My father Donald Read Bliss inside his house-trailer in Knoxville, Summer 1969, the last time I saw him alive. Leica M4, 35mm f/2 Summicron probably wide open; Tri-X in UFG at 1200 ASA. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2011. (Click on image for full-frame view.)
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AS I CONFRONT the inevitable sadness and regret associated with the 40th anniversary of my father's death, I am struck by how the pro-union demonstrations in Madison and elsewhere would surely win his approval just as the Civil Rights Movement did.
Meanwhile these new North American mobilizations of resistance to deliberately inflicted economic crises already fill me with enormous hopefulness we may have at last begun to shake off our Moron Nation submissiveness.
Yet I also see clearly how the DemocRats – the class-cowards who sat silently on the sidelines until they were goaded into action by MSNBC's Ed Schultz – are already attempting to co-opt Wisconsin's solidarity and pervert it to their own Machiavellian schemes.
It was this very sort of treachery – specifically DemocRat support for the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act – that prompted my father to support the outspoken New Deal advocate Henry Wallace over the ideologically backsliding political hack Harry Truman in 1948.
Hence my hopefulness is restrained by an equal measure of fear that hope itself will once again be proven not audacity but imbecility, precisely as Barack the Betrayer and so many other DemocRats have so notoriously proven it already.
As Obama has schooled us, these days we're on our own: the protection of the Wall Street banksters and the Big Business tycoons is now openly first on the political agenda whether the politician is DemocRat or GOPorker.
In the face of such tyranny, writing or even thinking about politics is nothing more than mental masturbation. It was precisely for this reason I began the year promising to direct my energies elsewhere, mostly to photography and memoirs, also to bits of volunteer work for my neighborhood association and my fellow seniors.
Nevertheless it seems events beyond my control have once again refocused my attention on political matters – this time (and really for the first time since the murder of Robert F. Kennedy on 5 June 1968) – with a dreadfully fragile but nevertheless undeniable maybe-we-can-still-prevail optimism.
All of which is more than anything else the legacy of my dead father, the influence of his teachings, the fact that (as we shall see) he continued to live his political beliefs as best he could – to “walk the walk” as the popular cliché puts it – long after he had given up all hope humanity would ever achieve the utopia he had envisioned in his youth.
For me this is the ultimate intersection of political and personal.
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My father's name was Donald Read Bliss. He was born into privilege and comfort on 4 July 1910 and died – a Bostonian exiled to the hard and bigoted isolation of Knoxville, Tennessee – alone in bed at approximately 4:30 a.m. Eastern Standard Time on 20 February 1971.
Told at age 28 the damage inflicted by childhood rheumatic fever had left him but five years to live, he proved the doctors wrong and lived to age 60. He was killed – apparently in his sleep (though it is said one is always awakened by the pain and terror implicit in one's final moments) – by a combined stroke and heart attack.
As befits our family's mostly Celtic ancestry – and though I was nearly 3,000 miles away in Bellingham, Washington – he announced his departure by appearing briefly at the foot of my own bed. My female companion, a young Irishwoman, saw him even more clearly than I. So did my dog Dingo, who howled as I never heard him howl before or since and whose howling seemed, for just an instant (and as my companion would later confirm), to blend with another far more eldritch cry of lamentation.
Though a boarding-school boyhood had left him ill suited for parenting, my father was by far the best teacher I ever knew. His knowledge and understanding of history and historical processes seemed to have no peer – not even amongst the presumably learned professors I encountered en route to an interdisciplinary BA degree that included a substantial component of history and the broader studies of history now labeled humanities.
Indeed I suspect had the Great Depression not intervened, my father might have become a history professor himself. I have no doubt the study of history and its associated technologies were his greatest passions.
His intellect and determination were breathtaking. Even shrunken as his personal fortunes were by the Crash of 1929, he rose to a district directorship in the War Production Board c. 1945. Yet by the end of his life his workplace had shrunk – through no fault of his own – to an Esso service-station franchise on the outskirts of Knoxville.
In the intervening years, 1950 through 1966, he had been the only mortgage banker in East Tennessee (and probably in the entire South) courageous enough to lend money to credit-worthy African American families for buying houses in white neighborhoods. He also defied a “Christian” bankers' boycott and arranged the financing that built Knoxville's first Tennessee Valley Unitarian-Universalist Church.
Knowing as I do from my own bitter firsthand experience the true vindictiveness of the South, I do not doubt my father's straited end-of-life circumstances were Ruling Class vengeance for his brave contributions to the causes of civil rights and spiritual diversity.
*****
Politically my father was a New Deal Democrat in public and an unapologetic Marxist at home.
By the time I was in high school he had taught me what now in the long retrospect of my own old age I recognize as perhaps the most politically useful lesson of all: how to shed our Moron Nation blinders thus to see the carefully hidden elements of class-struggle that govern all human life.
It was upon this foundation that subsequent teachings in my native New York City – especially the free Manhattan James Baldwin so accurately immortalized as Another Country – made it undeniably clear capitalism should be regarded as nothing more than an ultimately pointless rat race whether one is a Marxist or merely an avowed bohemian like myself.
Indeed it is a prime legacy of a youth so blessedly shaped by such powerfully eye-opening influences I now write instinctively from the premise the capitalist economy is the ultimate behaviorists' rat maze even unto its favorite rat-starter – the device that sets us all running – which of course and no matter whether we are rodent or human is abject terror: in our human circumstances our terrible fears of unemployment and hunger and foreclosure and homelessness and the dread sum of them all the ultimate pissbum-in-a-doorway degradation of inescapable poverty and its associated pariahdom.
Another accurate analogy to capitalism is of course the workplace as stockyard with its executives as the herdsmen whose cattle-prods eventually drive us under the executioners' hammers so that even our remains are turned to Ruling Class profit: such is the system in which infinite greed is elevated to maximum virtue and absolute selfishness proclaimed the ultimate good.
It is also thanks to my father I knew – long before it became the common knowledge of today – the promises of the rat-masters are never to be believed: that for anyone outside the tiny capitalist aristocracy, there was always the huge danger we will be thrown under the proverbial bus just as we are now being flung by DemocRats and GOPorkers alike.
Which of course is what is provoking the events unfolding in Madison in front of the state capitol building – a place that with its architecture of arrogance and its piled snow is an eerie reminder of the Winter Palace in Petrograd maybe 1905 but surely not quite 1917.
But at least for now the astonishing rebellion of organized labor in Wisconsin and elsewhere is promising to be the strongest anti-depressant I have known in this lifetime.
And could it be, as seems apparent from the television coverage, the activists are boldly reclaiming the color red? If so, they are rescuing red from its hard-right revisionist kidnappers and restoring it to its former age-old status as the ultimate blood-of-workers banner of economic democracy and humanitarianism.
To paraphrase Dylan: something is happening, and we don't know what it is.
*****
On 27 April 2010 I wrote and posted here and on Facebook an essay that asked what seemed to me an obvious question: “Economic Collapse: Capitalist Death-Stroke to Hated Public Services?”
The piece acquired a tiny bit of notoriety amongst my readers because Facebook not only suppressed it almost instantly but severed the link between itself and TypePad, my blog server, so that any subsequent new material in Outside Agitator's Notebook would no longer appear on Facebook without special effort on my part.
That was the onset of a long dismal sequence of troubles with Facebook that culminated a few weeks ago in the (deliberate?) compromising of sufficient information phish-fraudsters were able to send their would-be victims messages seemingly from me. The messages led directly into phish-traps from which Microsoft-programmed computers would then be electronically looted of all security information including bank passwords and – once so emptied – subsumed in bot-nets for further criminal activities.
Though I am no longer shackled to Bill Gates, many of my friends still are, which means my only ethical move was to do as I did – leave Facebook immediately and presumably forever – which of course has severely diminished my already small readership, no doubt exactly as intended.
Even so (and with both an uplifted fist and an uplifted finger to the Ruling Class) here below is that essay again, its core question – is the economic collapse intended to be the final battle of the class war? – answered beyond dispute by the policies that are provoking the Wisconsin Uprising and kindred resistance throughout capitalism's United Estates.
Without the teachings of my father, it is not a question I'd have known enough to ask.
*****
As if I am being warned against over-optimism, the ears of my mind again hear the voice of my father predicting economic conditions in the United States will eventually become so savage, its victims will welcome the Red Army as the citizens of Paris welcomed the allies in August 1944: that is, as an army of liberation.
Thank you, Dad, for teaching me to question authority and most of all to think.
It is one of the great regrets of my life I was unable to attend your memorial service, though I believe you understood what certain other family members never will: that I was a college student, subsisting literally from hand to mouth on the punitively tiny Vietnam Era G.I. Bill and whatever other financial crumbs I could scrounge – that I was truly broke.
I think you know too Dad the Veterans Emergency Loan Fund at Western Washington State College had already run dry that quarter, which meant my only alternative was to try to beg the necessary travel money from my mother – the same woman who so despised us both she vindictively destroyed your American Houses career in 1943 and tried to murder me in 1945.
Predictably she not only refused the loan but hid her hatefulness, as she nearly always did, behind her singularly venomous brand of Christianity: “If it's god's will you go to your father's funeral, god will provide” and of course her god – who is a malevolent and sadistic god – merely granted my mother another psychological triumph: just as she hoped, my absence from the service provoked an everlasting familial schism.
Most of all Dad may this long-overdue eulogy help you rest in peace.
*****
Economic Collapse: Capitalist Death-Stroke To Hated Public Services?
WHAT IF THE destruction of governmental services is in fact the clandestine purpose behind the economic collapse?
Too far fetched to consider?
Look at our national history.
Note how in the United States the capitalist Ruling Class relentlessly opposes government social services – public education, transit, health care, welfare, unemployment and disability compensation – and has done so since their inception.
Whenever possible, the Ruling Class uses its ownership of the political process to ensure such services never come into being.
When that tactic fails – as it did during the New Deal – the Ruling Class targets the services with relentless wars of attrition, as in the campaign to privatize Social Security.
Or the Ruling Class co-opts some genuinely humanitarian effort, as it did in its perversion of health care reform into the implicit slavery and unimaginably huge windfall profits of mandatory insurance – potentially the greatest forcible transfer of wealth from people to plutocrats ever recorded.
These days – with the politicians of both parties in unabashed servitude to the Ruling Class (hence my use of the labels DemocRat and GOPorker) – such efforts appear unstoppable: so much so the final legacy of our era may well be the death of U.S. constitutional democracy.
But until now the associated warfare has been so low-keyed – and so methodically downplayed by Ruling Class media – it was imperceptible save to its designated victims: a circumstance enormously facilitated by the national cult of self-obsession that ensures our imprisonment in Moron Nation.
Again consider our history.
During the 1930s and for several years beyond the end of World War II, the U.S. had the best, most widespread public transport in the world. Even smaller cities – witness Roanoke, Virginia and Bellingham, Washington – had electrically powered trolley systems, what today is called "light rail."
But all that was deliberately swept away – not by accident, but by governmental collaboration with the Ruling Class to ensure our permanent enslavement by Big Oil and Big Automotive.
Whether by compulsory automobile ownership – the ultimate example of slaves conditioned to love their bondage – or by transit systems wedded to buses, we are now inescapably shackled to vehicles powered by fossil-fueled, internal-combustion-engines.
The initial victims – those of us who could not afford automobiles – complained bitterly. Indeed we still complain. But because we are impoverished – that is, because we are demonstrably unprofitable (and therefore deemed unworthy of capitalist exploitation) – our complaints are dismissed as irrelevant.
Much the same thing happened when millions of the poorest and most disabled people were flung off welfare by intentionally murderous welfare cutbacks. Many DemocRats and GOPorkers applauded the savagery as “reform.” The remainder of the non-welfare population was indifferent. Few imagined they might someday need the very safeguards that had been so heartlessly – and permanently – destroyed.
Likewise when reversal of the indisputably real post-Sputnik education reforms began the process of moronation – the post-Kennedy dumbing down that has made us the most ignorant people on earth.
Teachers protested; so did the better students. No one else listened.
Now of course the economic collapse and its subsequent Great Recession have inflicted a reduction of tax revenues so severe it has no precedent. This in turn has radically accelerated not just public school closures but the termination of all categories of social services.
The revenue shortfall is so huge – so devastating – it threatens to eliminate any governmental function that does not directly serve the goals of capitalism: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, the total subjugation of all the rest of us.
Predictably, the military budget thus continues to be obscenely fattened even as every other budget is methodically starved.
Conditioned as we are to regard The Economy as a god-like entity beyond human control – conditioned too to regard the Ruling Class as stupid and bumbling – it seldom occurs to us to focus on how cleverly the so-called "collapse" escalates the seven-decade war on social services, perhaps to its final anti-humanitarian triumph.
No, you say. Not possible; not even the most diabolically greedy Wall Streeters would dare torpedo the economy merely to sink the governmental services they so notoriously despise. Besides, capitalists are not that bright...
Ah but note how these presumptively dimwitted capitalists destroyed the seemingly all-powerful Soviet Union, how they have concentrated their holdings into monopolies now more powerful than any government in human history, how their capitalist edicts now shape even the minutiae of everyday life.
Indeed perhaps capitalism's most successful stratagem of all has been convincing us the capitalists themselves are boorish dunces.
Meanwhile it becomes ever more undeniable – note the charges against Goldman Sachs – the alleged “collapse” was deliberately engineered.
And now the slow attrition of social services has become a rout.
Meanwhile the one principle that would combine all these facts in razor-edged symbiosis has been suppressed by the most relentless campaign of intellectual censorship and criminal taboo this nation has ever known.
What principle is that?
The historic truth of class struggle: the law of cause and effect applied to human societies, for the discovery of which all thanks to Karl Marx and Frederich Engels:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/
Outsourcing industry and downsizing the workforce – permanent Jobless Recovery – gave the Ruling Class a financial bonus of a magnitude inconceivable to most of us: picture a convoy of Brinks trucks long enough to ring the earth at the equator.
Now the downsizing of social services – first gradual, now cataclysmic – adds still more to the capitalists' already unthinkable wealth.
Note too how the Ruling Class gradually freed itself from taxation, thereby guaranteeing that – once it pulled the plug on the American Dream – it was already exempt from the New Deal-type assessments that would be essential to rebuild the job market.
"Cunning" is understatement.
Factor in the looming double-apocalypse of petroleum bankruptcy and terminal climate change, and you have the perfect motive for grab-it-and-run looting: hence “collapse.”
Post-Katrina New Orleans is thus in every sense of the word a portrait of our future: the destiny to which – if the capitalist Ruling Class has its way – We the People have already been damned.
If I prayed – which because I regard prayer as an adult version of letters to Santa Claus I do not – I would pray that I am wrong.
LB/20 February 2011 (“Economic Collapse” originally published 27 April 2010)
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Posted by: Classic Timberland Boots | 11/27/2011 at 02:39 AM