(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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