism that has obviously motivated human achievement long before our species became recognizable as such.

I began writing this concluding installment of the intended three-part series accordingly.

But then all this work was destroyed by an allegedly "impossible" word-processing crash, and my failed attempts at reconstructing it from memory eventually forced the entire effort back to the proverbial drawing board. The result is the radically pared-down, apologetically tardy result you are reading now.

*****

MOST OF US know from experience our species’ survival requires the solidarity of positive mindfulness, which paradoxically includes the seemingly negative recognition of the worst that might happen countered by relentless determination to use our proven abilities to transcend whatever awfulness might otherwise prevail.

Such mindfulness is thus the diametrical opposite of Barack the Betrayer’s intentionally misleading proclamation of the "audacity of hope," an astoundingly brazen Big Lie intended to minimize the evil of subjugation by delusional redefinition of our cowardly acceptance of its atrocities as virtuous steps toward  "change we can believe in," the far more malignant Big Lie that is statistically proven the One Percent’s most effective weapon for reducing voter turnout.

Our resultant realization of the imbecility of hope -- our species’ loss of positive mindfulness -- is one of the foremost symptoms of this hitherto-undiagnosed complication of the radiation sickness the Bomb has inflicted on us all. Its agonies are infinitely worsened by the incurable gangrene of self-inflicted terminal climate change. But the Bomb not only robbed us all of our ancient ability to think our way out of ultimate crises; it filled the resultant void with the negative mindfulness of the death-camp, whether eternally or not remains to be seen.

*****

MARXISM’S IRREFUTABLY PROVEN socioeconomic projections are based on breakthrough scholarship that also brought about some of the earliest academic recognition of the matriarchal proto-communism that sustained our species through its first approximately 194,000 years.

Moreover, the earliest histories of Marxian theory point to the likelihood Karl Marx’s intent -- Frederich Engel’s too -- included some degree of formal restoration of our original nature-centered solidarity, hence the Marxian opposition to organized religion.¹ That’s why I will always be perplexed by Marxism’s choice to ignore archaeology’s proof of the ecogenocidal, end-of-history violence of patriarchy’s endless war against Nature. Patriarchal invasion and conquest destroyed our earthly Eden, maliciously slandered its Gaian goddess as the source of all evil and began its deliberate reversal of human evolution by falsely re-branding our Mother Earth as our species’ mortal enemy. But Marxism chose to redefine these apocalyptic evils as essential stages of human development, unavoidable steps in an evolutionary process that made humanitarian socialism the historically inevitable liberation of the entire 99 Percent and thus eventually of all humanity.

In other words, Marxism’s one terminal error is its irrational belief in the Christian, ultimately patriarchal definition of progress, which the Cassandras of feminism have been desperately warning us for at least a century is the apocalyptic banishment of any and all commitment to humanitarian advancement.

It is in this context we encounter real-world proof of the tyranny-preserving function of doublethink -- a truth hidden by a malicious lie, a contradiction in terms, a pearl concealed by pig dung. It is exemplified by the Christians’ two-part claim our species’ history (A), reveals an observable “moral arc,” which indeed it does, and (B), the all-time Big Lie this arc bends toward "justice" -- which it most assuredly does not, the terror-tabooed truth we painfully learn only if we dare study the approximately 6,000-year historical timeline of ever-more-deadly patriarchal atrocities.

What we also discover is prior to the patriarchal conquest, our species’ technological and socioeconomic progress walked mostly hand-in-hand, one nurturing the other in a symbiosis of humanitarian betterment based ultimately on oneness with nature and kinship within the family of Mother Earth.

Matriarchy was societal motherhood symbolized by its variously named Goddess: its universal quest for better living -- not merely as sustainable food supplies, indoor plumbing and central heating, but the relentless improvement of human health and the infrastructured time both to advance our Stonehenge-based understanding of our relationship to the cosmos and relish the sensual wisdom that grants female and male equal potential of maximum sexual fulfillment. As with motherhood itself, matriarchy’s "moral arc" bent toward more humanely fulfilling futures, its ethos epitomized by First Nations’ memories of beneficent visitors from beyond the sunrise, the global reach of the Minoan trading commonwealth and the game-park wealth of the Iroquoian Confederacy, for which, in lieu of the destroyed links, see the recommended reading again appended to this text.

Patriarchy’s consequences irrefutably prove it matriarchy’s diametrical opposite. The "greatest tyrant" competition at the core of patriarchal history defines it as the self-obsessed, morally imbecilic, serial-killer minded, definitively ecogenocidal quest by individual males for the sadistic, rape-everything omnipotence attributed to their allegedly divine male idols (double entendre intended). Patriarchal violence terminated the matriarchal partnership of humanitarianism and technological advance; it divided these former evolutionary partners into murderously hateful foes; it reduced "progress" to the perpetual refinement and weaponization of the technology and psychology of everlasting war.

The Bomb is patriarchy’s species-terminating orgasm, its mono-orgasmic final solution to the terrifying and hatefully envied multiply-orgasmic female, its mushroom-shaped ejaculations flaming upward from the definitively Abrahamic miasma of terminal climate change as apocalyptic declarations of our Masters' omnipotence.

What history now bends toward -- what the patriarchal timeline has always bent toward throughout its ongoing 6,000 year effort of apocalyptic nazification -- is ever-more-inescapable tyranny on the mandatory global Trail of Terrified Tears to extinction.

Patriarchy’s preservation thus requires constant application of ececogenocidal force.

Which in turn mandates destruction of every trace of our humanitarian achievements, lest they inspire further outbreaks of influential feminist rage, as when a wildcat strike by all five thousand of the women employed by Petrograd’s Lesnoy Textile Works on 8 March 1917 triggered the entire Russian Revolution.

*****

THOSE APOCALYPSE-ENABLERS who yet respond to our Masters’ ever-more-obvious malignancy by claiming such cleverly schemed malice "is just too outrageous to believe" should take note of the fact the obliteration of any and all history favorable to the 99 Percent is precisely what the Nixon/Kissinger/Pinochet triumvirate of terror imposed, albeit with less-than-total success, on pre-Internet Chile:

"The regime’s aim was more than the violent repression of the (Unido Popular) and the left. It wanted to ensure that nothing remained for the next generation to remember or be proud of—none of the cultural, social, and economic achievements made under Allende. Pinochet undertook a policy of systemic eradication of everything that immortalized the thousand days of the UP. The junta did more than carry out crimes against the Chilean people, for it attempted to create a year zero, devoid of a Marxist past. Chilean history became before and after the coup."

Since then, the ongoing reduction of our species’ libraries of printed manuscripts to concentrated collections of electrons -- that is, from intentionally preservative media to storage intentionally vulnerable to flip-of-the-switch destruction -- renders all our species’ wisdom and knowledge readily redactable.

Patriarchy’s desperation to suppress all evidence of humanitarian potential -- even if our Masters are miraculously prevented from launching their thermonuclear Final Solution -- means any of us who benefited from the now-prohibited education that nurtured rational thinking or are old enough to remember vividly the era of national hopefulness borne of the New Deal are now at ever-greater risk for extermination.

Typically we’re murdered not by now-unfashionable death camps but cunningly euphemism-protected mechanisms of slow-motion genocide -- homelessness, denial of welfare and food stamps, abolition of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and methodical destruction of any other remnants of our species’ now-prohibited positive mindfulness.

We are thus imprisoned by inescapable surveillance, our sadistic overseers’ whips the electronic media Big-Lie-pimped as tools of personal liberation but which are now revealed as the invisible concentration-camp fencing its critics, myself among them, always assumed it to be.

*****

LET US THEN briefly review some exceptionally vivid photographic documentation of patriarchy’s apocalyptic consequences: fire and drought; the climate-change devastation inflicted most recently on Pakistan, Puerto Rico and Florida; and above all else the deliberate intensification of all these horrors. Note the ecogenocidal competition forced on all nations by patriarchy, exemplified by how China has overthrown the ecogenocidally top-seeded USian Empire as the planet’s champion polluter; note too the bring-on-doomsday message of ecogenocidal sabotage, as in the greenhouse-gassing of the world with methane.

The obvious symptoms of our plight -- what military intelligence correctly refers to as "enemy indications" -- begin with the fact our global Masters claimed inability to organize collective amelioration of climate change is becoming our species' terminal Big Lie.

It is proven so by their mutual rejection of their historically proven capacity for successfully cooperative international achievements -- a bring-on-the-apocalypse decision the apocalyptic magnitude of which is exemplified by contrasting the ruling-class successes of the international space station with our Masters’ terminally deadly refusal to mobilize against our looming extinction. The terminal failure of USian democracy -- its relentless march toward white male supremacy climaxed by the irreversible Christonazi tyrannies methodically inflicted on us by the cabal of lifetime-appointed führers that now and forever gives the U.S. Supreme Court the permanent omnipotence sought by Hitler -- thus redefines the entire nation as a failed state.

Let us not forget that any such perpetuation of evil -- for example, the approximately 47,000 annual deaths the One Percenters inflict on us by the intentionally genocidal denial of medical care -- redefines that evil as policy rather than anomaly or coincidence.

Quoth Caitlin Johnstone in "Future Generations (If There Are Future Generations)" there is no longer any question our species "built our entire civilization around economic models that could only result in the destruction of our biosphere.”

The apocalyptic failure of the United States to transcend its founders’ ecogenocidal white racism and achieve even the rudiments of social democracy? Marxism’s abject failure at halting the patriarchy-mandated apocalypse? As Audre Lorde so memorably points out, "the Master’s tools will never dismantle the Master’s house."

*****

FIVE YEARS OLD when the USian Empire nuked Japan, somehow I instantly recognized the bombing as the terminally apocalyptic event it truly is, its emotional shock far exceeding even that inflicted by my birthmother’s violent attempts to murder my father and me on that year’s Summer Solstice Eve. But it took me another half-decade to intellectually mature enough to verbalize my recognition of the bombing as "the beginning of the end of the world" -- a conviction I knew to be so dangerously subversive, I kept it strictly to myself until the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Even then I dared share it only with my first wife, a Baltimore artist and poet to whom I am forever grateful for introducing me via Plato’s Republic to the hitherto-only imagined satisfaction of reliably thought-provoking, often naked-souled conversation with a woman my own age who was unabashedly my intellectual equal but who later ended our marriage in ideological retaliation for my post-arrest civil rights activism:

Quoth she: "Loren, are you getting involved with communists and stuff?"

Quoth I: "Yeah, probably."

Quoth she: "Then I’m leaving."

Most often though I resisted thinking about the bombing because on the rare occasions my usually impregnable mental resistance failed, it flung me into a uniquely bottomless realm of psychologically unbearable horror. Then I would slam my mental door on it as quickly as a firefly’s flicker, my don’t-go-there emotional-pain-avoidance reflex toughened to near-absolute dependability by surviving my hateful birthmother’s efforts at marticide and post-partum abortion.

(Which probably explains why now even at age 82 I must always look outside myself for words or analogies adequate to describe the pivotal psychological wounding inflicted by the bombings -- the one relentlessly tabooed symptom that would correctly redefine the radiation sickness vectored locally by Hiroshima and Nagasaki as physical symptoms marking the global onset of an incurable psychological pandemic of global despair. Exactly as our Masters intended.)

Indeed in all my years of searching I have found only two books and two films that dare attempt to express its inescapable and infinite hopelessness. The books are John Hershey’s Hiroshima (Alfred Knopf: 1946) and Nevil Shute’s On the Beach (William Morrow and Company: 1957); the films are the John-Paxton-scripted Hollywood variant of On The Beach, directed by Stanley Kramer (United Artists: 1959) and Pandora, written and directed by Park Jeong-Woo (CAC Entertainment: 2016). Pandora is the very best anti-nuclear film I have yet seen.

*****

IT NEVER OCCURRED to me to ponder our true Masters’ identity until 1971, when a newly released Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young song eerily underscored a question I had begun to ponder as the press-officer on a federal Office of Opportunity "community mobilization" (sic) project in Washington state

I was offered the job because of my volunteer work for a Whatcom County fair-housing group, and I arrived in the state capitol of Olympia eager to continue my activism on a much broader front by using my professional investigative-reporting and documentary photography skills to propagate the project’s five statewide coalitions: Housing, Welfare Rights, Education, Labor and Youth.

But I quickly discovered the education and labor coalitions had been infiltrated, captured. subjugated and weaponized by the John Birch Society, a prime ideological ancestor of today’s Hitler-worshiping Christonazis.

As I remember, the proto-Christonazis took the education coalition merely by following slave-trader and Ku Klux Klan founder Nathan Bedford Forrest’s probably apocryphal advice to "git thar fustest with the mostest" -- a takeover I thought looked suspiciously as if it had been aided by the feds: remember Tricky Dick Nixon was president and was already known to have commissioned the Rand Corporation to prepare a publicly acceptable rationale for suspending the 1972 election.

The labor coalition meanwhile had essentially self-destructed when the Birchite infiltrators -- or more likely their German war-criminal-nazified Central Intelligence Agency leadership -- proved sophisticated enough to leverage already paralytic intra-union and inter-union racial and gender hatreds into now-obvious precursors to the irreparable divisions sustained by today’s identity politics.

Next destroyed was the youth coalition, which collapsed in despair after its hugely successful initiative campaign to lower the drinking age to 18 collected nearly twice the signatures required to get it on the ballot but was terminated by the extreme prejudice of the fanatical proto-Christianazi prohibitionists. Their own efforts perpetually focused on re-imposition of national prohibition, they looted  all the Youth Coalition's signed petitions from a parked automobile left unguarded by the ruinously irresponsible activists who were delivering it to Olympia.

Inflicted only days after I joined the Washington State Conference of Coalitions, this atrocity told me we were under surveillance by powerful enemies far more sophisticated than anyone borne of the state’s typically xenophobic, white-supremacist, anti-Jewish, anti-intellectual Moronic Majority.

It also told me my presumptive role of propagating propagandist was really that of organizing our strategic and tactical defense.

Which in turn left me expressing aloud to my WSCC management colleagues Terry MacDonald and Yvonne Howard my immediate need to know just how high up the ruling class our enemies were -- a question not even obliquely answered until 1974 when Watergate felon John Ehrlichman admitted the state’s prideful ignorance ensures its function as a favorite rat-lab for the perfection of techniques of oppression.

In any case, by the time I was hired to organize our resistance, our enemies had left us only two functional coalitions. One was Welfare Rights, a wondrously defiant biracial solidarity of proudly proletarian women who were then in the process of ejecting a trio of Ivy-League-schooled feminists for preaching man-hating as the only legitimate first step to female liberation. The other survivor was Housing, which had already acquired sufficient support amongst upwardly mobile whites to ram through legislation repealing a state law that had hitherto granted landlords literally limitless power to oppress tenants.

But when we pled for the competent secretarial support we needed to launch a media blitz to protect the welfare mothers from further assaults, state OEO repeatedly denied it.

And when I abetted my investigative skills with booze to manipulate an official into revealing the reasons for the denial, I learned our true purpose was the predecessor of "change we can believe in": creating the illusion of working toward social-democratic reform while ensuring our own efforts were but charades, invariably defeated in the end.

Rejecting OEO’s effort to redefine my more-than-adequate WSCC salary as bribery for submission, I immediately resigned in protest.

As I know from 30 years on newspaper and/or magazine staffs and the remainder of my life as a politically exiled freelancer, this clandestine reversal of stated purpose is absolutely typical. My resignation is not:  too many of my colleagues are de facto wage-slaves who have families to support and in the realm of unspeakable evil this nation was reduced to on 22 November 1963, they have no choice but surrender.

Thus we see how the ultimate purpose of all post-New-Deal USian governance at every level is the use of false promises to pacify the Moronic Majority by fostering just enough imbecility of hope to sustain our Masters’ boiled-frog imposition of ever-more-inescapable tyranny.

*****

LIBERAL APPLICATION OF Occam’s Razor limits to three the logically probable identities of our ecogenocidal assailants:

Firstly there’s the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, the frightening proof of which Jeff Sharlet bravely reveals in The Family (Harper, 2008) in further confirmation of the courageous revelations by Chris Hedges in American Fascists: the Christian Right and the War on America (Free Press: 2006).² Less well-know are the Christians’ declarations of misogynistic, ecogenocidal hatred of our Mother Earth declared by fundamentalist-church reader-boards throughout the early ‘70s: Organic Is Satanic and Environmental Means Of The Devil.³

One need only scan their formal theology to recognize the Christonazis’ suicidal intent is salvation by the permanent destruction of the life-bearing capabilities of our planet, which they believe to have been captured by Satan despite the efforts of their alleged savior Jesus and which must thus be reduced to an eternally lifeless orb.

Think of it as the global counterpart of the Empire’s Vietnam policy: "gotta nuke the planet to save it from the Devil."

Such an intent as the clandestine purpose of imperial policy -- a policy unquestionably enforced by the global terror inflicted by USia’s demonstrations of infinite savagery at Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- would surely explain how and why the normally cooperative international leadership dutifully pretends it’s powerless to achieve any effective agreement to even ameliorate terminal climate change.

But assuming for a moment this were the only operative possibility, it would eliminate the obvious (and obviously relentlessly censored) fact the years of nuclear winter inevitably inflicted by thermonuclear apocalypse would unquestionably reverse global warming, World War III might therefore actually preserve planetary life, albeit nothing above the cockroach level.

Thus while there’s no  question this onslaught by Christianity is already well underway, the extent of its ecogenocidal culpability remains obscure.

Secondly then there is the approximately equal probability the post-World-War-II world is increasingly ruled by a clandestine Nazi International, an organization spawned by Germany and the USian Empire c. 1944-45 to disguise nazism as "neoliberalism" and keep its ideologies of identity politics and racial hatred alive for future weaponization of global conquest.

Even were I to reject the evidence presented by Joseph P. Farrell and the late Mae Brussel as useless "conspiracy theory," I find sufficient indications in the past 90 years of USian corporate and governmental history to evaluate the Nazi International hypothesis as probably true.⁴ Indeed it would not surprise me to learn it is headquartered in or directly across the river from Washington D.C.

But one important indication yet apparently remains a perplexing mystery; neither of our two suspects -- nor the likelihood they are opportunistic collaborators in global ecogenocide -- explain the skyrocketing incidence of momentary intrusions by ever-more-obviously hostile UFOs.

Were these vessels of earthly origin, their presence would be recognized as the aerial reconnaissance it unquestionably appears to be.

Witness too in this context our Masters’ handling of the UFO matter, 75 years -- three quarters of a century -- from official denial to official confirmation of evidence that logically allows only two (rational) explanations: either the UFOs are here to monitor our behavior much as psychologists monitor lab rats, or they are mapping the planet and testing our defenses in preparation for full-scale invasion. Given their obvious technological omnipotence, either likelihood reduces patriarchal religion to primitive science fiction and ourselves to future slaves, in either case, humanity besieged by forces so infinitely powerful, resistance is (genuinely and forever) futile.

Extraterrestrial invasion? That’s logical possibility number three, with the only remaining questions the extent to which we have already been conquered and the parallel extent to which our earth-born Masters have already betrayed us, selling out the entire 99 Percent in return for the invaders’ promises to maintain the already self-perpetuating One Percent aristocracy as their overseers on Slave Plantation Earth.

The most hideously repugnant aspect of this hypothesis is the since-suppressed observation by several prominent USian scientists in the mid-1970s that the g-forces generated by the UFOs’ instantaneous directional changes at speeds in excess of 25,000 miles per hour are survivable only by exoskeletal life forms.

In other words, if our conquerors are genetically advanced predatory insects, they are also demonstrably clever enough to terraform themselves a new home by poisoning our Mother Earth with patriarchy for the past 6,000 years. Now -- with our planet’s soaring temperatures making it ever more comfortable as a cosmic roach motel -- perhaps they are preparing to make it their new homeland, much as our ancestors invaded the Americas for the same purpose.

What this also suggests is we may be pawns in a much larger fight than we imagine. The interstellar war suggested by Hindu and Abrahamic texts is indicative the patriarchal conquest of planet Earth -- initiated by the terrorism of allegedly "divine" apparitions (in the Abrahamic religions the ball-of-fire emergence of "Yahweh" atop Mt. Ararat, also talking snakes, fiery wheels in the sky and loquacious brushfires) – may thus have been the beginning of an unspeakably malicious, bottomlessly evil, irresistibly cunning ecogenocidally apocalyptic effort to herd humanity into self-extermination and reduce our Mother Earth back to the bug planet she was in the Ordovician, 480 million years ago.

(Yeah, I know all earthly cooperative-insect hives are queendoms; but who’s to say the drones of whatever realm is attacking us didn’t overthrow their queen and put a fire-ant version of Donald Trump’s idol Hitler in place as dictator for life. In any case, the ever-more-obvious fact we are doomed no matter what happens means the cliché "all bets are off" is now our species’ ultimate truth.)

If extraterrestrial invasion is indeed what obtains, it would thoroughly explain our earth-borne Masters’ two-faced betrayal: claiming concern about climate change even as they set aside their ideological conflicts to unite in serving the conquerors by intensifying their ecogenocidal destructiveness.

While all humans are self-preservationists, the deadly difference between the One Percenters and ourselves is the latter have made themselves omnipotent by the weaponization of their technology -- something the purposeful destruction of the Soviet Union guarantees we the 99 percent will never again be allowed the resources and wealth to overcome.

Our Masters realize it was the advent of firearms made an armed proletariat possible, which in turn forced concessions from a viciously sadistic, murderously self-centered, utterly sociopathic ruling class. Now all those concessions are being reversed, complete with forcible disarmament and its intended consequences, the mandatory pacifism and compulsory victimhood that defines slavery and serfdom.

Since history shows imperial conquest always follows the same ecogenocidal pattern –note how the hereditary Celtic aristocracy who survived beyond Roman conquest preserved its authority by serving the conquerors as local overseers; likewise the conquered aristocrats of India, Africa and many First Nations tribes survived by serving the British Empire in much the same way.

Above all else note the global surrender to generic nazism disguised as neoliberalism, especially the Chinese Communist Empire’s emergence to challenge the top-seeded USian Empire as the planetary champion in the ecogenocidal stakes for our species’ most deliberately deadly poisoner.

As I have said before, ideas have consequences. And when ecogenocidal consequences are sustained by policy, they are unequivocally intentional. In fact when we examine the evidence, it becomes undeniable patriarchy is ecogenocide -- deliberate, conscious, bottomlessly evil ecogenocide.⁵

Bombing an asteroid to keep it from hitting Earth? Our Masters are so infinitely evil,⁶ it wouldn’t surprise me the bombing has the opposite result, ensuring the asteroid hits us instead.

Nor would I doubt they believe themselves well-enough bunkered to survive. Indeed they have already told us as much by their escalation of thermonuclear terror to an all-time high.

Welcome to the global Auschwitz: Arbeit Macht Frei...und Todt.

______________________________________
¹See my essay about the "Crypto-Radical Seismology Faction" resurrected from Northwest Passage, 28 July 1970, page 16. While it was primarily a discussion of the failures of urban radicalism, it was also beginning of my realization we cannot unshackle ourselves from capitalism without first overthrowing patriarchy. It is also  the only piece I wrote under the nom de guerre Angus L. Forsthe, my use of a pseudonym a product of the then-commonplace belief we were at the beginning of a socialist revolution.

²As much as I admire Hedges’ writing, with which I am in emphatic agreement probably 95 percent of the time, I deplore his slander of the non-USian residents of the American continents by his continued acceptance of the slavemaster-founded, meticulously nazified USian Empire’s wanton theft and intentional perversion of the continents’ name.

³My photographs of two such reader-boards in rural Washington state were destroyed by the arson fire of 1 September 1983. While many less-theocratic-minded Christians will protest this pejorative application of their theological name, the refusal of the mainstream churches to officially eject the Christonazis as heretics proves the usage to be both accurate and deserved.

⁴The proven indications include 1933-34 Bankers’ Plot; from 1938 onward, the financial aristocracy’s outright bribery and eventual purchase of influential factions within white protestant Christianity to produce the so-called “prosperity gospel”; c. 1933-1945, IBM’s obscenely profitable service to Hitler’s extermination of non-Aryans; beginning in l944, the defiantly anti-Soviet sanctuary the federal government secretly gave tens of thousands of Original Nazi war criminals and their recruitment by government and big business as advisors in fulfilling the banksters’ intended nazification of the nation; the suspicious timing of FDR’s death on 12 April 1945; the murder of JFK and the subsequent eleven years of ideologically "cleansing" slayings apparently ending with the murder of Karen Silkwood; the FBI’s COINTELPRO and the CIA’s Operation CHAOS; the advent of USian "identity politics" as the gateway to the permanent, Mein-Kampf fulfilling anti-solidarity functions of gender war and race war; the useful-idiot dovetailing of bring-on-the-apocalypse Christianity with the environmentalists’ demand for exterminating 90 percent of the working class; and let us never forget our Masters’.good-cop/bad-cop routine, the maliciously manipulative strategy that gave birth to "change we can believe in," demonstrably USia’s most effective weapon for discouraging voter -turnout: the bad-cop Republicans terrorize us , the Democrats pacify us with false promises of protection and both parties then collaborate in our betrayal. by ensuring the fulfillment of said promises is either legislatively prohibited or reduced to meaninglessness.. All of which is underscored by the ever-more-brazen re-emergence of localized nazism throughout the planet, its ultimate victory guaranteed by the ever-more-deadly poverty by which our Masters tyrannize the global 99 Percent. Since all of these indications are detailed in the immediately preceding essays, I see no need to elaborate them again here.

⁵There is fourth possibility, albeit one so contrary to patriarchal brain-warping even many of the most enlightened among us will probably reject it out of hand. The Gaia Hypothesis defines our Mother Earth as a living organism, conscious and self-regulating. Our species has warred against her since patriarchy’s onset; with its ecogenocidal war against her now entering its seventh millennia, she has obviously begun to fight back. The only remaining question is whether she intends to exterminate us or teach us to heed the example of our matriarchal ancestors and live harmoniously within her embrace; after all, is there any human function more essential to our species survival than competent motherhood?

⁶While censorship makes conclusive proof of the malignant magnitude  of our Masters' evil increasingly more difficult to find, the following books make it painfully obvious. Their titles are self-explanatory:  Howard Zinn, A Peoples' History of the United States (Harper and Row: 1980); Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (Beacon Press: 2014);  Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: the Holocaust as History and Warning (Tim Duggan Books: 2015); James Q. Whitman, Hitler's American Model: the United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (Princeton University Press: 2017); and our oppressors' bible,  Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, the Ford Translation (Elite Minds Inc.: 2009-2010). By far the best over-view of the innumerable achievements of our relentlessly tabooed pre-patriarchal millennia is Barbara Mor's The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth, (Harper & Row: 1987, 1991). Gavin Menzies, The Lost Empire of Atlantis (William Morrow: 2011), details his authoritative, extensively researched hypothesis that the Minoans, whose pre-patriarchal civilization thrived for at least a thousand years, were seafarers enough to organize the first global trading commonwealth; bear in mind while reading Menzies that First Nations accounts suggest an anciently widespread "old people's" culture  based on barter and shared knowledge rather than on conquest and slavery. Marija Gimbutas, The Civilization of the Goddess: the World of Old Europe (HarperCollins: 1991), summarizes the archaeological evidence that proves the superior sustainability of Europe’s pre-patriarchal culture, while Robert Graves, The White Goddess: an Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 1966/1982), explores in detail the associated aesthetics and metaphysics. Thomas E. Sanders and Walter W. Peek – their indigenous names respectively Nippawanock (Cherokee) and Metacomet (Narragansett-Wampanoag) -- do likewise in their dated but nevertheless still relevant Literature of the American Indian (Glencoe Press: 1973).

LB/23 September-7 October 2022

--30--

Organic vegetables grow most productively when they're consciously planted in worshipful recognition of our absolute dependence on our planetary mother's beneficence. This was my 1995 back-country garden amidst its 31 July-1 August celebration of Bron Trogain/Lughnasadh. 
(Photo by Loren Bliss © 1995, 2022)  

*****

ARCHAEOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGY -- see especially the works of Robert Graves, Marija Gimbutas, Barbara Mor, Gavin Menzies, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Thomas E. Sanders and Walter W. Peek -- strongly suggest there was indeed an evolutionary arc toward humanitarian cooperation and justice during the approximately 194,000 years before the terminally ecogenocidal imposition of patriarchy began turning our previously female-centered¹ species against our Mother Earth some 6000 years ago.

So do the many First Nations' descriptions of prehistoric visitors to the Americas as benefactors rather than conquerors.

Were this not so -- were there no such cooperative solidarity  --  we'd never have been able to survive four ice ages, not to mention all the volcanic, seismic, bacteriological and zoological horrors that confronted us during our species' approximately 200 to 300 millennia.  

How then did patriarchy -- misogyny maximized to ecogenocide -- manage to conquer us with its suicidally divisive, every-man-against-everyone-else ideology? And why are we unable to free ourselves from its shackles?

*****

IN BITTER TRUTH, our patriarchal Masters are infinitely more evil than we dare imagine; they beset us in every way possible. Abrahamic theocracy proclaims patriarchy essential to counteract the (alleged) inferiority of all non-whites and to suppress the (alleged) sinfulness of all females, our Mother Earth most assuredly included. Hindu and Buddhist patriarchies view all females with equal contempt. Whites are conditioned to despise all people of color; in turn, peoples of color learn to despise all whites. Gender itself is weaponized, pitting males against females and females against males,  tainting even our most basic instincts with fear, distrust and contempt. Such is the ultimate balkanization purposefully inflicted by identity politics, the strategy by which our Masters perpetuate the extremes of cultural divisiveness they know inevitably leads to nazi race war,  thereby ensuring we will never be able to unite and overthrow them.

Meanwhile our Masters claim capitalism's  terminal transformation to neoliberalism -- that is, to the localized variants of nazism -- is unavoidable because  "society" itself is naught but delusion, or so their ever-more-apocalyptic lies pretend. Survival for each of us, they insist, thus demands endless, utterly merciless competition against all others. Exactly as intended, the  disunity so perpetuated combines with inescapable surveillance and ever-more-thorough censorship to guarantee the human solidarity essential for even minimal reform  remains out of our collective reach forever -- that is, until the present world order is no more.

Ecogenocide thus rules our entire planet. Hidden for decades by our Masters' cunningly contrived vocabularies of  deception, its escalating ruin has become too deadly to conceal and too overwhelming to counteract or even minimally ameliorate; thus inescapably doomed to extinction or slavery by our Masters'  apocalyptic mandates  whether  disguised as "neoliberalism" or  "Marxism," the entire global 99 Percent is now reduced to the future as defined by the alternatives of rage, hopelessness and final surrender Kübler-Ross  identified as our species' psychological  norms for medically foreseen  dying and/or grieving.

The prime so-called "neoliberal" perpetrator of our  doom is of course USian imperial capitalism, which Hitler himself hailed as the global role-model for  governance by mass murder;  the prime Marxist example is the People's Republic of China, its so-called "Marxism" nothing more than  the dishonestly labeled imperialism of state capitalism -- profiteering by the state (rather than by some hereditary plutocracy) -- with its institutionally protected moral imbecility every bit as deadly as that inflicted by our own avowedly capitalist Masters.    

Note too how Christonazism, Islamic nazism, Hindu nazism, the “neo” resurrections of  Original German Nazism and all the other forms of nazism whether doctrinal or existential are all cunningly euphemized as mere "fascism." Obviously this deception is intended to suppress the potential of revolutionary awakening implicit in the torture-chamber/death-camp corpse-stench inevitably generated by usage of "Nazi" or "nazi" in any of its grammatical forms.² 

Accurate reading of patriarchal history also strongly suggests our Masters allowed us socialism and social democracy only when they were assured the proponents of each  would carefully suppress any acknowledgement of    patriarchy's ecogenocidal deadliness; study the Marxism-and-Feminism chapter (pages 13-20) of the carefully footnoted Barbara Mor work cited below for a brilliantly summarized rediscovery of the patriarch-suppressed  awareness shared by Karl Marx and Frederich Engels that our lost egalitarian cooperativeness had been the socioeconomically logical product of our prehistoric matriarchal proto-communism; contemplate too the implicit suggestion Marx and Engels might also have been concerned true socioeconomic equality would prove restorable only by matriarchy's renewal, notions  now  carefully excluded from formal Marxian ideology.

Beyond that, social democracy is invariably the ultimate political scam, capitalism allegedly "reformed" -- though only in "change-we-can-believe-in" charades that   could never threaten our Masters' omnipotence, our boiled-frog enfeeblement and subjugation thus always perpetuating (and often reinforcing) capitalism's ability to eventually transform itself permanently into nazism.

Though socialism includes the World Socialist Web Site -- our best, most reliable present-day source of accurate information about what our Masters are actually doing to us -- WSWS nevertheless yet tries to convince us to accept Marxism's one and only historically proven Big Mistake: its claim the horrors of patriarchy and its ideological and socioeconomic descendants are merely transitional discomforts, necessary growth-pains in an allegedly "inevitable" march toward universal equality and justice -- a "march" we now must recognize as wholly imaginary, naught but myth, misunderstanding and finally a Big Lie.

To bad for us  (and all the more power to the forces attacking our species and our planet),  even our most sincere would-be savior continues to discredit itself by deluging us with apocalyptic falsehoods about "progress" and the "moral arc" of history -- the arc that in any accurately labeled archaeo-historical timeline  reveals our species' most inescapably damning truth: that beginning maybe six-thousand years ago it bends relentlessly toward subjugation and extinction.

"Progress" -- whether adjectivally capitalist or Marxist -- is thus by far our species' most destructive self-contradictory noun.  It is also the deliberately ecogenocidal cancellation of any and all hope for human survival.

It may therefore seem to some we are  indeed witnessing the  "end of history" proclaimed in 1989 by Francis Fukuyama -- albeit in a manner that forever denies us even the very few positive Working Class outcomes he and all the other  neoliberal liars claimed to foresee. Not only have our Masters permanently eradicated  the former (extremely limited) New Deal social democracy; the socioeconomic savagery they've gloatingly imposed on us since then is -- exactly as intended -- eliminating empathy itself: note the self-obsessed moral imbecility exemplified by Hillary Clinton's obscene celebration of Omar Gaddafi's execution by anal impalement. Note too how its horror was popularly reduced to reality-television fun rather than the dire warning of run-amok evil it remains to anyone still fully human. With our Masters' reign of perpetual warfare deliberately metastasized from the imperial rat-lab  of the Middle East to methodical imposition on all the peoples of our wounded planet, the resultant atrocities are everywhere suppressing the remnants of humanitarian consciousness with the apocalyptic venom of social-Darwinism. 

Meanwhile let us never forget the ultimate lesson of our present-day plight: that patriarchy achieves its final fulfillment only as  nazism -- which, short of some humanitarian miracle,  means from now on, the very best any of us in the 99 Percent can ever expect are lives of constantly worsening, ultimately deadly poverty, this intended to exterminate all of us deemed "surplus workers" and force the enslavement of any 99-Percenter who somehow manages to survive this new, global, slow-motion holocaust. 

*****

T0 FREE OURSELVES from such shackles, we must first cast off the self-censorship imposed by the K-12 brainwarping that teaches so many of us to despise the study of history; once we do, we discover two of our species' more potent truths: firstly, that the real U.S. history  -- that is, the ecogenocidal history relentlessly tabooed by our Masters -- quickly makes it clear why Adolf Hitler regarded the United States as the prototypical nazi nation; secondly, we discover history as a compellingly dynamic record of human experience rather than the repugnant tedium of meaningless memorization to which it has been deliberately reduced by our USian Masters' education policy.

Then maybe we'll begin to comprehend the inescapable totality of the Orwellian/Machiavellian methodology by which our Masters are subjugating and re-enslaving us. And perhaps some of us will then find the courage to embark on the even-more-daring quest for genuinely sustainable humanitarian solutions -- outcomes that might save our species and our planetary motherland -- which are therefore the very outcomes patriarchy has always denied us.

By far the best over-view of the innumerable achievements of our relentlessly tabooed pre-patriarchal millennia is Barbara Mor’s 501-page, convincingly footnoted  expansion of an illustrated pamphlet by Monica Sjöö: The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth, (Harper & Row: 1987, 1991). Gavin Menzies, The Lost Empire of Atlantis (William Morrow: 2011), details his authoritative, extensively researched hypothesis that the Minoans, whose pre-patriarchal civilization thrived for at least a thousand years, were seafarers enough to organize the first global trading commonwealth; bear in mind while reading Menzies that First Nations accounts suggest an anciently widespread "old people's" culture that was based on barter and shared knowledge rather than on conquest and slavery. Marija Gimbutas, The Civilization of the Goddess: the World of Old Europe (HarperCollins: 1991), summarizes the archaeological evidence that proves the superior sustainability of Europe’s pre-patriarchal culture, while Robert Graves, The White Goddess: an Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 1966/1982), explores in detail the associated aesthetics and metaphysics. Thomas E. Sanders and Walter W. Peek – their indigenous names respectively Nippawanock (Cherokee) and Metacomet (Narragansett-Wampanoag) – do likewise in their dated but nevertheless still relevant Literature of the American Indian (Glencoe Press: 1973). Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous People’s History of the United States (Beacon Press: 2014) documents in detail the patriarchy’s methodical extermination of those cultures.

The one book listed above that might prove difficult to obtain is Gimbutas' work, unfortunately one of our most important references -- its importance underscored by the relentless patriarchal censorship that has made her groundbreaking discoveries both difficult to find in local bookstores and prohibitively expensive when the search succeeds; this is because an ad hoc patriarchy of jealously hostile male academics have long conspired to keep her work out of print, which is why it is now also effectively censored by collector-pricing: on 11 August of this year, I was unable to find a usable copy of The Civilization of the Goddess priced at less than $62.59 plus tax and shipping. But Bookfinder.com – the source at which I begin all book searches – indicates the other recommended texts remain available at rational prices.

However, if the Christonazi conquest of the United States continues as predicted, all such works will undoubtedly be banned as “heretical,” with mere possession far more feloniously deadly than my illegal possession of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl was in theocratic Ku Klux Tennessee c. 1959.

It is a bit of an aside, but I am thus reminded of how in the always-sadistically biblical South, a basic D. R. Bliss Family rule was to never publicly acknowledge our extensive home library. Why? Because in the South of the 1940s and ‘50s -- reading politically illegal books (and my father had  more than one of those) -- could get you beaten, jailed, beaten again and maybe even killed -- same as in today's soon-to-be 41-state neo-Confederacy.³

Meanwhile we see how patriarchy radically re-defines our consciousness and being, reducing each of us to mere commodities intended only for profitable exploitation.  Our world, and by implication the entire universe, is thus shrunken to the womb-less ejaculate of some seemingly divine, viciously sadistic "involuntary celibate," the invading usurper-god who dares claim he created Planet Earth only six thousand years ago  -- not coincidentally just about when the patriarchal threat becomes archaeologically obvious.

So now at Christmas the multitudes  immortalize the divine victimization of a certain working-class Nazarene named Mary in a galaxy-caliber atrocity that redefines rape as "immaculate conception" -- which is of course the true but oft-concealed "conception-is-always-an-act-of-god" reason the Christonazis sadistically refuse rape and incest victims the medical, emotional and material rescue provided by abortion.

*****

SOME OF US, a growing few,  are at last coming to understand the ultimate and truly apocalyptic danger of capitalism is that it will always morph into nazism -- that nazism is its only possible outcome. That's because capitalism's transformation to nazism is in fact inescapable: the inevitable consequence of capitalism's powerfully symbiotic  proto-nazi combination of greed, moral imbecility and technological omnipotence.

Many more of us now also recognize ecogenocidally misogynistic religion, capitalism and nazism as direct descendants of patriarchy and thus properly name patriarchy as the ultimate perpe-traitor of our looming doom.

As indeed we damn well should; already -- this in addition to the USian wars of extermination waged against First Nations peoples -- we  have a 144-year litany of post-Reconstruction atrocities within the separate states. It begins with the U.S. Government's formal re-imposition of national white supremacy in 1877; it gains momentum with white supremacy's confirmation by SCOTUS in 1896; it triumphs, first by giving legions of Nazi war criminals governmental and Big Business sanctuary; next by the ideological reversals inflicted by the 11-year political murder spree that (apparently) began with the un-prosecuted slaying of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy and (seems to have) ended with the un-prosecuted martyrdom of Karen Silkwood; lastly by the election of Ronald Reagan -- "Ronnie the Nazi" to those of us who saw beyond his disguises -- the Powell Memo disciple whose clandestine mode of nazification unstoppably began the deliberate USian march toward destruction of the federal union and increasing international recognition of USia as our species’ ultimate -- and ultimately apocalyptic -- “failed state”:  a very real Public Enemy Number One.

Now, as a consequence, we suffer the present-day, de facto imposition of ecogenocidal theocratic tyranny by the Christonazi Supreme Court -- an affliction as destructive to human society as terminal cancer is to the human body.  

Nor is it by accident those 144 years of USian atrocities have unstoppably skyrocketed into permanent ChristoNazi omnipotence.  Humanitarian "progress" is thus proven impossible, never more than deception or delusion, with the only "moral arc" discernable in our species' patriarchal history leading exclusively toward ever-more-maximized tyranny and utterly inescapable re-enslavement -- its perpetrators granted real-world omnipotence by  the caste-prohibited wealth necessary to counter a technology of oppression already so inexplicably far beyond any 99-Percenter's ability to resist, it ensures our Masters rule is  forever: that is, until our entire species is extinct. 

Therefore let us now dare ask our species' most decisive question:

How then -- save by some form of extraterrestrial rescue (though only after they’ve raped our Mother Earth back to bug-planet permanence) --  can our Masters imagine they will escape the apocalyptic destruction they are so wantonly inflicting on all the rest of us?
___________________________

¹I say "female-centered" to discourage the patriarchal attacks intended to suppress the increasingly irrefutable archaeological evidence our species was originally matriarchal or at the very least matrifocal and matrilinial.

²"Nazi" -- cap "N"-- is Weimar Republic slang that has since become a proper noun for Germany's N.S.D.A.P., the  Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei; "nazi" -- lower-case "n" -- is what our Masters deceptively label "fascism": localized and relentlessly euphemized nazism as in the  Ukraine, the Russian Federation, today's China plus of course the USian as-yet undeclared neo-Confederacy,  Pinochet's Chile and all USia's other hopelessly oppressed imperial puppets.

³Given the permanent absence of anything akin to the Soviet organized-resistance that terrified our nazi-minded Masters into allowing us the nearly five decades of New Deal social democracy that were forever terminated by the 1980 election, it seems obvious to me that once our Masters  complete the capture and theocratic "cleansing" of their intended 41-state neo-Confederacy, only a strong military alliance with a major foreign power would save the remaining nine anti-nazi coastal states -- all of their populations forcibly self-disarmed --  from conquest by Confederate blitzkrieg, its imperial  legions granted thermonuclear omnipotence by the doomsday arsenals of the former United States. Worse still, I know of no nation that by then would  dare try stop the new C.S.A. from achieving its ultimate intent: expanding Christonazi tyranny first to all North America, then to whatever land on this planet remains habitable.  

*****

(Next: my long-resisted  conclusions as to whom [and what] our real masters  truly are,
with apology for first estimating as a two-or-three-graf hypothesis what  has instead
grown into a separate concluding essay,  an ongoing work in progress.)

-- LB, 12-21 August 2022

-30-

AFTERMATH: a young woman finds an antique colander in the debris and wreckage washed ashore by the unprecedented high tides of an unusually severe winter storm.  (Photo by Loren Bliss ©2022) 

*****

WE ARE SUBJUGATED as we now are primarily because our conditioned ignorance and gullibility allow nearly all of us -- no matter how sophisticated we might imagine ourselves -- to be seduced by three of our species' most deceptively camouflaged intellectual malignancies.

The seductiveness of these symbiotic falsehoods is so overwhelming, not even the clarifying might of dialectic materialism -- Marxism's presumably impenetrable defense against irrationality -- seems able to protect us from their relentlessly induced delusions.

What are they then, these three most ruinous Big Lies, our ecogenocidally terminal triplets?

The most venomously destructive Big Lie is our pathetically superstitious belief in "eternal life," which -- because there's allegedly "a better home a-waitin in the sky" -- relieves us of any moral obligation to improve the conditions of life on earth. Next comes the ignorantly lethal twining of "progress" with the equally ignorant, equally false, equally crippling conviction the "moral arc" of our patriarchal history "bends toward justice."

"Progress" is the Big Lie that sought to shrink Nazi Germany from what it truly is -- patriarchy’s ultimate definition of itself -- to an anti-historical anomaly; the "arc toward justice" is the corroborative Big Lie by which our Masters leverage our brains into accepting "progress" as synonymous with "betterment" in the One Percent's living conditions -- never mind that for the 99 Percent, such "advancements" invariably mean worsening poverty, skyrocketing body-counts and irreversible environmental destruction.

But as any serious student knows, the arc of history itself is absolutely real -- though the reality it bends toward is not the blessing of liberty and justice but the terminal curse of its antithesis: ever-more-inescapably brutal subjugation by our nazi-minded Masters’ ever-more-technologically omnipotent  arsenal of horrors. Doubt me? Study the six-millennia historical timeline: note what Loreena McKennitt so memorably describes as "the months of peace and all the years of war."

*****

WHILE CAPITALIST "PROGRESS" and socialist "progress" are conventionally believed to be diametrical opposites, closer scrutiny reveals each ideology is equally committed to the apocalyptic destruction of our Mother Earth.  Though the socialist version is traditionally said to be synonymous with our species' quest for freedom and justice, that (former)  ideological truth has since been reduced to yet another Big Lie by the fact Communist China now exceeds the United States as this planet’s deadliest polluter. (The U.S. remains our species’ all-time champion at any and all forms of industrialized murder, which thus preserves its top-seeded role as the world champion of deliberate ecogenocide, a ranking not even    Nazi  Germany could challenge.)  Meanwhile the capitalist version of progress -- formerly euphemized as "bigger and better" --   is now revealed as the methodical reduction and subjugation of the 99 Percent: extermination of "surplus" workers and permanent enslavement of the survivors. Thus capitalist and socialist ideologies are now twinned in ecogenocidal destructiveness.

As our Masters learned by their nazification of Germany, the more vicious they are -- the harsher and more difficult they make survival for any of us whose lifeblood is measured by paychecks -- the closer they move the masses to embracing the intrinsically hateful identity-politics tribalism of generic nazism.¹  And with the Soviet Union beaten, destroyed and no doubt gone forever, there is at present  no power left anywhere on this planet -- absolutely none -- capable of organizing a genuinely powerful anti-nazification campaign, which is the only development that might -- though with odds now only slightly better than those of the proverbial snowball in hell -- yet save us from this all-encroaching, all-destroying evil.²   Such is the ecogenocidal reality of patriarchal "progress."  

In synergistic combination with the fake history of a nonexistent  "arc...toward justice,” the antisocial venom inherent in this notion of "progress" is intensified to the Nth power, with every tyrant now testing his³ serial-killer instincts in competition for top ranking on the oppressive-technology-is-god’s-greatest-gift roster of our species' most ecogenocidal Masters. But the concept of "progress" itself -- the curiously persistent belief in some imaginary human dynamic that leads inevitably toward individual and collective betterment -- is proven by the very history it ignores to be among our species’ most self-destructive forms of magical thinking. Never forget our Masters' definition of "progress" includes the IBM-organized Holocaust, and enough  chemical, biological and thermonuclear weaponry to reduce our Mother Earth to a cinder as lifeless as any asteroid. 

Thus -- and it cannot be repeated too often -- the only “moral arc” evident in human history "bends" toward nazism on a global scale, which means we socialists are gravely mistaken in believing history is our ally and guarantor of our eventual triumph.

One of socialism's core principles -- that the historical momentum of "progress" makes socialism inevitable -- is itself proven wrong: not necessarily  a Big Lie (at least not in the beginning), but unquestionably a ruinous misunderstanding. For as the ongoing reversal of every one of our progressive reforms proves beyond dispute, it is the ecogenocidal momentum of patriarchal history -- the irresistible force of our Masters' eternally nazified will (however ideologically disguised) -- that is destroying us. 

Viewed objectively, our history -- save during the immediate aftermath of the Soviet Revolution -- is whatever our Masters impose on us; thus it is inseparable from our Masters’ historically proven policy of imposing ever-more-self-sustaining tyranny: a relentless march toward ever-more-omnipotent aristocracy protected by ever-more-sadistic zero-tolerance dictatorship fostered by ever-more-invincible technology.

*****

TO BEGIN THE process of discovering and thereby surviving the socioeconomic cancers lurking in our notion of "progress," we must first overcome the crippling aversion to the study of history intentionally inflicted on us by our Masters' insistence it be taught, K-12, as  nothing more than wearisome, intentionally repugnant drills in rote memorization of names, places and dates.  

Beyond that, I suggest reading five authors  the ChristoNazis damn as both treasonous and heretical. These are: Howard Zinn, A Peoples' History of the United States (Harper and Row: 1980); Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (Beacon Press: 2014);  Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: the Holocaust as History and Warning (Tim Duggan Books: 2015); Chris Hedges, American Fascists: the Christian Right and the War on America (Free Press: 2006); Jeff Sharlet: The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (Harper: 2008).

For me, the most influential gift of the above reading was its revelation of the ageless toxicity of the malevolence directed against the 99 Percent, especially the vast global majority of us who are not white.  A near-lifelong student of history and a miserably involuntary, New-York-City-born resident of five former slave states during most of my first 24 years, I am familiar with most of our Masters' innumerable atrocities; but until I read An Indigenous People's History and Black Earth, I had not realized our patriarchal Masters have always been motivated by the same philosophically and methodologically sophisticated hatefulness they exhibit today.  Yesteryear's Masters were just as conscious of the evil they were inflicting on First Nations folk --  and just as sadistically gleeful about their ecogenocidal triumphs -- as today's Masters are as they reduce us all back to serfdom and slavery.      

If we dare to truly comprehend the toxic magnitude of what assails us, I also recommend -- emphatically recommend --  reading what has again emerged as our species' bible of manifest evil, Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf.⁴  If we are to truly know our enemy, Mein Kampf is the only book I know that reveals the otherwise unimaginable skill empowering the evil that is overwhelming us. Contrary to our most crippling misconceptions, our foes are neither ignorant nor stupid; they are in fact what they have always been: the best-educated, most intellectually malignant, most effectively cunning oppressors in our species' entire history. That's why -- if we are to have any chance of escaping our Masters' corporate slavepens -- learning something of our real history is necessarily part of our education for intellectual self defense. Nor can it be said too often the taboo'd historical facts revealed by the above bibliography prove beyond dispute our species' only "progress" since the advent of patriarchy is technological -- and that if we are not part of the aristocracy, its only "gift" is ever-more-inescapable despotism. Our freedom is diminished each time our Masters' technological prowess increases.  Thus for us, we the people of the 99 Percent,  "progress" merely strengthens the deadly shackles by which our Masters' long ago began re-enslaving us.

In other words, the sole function of "progress" under Capitalism is to sustain and intensify our Masters'  savagery. "Progress" is thus revealed as the intentionally terminal opposite of "sustainability."

This is clearly the mindset from which our Masters developed and promoted electronic media -- the world's first genuinely inescapable shackles of total surveillance falsely peddled as enhancements to human freedom and mindlessly embraced by entire populations of self-obsessed, fanatically acquisitive workers already reduced to pre-nazi moral imbecility by the relentlessly worsened hardships of survival.

But when we discover our forbidden history's excruciatingly painful revelations, we  are at long last able to chart such "progress" with an historically accurate arc. Whether from the five books cited above or from more extended studies of sociology and history, we learn that eras of humanitarian governance are but the tiniest intervals of relief in the long timeline of patriarchal despotism.

And then -- contrary to all the lies we’re told -- we discover the timeline’s arc curves relentlessly toward technologically maximized tyranny.

Which in turn reveals any notion of "progress" to be naught but diabolically clever propaganda, devastatingly effective in its primary function of perpetuating all present-day forms of tyranny. We discover "progress" as our Masters’ all-time whopper of deliberate disinformation and purposeful misdirection. As already noted,  if we believe in "progress," we can always dismiss past atrocities as anomalous aberrations we've somehow (magically) grown beyond rather than acknowledge them as the horrifying declarations of present-day human surrender to ecogenocidal evil they actually are.

Meanwhile -- thanks to our Masters' ongoing destruction of our planetary resource base -- we the people of the 99 Percent, we who are Working Class even if we are too brainwarped to acknowledge our credit-card servitude, every one of us is now forever doomed to struggling for survival in a realm of perpetually declining expectations and therefore eternal hopelessness.

What this means is implicit in the fact history tells us progressive change occurs only in response to rising socioeconomic expectations among the 99 Percent -- that declining Working Class expectations invariably diminish humanitarian considerations and often, as in the Holocaust or the extermination of First Nations peoples, completely suppress them.

Such is the challenge we socialists face. If even a trace of humanitarianism is to survive, if our species and our planet is to avoid destruction in some final paroxysm of terminal moral imbecility, we must transform our ideologies into  effective antidotes against skyrocketing despair: precisely what history tells us is impossible in any time of societal despair -- never mind today's hopelessness truly is bottomless, without precedent in our species'  experience.

Fact is, our Masters today believe their technological omnipotence has freed them of any obligations beyond themselves and their caste: theirs is the sadistic moral imbecility of a Vlad Tepes elevated to infinity by the “gifts” of modern technology: inescapable surveillance and an ever-expanding arsenal of doomsday weapons, with the ever- worsening environment to force our ever-more-violent reduction to social Darwinism, just as our masters have always intended.
___________________________

¹Why nazism rather than fascism? Why do I choose "nazi" rather than "fascist" as my generic term for the run-amok evil that assails us? Note that each term originated from proper nouns. But in the capitalist world, only "fascist" -- with its implicit absence of Auschwitz-type death camps further gentled by the comic-opera undertones of the Mussolini regime -- became the generic. And knowing the galaxy-class psychological warfare skills of our Masters, I cannot doubt this now effectively mandatory usage of "fascist" rather than "nazi"  is deliberate deception to downplay their malignant intent. 

²Many socialists, especially my fellow Marxians, will denounce my use of "evil" as counter-revolutionary religious moralizing. In adamant rebuttal I suggest such critics consult Webster, which even in its unabridged second edition (Dorset and  Baber: 1983) minimizes the religious connections to "evil." I -- an agnostic Gaian pagan -- use it here without apology as the most linguistically apt, definitively correct, emotionally accurate English noun to describe what our Masters are doing to us: the methodically nazified socioeconomic miasma in which most of us are slowly being drowned and through which all  surviving 99 Percenters are to be enslaved.  

³Of course I am aware there are many female capitalists. I am also aware that capitalism -- at its core a greed-fueled, wealth-based, white-male-supremacist  death-cult -- is a subset of patriarchy, which itself is nothing other than maximally weaponized misogyny. Thus (real) feminists damn female capitalists as traitors to their gender; (real) socialists condemn all capitalists as traitors to the entire 99 percent; as traitors to our species; and as traitors to our Mother Earth. Thus when a female labels herself "capitalist," what she is really doing is declaring herself an ecogenocidally predatory male; when a male labels himself "capitalist," he is declaring himself a deadly enemy of the 99 Percent, an enemy of our species and most of all an apocalyptic rapist of our Mother Earth.    

⁴The Ford Translation (Elite Minds Inc.: 2009-2010), is the only version I could find that was not censored by collector pricing. While I have no way to evaluate the publisher's claim their Mein Kampf  is the most accurate English translation to date, the braggadocio of their firm-name leaves me suspicious of who and what they might be. Moreover I know Mein Kampf to be amongst our most tedious reads; I first read it c. 1954-1955 as part of my late father's know-our-enemy education. Then as now, it is the most difficult reading I have yet encountered. To be sure, that's partly because  no translation can improve the semi-literate wretchedness of Hitler's jailhouse German -- but the real reason Mein Kampf is so painful to read is it is a window on pure evil, in any language the terrifying examination of a monstrous Malleus Maleficarum mind that could as easily be a modern hybrid of Augusto Pinochet, Ayn Rand, Ted Bundy and James Fields. )

(Next: Human Societies Were Not Always Competing in a Death Race) 

LB/18-29 July 2022

-30-

A failed May Day demonstration became my public obituary for Occupy Tacoma; I was among its mourners because -- disclosure -- I had been among its earliest and most hopeful activists. But the deliberately induced  self-obsession and  moral imbecility that destroyed Occupy from within is now destroying the United States as intended, for which see below. (Photo by Loren Bliss ©2012)

*****

Biden's Broken Promises and Ecogenocidal Policies
Make It Ever More Obvious Our Masters -- Whomever or
Whatever They May Be -- Intend to Exterminate Us, Whether by
Disease, Terminal Climate Change or Thermonuclear War

GIVEN THE DEADLY and unprecedented  combination of inescapable horrors by which we are oppressed  -- the mass murder deliberately inflicted  on us  as  "herd immunity";  the unchecked (and thus obviously intentional) intensification of climate change; and now the most terrifying eruption of U.S. war mongering in my nearly 82-year lifetime -- I cannot possibly disagree with the 55.7 percent of the world's 16-to-25-year-olds already convinced our species is doomed. 

But neither they, nor I,  nor any other fellow human without access to the clandestine bunkers of the USian Empire's 17 secret police agencies,  is likely to ever learn who -- or what -- is so methodically destroying our world, and -- just as importantly -- whether our attackers' goal is our enslavement or the extermination of our species.  In all probability, the  only way we will ever learn those truths is if they are inadvertently revealed by the self-destruction of present-day human society or accidentally discovered by some post-apocalyptic explorer -- that is, if any of our species manages to survive what is being done to us.  

Nor can I continue my disagreement with those who assert the present, inescapable captivity of the Working Class¹ -- that is, our de facto enslavement (whether under Nazism disguised as "Neoliberalism" or under Chinese state capitalism disguised as Marxism) -- reduces any present-day discussion of "politics" to naught but mental masturbation.

Which might as well be spelled "master-bation," since in hopelessly moron-ated, pridefully anti-intellectual Moron Nation,  there is neither the leadership nor the knowledge to ever again rescue us from the deceptions that sustain our enslavement and bring us ever closer to ecogenocidal doom. For which, by the way,  we damn well need to stop blaming the Working Class;  contrary to the anti-Working-Class slanders perpetrated by Hillary the Horrible and the brain-warping deceptions disseminated daily by the mainstream media propaganda machine, Moron Nation is mostly the incurably Ayn Randified white bourgeoisie.

Now I too have come to recognize not just the terrible truth prophesied by Jackson Browne, but the ultimate horror first truthfully prophesied by science fiction: that today's technology has given our Masters such omnipotence, "resistance is futile."  It is also -- again witness the collapse of Occupy -- absolutely pointless under present circumstances, conditions intentionally rendered permanent by the USian Empire's destruction of the Soviet Union and the resultant loss of its proven expertise (witness China, Vietnam, Cuba, etc.),  in training revolutionaries and organizing revolutions.

This then is in all probability  the final chapter of my farewell to any political writing beyond occasional comment-thread posts on other websites.

***     

SINCE MY FIFTH year, when  our Masters gleefully nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki a mere three months after my birthmother's spectacularly violent attempt at post-partum abortion had fragmented my family and reduced me to an emotional orphan, I have been ever-more-certain some form of doom -- unquestionably the permanent destruction of modern civilization (and most likely the extinction of all humankind) -- is our species' inescapable fate.

Somehow too I recognized the irreparable destruction inflicted by my birthmother's would-have-been homicidal frenzies against me and my father were but a microcosm of the macrocosm of global destruction patriarchy was already inflicting on the world. I also sensed the patriarchy's predatory misogyny was as much the cause of my birthmother's madness as it was the source of our species' suicidal embrace of  thermonuclear and biochemical weaponry -- though I would be in my late teens before I had the knowledge, insight and vocabulary to begin putting it all together, initially via my journals, finally in the arson-suppressed "Glimpses of a Pale Dancer."

And now, with genuine gratitude for the hours of uninterrupted contemplation and meditation granted me by the pandemic, I have come to realize the great life-bonus handed me by that dreadful background of familial dysfunction: it seems we "incurably broken" victims may be the only folks left in the entire USian Empire with enough clarity of vision to recognize what is being done to us. 

In any case it is clear our Masters have already achieved their penultimate goal: real-time duplication of the ecogenocidal omnipotence by which their sadistically patriarchal gods have always sought to subjugate and eventually destroy our Mother Earth. And now it seems they are imposing their Ultimate Solution: ever-more undeniably, the reduction of our planetary Motherland back to a jungle hothouse ruled by giant bugs.     

At the very least, we now know the Republican (Nazi) Fifth Column within the "Democratic" (sic) Party enabled Biden the Beguiler to disguise his Inner Hillary just long enough to deceive us into voting him into place to resume the unreconstructed Goldwater-Girl's hate-prompted mongering of a purposefully genocidal war against Russia and its allies -- a war the only possible result of which will be human extinction.

Hillary's run-amok warmongering against  Russia is precisely why I voted for Jill Stein in 2016: I recognized in Hillary the same Let's-Conquer-the-World-and-Enslave-All-Its-Surviving-Inhabitants psychopathy that prompted Hitler to start World War II. As I would assert when accused of  "squandering" my ballot, the only (real) choice our Masters allowed us in 2016 was between Trump's domestic holocaust and Hillary's thermonuclear apocalypse, and I could not in good conscience vote for either.

In 2020 I voted for Biden because his lies about New-Deal restorations convinced me his Evil might (truly) be "lesser"; instead my vote and its outcome, the election of a Hillary-caliber advocate of planetary destruction,  has become an unforgivable lesson. It is another profoundly depressing example of what -- in rebuttal to  Barack the Betrayer's malevolently fraudulent "audacity of hope" -- I long ago relabeled "the imbecility of hope."

Now of course I'm certain the  horrors promised by Trump and his Nazis were obviously scripted to help our Masters' preferred death-puppet, Biden, beguile us all with his innumerable deceptions.  It's the political variant of the good-cop/bad-cop routine, and it is exactly how our system -- one Ruling Class party concealed by two deceptive names -- is intended to function.

Meanwhile Biden serves the same clandestine purpose as Obama: their colossal "change-we-can-believe-in" betrayals destroy the remnants of our faith in democratic process, ensuring permanent Nazi victory as early as 2022.

For however long I manage to remain alive, it will weigh painfully on my conscience I was (again) seduced by yet another variant of "change we can believe in" and thus was deceived into voting for a president at least as determined as Hillary herself to provoke the  thermonuclear war that makes "Better Dead Than Red"  -- actually "Better Death Than Democracy" -- our planetary Motherland's final epitaph. 

Which is precisely why I'm posting the two  LA Progressive links below, each with full texts of my own comment-thread responses, all of it underscored by the thoroughly documented truth we of the Working Class have been permanently disempowered in the ever-more-brazenly Nazified United States, and are being rapidly enslaved everywhere else on this doomed planet as well. 

Obviously none of this can be abated without revolution, which -- just as obviously -- our Masters' now absolute, divine-sadist-caliber technological omnipotence and inescapable mass surveillance has rendered impossible. And so it will remain until technological and socioeonomic collapse, however caused,  reaches such de-electrified magnitude even our Masters themselves have no potential sanctuaries apart from the encampments of their victims -- where one hopes they will at last receive justice.

(Dare anyone ask if this -- the historical fact our Masters' omnipotence is entirely dependent on the now-inescapable techno-shackles of the cell phones and computers by which they've seduced us into self-enslavement  --  is perhaps the subconscious reason the otherwise delusion-based Abrahamic religions are spawning so many  bring-on-the-apocalypse cults?)   

Subjugated by an incurably conditioned combination of prideful ignorance and induced sociopathic self-obsession, the USian Moronic Majority has already proven itself permanently enslaved: the evidence is in the rise and fall of Occupy. As proper analyses  of Occupy's abject failures demonstrate conclusively (examples  here, here and here), the relentlessly anti-intellectual, incurably Ayn Randified egos of too many of its unyielding majority of white/bourgeois activists would have eventually killed the movement from within even without the external forces of our Masters' infiltrators, truncheons and pepper gas. Nor is it an accident such pridefully ignorant, maliciously self-obsessed egotism has become the prime USian ethos. Terrifyingly savvy in Josef-Goebbels-caliber propaganda and behavior modification, our Masters long ago mandated the requisite cradle-to-grave conditioning. Why? Because an ever-expanding Moronic Majority within the dominant white bourgeois fosters and sustains the identity politics that nurture Nazism even as it makes Working Class self-liberation impossible, thus perpetuating  our Masters' omnipotence.

And while we are again being schooled in the fact there is ultimately no defense against our Masters' tyrannies, backed as they are by thermonuclear and biological weapons, let us never forget their ultimate rebellion-suppressant -- the neutron bomb -- which our Masters designed specifically to exterminate all mammalian life in a given target while preserving most of the target's physical infrastructure and material wealth for looting.

(Yes the U.S. government claims they got rid of all their Neutron Bombs; but who can believe our Masters -- who are now suppressing the real Covid death toll -- would ever discard such a classically Neoliberal weapon so useful for speedy extermination of Working Class resistance? Nor dare we doubt the eternal threat our Masters sent to all humanity via Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- "we'll nuke whomever we choose" --  is equally applicable today.) 

Thus -- since there is absolutely no longer any rational hope for "change" beyond the ever-more-disruptive Big Lies of "change we can believe in" -- my personal ethics demand I stop writing as if our betterment were somehow miraculously possible, when the truth is, literally every humanitarian advancement to which I and so many others of my age devoted ourselves -- the defense of our Mother Earth; government-funded universal health care; government-funded public education through graduate school; freedom of inquiry and expression; sexual, racial and ethnic equality; restoration of workers' rights; affordable housing -- all have been permanently obstructed or reversed.   Nor -- with the U.S. Supreme Court now thoroughly Nazified by lifetime appointments -- is there any rational hope for betterment.

Hence, as an older person who emphatically agrees with the skyrocketing pessimism that has already captured 55.7 percent of the planet's youth, I may yet be in a minority, but I am by no means alone.

It is a pessimism reinforced daily by the now-irrefutably proven fact our Masters' sole reaction to terminal climate change is deception, a great smokescreen of lies to hide the fact their ultimate intent -- confirmed by their relentless refusal to act -- is to continue maximizing its deadliness.

But is the virus, in spite of its still-multiplying mutations,  not yet deadly enough to satisfy our Masters? Is the death rate amongst homeless people still too low to meet our Masters' quotas?  Is that why Biden is doing more than any U.S. president ever to provoke thermonuclear apocalypse?

Yet no one,  at least no one with enough prominence to be widely heard,  has yet dared demand to know just who -- or what -- these Masters truly are. Why are they destroying our planetary Motherland's ability to accommodate higher lifeforms?  Could it be the truth is deemed to be so terrifying for us -- We the People of the Working Class -- its mere disclosure would provoke the revolution our Masters so obviously fear? 

Here then are the aforementioned two LA Progressive comments:

On "Is the U.S. Provoking War with Russia?":

On "Why Is Congress Killing the Child Tax Credit?":

The Child Tax Credit was canceled by our Masters’ ecogenocidal majority — that is, by the Republican (i.e., Nazi) Party and its “Democratic” (sic) Fifth Column — for the same reason their White House puppets have weaponized Covid into the 21st Century’s Zyklon B: to help expand and perpetuate the planet’s highest death toll even as Biden the Beguiler attempts to agitate thermonuclear doomsday by goading Russia and China into World War III.

In thinking about what is being done to us, remember that our Masters (whomever or whatever they may be), are so well-fortressed, they believe they and their chosen vassals will – like the Nazi death-camp commanders and SS psychopaths who are their obvious if secret role models – survive whatever horrors they inflict.

What then is the basis of these newest, ultimately apocalyptic manifestations of USian imperial murderousness? Google “Eric Pianka population control,” without the quotation marks of course.

While Pianka’s demand for a 90-percent reduction of the human population remains circumstantial evidence, its relevance becomes ever more undeniable as our Masters’ genocidal intent becomes ever more overwhelmingly obvious.

Too bad the USian Moronic Majority – which clearly includes far more of the killer nation’s pseudo-Left than its terminally triumphant Nazi Right – suicidally surrendered this issue to the Nazis.

Which, once again, enables the pseudo-Left to suppress the horrific truth: that genocidal population reduction is already – if only to the dwindling minority of us who retain the ability to think logically – the (obvious) long-range purpose of Neoliberalism.

Indeed I hardly think it far-fetched to rank what should clearly be labeled the “Pianka Memo” as (at least) equal to the “Powell Memo” in our Nazi-educated Masters’ present-day revisions of Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” and their imposition of policies so derived.

***

ONE OF THE  more thoroughly obscured facts of life under patriarchy, and especially beneath the (thus far) metaphorical jackboots of its U.S./Nazi offshoots, is the extent to which we're methodically denied any useful knowledge of our own national history.

The problem -- already apparent in the 1950s and solidified into a permanently unsolvable barrier today -- stems from our Masters'  long ago recognition that, just as the study of history is epicentral to Marxism and socialism in general, it is anathema to Capitalism.²

Obviously in our Nazi-trained Masters' post-World-War-II quest to avoid the appearance of official public-school censorship, they decided on a policy that -- both in terms of its effectiveness and the magnitude of its deception -- testifies to the unprecedented,  absolutely bottomless malevolence of their Josef-Goebbels-caliber cunning. 

They censored our school books, of course; among the suppressed truths were all examples of positive consequences evolving from relations between the U.S. and Russia:  how the Russian Empire saved the federal union from conquest by British, French and Confederate armies during the (first?) USian Civil War;  how the Soviet Revolution helped inspire the Civil Rights Movement; how it terrified our Masters into granting women the right to vote and granting rights to organized labor our Masters have since abolished; and -- especially in the context of the Nazis' attempted coup against President Roosevelt and his New Deal -- let us never forget how Soviet- influenced alternative media saved us from our Masters' original scheme to make the United States a Satellite of Nazi Germany.     

But they also insisted their propaganda-version of history be taught only by the proudly anti-intellectual legions of super-patriotic, testosterone-frenzied thugs  who coach high-school male varsity sports. Thus was mandated the near-universal K-12 public school policy of having history, sociology and economics  be  "taught" (sic) mostly by "teachers" (sic) who were semi-literate jocks,  men whose only degrees were in "phys ed," which was tied with something called "home-ec ed" as the easiest collegiate majors. The home-ec department, of course, was the jocks' favorite source of female companions. 

Thus too was the study of history -- a fascinating human drama scripted by the interplay of cause and effect -- reduced to the intentionally repugnant rote-memorization of dates, places and names. Obviously, our Nazi-tutored Masters knew the best way to keep us from learning our true history was to teach it in such a way to make it a despised subject. Worse, every one of the so-called social-studies "teachers" (again sic) I encountered in the three public high schools schools I attended c.1954-1958 knew far less (real) history than I had already learned from my father's home library by the time I was 11 or 12. 

As a result, just as we are robbed of the truth there could never have been a New Deal without the Soviet Revolution, so are we denied the truth the destruction of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics  has robbed us us, most likely permanently, of the organized protection of the one ideology that -- despite its flaws --  was nevertheless our species' only rational hope for ever evolving a genuinely humanitarian future.

Who then can doubt that is why the USSR was always our Masters' prime target? And, in this context, who can doubt the possibility it might rise again -- however faint it may be -- is the bottom-line reason our Masters are openly provoking World War III? 

Note how Hitler ordered the invasion of the Soviet Union despite the entirely rational objections from Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW in the foregoing link),  which was then -- indisputably and by far -- the world's most militarily competent general staff. 

Again the question: who -- or what -- convinced Hitler to overrule the generals who had already given him an unprecedented string of conquests? And who -- or what -- convinced the USian plutocrats to (secretly) adopt the Nazi cause as their own?

Not surprisingly, our Masters' continuing refusal to answer any such questions furthers their foreign and domestic campaigns to sustain and intensify their policies of anti-solidarity chaos. But it also evokes the skyrocketing belief -- already 50 percent in Britain -- in such horrors as these. 

Which, if true,  means we are scarcely better defended than the doomed inhabitants of what may have been Sodom and Gomorrah -- that even our faintest hopes are as imbecilic as the fake "hope" (sic) so successfully pimped by Obama.

As is already true -- thanks to the lifetime-reigns of the U.S. Supreme Court tyrants and the resultant fact their again-confirmed Nazification will outlive nearly all of us (and by then will be either apocalyptically moot or remain at least as Nazified as it is today)  -- for any hopes yet foolishly retained by any members of the USian Working Class. 

But I do see one (faintly) visible global hope -- the only such hope I can find -- that actually has some basis in rational possibility. Because we know the Chinese think in terms of centuries (rather than the days and months that seem to be the outer limits of USian thinking), I submit it is at least possible their apparent co-optation by the final Nazi forms of Capitalism may instead be a colossal deception straight out of  Sun Tzu, specifically the dictum that if an enemy's greatest strength can somehow be transformed into his greatest weakness, victory is assured.

What then?

Perhaps, building upon the metaphysics implicit in the Gaia Hypothesis and the visions of equality and socioeconomic justice given us by Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky, our descendants can successfully resurrect our quest for Working Class liberation. 
__________________

¹I use the term "Working Class" in the Marxian sense, that is, to include all of us for whom job loss is inevitable ruin because our survival is entirely dependent on our own earnings -- and not on ancestral wealth or other undeserved riches. . 

²Were I teaching a survey course in U.S. history, these five texts would be required reading: Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous People's History of the United States, Beacon Press: 2014;  Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States, Harper & Row: 1980; Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts, International Publishers: 1943; Jeff Sharlet, The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, Harper: 2008; Heather Cox Richardson, How the South Won the Civil War, Oxford University Press: 2020.

LB/2-12 February 2022

--30--

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.

*****

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.

*****

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?

*****

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.

*****

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.

--30-- 

MY APOLOGY FOR Dispatches' long silence.

Convinced there is no way to defeat our Neoliberal (Neonazi) Masters save by doing whataver may be necessary to survive their ongoing campaigns of exterminate-the-Working-Class ecogenocide -- the murderously weaponized profiteering by which they are replacing us with slaves and robots -- I have been trying since last November to find some new pathway for this blog. At that I may have succeeded; my new approach might be termed "speculative futurism" -- that is, if by some miracle we have any future at all. But its launch -- at present a collection of handwritten notes that fill two legal pads -- has been repeatedly delayed by the need to complete several more mundane projects I trust will be infinitely more useful to those who inherit my few possessions.

And now our relentlessly Neoliberal (Neonazi) politics, in the form of six exceptionally disturbing reports in the daily horror show of local, state, federal and global news, has added its own depressing taint: 

The Republican Party has Turned Fascist and is Now the Most Dangerous Threat in the World
So triumphs the (mostly clandestine) termination of USian democratic process our Masters began with the Wall Street Bankers' (quickly forgiven and forgotten) Plot c. 1929-1934 to turn the U.S. into an ally -- and more likely a colony -- of Nazi Germany.  

Supreme Court Rules Against Union Recruiting on California Farms
This completes the methodical murder of the USian labor movement begun by the Taft-Hartley Act of 1974.

With support of Biden, federal court backs Trump’s police-state assault on peaceful protests in Lafayette Square
A horror story accurately summarized by its headline.

Time to Say "You're Fired" to Merrick Garland?
See obvious reasons above.

Military Document Puts (All) Socialists in League With Neo-Nazis
In other words, any form of socialist organizing is to be made illegal.

Appearance Versus Essence: Biden is Stabilizing, Not Ending, Neoliberalism
As predicted, the "Democratic" (sic) Party is again functioning as the Republican Fifth Column.

Indeed the news has become so incessantly horrific, I -- a near-lifelong journalist -- radically reduced my reading of it after by some miracle (thank you Goddess!) we managed to get the Hitler-wannabe Trump and the WitchFinder-General-wannabe Pence at least temporarily out of the federal executive branch.

But since that deceptive "victory," it has become painfully obvious nothing of substance will change under the new regime -- that in hideous truth the only "change we can believe in" (exactly as under Barack the Betrayer) -- is that our Masters will continue to worsen our lives. 

And now we know the Democrats will do as they did before 2018 -- that is, everything possible to ensure the overt Nazis take full power in 2024.

*****

BECAUSE I AM fervently committed to de-politicizing Dispatches, I am also publishing here today a commentary from earlier this month, originally intended as the beginning of a preface to an introduction of the new Dispatches, but now revised for presentation here as what I hope will by my last purely political commentary ever. For when truth is shrunken to pearls before swine, when our Masters' Moronic Majority has been permanently conditioned to such moral imbecility it reflexively applauds atrocities as victories, then journalism is reduced to utter pointlessness, to naught but (another) exercise in skull-versus-boulder futility.  

Initially what I wrote was in favorable response to "A Kinder, Gentler US Empire Is Not Possible"; I sought to employ this exceptionally thought-provoking column by Caitlin Johnstone as the peg upon which to hang my withdrawal from political journalism. 

While I wholeheartedly agree with Ms. Johnstone’s hypothesis and salute her courage for daring express it,  I soon realized I must also respectfully suggest she has not taken it to it’s ultimately unavoidable conclusion, to wit: whether our Neoliberal (Neonazi) Masters have revealed themselves to be the sadistic moral imbeciles they truly are or remain closeted as Democrats and other pseudo-humanitarians, the ultimate lesson of human history is that all genuinely progressive movements -- that is, any truly humanitarian movement -- will be methodically destroyed at birth or as soon as possible afterward.

Note I am 81 years old, a near-lifelong Marxian formerly self-disguised by sometimes award-winning journalistic necessity, first as a "liberal Democrat" (until arson, almost certainly by federal agents, destroyed all my life's work in 1983); next as a "democratic socialist" (until the forcible retirement imposed by the ecogenocidal profiteering of '08-'09 cost me everything save a miserly Social Security pension and damned me to ever-deadlier poverty).  I am also a seasoned veteran of defeat: the (failed) post-Sputnik campaign to make USian K-12 brainwashing more like Euro/Soviet education and thus far less hostile to science, mathematics, the humanities and original thinking in general; the (failed) Civil Rights Movement; the (failed) Anti-Southeast Asian War Movement, which despite its innumerable lies to the contrary was pathetically immaterial to Vietnamese victory, won solely by the infinite courage of the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese People's Liberation Army;  the (failed) Back-to-the-Land Movement; the (failed) Alternative Press Movement; and the (repeatedly failed) Labor Movement.

Though I voted for Obama twice -- votes I considered meaningless apart from their function in preserving the franchise -- by  2011 I had dubbed him "Barack the Betrayer" and had recognized his “change we can believe in” as the greatest Big Lie of political betrayal in USian presidential history; during that same period of enlightenment I was repeatedly booted in the metaphorical gonads by the irrefutable and therefore terrifying technological truth our ever-worsening circumstances are now so universal they have become inescapable save by death -- precisely as our Masters intend.

Thus, recognizing I truly had nothing left to lose, I joined the earliest Tacoma-activist ranks of the (failed) Occupy uprising, at the same time publicly acknowledging the Communist-at-heart I had secretly been at least since the murderous aftermath of the coup of 22 November 1963 proved to me our species' one and only genuinely humanitarian alternative was a definitively transitional Dictatorship by the Proletariat -- a true reformation now rendered forever impossible by the defeat of the Soviet Union.  

I was also an early activist in the (failed) Tacoma $15 Now Movement, though worsening health forced me to drop out several months before its defeat by the already reliably subjugated voters.

Yet even then I moronically retained just a bit of hopefulness.

But now after living through the cunningly disguised but effectively genocidal Neoliberal weaponization of the first 18 or so months of the Covid-19 pandemic, I can no longer doubt all is lost, certainly for modern society. In which context the entire global space-race becomes nothing more than an all-time epic of colossal propaganda and obscenely costly psychological warfare intended to maintain the cult of compulsory optimism. How? By distracting us from the ever-more-undeniable reality of an apocalypse already well underway – and most likely fatal to our entire species.

Why – or perhaps how – have I at last achieved some semblance of intellectual realism?

More appropriately, what enabled me to escape what Chris Hedges aptly terms the "curse" of optimism?

I escaped because anyone who recognizes the terminal magnitude of patriarchal technology also understands there is no power on this planet capable of overcoming our Masters' wealth-sustained (and therefore eternally unbreakable) monopolies on the technologies of universal surveillance and thermonuclear terror.

In societal reaction to which – or so I strongly suspect – our burgeoning belief in “space aliens” is most likely nothing more than the military-technology-fostered 21st Century reinforcement of our self-destructive dependence on adult versions of the Santa-Claus myth, specifically the variously named patriarchal god of both the socioeconomically suicidal belief in the biological absurdity called “eternal life” and the maximized ecogenocidal malevolence of a misogyny that in its apocalyptic ejaculations of clitoris-envy damns all femaleness from our Mother Earth’s to that of our planet’s smallest distinctively gendered creatures.

It is a bit of an aside, but in psychological truth the Christmas Santa is our starter-god; he introduces us to the same terror that defines not only the globally dominant patriarchal god Yahweh/Jesu/Allah, but also all the planet’s governments assembled – whether knowingly or not – using the YJA biblical Erector-set: “he sees you when you’re sleeping; he knows when you’re awake; he knows if you’ve been bad or good; obey or burn at the stake.” In other words, it’s the same enslave-the-Working-Class scam whether invoked as Santa or Jesus or any other allegedly “divine” (and therefore “infallible”) would-be “savior.”

If space aliens exist, our own species' history should tell us they are undoubtedly here as conquerors – which perhaps in our species’ final moments will end forever the greatest deception of all human history, the ultimate Big Lie “the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice.” To those of us who actually know history, the truth is of course the diametrical opposite: if there is any moral arc at all, what it bends toward is ever-more-technologically enhanced – and therefore ever more inescapable – ecogenocidal tyranny.

Proof? Look how our capitalist Masters warred against the Soviet Union until it was finally destroyed by the dark undertow of the very Russian history it had sought so fervently to transform. Yet even now 64 percent of the former Soviet population tells pollsters their lives were far better when they were governed by Marxism. Ditto for the former East Germans. (Note that Foreign Policy is a Ruling Class publication, hence -- because our Masters require accurate intelligence if they are to maintain their methods of oppression at peak efficiency -- it is allowed to be a  bit more truthful in its [still-obviously biased] reporting.)

In any case, what our Masters did to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and its Warsaw Pact allies proves that if any genuine (i.e. truly ecohumanitarian) revolution were to occur anywhere, it will be crushed. Remember not just the murdered Karen Silkwood but the murdered Kennedy brothers and the government-murdered victims at Chicago (Fred Hampton and Mark Clark); at Kent State University (Allison Beth Krause, Jeffrey Glenn Miller, Sandra Lee Scheuer, William Knox Schroeder and let us not forget Dean Kahler, whose life was destroyed by the  permanent paralysis inflicted by a single round of .30-caliber M2 Ball through the spine); and at Jackson State College (Phillip Lafayette Gibbs and James Earl Green).

But those atrocities only hint at the horrors of our now inevitable future. For had the Soviet revolutionaries been long-term disciplined enough to perpetuate their ideology not only by successfully resisting invasion, infiltration and  disinformation, but by defeating co-optation and its backup SOPs (standing operating procedures) of arrest, torture, murder and political assassination of all true progressives -- our Masters’ new Final Solution was already in their arsenals. This is the Neutron Bomb, designed specifically to exterminate hostile or rebellious populations without damaging infrastructure (gold teeth included) or reducing its post-holocaust value as loot – ever the material wealth of capitalism and its euphemism-cloaked empires.

As to the too-rapidly mutating Covid-19, I must confess it increasingly seems to me its three most plausibly deniable alternatives are (1)--the Jackson Browne/Gaia Hypothesis alternative, the punitive anger of our Mother Earth, let us hope not (yet) in terminal fulfillment of JB’s ever-more-obviously prophetic vision of “the magnitude of her fury in the final hour”; (2)--the Biblical alternative, i.e., self-imposed apocalypse by deliberate or (allegedly) accidental release and/or by any and all of the (other) diabolical forms divinely imaginable; or (3)--the space-alien bio-weapon hypothesis many humans sense but too few of us dare speak aloud, certainly not as fact but just as certainly, given UFOs, as another intuitively obvious possibility we must therefore publicly consider.

Whatever obtains, it is scarcely more than a distraction now that our downward momentum has become irreversible. Whether in service to their own moral imbecility, as puppets of extraterrestrial conquerors or in some unspeakably repugnant combination of both evils, our Neoliberal Masters have already created the intentionally addictive technologies of tyranny that doom us all, exactly as prophesied by the darkest science fiction. Worse, they have weaponized their technology into the instrument of our ultimate self-betrayal, the now-inescapable shackles of limitless surveillance falsely peddled and gullibly embraced as a technology of human bonding. With the flawed but nevertheless Working-Class-exemplary Soviet Union gone forever and China permanently reduced to a slave-state capitalism indistinguishable in its ecogenocidal sadism from that of the avowed Neoliberalism that rules the rest of this planet, I cannot doubt all is truly lost.

Yet resistance remains vital to ourselves and to our offspring and to theirs and thus to the sustenance of human spirit, yes even and most especially now when any hope for betterment or promise of rescue is banished by our ever-more-obvious subjugation, and the sci-fi prophecy of "resistance is futile” has in fearsome fact become the one pivotal truth of all our lives -- which means survival itself may soon be our sole remaining possibility for revolutionary defiance.

LB/14-23 June 2021

-30-

Fearing Revolution, the Plutocrats Unite for Class War against
Legal Gun Owners, Retaining the 2nd Amendment as Propaganda but
Imposing Prohibitive Fees and Taxes, Thus Redefining Self-Defense  
as the Exclusive Privilege of Our Masters and Their Collaborators

***
Still Doubt the DemoPublicans' Back-Room Unity? Read On

***
Plus See Below for DfD's Long-Promised New Monthly Format

WHAT I HAVE ASSEMBLED  here is hitherto obscured but nonetheless compelling proof the Trump/Pence Regime -- secure behind its ever more crippling effluent of Nazi-style Big Lies and other Josef-Goebbels-type deceptions -- is so terrified by the intensifying likelihood of socialist revolution, it is now collaborating with the Democratic (sic) Party to forcibly disarm all U.S. Working Families. 

The proof is in the following jig-saw puzzle of reports, which with an uplifted social-finger of journalistic defiance are hereby assembled into a revealing whole. Which I assure you is no -- say again NO -- conspiracy theory; it is instead the geography of an infestation.

Firstly, for context -- the historical framework inside which we'll piece the puzzle together --  we should review the Powell Memo, the Mein Kampf of Imperial Neoliberalism, thus to confirm our understanding of the fascist ideology¹ by which we are subjugated and enslaved.

Secondly let us note that gunowner taxation is implicitly approved by Heller's Paragraph 2, a fact concealed by the media hysteria --  a cunning cacophony of equally distracting pros and cons --  engendered by its revocation of the Washington D.C. ordinance that outlawed handgun ownership:

Like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited...For example, concealed weapons prohibitions have been upheld under the Amendment or state analogues. The Court’s opinion should not be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms... (Emphasis added.)

Note too the date of the Heller decision -- 2008 -- and that it was authored by the late arch-conservative Anton Scalia; for deeper background, see also the Encyclopaedia Britannica's clearly written, exceptionally unbiased and therefore contextually useful history of the Second Amendment, including its Imperial Roman origins. 

Then, as if in (surely coincidental) climactic conclusion, we add the following links, watching, perhaps smirking as the topic-puzzle comes together, dates-of-occurrence punctuating its relentless unfolding:

2009 -- Targeted Taxes on Getting Abortions, Buying Guns, and Exercising Other Constitutional Rights
2013 -- New gun control strategy: Tax 'em
2015 -- Why Exactly Are We Taxing Guns?
2017 -- Hey, NRA! What About Patients' Gun Rights?
2018 -- A Gun Rights Group Says Trump Has Gone From Supporter "To The Gun-Grabber In Chief"
2018 -- Repeal the Second Amendment? Gun-Control Advocates Say No - The Atlantic
2019 -- Elizabeth Warren Introduces Sweeping Gun Control Plan
2019 -- Here’s The Document The White House, Barr Are Using To Push Gun Control On Republicans
2020 -- Florida REPUBLICAN Senators Vote for Massive Gun Control Bill
2020 -- NH: Republican Gun Confiscation is Still Moving

(Capitalization and punctuation as in originals)

I trust I need not thrice repeat this is NOT conspiracy theory. It is instead a choreography of the evolution of an idea mostly as shaped by reactions to Heller -- a decision blessed or cursed as a pivotal victory for the right to keep and bear arms -- hereby revealed as its (presumably) unintentional death-blow instead. 

*****

WHAT WE SHOULD be asking ourselves is how often the Republicans join with the Democrats in expanding and sustaining tyranny. 

The immediate answer is  found in the Democrats' reliably overwhelming support for the Patriot Act, most recently last November.

But a more damning answer is to be found in the historical fact that whatever tyrannies our Capitalist Masters demand, their vassal-politicians immediately set aside their charade of squabbling, then unite to grant it with bipartisan obedience -- a malevolently Capitalist bipartisanship exemplified by its Neoliberal destruction of public education and its robbery of Working Families' ability to think rationally; by the re-enslavement of women through outlawing abortion, radically restricting access to birth control and tacitly encouraging sexual harassment to drive females from the workplace; and by subjugation of the entire 99 Percent through forcible disarmament.

Thus we confront the re-emergence of class struggle's original and ultimate forms: not between Workers and Bosses, but between Masters and Slaves. 

As regular readers know, I closely watch certain Rightist websites. Why? Because -- with malicious censorship on the Left now at least as prevalent as on the Right -- such sites (especially after we've learn to read between their lines of bias),  are surprisingly reliable sources for news the Left wants to keep hidden.

Meanwhile our shock-doctrine² Masters weaponize their bipartisan terror of socialist revolution and further weaponize climate change as the ultimate form of regime change. 

Apropos firearms, our Masters' bipartisan intent is to disarm us all, to thereby reduce us to the helplessness of mandatory pacifism  (yes, even in the face of murderous attacks by criminals),  thus condemning us to the compulsory victimhood that has always defined serfdom and slavery.

Apropos women's rights, our Masters' bipartisan intent is to (again) reduce "female" to  a synonym for "powerless" -- not the least because every real revolution since 1789 has been started by women. Thus the Machiavellian anti-abortion cunning of the Democratic (sic) Party -- first exemplified by Carter the Christer's endorsement of the Hyde Amendment, next by Barack the Betrayer's cunningly obscured betrayal of abortion rights, more recently by voting records they try to hide behind lies and disinformation -- is ultimately more effective than Republican demagoguery at imposing compulsory Working Class motherhood, complete with all its mandatory impoverishment and ever-expanding criminal liability.

Thus the Democrats' ultimate Big Lie -- "change we can believe in" -- yet prevails.       

But -- precisely as our Masters have already done with the First, Fourth and Fifth amendments and are now doing with the Second Amendment -- they leave the wording of the Bill of Rights intact.

Ask yourself: what more effective propaganda to preserve -- particularly amongst the pridefully ignorant³ -- the truly monstrous, ultimately apocalyptic Big Lie of "American democracy"?

Nor is this on any way a new strategy; it merely expands the deluge of Big Lies intended to sustain the core Moron Nation deception: that we the people of our species' most ecogenocidal Empire are yet allowed the protections provided by our (alleged) constitutional "rights." 

Note how the First, Fourth and Fifth amendments have already been nullified by the Patriot Act. Note too how their nullification is broadened and  pointedly underscored by the Robbers' Court's subsequent repeals of gay, lesbian and transsexual (LGBTQ) rights and of religious freedom for atheists, agnostics and spiritual nonconformists -- now soon to expanded by the Robbers' Court's intent of outlawing abortion nationwide.      

Thus the Second Amendment has also been nullified -- this by judicial sleight-of-hand including the censorship-obscured anti-legal-gunowner carte blanche cunningly buried amongst the pro-Second-Amendment distractions of  Heller.

And since Citizens United has now clearly defined money as speech, what is to prevent our Masters from further defining prohibitive cost -- whether for firearms,  contraception or anything else -- as "constitutional" forms of prohibition, censorship and regulation? 

*****

Indications: Stuff I Already Read, Here in Case You Missed It

(Capitalization and punctuation as in originals)

Our Mother/Our Selves

Verily, as we do unto our Mother Earth, so we do unto ourselves.

Climate Models Are Running Red Hot, and Scientists Don't Know Why

Earth Just Had Hottest January Since Records Began, Data Shows

Worst Locust Swarm to Hit East Africa in Decades Linked to Climate Crisis

UN warns of major shock as Africa locust outbreak spreads

Ozone Layer Recovery Is Being Undermined by Pollution From US Companies

UN Biodiversity Chief: Humans Risk Living in an 'Empty World' With 'Catastrophic' Consequences

Bumblebees Face Extinction From the Climate Crisis

5,000-year-old tree in Scotland is changing from male to female⁴

Calamity by Contagion

Even after her metamorphosis from bugs to mammals, our Mother Earth remains fatally buggy. 

The coronavirus pandemic: A global disaster

World Health Organization warns of global risk from coronavirus outbreak

Top 10 Myths About Bedbugs

Climate Change May Release Ancient Viruses From Melting Tibetan Glacier

Viruses, Epidemics and Experiments: The History of Biowarfare

Theocracy Triumphant

Too many of us remain oblivious to the threat of resurgent patriarchal religion, especially when its deadly misogyny is financed by our Masters and hybrid with fascism.

El Salvador: The Country Where Having a Miscarriage Can Land You in Prison

Rick Wiles: God Has Sent the Coronavirus to “Purge a Lot of Sin Off This Planet”

Trump Spiritual Adviser Paula White Orders End to 'Satanic Pregnancies'

There's a Video Posted on the Official White House YouTube Page Calling Homosexuality the Devil's Work

Writer Calls Egalitarian Marriages “Functionally Homosexual”

Christian School Expels Girl for Wearing Rainbow Sweater on Her Birthday 

Tampon tax break faces resistance in Tennessee

The FBI Makes a Bizarre Claim About Pro-Choice Terrorism

FOCUS: America May Be Nearing the End of the Roe Era

Josef Goebbels Prevails

After all that’s gone down, who among us still doubts the predatory Neoliberal cunning that prompted our morbidly Machiavellian Masters to pervert our so-called “mainstream media” into our species first-ever privately owned for-profit Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. Indeed our Masters brought it home with their Nazi fellow-collaborators after Germany lost the war.  

The “Afghanistan papers”: The criminality and disaster of a war based upon lies

Why the Buttigieg Campaign Tried to Have Me Arrested for Handing Out Information About Medicare for All 

Listening to Mike Pence’s history, you might think it wasn’t Soviets but Americans who liberated Auschwitz

The FBI Has Been Lying About Seth Rich

The US Government Lies Constantly, And The Burden Of Proof Is On The Accuser

World’s Highest Standard of Living

For a broader perspective on the unchanging bounty of USian Exceptionalism, go here. And here. And here. 

Marianne Williamson Is the Canary in the Coal Mine for American Democracy

The Trump administration’s surveillance dragnet

Black Lives Matter Excluded from Los Angeles Women’s March

“The Cops & the Klan Go Hand in Hand!”

A Bank Called the Cops on a Black Man Trying to Deposit the Money He Won in a Racial Discrimination Lawsuit

Cops and Spies Chase Blacks and Leftists While Violent Whites Grow Bolder

Oakland, California: With guns drawn, police evict homeless mothers from house

Keeping Homeless Families Homeless, by Force

Homelessness in Koreatown: a parallel neighborhood of unhoused people has grown up around the existing community.

The Shame of Child Poverty in the Age of Trump

Seattle bureaucrats aid Amazon charge Sawant with ethics violations

Why Are Democratic Candidates Taking Money From Union-Busting Lawyers?

Florida: Man arrested after allegedly driving van into GOP registration tent

After 18 Years of US Occupation, Poll Finds Zero Percent Of Afghans Thriving, 85 Percent "Suffering"

Taxpayers Shell Out $1M After Officers Force Mom to Give Birth into a Toilet, Letting Baby Die

Enslavement as Convenience

In keeping with the strategy and intent of Neoliberalism, our Masters long ago conditioned us to value convenience over freedom. Hence the unstoppable popularity of self-enslavement by electronic media: the irrestably seductive opiate cunningly engineered to dumb us down -- and numb us down -- even as it tethers us to 24/7 surveillance. (Hence too the notorious, convenience-centered inability of USian whites to liberate themselves, much less anyone else.)    

The Joys of the Digital Revolution Bring the End of Privacy

Freedom Rider: The Internet Does Washington’s Dirty Work

Lest We Forget

Claiming to focus on human life while ignoring or denying the determinism of its socioeconomic and political contexts is no different from pretending to study mammalian  reproduction while ignoring or denying the sexuality by which it obtains. How so? Because -- once we transcend the ideological blindness imposed on us to sustain Capitalism -- we recognize the extent to which contexts determine how we live and die, just as sexuality determines reproduction. 

Average U.S. Citizens Have “Little Or No” Influence On Government Policy

How American Racism Influenced Hitler

Wall Street's Fascist Plot to Seize the White House

How IBM Helped Nazi Germany Exterminate Those It Deemed 'Unworthy of Life'

The Modern Education System Was Made to Foster “Punctual, Docile, and Sober” Factory Workers

Poverty Is the New Draft

Why the Left-wing Needs a Gun Culture

But Is It Really Ecogenocide?

Why else – save to exterminate “surplus” Working Families, permanently enslave the survivors and reorder all human society into the global equivalent of an antebellum slave plantation – would our Neoliberal Masters feign such total paralysis in the face of humanity’s deadliest disaster?

The Toxic Reach of Deepwater Horizon's Oil Spill Was Much Larger - and Deadlier - Than Previous Estimates, a New Study Says

Environmental Protesters Are Being Criminalized Around the World

US Listed Climate Activist Group as Extremists Alongside Mass Killers

Wall Street Invading Wet’suwet’en Territory

Puerto Rico's Disasters After the Earthquakes

The Evil List: 30 Tech Companies That Are Doing the Most Harm

No Safe Level of Air Pollutions;: Major Study Links Cardiac Arrests With Fine Particulate Matter Exposure

How Economic Despair Drives Workers to Their Deaths

Study: Nearly 500 Million People Worldwide Struggle to Find Adequate Work

Where United States' Climate Migrants Will Go As Sea Level Rises

Japan Races to Build 22 New Coal-Burning Power Plants, Despite Climate Risks

Latest UN plan to address catastrophic decline in biodiversity—more empty platitudes

The Environmental Burden of Generation Z

Sparks Against Despair

Though history proves the “arc of the universe” bends toward tyranny rather than justice, we should also cherish a certain truth powerfully evoked by Peter Gabriel: “You can blow out a candle/ But you can’t blow out a fire/ Once the flames begin to catch/ The wind will blow it higher.”

Global Poll Finds Majority Believe Capitalism More Harmful Than Good

Gallup: 60% of Americans Say They Could Vote for an Atheist President

Making Rebellion Attractive: Why the Establishment Still Hates John Reed

Bernie Sanders Leads Trump, All 2020 Candidates in Donations From Active-Duty Troops

Just Get On And Go! Olympia Transit System Goes Fareless

Atlanta Turns 7-Acre Vacant Lot Into Largest Free Food Forest In The Country

Dog sleuths sniff out crop disease hitting citrus trees

Orangutan in Borneo offers its hand to;rescue a man from snake-infested water⁵

Takes a village: Bear foster mom raises cub saved by dog

Thunberg: Indigenous Peoples Lead the Fight Against Crisis;

We Need to Ask Many Questions of Our Nation;s Mainstream Media. Here Are Just a Few.

Propagandists Cry About Bernie’s Online Base Because It’s Effective, Not Because It’s Mean

Yes, dear readers, this is at last the long-promised new Dispatches format. I will post monthly, with occasional "extras" as events demand.

(Sorry, Charlie; our Masters only want intimidated tuna -- especially now, with survival itself increasingly criminalized as revolutionary defiance -- the real meaning of the ever-escalating wars against refugees and homeless people.)  

_____________________________________________

¹When we consider the patriarchal origins of the Empire's ecogenocidal capabilities and intentions, it is at least arguable the Powell Memo is the Capitalist aristocracy's 20th Century update of the colonial aristocracy's outraged reaction to the 1772 British Supreme-Court Equivalent's ruling that Blacks are humans and therefore have human rights -- which historical truth I learned in childhood from my second-generation British (English/Scot/Canadian) father. Thus the so-called "American Revolution" was the antithesis of liberation. Indeed it was the original "regime change." Then as now it is intended to preserve what today -- Neoliberal euphemisms not withstanding -- we recognize as the core mindset of Nazism: genocide (against all First Nations peoples);  enslavement (of Africans); and murderous discrimination against all other minorities -- precisely the precedents Adolf Hitler borrowed from the United States. Nevertheless I find it more useful to regard 1934 as the visible starting point of present-day USian Ruling Class malevolence, specifically the One Percenters' aborted-but-never-prosecuted fascist coup, which would have reduced the U.S. to a slave state while making it the resource-dominant and therefore ultimately triumphant fourth member of Hitler's later Rome/Berlin/Tokyo Axis. Even then, our Masters' long-term motive was global conquest, and from their morally imbecilic perspective, alliance with Hitler and enhancement of his horrors was the shortest, cheapest path to victory. Remaining free to subvert our freedom at will, the same cabal of unimaginably rich aristocrats helped perfect the Nazis' genocide machine even as they financed the seditious rise of ChristoNazism and countenanced (if not mandated and commanded) the coup that, on 22 November 1963, not only murdered President John Fitzgerald Kennedy but slew the Republic as well.

²We all owe Naomi Klein (The Shock Doctrine: the Rise of Disaster Capitalism; Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt and Company, New York: 2007) a debt of gratitude for what amounts to a breakthrough volume of strategic intelligence-analysis detailing how our Masters are weaponizing Nature to re-order human society into their Neoliberal global (slave-plantation) model.  Indeed it Ms. Klein exposes the malevolence and manipulative cunning by which the Powell Memo  is ever-more-lethally enforced, not the least as the 20th Century revision of the Declaration of Independence.                  

³As I noted in a recent "what-is-to-be-done" e-mail to friends, we the people are so dumbed down, there is no longer any antidote for the submissiveness of the Moronic Majority -- the vast number of U.S. citizens, minorities included, who by socioeconomic definition are Working Class but reflexively side with our Masters -- even now, when there are no longer any rational doubts about Ruling Class capabilities and intentions: the former the de facto omnipotence granted by the diabolical combination of total surveillance and cell phones, the latter the ever-more-obvious ecogenocidal reordering of human society into a global slave plantation. Note too how how the Moronic Majority will break down shopping-center doors -- even commit murder -- to fit itself with the 21st Century slave collar, i.e., the cellphone. As a friend of mine observes, we have thus become a nation of "I-Phone Zombies."    

⁴Thanks to Tigerlille for spotting this story and sending me its link. The story prompts at least two significant questions. (1)--Is accelerated gender plurality a multi-species response to patriarchy-inflicted apocalypse? (2)--What relevant lessons does our Mother Earth thus beseech us to learn?

⁵Thanks to Tigerlille for this story too, which -- vitally, I believe -- shows us a truth of mammalian solidarity too long rejected as "primitive superstition."    

LB/15 February 2020

-30-

(Thus the Powell-Memo/Ayn-Rand Moral Imbecility That Perpetuates
'American Exceptionalism' Dooms Us All to Ecogenocidal Extinction)  

CRADLE-TO-GRAVE AYN RANDIFUCATION -- maliciously seductive conditioning in the principles of Mein Kampf¹ and the Powell Memo that make tyranny fun and profitable for the plutocrats and inescapably deadly for all the rest of us -- has become the sole determinant of the quality of life in today's United States. 

This remains the one pivotal  truth of our existence no matter how frantically we might try to ignore or deny the skyrocketing horrors of its obvious results, a frog-boiled compound of deliberately ruinous afflictions that make it excruciatingly obvious we are never again to be granted even the tiniest mercy of an antidote, much less an actual cure. 

These ultimately non-survivable assaults include:

• The death-blows -- whether physical or mental -- endlessly dealt us by the fascists, ChristoNazis, Original Nazis and all the other antihumans vengefully massing on the global Right:
• The socioeconomic fragmentation the equally ego-driven USian Left imposes on us with the innumerable fads of identity-politics and zero-tolerance "political correctness" it employs to blind us to the urgent reality of ecogenocidal class war;
• The me-first recidivism by which We the People of the 99 Percent are endlessly conditioned to perpetuate our own socioeconomic powerlessness;
• The murderous coup of 22 November 1963, to which -- with the terror and terrorism of at least a dozen more political murders -- our Overlords have since added the police-state guarantee of their own ever-more-obviously irreversible omnipotence;
• The nearly two million children, women and men our Masters slew in Southeast Asia to begin transforming the global-enslavement agenda of Neoliberalism into the ecogenocidal agenda of the terminally White Christian USian Empire;
• And -- last but by no means of lesser significance -- the apocalyptic revelation implicit in the defeat of the Soviet Union: specifically that there will never again be a people or nation on this planet allowed to develop the capability of overthrowing our conquerors by any means less  suicidal than thermonuclear war.

Thus we are infinitely more paralyzed by subjugation than our officially enslaved ancestors could have ever imagined -- so subjugated, in lethal fact, that even the most far-fetched possibility of liberation is now eternally beyond our reach -- "eternally" used here in the sense our species' self- destruction-by-patriarchy will be literally everlasting. 

This is because our Masters, employing their unprecedentedly diabolical cunningly, have gradually but methodically reconstructed human society to deliberately rob all the rest of us -- forever -- of any instincts, skills or possessions that might facilitate our escape from the invisible dungeons of this new mode of solitary self-confinement.

(Indeed I cannot doubt the glaringly anti-intuitive operations of our dominant electronic devices is intended to drill us in the abandonment of intuition -- a paramount step in our forcible reduction to the subhuman consciousness essential to our permanent enslavement that would be a picture-perfect example of the ever-expanding thoroughness of our Masters' malevolence.)     

Precisely as mapped out by the psychological warfare gurus whose weaponized market research makes Madison Avenue the one true ruler of the world, the grotesquely anti-social  self-centeredness within which we are all so relentlessly conditioned -- literally from our first breaths outside our mothers' wombs -- guarantees the vast majority of us will forever remain self-subjugated and therefore eternally imprisoned in our Masters' slave-pens. 

Meanwhile the very few of us who manage to escape -- an already minuscule number that further dwindles every year -- are ever-more-vehemently denounced as failures, often with a slanderous hatefulness of such foul intensity, the temptation to forsake our defining iconoclasms becomes irresistible, never mind the sometimes-fatal, always-devastating cost such abandonment imposes on our own mental and physical health.

Forgive the apparent digression -- as you'll see, it is actually not -- but here for clarity and context I must explain that in all my decades of paying close attention to such matters, I have met only two sorts of iconoclasts, something that until this writing I had never given much thought beyond idly wondering to what extent a psychologist or psychiatrist might recognize each of these sorts as separate personality types.  But along comes the Apocalypse, and here we are again discussing Relevant Things, so I need to preface what follows by explaining that the sole criterion by which I the (iconoclastic) journalist determine in what lot any given iconoclast might belong is that of apparent trustworthiness, which tonight I shall designate accordingly: NT = Not Trustworthy; PT = Potentially Trustworthy.

In the NT category of iconoclasts go all those I think of as "volunteer iconoclasts," persons moved to iconoclasm by specific grievances and vexations or sometimes even fads and therefore prone to abandon their iconoclasm as soon as they can rationalize so doing, hence, for example, the death of the Counterculture -- and the nearly identical physics of the Ayn-Randified anti-solidarity epidemic that slew Occupy five decades hence. In the PT category I include all of us whose us whose quest for salvation-by-iconoclasm is of the involuntary and therefore permanent sort born of trauma. And -- yes (I am working this out as I go) -- an NT could certainly become an PT; though I doubt a PT -- save by betrayal --  could ever become anything else.  

Which brings us back to the less-than-comfortable topic of our individual and collective vulnerability to the omnipresent pressure of temptation to abandon our iconoclasm,   a vulnerability to which I myself will most assuredly attest. Emotionally orphaned at age five (and quite properly ever afterward a skeptic who -- try as I might -- will never unlearn the lesson that "trust" is but an invitation to betrayal),  I nevertheless did my best to evolve a working balance between (real/spirit-healing) iconoclasm and the (apparent) conformity by which for many years I was able to keep my iconoclasm fed. 

But of course in the end our unforgiving Masters won -- as the proper study of history makes it obvious they always have and always will -- a lesson taught me in my elder years  by the ever-worsening poverty that makes me ever more dependent on (and always infinitely grateful for) the beneficence of friends and comrades. Without them I'd be dead -- precisely as are others I have known who grew old without friends or families or died young because their poverty denied them healthcare.  Such is Neoliberalism in action, lethal as serpent-venom to its innumerable victims, fatal even in the realms of imagination.     

Beyond that, note too how the Neoliberal Final Solution to the growing rage resulting from our Masters' destruction of the last vestiges of the mostly illusory "American Dream" is leveraging the economy so brutally, all humans -- that is, everybody but the plutocrats and those former humans who have embraced moral imbecility to serve the ecogenicidal plutocrats' agenda -- are hurled into inescapable poverty and abandoned to the struggles-to-the-death it so often necessitates.  Such is our fate: We the (Surplus) People of the (hmmm; what do we call it now?) used-to-be (but-never-really)  United States  of America.

Meanwhile, in methodical furtherance of our disempowerment -- one of the lessons our Masters' grandfathers learned in Tsarist Russia is what happens when workers are allowed guns --  local rulers in both  Seattle and Tacoma have pioneered an entirely constitutional means of prohibiting civilian firearms ownership and funding compulsory buybacks. Thus the Ruling Class terror of revolution is being expressed -- just as I had repeatedly warned it would be -- by a notably Orwellian campaign of imposing forcible disarmament, mandatory pacifism and compulsory victimhood on every civilian who is not officially certified as a ChristoNazi or other sort of fascist, whether by obscene wealth or sturmabteilung membership. Borrowing from the poll-tax era, out masters have imposed taxation intended to make gun ownership so prohibitively expensive it is transformed -- first in the Ruling Class rat-lab of Washington state,² ultimately throughout the entire imperial homeland --  into a rare privilege only the wealthiest, most fanatically reactionary aristocrats can afford.

Exactly as in the antebellum South.
___________________________

¹See particularly pages 100-104, Mein Kampf (the Ford Translation, Elite Minds Inc.:2009), for a summary of some of the Nazi attitudes later embraced by Ayn Rand. For EMI's other titles -- and evidence indicative of its overall political and socioeconomic bias -- go here and here.

²As testified by Watergate Felon John Ehrlichman, the Seattle plutocrat who played a leading role in helping President Richard Milhous Nixon nullify the Constitution. See especially this Harper's piece exposing the misogyny, racism and generalized hatefulness that spawned the so-called "War on Drugs" as a notably bipartisan war against racial, biological and ideological minorities. Also I must apologize for the lack of a citation to Ehrlichman's testimony about our Masters' use of  Washington state as a favorite psychological-warfare laboratory to test and perfect their methodologies of oppression. Though the story was covered briefly but extensively by local media including The Seattle Post-Intelligencer at the time, my Ehrlichman file was destroyed on 1 September 1983 by the same arsonist(s) who destroyed all the rest of my life's significant work. With the death of The P-I as a newspaper combined with the deaths of any relevant alternative journals, there is no way (now that Ehrlichman's admission has again become relevant) I can recover any of these bibliographical references; I have squandered I-know-not-how-many hours of  Internet time in failed searches for a usable reference, and now four-and-one-half months short of my 80th birthday, I am too damn old (and therefore too poor and too crippled) for the many requisite journeys to and from the microfiche machines of several Seattle libraries. But if someone is inclined to help me with this search, please do.

*****

I HAD FOOLISHLY imagined the recent election might give me some small reason to applaud, as indeed it did in Seattle. But alas that fleeting moment of uniquely localized joy was quickly reduced to anger and vexation:  

Pierce County sends a message to Sound Transit with vote on the I-976 car-tab measure

Washington State Voters Reject Affirmative Action, Again

Kansas City votes to remove King's name from historic street

Tucson voters overwhelmingly reject sanctuary city measure

Las Vegas law makes sleeping on downtown streets illegal

(These are heads exactly as linked from the Internet, with up-style capitalization or down-style lack thereof as in the originals.)   

Once again I am reminded of what has been the ultimate truth of human life on this planet for the past approximately six thousand years -- that under patriarchy, any and all alleged inferiors are ultimately naught but prey. That includes our Mother Earth, all females, anyone or anything else our male-supremacist  (or male-supremacist-minded)  overlords choose to target for exploitation, enslavement or death.

Nevertheless I wonder if it is wrong to equate Nazis and Neoliberals. The big difference is even the Nazis sought better lives for those they considered their own Aryan kind, while Neoliberals seek better lives only for themselves and make no secret of the fact they intend to savage all rest of us to ensure their obscenely undeserved comforts: Nazism shrunken to its most black-holishly in-sucking microcosm, as it were.

But thanks to the obsession-with-self  now so thoroughly ingrained in so huge an USian majority by allegedly "educational" or "religious" celebration of Ayn Rand's predatory individuality, it has become the Empire's sole defining ethos. Thus have our Masters transmogrified every one of our potentially revolutionary solidarities -- those of class and race and gender -- into insurmountable barriers the prevailing cult of Identity-Politics selfishness guarantees cannot ever be toppled or even ameliorated.

*****

FIVE RELATIVELY RECENT news reports and features  the comment-threads of which contain responses I am especially proud to share:

Abortion After the Clinic

FOCUS: 'Not Our Mission': Private Fire Crews Protect the Insured, Not the Public

FOCUS: A Future Without Ruth Bader Ginsburg Is a Chilling Prospect

Did Kavanaugh's Replacement, Neomi Rao, Show the Supreme Court a Path to Justify Trump's Defiance of Congress?

While Supreme Court Waffles, Cities Stand Up for LGBT Workers’ Rights

My apologies if I've linked to any of these reports in other contexts. 

*****

I WONDER IF anyone with greater readership than I has noted the existential similarities between the Republican assault-by-invasion against the Democratic (sic) participants in a classified (and therefore closed) impeachment hearing and the Democratic (sic) slaveholder-family Southron congressman's attempt to beat Republican Sen. Charles Sumner to death with a wooden cudgel.

No, this did not happen last week in Trumpland; it was one of the incidents that presaged the Civil War.

(And yes there are ironies here aplenty,  chief among them the 180-degree, century-long turnabout by which the Republican Party eventually betrayed the very peoples of color whose vigor had energized its youth, even as the Democratic (sic) Party would betray them again as, three decades later, our implacably white-supremacist nation became ever-more-open about resurrecting its white supremacy to its good-ole-Ku-Klux-Klavern max.)

But let us not forget how the Republicans first employed their modern adaption of  this slave-masterly tactic to deny Albert Gore Jr. the presidency in 2000. Nor this, which begins with how a Republican candidate assaulted a mainstream journalist and (thereby?) won an election victory and in its turn brings us back to this and therefore to this, all of which together I submit as irrefutable proof the Republicans are not only methodically encouraging violence but deliberately getting more brazenly violent themselves.

Plus given the growing weight of evidence there is indeed (again) some super-secret organization behind the global fascist conspiracy, it must certainly be asked what clandestine operations might have been served by this most recent act of treasonous brutality.

*****

RALPH NADER HAS written a new essay entitled "The World Is Waiting for America to Rise Up"; like most of his work it is informative and compelling. When it was published last week (8 November 2019) by the website Truthdig, I read it carefully, then took some time to pen a thoughtfully critical comment-thread response -- only to see my work slain by censors literally seconds after I posted it.  Here -- with an ink-stained social finger uplifted in contemptuous salute to Truthdig's picayune proctors of punitive propriety -- is the text they hoped they had suppressed:

I know and often applaud Mr. Nader -- I was the first daily-newspaper reporter in the United States to take seriously the findings he would later reveal in Unsafe at Any Speed (and of course the story was killed by my editor, Richard Smyser, ironically then chairman of the Associated Press Managing Editors Freedom of Information Committee) -- so I post the following with a combination of respectfulness and regret:

In the inescapably abject and steadily worsening poverty of old age, I am closer in the everyday sense to this nation's now-genuinely wretched "grassroots" than I ever was before, even during the 30-plus award-winning years I served a dozen newspapers and magazines in staff positions ranging from reporter to editor-in-chief.

Hence from innumerable conversations with socioeconomic peers of all ages I know something the pollsters dare not ask and Mr. Nader most assuredly does not want to hear: that most USians regardless of age, ethnicity or gender ignore calls to action because we -- like so many Germans under Nazism -- have learned from bitter experience we are already a hopelessly conquered people.

Which is the only conclusion possible from the data Mr. Nader cites in the above essay -- data that is further confirmed by the painfully low voter turnouts that reveal the (correct) belief we-the-people have been reduced to such irremediable powerlessness, a growing majority now acknowledges our elections are naught but meaningless charades.

Precisely as proven by Barack the Betrayer, any vote for a self-proclaimed progressive is likely to be a vote that merely sets us up for yet more betrayal.

That's how I know homeless camps are, in mostly denied truth, the only accurate archetype of our future: we the people now eternally damned by our Neoliberal masters to serfdom, slavery and whatever other forms of torture, exploitation and victimization they impose -- invariably with their signature gloating sadism.

Yes there is a flurry of bright spots, such as Kshama Sawant's victory in Seattle, but any progressive victory can be (and will be) nullified by the ChristoNazi cabal that now and forever rules the Empire via the Robbers' Court.

Under those irremediable conditions, resistance truly is futile -- just as it has always been, and just as it is sure to remain as long as the Capitalists are allowed to retain their omnipotence.

Doubt this?

Look at how every progressive gain we-the-people forced on the United States (mostly via the labor movement) during the New Deal and again c. 1961-1968 has either been repealed or – like the right of women to control their own bodies – it is under such relentlessly well-funded ChristoNazi attack its repeal is inevitable.

Moreover we are increasingly schooled in the corollary fact resistance has again become deadly dangerous.

And it will soon -- as soon as the ChristoNazis complete their consolidation of power in the boiled-frog aftermath of the coup of 22 November 1963 -- be infinitely deadlier.

In fact (based on new technologies of oppression and Rightist promises to maximize their use), it will be far more deadly dangerous than it was in Germany under Hitler.

But above all else we know this time the Nazi onslaught is literally forever because there will never again be a people or nation allowed to develop, as the Soviet Union was able to do, a force capable of defeating it -- "forever" in this context defined as however many years remain until we have rendered our own species extinct and reduced our Mother Earth back to a bug planet.

All that said, the only lesson I can discern in the rapidity with which Truthdig killed this piece is that the terminal truths of our ecogenoicidal era are increasingly tabooed -- including by allegedly "progressive"  publishers. To learn about of my two most telling encounters with our "nonexistent" press censorship, go here.

*****

AN ECLECTIC ANTHOLOGY of suggested reading from websites Left, Right and center, the following reports and essays sample the circumstances of our lives and the condition of our planet as we squirm beneath the crushing weight of Neoliberalism. Most of these are current works -- that is, published since mid-October.  The one exception, "How Democrats Keep Guns in the Hands of the Rich" (and are working overtime to confiscate them from all the rest of us), is a 2017 Chicago Tribune report that despite its age remains relevant today, especially in light of what is being done to us here in Washington state. (Yes, you already may have read one or more of these stories,  but in case their headlines pique your interest, here they are, in no particular order):

Missouri officials tracked women’s menstrual periods in effort to shut down state’s last abortion provider

Senate Democrats Join GOP to Back 'Automatic Austerity' Bill That Would Gut Social Programs, Hamstring Bold Policies

Humanity Has Already Destroyed Half the Animal and Plant Life on Earth

Crow Nation Is a Place Where One Could Vanish - and Many Have

After This Fungus Turns Ants Into Zombies, Their Bodies Explode 

Colorado Student Suspended for Holding Gun in Picture on Social Media

Best Gun Friendly States for Firearm Owners (2019)

David Lynch's Chillingly Prescient Vision of Modern America

How Democrats keep guns in the hands of the rich

The Boeing crashes and the criminalization of American capitalism

What in the world is Adam Schiff thinking with his domestic terrorism bill?

A New Study Confirms (Again) That Race, Not Economics, Drove Former Democrats to Trump

Restaurant Owner Enslaved Intellectually Disabled Black Man

Class War Violence: Centralia 1919 - CounterPunch.org

For the Eleventh Straight Year, United States Votes “No” to UN Anti-Nazi Resolution

The U.S. Drops to 32nd in Global Ranking of Nations Promoting Freedom of Thought

Trump Reveals Plans for Nationwide Crackdown, More Militarized Police

Muddying The Waters On Firearms Research & Suicides

Why Aren't People in the US Rising Up Like Those Elsewhere in the World?

AP Photos: Hong Kong protesters resort to medieval weapons

The Associated Press photo essay immediately above -- which includes some excellent photographs made under difficult wartime conditions -- brings to mind unpublished fiction I wrote in the late 1950s and early-to-mid 1960s, including a short-story about modern-day revolutionaries who responded to confiscatory disarmament by equipping and organizing regiments of archers;  its plot came to me as I watched the NYPD tactical police massing like medieval infantry to clear Central Park's Sheep Meadow of the many-thousand participants in the 1967 Easter Be-In, a Countercultural event I had already covered for maybe nine hours as a freelancer -- never mind it was also my 27th birthday. But all my fictional manuscripts were destroyed by the arsonist(s) of 1 September 1983, the same person or persons who also incinerated, as I note in the sidebar, a 24-year investigative project that had seemed solidly destined for mainstream publication, two other non-fiction works-in-progress and thousands of thematically related photographs, a loss so devastating it insured -- as I am certain was intended -- that no matter how much longer I might live, I would never again dare seek significant outlets for my work. Hence I have no clue what Dispatches might yet become, though perhaps a beneficent Muse will reveal to me its proper direction.

LB/15 November 2019

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WHEN I FINALLY ABANDONED my effort to make Dispatches a weekly news site and decided instead to retain its title but post only when events and (dwindling) creative impulses so demanded, my notion was I'd normally write maybe one post per month -- unless of course some breaking story required the 21st Century online equivalent of an Extra.  

(Yes I am old enough to remember when newsboys -- and very occasionally newsgirls -- hawked papers on the street: "Extra, Extra, read all about it...")

(No, not "just like in the movies"; "exactly as in what used to be real life" instead.) 

But then the net neutrality story took a new and damnably revealing turn that underscores my most recent anti-censorship essay and again demonstrates how the Left destroys its own credibility not only with censorship per se but with malicious disinformation -- in other words by behaving exactly as the ChristoNazis, Original Nazis and fascists routinely behave -- and thereby, like our enemies, serving our Overlords by further spreading chaos and confusion amongst us all, we the people of the ever-more-savagely oppressed 99 Percent, we who are ever-more-undeniably the planet's [only] remaining human beings.

Quoth the website Demand Progress in a 1 October 2019 email (bf as in original): 

A federal court just threw out a key part of Ajit Pai's repeal of net neutrality—a game-changer in the fight for net neutrality...But while we didn't get the complete win we wanted, allowing states to enact their own strong net neutrality protections is a huge deal. And we can still win at the federal level by pressing the Senate and presidential candidates to act. 

This grotesquely misleading pitch for an "emergency donation" then jumps to somewhat-less-deceptive, light-faced huckstering inside:

A federal court has just thrown out part of Ajit Pai's repeal of net neutrality. This ruling also means the 2020 presidential candidates need to step up and pledge to restore net neutrality — and we’re working hard to push them to do so. But we can’t act without your help, and time is of the essence.

All of which illustrates the knife-edged relevance of Chris Hedges' 2015 essay, "Our Mania for Hope Is a Curse" -- an essay every (allegedly) Leftist U.S. website save the notably courageous Popular Resistance has long ago maliciously suppressed as contrary to the mandatory USian  cult of (tyranny-preserving) clinically delusional optimism: 

The naive belief that history is linear, that moral progress accompanies technical progress, is a form of collective self-delusion. It cripples our capacity for radical action and lulls us into a false sense of security...

But to challenge it, to state the obvious fact that things are getting worse, and may soon get much worse, is to be tossed out of the circle of magical thinking that defines American and much of Western culture. The left is as infected with this mania for hope as the right. It is a mania that obscures reality even as global capitalism disintegrates and the ecosystem unravels, potentially dooming us all...

The 19th century theorist, Louis-Auguste Blanqui, unlike nearly all of his contemporaries, dismissed the belief, central to Karl Marx, that human history is a linear progression toward equality and greater morality...

"Its regressive march," (Blanqui asserted) "goes back through every stage of privilege to human slavery, the final word of the right to property.”

And again it is the eloquently truthful Mr. Hedges who tells us why not only revolution but even the most minimal humanitarian reforms are impossible at present and will undoubtedly remain so for as long as the USian ethos of compulsory delusion paralyzes the Occidental mind, exactly as our diabolically Machiavellian masters intend: 

Only those who accept the very real possibility of dystopia, of the rise of a ruthless corporate totalitarianism, buttressed by the most terrifying security and surveillance apparatus in human history, are likely to carry out the self-sacrifice necessary for revolt.

Meanwhile Credo -- a self-proclaimed "progressive" marketeer that implicitly promotes the notion Capitalism is humanitarianism -- a vivid example indeed of what George Orwell aptly labeled "doublethink" --  has nevertheless (to its credit) reported the partial truth about net neutrality's extermination. 

Quoth Credo:

Yesterday, a federal appeals court affirmed that the Federal Communications Commission's murder of the internet was lawful.

But then of course the Credo text continued pimping the Democratic (sic) Party's hallucinatory agenda of Hope and Change-We-Can-Believe-In by absurdly claiming the same bipartisan cabal of perpe-traitors can somehow (as if by magic) be pressured to restore net neutrality on a national basis -- never mind the lifetime (hence effectively eternal)¹  ChristoNazi control of the Supreme Court forever nullifies all such efforts.        

Not surprisingly, the most factually complete report of this ongoing Neoliberal atrocity -- an atrocity that will undoubtedly be grown to national proportions by the Robbers' Court -- is by a harder-to-censor wire service, specifically the Associated Press, the text of which was also featured by TruthDig:

The Federal Communications Commission could dump rules that keep internet providers from favoring some services over others, but couldn’t bar states like California from enacting their own prohibitions, a federal court ruled.

While Tuesday’s ruling handed Trump-appointed regulators a partial victory, consumer advocates and other groups viewed the ruling as a victory for states and local governments seeking to put in their own net neutrality rules.

The FCC’s 2015 net neutrality rules had barred internet providers such as AT&T, Comcast and Verizon from blocking, slowing down or charging internet companies to favor some sites or apps over others.

Once again the Norman Vincent Peale disciples  and all the other power-of-positive-thinking pimps are confronted with the ultimate truth their historically illiterate, clinically delusional belief "the arc of history bends toward justice" is one of the two the most monstrously crippling Big Lies ever imposed on human beings. 

The other Big Lie? The equally delusional, equally paralyzing belief in "eternal life" -- which commands its deliberately duped millions to submit to the Neoliberal horrors by which our masters are slowly exterminating us and to focus gaining on the nonexistent rewards of "heaven"  instead.

All that said, the many-times-cited reason I seldom bother to report anything about the net-neutrality squabble is my recognition of Neoliberal murderousness tells me any notion of its restoration is but pie-in-the-sky.

Why?

Because one of the primary objectives of the Neoliberal (NeoNazi) New World Order is the malicious denial -- ultimately the zero-tolerance denial -- of any  information that might be useful to us, we the people of the 99 Percent, lest we awaken to the fact "Neoliberal" is already secret synonym for "enslavement"
___________________________

¹The death of net neutrality is "effectively eternal" because whatever reality prevails at the moments of our deaths is literally "forever" in the sense that any change, tyrannizing or liberating,  that takes place after one's death -- the permanent eradication of one's consciousness -- can never be known by the dead.

*****

A Dozen Relevant Reports I Hope You Will Read and Contemplate

NORMALLY I WOULD have set these aside to be posted as recommended reading once each month. But the last week produced so many such stories, my collection-file was soon overflowing. Hence:  

Report Highlights Gender Inequality Worldwide
Women are often at a disadvantage compared to men. A study shows where in the world the situation is especially dramatic -- and which countries are the closest to reaching gender equality. Description: conceptually useful geographic details of the patriarchal/Abrahamic/Capitalist/Neoliberal/NeoNazi horrors with which we are already familiar.

Secret Israeli Nuclear Test Covered Up to Help Jimmy Carter’s Re-Election
Former President Jimmy Carter covered up a nuclear weapon test by Israel in 1979, declassified reports have suggested. His administration feared that making the discovery public would damage his bid for re-election. U.S. satellites picked up a “double flash” signal associated with a nuclear explosion in the South Indian Ocean in September 1979. This led to an emergency at the White House, according to Foreign Policy magazine which obtained the documents.

Washington's Coastal Tribes Are Working to Escape Rising Sea Levels
For the Native tribes that have historically lived along Washington’s Pacific coast, the threat of rising waters is real and imminent. As a result, many must grapple with the forced relocation of entire villages to higher ground before their homes are submerged. Dystopic Observation: But, as always -- this misleadingly optimistic report not withstanding -- our genocidal overlords continue doing everything in their white-supremacist power to condemn the tribes to extinction, whether by surging sea levels or myriad other mechanisms of slow-motion genocide. 

One Year after Khashoggi Murder, US CEOs Flock to Saudi Arabia
At least 40 US executives are preparing to attend the annual Future Investment Initiative (FII) conference, dubbed “Davos in the Desert,” at the end of this month. Many of them bailed out of last year’s event, held just weeks after Khashoggi’s killing, sending subordinates to represent them in order to avoid being seen as openly endorsing the murderous methods of the Saudi monarchy. Casting such qualms aside this year, senior executives from Wall Street’s top financial firms—Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and BlackRock—are all listed...

Boeing Engineer Filed Complaint Alleging Culture of Profit Over Safety
A senior Boeing engineer filed an internal ethics complaint this year following two fatal 737 Max crashes, claiming that the company rejected a safety system during the plane's development to cut costs though it could have reduced the risks, according to the New York Times. In the complaint, which Boeing has sent to the Justice Department, the engineer Curtis Ewbank alleged, "Boeing management was more concerned with cost and schedule than safety or quality," according to the newspaper, which has reviewed the complaint...Ewbank also called out Boeing's chief executive Dennis Muilenburg for publicly misrepresenting the safety of the plane, the newspaper reported. DO: Welcome to the deadly skies of Capitalism.

NATO Rejects Putin's Request to Ban Missile Deployments in Europe
At the end of this week NATO announced a bombshell that’s gone largely under-reported given the Ukraine transcript brouhaha and Democrats’ push for impeachment.

Bigots Welcome on America's Police Forces
In June, Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting identified hundreds of police officers across the country who were members of closed racist, Islamophobic, misogynistic or anti-government militia groups on Facebook. We sought reaction from more than 150 law enforcement departments about their officers’ involvement in these extremist groups. Yet only one department – the Harris County Sheriff’s Office, which fired a detective for racist posts – has publicly taken any significant action.

Democrats Refuse to Include Gang Members in 'Red Flag' Laws
Democrats showed their lack of interest in gun control laws that address the real source of gun violence this week when they refused to include gang members in “Red Flag” laws. DO: Thus the Democratic (sic) Party's role as chief perpe-traitor of the Ruling Class effort to frog-boil all us Working Class folks to compulsory pacifism continues apace -- never mind the ChristoNazification of the federally militarized local police means the cops' storm-trooper allies will of course -- exactly as in Nazi Germany -- be allowed to keep their weapons and thereby given carte blanche to terrorize us at will. (This report is unapologetically linked from a Rightist website because all major U.S. Leftist sites forbid pro-Second-Amendment coverage.)   

US Census Report: Inequality Grew Rapidly in 2018 to Record Levels
Social inequality in the United States is rapidly reaching unprecedented levels, according to US Census data published Thursday. The past year saw a staggering transfer of wealth from the bottom 90 percent of the population to the top 10 and top 5 percent. This is the intended result of the bipartisan social counterrevolution intensified by Barack Obama and carried to a fever pitch by Donald Trump, who has slashed corporate taxes and regulations with no opposition from Democrats in Congress.

Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders Blow Past Joe Biden in Fundraising Race
Presidential candidates Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders greatly eclipsed former Vice President Joe Biden in fundraising over the past three months, placing progressive Democrats on strong footing in the crucial final stretch before primary voting begins. RELEVANCE: The significant part of this story is its comment thread, specifically -- again apropos our censorship topic -- the overwhelmingly negative reaction I got for pointing out that Sanders' heart attack makes him un-electable. 

The Corporate Democrats (and Alicia Garza) Spewing Get-Sanders Slanders
Once the Bernie Sanders threat has subsided, Elizabeth Warren will be required to further neuter herself to allay the fears of billionaire Democratic donors...The War of/on Terror and Russiagate – both involving mass psychological warfare operations to stamp out domestic resistance to the global U.S. imperial offensive – signaled that the Lords of Capital’s tolerance for dissent was approaching zero. The contradictions of late stage capitalism and the increasing precariousness of U.S. empire squeezed all vestiges of liberality out of the boardrooms, as was reflected in the content of their ever-consolidating media. DO: written before Sanders' heart attack, this essay approaches genuine prophecy.

Earth’s Magnetic Field Mysteriously Pushing North Pole to Siberia
Earth’s magnetic field, the basis for modern global navigation systems, is constantly in some state of flux. However, it now seems to be going haywire, pushing the North Pole closer to Siberia, and no one’s sure why. The field changes as the molten metals surrounding the earth’s solid iron core churn and flow, creating electric currents and a corresponding magnetic field. As a result, the magnetic poles tend to shift slightly as a matter of course...(but)...The north magnetic pole sped across the International Date Line last year at a rate of 55 km per year, more than three times as fast as it moved before the mid-1990s. Now located in the Eastern Hemisphere, it’s moving away from Canada and approaching Siberia. Important detail: This report includes the most spectacular photo of the Aurora Borealis I have ever seen.

*****

IF WE ARE ever to cope with what is being done to us, we need to first transcend decades of carefully induced clinical delusion and admit why the Neoliberal (NeoNazi) Ruling Class is  reducing  our  once  beautiful  and productive nation to naught but a continent-sized miasma of burnt forests, slums, homeless camps, concentration camps, prisons and ever-more-heavily guarded military cantonments. The reason we are being drowned in destitution is simple: the Capitalists' genocidal exploitation of people and ecocidal rape of Nature is far more profitable in colonial realms more easily terrorized to submission.  Thus our domestic overlords are turning back to their ancestral source of obscene wealth: we the people, whom our overlords are quickly reducing to slavery -- which they in their greedy sadistic malevolence hail as the ultimate form of profiteering.

LB/4 October 2019

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