Loren Bliss: Outside Agitator's Notebook: Wisconsin as Moron Nation; Obama (Another) Reaganoid; I'm Banished

Sandwiches for Mind and Spirit

In photography, a sandwich is a collage made by printing two or more negatives simultaneously, typically to increase the psychodynamic impact of an image. Collage is a medium that has fascinated me for as long as I can remember -- probably since I was a child experimenting with finger paints, glue and newspapers -- but I never took it seriously until, sometime in my early 20s and still thinking myself a painter-to-be, I discovered the works of Jasper Johns. Now it seems to me that making sandwiches is to conventional photography what poetry is to prose: not just an intellectual exercise, but the opening of a doorway to the Mysterious Otherness I know as the Muse, from whom (sometimes in fulfillment of that McLuhanesque notion of art as prophecy) the currents of real creation invariably flow, whether swift and startling as a lightening strike or slow and soft as cottonwood seeds adrift on subtle summer air. The Palin/Hitler image, the newest of these works, is a shout of protest and -- though I hope I'm wrong -- an outcry of dreadful prophecy. The other five are related only categorically, as collage, but they address a subject light-years removed from the encroaching darkness of theocratic fascism. In a sense they are its true antithetical, nurturing yang against toxic yin, the remains of the illustrations for "Glimpses of a Pale Dancer," one of the books-in-progress lost forever in the 1983 fire that destroyed my life's work. Yet despite my losses, I still find solace in the declaration of Taliesin that was to have appeared on the frontispiece of "Dancer," and I believe that -- if our species manages to survive -- Taliesin's vision, which was also the vision of "Dancer," may somehow yet obtain. Its words are given here in the form I know best, as set out by Robert Graves: "The tops of the beech trees/Have sprouted of late/Are changed and renewed/From their withered state..." (Collage and photographic sandwiches copyright Loren Bliss 2009-2010.)

Hopes Betrayed: Faces of the Health Care Fight

Supporters of health care reform and a much smaller number of its opponents -- each faction identified by its picket-signs -- gathered for the "town hall" meeting called by U.S. Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA) in Lakewood on August 25, 2009. Originally scheduled for Lakewood City Hall, the gathering was rescheduled and moved to Lang Stadium to accommodate an unprecedented mobilization of pro-reform people. Cops estimated the crowd at about 2500. Given the betrayal of the reform effort four months later, such activism will probably not be seen in the U.S. again. (Two of these images -- "Single Payer Is the Solution" and "The tensions of opposites and opposition" -- were published here on October 12 and November 19 respectively.) Photos by Loren Bliss copyright 2009.

Graffiti: From Rural Bullets to Urban Bluster

When I returned to New York City in 1965 I was immediately impressed by the contrast between the graffiti I had encountered "out in America" -- the South and Middle West -- and what I saw in Manhattan. While the form and content of graffiti is sociologically important – possibly a semiotic indicator without peer -- I found the graffiti of Manhattan singularly appealing, the intellectual and aesthetic equivalents of a long-overdue breath of fresh air, and within a few days I had begun documenting it with 35mm and 120 film. (The opening photograph of this series was obviously made far from Manhattan, but I included it to establish an essential contrast.) Many more details about this particular body of work, which I briefly resumed when I went back to the City again in 1983, then abandoned after that year's career-terminating fire, are in my post of January 7, 2010. Yes I regard the best urban graffiti as genuine art, but too much of it, alas, is nothing more than a human variant on the canine practice of marking territory with spurts of urine: "I wuz here." All photos by Loren Bliss, copyright dates as noted.

Outside Agitator's Notebook...

is a journal of photography and text supplemented by an occasional collage. It is about life and death in the post-humanitarian United States of America. Its context is our subjugation by Ayn Rand capitalism -- the ecocidal credo of infinite greed redefined as ultimate virtue, the Bhopal-deadly dogma under which we in the Working Class are impoverished by outsourcing, intellectually downsized by inferior schools and psychologically terrorized by manufactured crises. Increasingly damned to labor in Big Business sweatshops and corporate slave-pens (if indeed we are allowed jobs at all), we are valued only to the extent we are exploitable for profit, and -- as soon as we become elderly, disabled or otherwise unprofitable -- we are flung away like broken machines and condemned to slow extermination by deliberate neglect and abandonment. The capitalist Ruling Class perfected these measures and built its prototype Moron Nation -- the state of conditioned helplessness and hopelessness it is now imposing on us all -- in the post-Civil-War South. That is also where the Ruling Class perfected Christian theocracy as its brain-police opiate and organized the Ku Klux Klan -- colloquially known as “the Saturday Night Men’s Bible-Study Class”-- as its original death squad. When the Working Class resisted, the Ruling Class belittled the Labor and Civil Rights movements as the product of “Outside Agitators” but retaliated with job terminations, mass arrests, torture and homicide. Jailed during one such episode in Knoxville, Tennessee (1963), also the survivor of three subsequent murder attempts (one of which cost the life of a brave and especially beloved canine companion), I have for many years proudly claimed the Outside Agitator label for myself -- all the more appropriately given my recognition that any artist under patriarchy (whether capitalist or socialist), is always an Outside Agitator -- a fact confirmed by our expanding knowledge of the artist’s dramatically different circumstances in the vanquished matriarchies that shaped human society for our first hundred-thousand years. While this is a long and complex topic, at its core is the realization matriarchy recognized artists as not just daughters and sons of the cosmos -- the literal truth in Taliesin’s statement “there is nothing in which I have not been” -- but as its disciples as well, the reasoning behind the invocation of the Muse with which Homer and other ancient poets begin their work. By contrast, the patriarchal system that has increasingly ruled us since the sack of Knossos mandates not only the theological prohibition of such relationships but the sociopolitical and economic suppression (or at least co-optation) of anything definitively or even implicitly female. Because artistic process violates all these patriarchal taboos even when its product appears to uphold them, art under patriarchy is always suspected of revolutionary agitation, just as the artist whether male or female is always a pariah, damned to abject poverty unless deemed exploitable for profit as a propagandist or trinket-maker. Now that “change we can believe in” has been undeniably proven a Big Lie by the betrayal of health care reform and our new enslavement via “mandatory insurance,” the material here will focus less on politics per se, more on photography, everyday life and relevant miscellany. OAN is updated weekly, typically on Wednesday nights or Thursday mornings, with occasional Extras as events or obsessions might seem to require.

02/16/2011

Wisconsin as Moron Nation; Obama (Another) Reaganoid; I'm Banished

Note: These are the quips of outside agitation I've posted so far this week on various websites. The last comment – which points out the parthogenetic father/son relationship between Christianity and capitalism – was suppressed by Truthout and seems to have gotten me permanently banished from its ranks of commentators even as its moderators are increasingly tolerant of obvious fascists and other Hard-Rightists.

The most disturbing element of this utterly predictable atrocity in Wisconsin is the astonishing number of people who are shocked by it, even on Common Dreams.

Apparently Moron Nation is far larger than I imagined; apparently there is such Obamanoid denial that even the (alleged) Left does not grasp that the American Experiment in constitutional democracy has been slain by capitalism – and with it the American Dream of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

Nor will either the Dream or the Experiment ever be resurrected. The capitalists will never allow it.

Wake up, people! We are ruled by a New Paradigm: absolute power and unlimited profit for the capitalist elite, total subjugation and genocidal poverty for all the rest of us.

What used to be the United States is now the United Estates of Wall Street and Big Business; what used to be our Constitution is but toilet paper for the banksters and tycoons and the two parties – DemocRat and GOPorker – that are their wholly owned subsidiaries.

As for Wisconsin, the state so many call "progressive" is the state that sent Joseph McCarthy to the U.S. Senate: Joseph McCarthy the closest approximation of Heinrich Himmler the U.S. had spawned until now, this everlasting New Dark Age spreading from the infinite darkness beneath the ObamaBush.

Meanwhile all that is different about Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is that he dares reveal what the moneyed aristocracy intends to do with those who are earmarked for slavery on the Big Plantation and with all the rest of us who – because we are no longer exploitable for profit – are targeted for extermination by abandonment and neglect.

Will Walker prevail? Or will he be – as Hitler and Mussolini were – abandoned by the capitalist ruling class for prematurely revealing the hideous truth of the capitalist ethos: infinite greed as maximum virtue, absolute selfishness as ultimate good.

Either way it is clear "we the people" will do nothing.

Too many of us love our servitude, and all of us know in our hearts the deadly price of resistance.

We know if we were to take to the streets here as the Egyptians did, the government would drop all pretense of democracy; it would be Tienanmen Square all over again, and the subsequent arrests like something orchestrated by Hitler himself.

Thus the unfolding lesson of Wisconsin, its message the dreadful truth that – as under the (presumably) fictional Borg – resistance is futile.

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/02/14-3#comment-form

*****

Unfortunately for all of us here below the salt, Obama – Barack the Betrayer on "Outside Agitator's Notebook" – is indeed another Reaganoid: a closet Republican who won election by waving the false flag of "hope" and brandishing the Big Lie of "change we can believe in."

That the GOPorker noise machine now makes the DemocRats' trickle-down Reaganomic savagery seem "moderate" is merely part of the great deception that has replaced the American Experiment in constitutional democracy.

http://crosscut.com/2011/02/11/politics-government/20626/Mr.-Obama%2C-you-re-no-Ronald-Reagan/?utm_source=Crosscut+Daily+Newsletter&utm_campaign=c533fab8b1-Crosscut_E_mail_2_11_20112_11_2011&utm_medium=email

(A thread from 11 February – a fight over the Ronald Reagan adulation cult – revisited because the controversy was still raging four days later.)

*****

Capitalism and Christianity are born of the same toxic patriarchal seed: the hierarchy of the select and the damned – the elite saved by god or rewarded by capital (the latter a metaphor for god), all the rest of us punished by the physical hell of subjugation and/or the metaphysical hell of damnation – and in every case our lot (allegedly) predestined by divine will. The Nazi concepts of übermenschen and üntermenschen are spawn of the same source.

This is why the capitalist aristocracy is now methodically imposing fundamentalism on the entire nation: its message of individual powerlessness "under god" is the greatest deterrent to economic democracy and humanitarian activism ever discovered.

Hence too the necessity of ensuring the enforcement agencies are suitably indoctrinated: just as the Ku Klux Klan was colloquially known throughout the South as "the Saturday Night Men's Bible Study Class," so is the U.S. military being turned into a new organization of Teutonic Knights – those mercenary Crusaders who Christianized Europe by sword and burning-stake and whose modern-day counterparts are now abroad learning the skills of murder and torture they will soon be employing here at home.

http://www.truth-out.org/christian-flag-folding-ceremony-reveals-official-sanction-church-state-violations-military67748

(Where is Aleksandr Nevskiy now that we need him?)

LB/16 February 2011

Posted at 05:15 PM in Current Affairs, Religion, Web/Tech, Weblogs | Permalink

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Loren Bliss: Outside Agitator's Notebook