The young woman in this image of oppression always makes me think of how Joan of Arc might have looked as she was led through the marketplace at Rouen on 30 May 1431. Though their fates were far different – this woman beaten and jailed, Saint Joan burned alive – each was nevertheless a victim of tyranny. The picture feels iconic; I remember it did so the instant I framed it in my viewfinder. But not until the advent of Outside Agitator's Notebook was it seen by anyone save those who read the East Village Other in May or June of 1967, perhaps too by the photo editors at The New York Times, Newsweek and Paris-Match and of course the few friends and colleagues familiar with my fire-doomed book “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer.” The picture originally appeared in the extra published by EVO immediately after the Memorial Day police riot in Tompkins Park. (The extra was a project on which the late Walter Bowart and I were among the chief collaborators: he was EVO's founding editor and wrote the text, while most of the inside photographs were mine.) Alas that one edition – which today would be an invaluable Lower East Side historical document – has since been disappeared, neatly sliced from the New York Public Library microfiche files, obviously by a librarian, obviously on the orders of some Ruling Class censor. Though my entire 1967 journal was destroyed by the 1983 fire (and with it most of the year's photographic notes and technical data), the film was undoubtedly Tri-X, developed at The Times' darkroom in whatever was their stock developer, probably D-76; the camera was either a Leica IIIG or a VT Canon, the lens a 35mm F/2 Summicron. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyrights 1967, 2009.
*
AT ONE TIME President Obama's budget speech last night would have had me applauding and maybe even cheering. But now after more than two years of his serial betrayals, my response is limited to muttering “bullshit” and changing the channel.
Everything Barack the Betrayer promised in his 2008 campaign – even his campaign slogan itself – was a lie. So why should I believe him now? Or for that matter, ever again?
More to the point, why should I stupidly embrace the optimism implicit in a positive response to his newest batch of promises? Why should I set myself up for more anguish? Pessimism not only spares me additional pangs of betrayal but gives me the opportunity for at least a small private smile if things don't turn out quite as badly as I now assume they will.
Which – with that curious synchronicity the personal and the political so often demonstrate these days – relates directly to the remainder of this piece. Begun as a response to comments posted a couple of days ago by Franetta McMillan and Sheare Bliss, it quickly morphed into an entirely new essay.
Here – reprinted from 12 April – is the dialogue that inspired it:
Franetta: I wrote one of those pour-your-heart-out letters to Obama, too, while he was deciding what to do about the war in Afghanistan. I must've spent a couple of weeks on it, trying to get every word perfect, like I was actually going to convince him to do right thing. When he announced he was going to escalate it, I felt personally betrayed. I think I might have cried. I was done with him after that.
You know, when Obama first began his run for the Presidency, almost everyone around me was excited, but I didn't trust him -- which, being a black woman, was a positively heretical position for me to take. Too much like a motivational speaker, I thought. It wasn't until after his speech on race that I began to get on board, because it wasn't until then I sensed he had some depth. Oh well. Turns out my first instinct was right.
Sheare: Franetta, I wept on election night, and it was because I truly had not expected that history would be made in my lifetime and with someone that, at the time, I genuinely believed had a strong ethical viewpoint and would bring that viewpoint to action. I should have been weeping for other reasons. I never, ever, ever expected that I would be calling Obama Bush 2.0, and long after other people were expressing concerns, I tried to support him despite my increasing doubts.
I should have been listening to my uncle.
*****
Thank you both.
My skepticism about the president I now call Barack the Betrayer grew initially from the overwhelming support given him by the Wall Street banksters and the barons of Big Business in general, for which see http://www.opensecrets.org/pres08/sectorallc.php?cycle=2008.
It was unprecedented for a Democrat to receive Ruling Class financial support of this magnitude; note how – for the first time ever – the Big Money mostly went not just to Obama but also to the Democratic Party rather than to the Republicans as in years past. To me, schooled as I was in objective analysis (thanks mostly to my father/Sheare's grandfather, the late Donald R. Bliss) – it was obvious the fix was in.
My doubts about Obama were intensified by a foreign policy paper which – published in the Council on Foreign Relations journal Foreign Affairs (thereby implying Obama was the Ruling Class presidential favorite as early as 2007) – argued the United States should expand its role as global tyrant: http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/62636/barack-obama/renewing-american-leadership
Thus Obama aligned himself with the Johnson/Nixon/Ford/Carter/Reagan/Bush I/Clinton/Bush II military and economic policies the United States imposed immediately after the murder of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy on 22 November 1963. I hardly need point out these are the policies that – especially in the eyes of the international Working Class – define the United States as the de facto Fourth Reich: an identity surely underscored by the Nazi-style helmets the U.S. military adopted during the Nixon years, began wearing during the Reagan presidency and has worn ever since.
Lastly there was the alternative-press report that noted the glaring difference between the Obama who spoke to Ruling Class audiences and the Obama who publicly campaigned for the presidency. I regret I can't provide a link; indeed I no longer recall the source save that it was a credible and definitively Leftist publication – the same journal that tried to make Obama's 2007 pro-tyranny piece part of the 2008 campaign debate. (Interestingly, the Foreign Affairs article, “Renewing American Leadership,” is now price-tagged to discourage public circulation.)
Nevertheless – obviously this was before I fully absorbed the chief lesson of the 2008 campaign (that hope is not “audacity” but imbecility) – I clutched at an Obama presidency much as a shipwreck victim clutches desperately at flotsam: Obama might not save us from capitalism's inevitable march toward fascism, but surely he would do a better job of protecting us from its innate savagery than John McCain and Sarah Palin would do.
Indeed it seemed a McCain presidency might follow the pattern established by the aged and terminally ill von Hindenburg even as Palin would thus be positioned to achieve power much as Hitler had done in the wake of von Hindenburg's death: the historical parallel, which a year later helped inspire my Palin/Hitler collage (in “Sandwiches for Mind and Spirit”), was genuinely terrifying.
As a result, though I never formally volunteered for the Obama campaign, I talked up his candidacy at every opportunity and probably won him as many as 30 or 35 votes. My contribution was surely nothing significant, but it was far more presidential-campaign political enthusiasm than I had felt since the murder of Robert Kennedy, whom I (correctly) recognized as “the last man who could have saved us from ourselves.”
And of course I myself voted for Obama.
*****
The post-election denouement that elevated my Obamanoia to its present level has two parts.
First was Obama's appointment of the avowed Christian theocrat Rick Warren – a JesuNazi misogynist and gay-basher of the first order – to give the inaugural invocation, the liturgical equivalent of the keynote address at a political convention. That was the instant I knew we'd been had, the Big Reveal “change we can believe in” had never been anything more than a Big Lie, the sleight-of-hand moment by which Barack the Betrayer reassured his capitalist masters he was theirs and theirs alone and would govern precisely as they demanded.
Then came the exegesis – the explanation – of Obama's treachery: Bill Moyers breathtaking admission our exalted democratic processes are nothing but a charade, sham and scam to opiate the masses much as panem et circenses did in Roman times and religion – particularly in the ever-more-theocratic United Estates of Wall Street – still does. That revelation is chronicled here:
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/blog/2009/07/bill_moyers_michael_winship_so.html
This was nothing new to real journalists. Most of us learned the hideous truth our first years on the job. (Why do you suppose we are so bitterly cynical? What else explains why so many of us become hopeless drunks?) But until Moyers bravely spoke up, we never dared publicly admit the American Experiment in constitutional democracy was itself a now Big Lie, that the genuine article had been murdered long ago, on 22 November 1963 if not earlier.
*****
Largely because (again thanks to my father's tutelage) I never committed the suicidal error of underestimating the capitalists' cunning, it took no real intellectual effort for me to recognize Obama might well be the fulfillment of a stunningly Machiavellian scheme that dates at least to the 1933 Bankers' Plot (for which Google).
The plotters' intent – a classic example of the innately fascist values at the core of capitalism – was to overthrow President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and replace his New Deal government with a Ruling Class cabal allied with Hitler and Mussolini. But the conspiracy had apparently been infiltrated by Soviet agents – probably Red Army Intelligence (Glavnoye Razvedyvatel'noye Upravleniye or GRU), since nothing related to this episode has yet been disclosed in the huge post-Soviet publication of KGB files. In any case, the plot was soon exposed via the nation's Leftist press, much of it Soviet-guided and at the time almost unimaginably influential.
Though it is an aside, here in the thwarting of the Bankers' Plot is most likely the reason FDR so thoroughly trusted Stalin: the agency that was later to become Hitler's nemesis in Europe seems to have made its global debut by saving the Roosevelt Administration and checkmating the bankers' scheme to turn the United States overtly fascist. (For more on GRU, the files of which have never been opened to public scrutiny, see The Red Orchestra by V.E. Tarrant, published in 1995 by Wiley & Sons Inc., New York.)
Here too is almost certainly the motive behind the vicious anti-Communist, anti-socialist, anti-intellectual purge the capitalist Ruling Class unleashed inside the U.S. literally the instant World War II ended. Nor is it any coincidence the purge and its longterm aftermath gave birth to the abysmally ignorant (and therefore infinitely submissive) U.S. electorate of today: Moron Nation.
Returning to the notion of Obama as the perfect fulfillment of longterm capitalist scheming, all we need do is reason from the premise of class struggle: in other words, apply the principles of objective analysis.
The Bankers' Plot, nearly lost to memory down the Orwell hole of revisionist censorship, is undeniable proof of the long-term Ruling Class intent to impose capitalist governance on every level of the United States: absolute power and unlimited profit for the aristocracy, total subjugation and genocidal poverty for all the rest of us.
Having failed to achieve despotism by coup, the U.S. Ruling Class – bolstered by the huge postwar influx of Nazi war criminals – applied the Josef Goebbels lessons of mass manipulation. Beginning with the purge, Ruling Class Media and public schools operated in conformity with Ruling Class mandates to indoctrinate the entire population in the credo of infinite greed as absolute virtue and limitless selfishness as ultimate good.
By so popularizing a shallow version of the ethos formerly held by the aristocracy alone – by expanding it into the philosophical and theological cornerstone of the entire population – the Ruling Class manufactured and sustains Moron Nation as surely as it fabricates the demand for a new but nonessential product. (The works of Henry Giroux, often published by the radical website Truthout, provide a superb source for details of the moronation process. So do the works of Chris Hedges, regularly available through both Truthout and Common Dreams.)
And now – if we view the Obama phenomena and its related developments from the perspective of Moyers' disclosure all we are allowed to see of present-day politics is a theater of deception – a hitherto unthinkable possibility comes into sharp and dreadful focus.
Armed with its batteries of psychological research – capitalism has methodically applied the rat-maze principles of behaviorism since the days of the Third Reich – the Ruling Class seems to have understood that an unprincipled Chicago opportunist disguised as an Afro-Democrat was the perfect agitator to at last thrust the carefully crafted constituencies of Moron Nation into the 21st Century variant of fascism. Just as the droning chants of “hope” and the zomboid repetition of “change we can believe in” mesmerized the Democratic rank-and-file to vote for Obama – note though how “hope” is a sublime admission of abject powerlessness (a point to which we shall return) – so did the prospect of a Black Family in the White House enrage the 70-something percent of the Caucasian citizenry that remains malevolently Ku Klux at heart.
Thus Barack the Betrayer, the ultimate political fraudster: in service to his Ruling Class masters he cons everyone, Left and Right. His promise-everything/deliver-nothing strategy generates such a tsunami of alienation it drowns the Democrats in self-disenfranchisement. Meanwhile the Republicans with their Teabagger storm-troopers (and yes in 2010 a huge number of betrayal-infuriated Democrats and independents) are goaded by their racism to embrace the Wall Street/Big Business tyranny that is the newest and most insidious variant of fascism. With Obama's treachery at least rationalized and often wholly obscured by the resultant controversies, he gives the Republicans (and ultimately the banksters) everything they want.
If my analysis is correct, Obama will set the stage for a Republican sweep in 2012 much as he did in 2010, further alienating the Left with additional broken promises even as his mere presence continues to infuriate the racist Right. The electoral result will complete Moron Nation's transition to the sort of governance envisioned by the capitalist plotters of 1933. With both houses of Congress controlled by the Teabaggers, the GOPorker who takes the White House will be free to impose an openly fascist, unapologetically Nazi-like regime, extinguishing the torch of U.S. liberty forever.
Since the Teabaggers in Maine are now methodically erasing all traces of social conscience from state buildings – tearing down murals and changing nomenclature – I cannot but wonder if 2012's winners will demolish the world-famous statue we New Yorkers know as Our Lady of the Harbor, perhaps proclaiming her, as the victors of 2010 did the now-banished material in Maine, “counterproductive” to the New Paradigm.
Were the resurrection of the dead anything more than theological fantasy, old-time liberal Republicans like Fiorello LaGuardia, Jacob Javits and Nelson Rockefeller would be rising in shame from their graves. So would Robert LaFollette, the Republican who became the original Progressive.
Obviously our experiment in constitutional democracy is finished – and just as obviously our collective subconscious already knows it. The sad proof is in our unquestioning acceptance of “hope” as synonymous with empowerment when in fact it demonstrates the opposite. Hope is the emotion of serfs, of slaves, of prisoners and indentured servants who desperately yearn for their masters to treat them less sadistically. Those who have genuine liberty don't just hope for relief from their grievances; they demand it.
LB/14 April 2011
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There's just one question that's been nagging at me for the last few months...If predator capitalism has already won, and resistance is futile, do we still have a moral obligation to resist? I still haven't figured out the answer to that one.
Posted by: Franetta McMillian | 04/18/2011 at 04:54 AM