Photographs by Loren Bliss copyright 2011 (click on images to view full frame).
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VISUALS
First, my apology for long absence. My computer was unexpectedly down for repairs from 4 June until last Monday, during which time I was involuntarily off line: another lesson in the terrible fragility of electronic media and the dreadful vulnerability of those of us without ready money. But for a charity of repairs, to which my deepest gratitude, poverty would have silenced me until next month.
(Though the local public library provides free computers and computer time, this is primarily so the burgeoning population of foreclosure victims and other homeless people can receive and respond to email; access is strictly rationed and thus effectively prohibits blogging or any other form of extended usage. Moreover the libraries themselves are under relentless economic attack. The dramatic reduction in governmental services that is the [intended?] consequence of capitalist contraction has already closed two branches and threatens to eventually shut down the entire library system.)
That said, the images above would have been much more “impactful” – an odious Madison Avenue perversion of language that (it pains me to admit) is nevertheless useful – had the pictures appeared as I originally intended: a follow-up to the Tompkins Park Police Riot retrospective published here on 29 May. But even this late, they are not without relevance: both photos provide glimpses of Lower East Side ambiance during the time-frame of the riot. Each scene was recorded amidst a weekend-long community-wide “Sweep-In,” a mid-April cleanup choreographed by the Jade Companions of the Flower Dance, the hippie neighborhood association; the Jade Companions hoped the event would demonstrate the hippies' commitment to community solidarity and thus neutralize escalating tensions between the newcomers and established ethnic groups, chiefly Hispanics – “Spanish” in the parlance of the day – and Ukrainians.
To those unfamiliar with the sociology of Manhattan neighborhoods, a little history is probably called for to clarify the issues. The Lower East Side had long housed a growing number of bohemians whether white or African-American; skyrocketing rents inflicted by the gentrification of the Village was ousting us from our original habitat and pushing us steadily eastward across Lower Manhattan. By and large we coexisted peacefully, at least with Hispanics, though our relationship with the Ukrainian community – said to harbor a substantial number of Nazi war criminals – was never better than coldly hostile.
But the developers had already begun calling the Lower East Side “the East Village” – thereby implicitly threatening all of us with further gentrification – and now the huge influx of bourgeois-comfortable white suburban hippies prompted by the so-called “Summer of Love” gave the threat a name and face. Indeed (and as it seemed to me at the time), the Sweep-In – rather like an irate mother invading an offspring's apartment with intrusive clean-up demands – may have actually exacerbated the tensions.
When the cops attacked the hippies on Memorial Day – their (alleged) justification an (alleged) complaint from the Ukrainians (alleging) the hippies were offending anti-communist sensibilities by making peace music on a war holiday – the Hispanics joined the Ukrainians in jeering the hippies and cheering the brutality of the assaulting police.
Hence – and I remember how I sought images to express it – the chilling aura of a witch-burning that haunted the edges of the entire Memorial Day episode, so evident in the photo of the white-clad woman, already beaten, being led to imprisonment. Perhaps because she had met my eyes and spoken to me before her arrest (“How can you just stand there and photograph? How can you stand there and watch this happen?”), perhaps because of the resultant guilt (and notwithstanding the fact her ordeal was surely minor compared to that of the woman this image always brings to my mind), even now she makes me think of the one who died in the town square at Rouen, 30 May 1431...
Though I shot probably as many rolls of Tri-X during April's Sweep-In as I did during the 30 May 1967 riot, the two images above were the only portfolio-class pictures of the Sweep-In to survive the 1983 fire, and from the perspective of history they are (as the late Cicely Nichols also noted), eerily appropriate milestones for the era despite their origin in a single event. At the beginning of the Summer of Love was its implicit optimism as expressed by the street musician – street music is an everyday part of life in Manhattan, though the hippies added their own variations to the Lower East Side's predominantly Hispanic theme – but at the end there was naught but the dejection of ruin too vast to repair.
Which is, it seems, also an analogy for our circumstances today – perhaps because it is ultimately an analogy to all life under capitalism: first optimism, then ruin. Leica IIIg or Canon VT (tech data lost in the fire), Tri-X in Diafine at 1200 ASA.
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NULLE BASTARDO CARBURENDUM
The hitherto-secret atrocity of a drug shortage imposed by typical Prescription Drug Lord profiteering and afflicting hundreds of thousands of chronic acid-reflux-disease patients is being covered up by Ruling Class Media, at least partly due to the new indifference of DemocRat politicians toward lower-income constituents – DemocRat spelled with a cap R to denote a false-flag Republican or at least a Republican enabler.
The drug, the generic form of Tagamet, is a substance known as cimetidine. The manufacturers have stopped producing it seemingly because – in their obscene and potentially murderous capitalist greed – they deem it insufficiently profitable.
As a result, cimetidine is increasingly unavailable to those of us dependent on it, whether for treatment of episodic acid-reflux disease or its infinitely more severe and potentially deadly form erosive esophagitis.
Meanwhile Sen. Maria Cantwell, Sen. Patty Murray and Rep. Norm Dicks, DemocRats all, have made it clear they don't give a damn. Never mind the fact the prescription drug industry is (presumably) regulated by the federal government and thus (presumably) under Congressional supervision.
The nonprofit pharmacies of the Group Health Cooperative ran out of cimetidine several weeks ago, and its availability even at the for-profit pharmaceutical ripoff outlets – Walgreen, Rite Aid, Fred Meyer and the like (none of which recognize Medicare Extra Help and all of which therefore charge at least 496 percent more than GHC charges) – is so limited the drug is being rationed.
I know these details as a victim of erosive esophagitis – “ erosive” because stomach acid is literally eating away the lining of my esophagus – a condition always terrifying given its association with esophageal cancer and sometimes so painful its occasional flare-ups trigger cardiac arrhythmia.
For me as with untold numbers of others (the drug lords keep such percentages secret), there are no substitutes for cimetidine. The Zantac family of drugs gives me killer headaches; Prilosec and its kindred spike my blood pressure to life-threatening heights; and my one-time trial of famotidine – generic Pepsid – inflicted the worst most terrifying bout of palpitations and atrial fibrillation I have ever known.
(Though it is an aside, I find it curious, perhaps even ironic, that my esophagitis began three weeks after the date I permanently quit smoking tobacco, 23 September 1995. It has continued ever since, no doubt because – just as I have learned there is no solution to post-nicotinic weight gain save the obnoxiously intrusive burden of perpetual calorie-counting, there is ultimately no substitute for the enormous stress-relief nicotine formerly provided, whether by alleviating the relentless physical pain of deteriorating spinal and joint injuries or relaxing tensions imposed by external circumstances. So much for the bullshit notion quitting smoking automatically leads to improved quality of life. Yes I'm probably living longer. But given the radical increase in discomfort inflicted by the lack of nicotine, I often ask “what the hell for?”)
In any case soon after I was informed of the cimetidine shortage – this when Group Health began rationing my prescription – I telephoned the offices of Cantwell, Murray and Dicks in the hope at least one of the staffers of these elected officials might take an interest in an artificially created prescription-drug shortage that obviously impacts hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of women and men.
But nobody cared. Murray's people demanded to know what it was I expected them to do about it (and seemed utterly bewildered when I responded that, at least as far as I know, it is – or WAS – the federal government's responsibility to regulate the supply of prescription drugs). Dicks' associates were a bit more conciliatory, essentially claiming such matters were beyond their authority. Cantwell allowed me only the option of leaving a recorded message; her staffers did not bother to respond at all.
This was an entirely unique experience. I cannot count the times I have contacted my federal representatives on one matter of another and gotten at least a cordial welcome even when I was reaching out as a private citizen rather than as a member of the working press. But never until now was I greeted with a response tantamount to a polite “fuck off.”
I cannot but wonder if this is yet another expression of the new brazenness of capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class; for all the rest of us naught but total subjugation and genocidal poverty – with not even the former pretense of representation.
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A second secret atrocity – the long-intended betrayal of lower-income seniors and disabled people by AARP (formerly the American Association of Retired Persons) – was revealed Friday by The Wall Street Journal, which reported the so-called "senior lobby" favors slashing Social Security stipends and raising the retirement age but adamantly opposes taxing the rich.
Obviously timed to be obscured by weekend distractions, this outrage is discussed in detail here:
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/06/17-6
As I commented on the associated thread (the news value of the story elevated it from "Dialogues" to "Nulle Bastardo"):
Since long before the time of the Medicare Prescription Drug Lord Benefit – aka Medicare Part D – AARP has been nothing more than a Republican Party front organization, a not-so-secret agent for the insurance industry and above all else an advocate for the paradigm of capitalist governance now being imposed on the United States. Which means (as can never be said too emphatically or too often), absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation and genocidal poverty for all the rest of us.
Anyone who doubts this is either ignorant or in denial. Note especially how AARP is now throwing us lower-income seniors under the bus even as it protects the wealthiest retirees, this by insisting these fat-cat aristocrats neither pay more into the system nor receive stipends adjusted for their obscene wealth.
Why? Because money stolen from those of us below the salt means more money – and more profit – for AARP's true constituency: the all-powerful moral imbeciles who make up the Ruling Class.
Once again, it's nothing new, just another atrocity inflicted by capitalism in action.
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DIALOGUES
Three of my recent contributions to Internet discussions have been about language and naming. The following observation popped out in frustrated anger during a quest for information relevant to a change of Internet servers (from Comcast to Qwest):
I might as well put on my writer/editor hat – 55 years total experience – and insult everybody (nothing personal) by pointing out the use of "client" in the context within which we are speaking is a classic example of the kind of Nurd malapropisms that drive non-Nurdish populations berserk.
A "client" – look it up in Webster – is "a person or company who engages the professional advice or services of another"; alternate definitions are "one who is under the protection of another" (as in a "client state" or a "welfare client"), or one who is "a customer." By no stretch of logic or (normal) imagination can this be twisted to apply to PC email software designed to function in tandem with (and thereby offer certain advantages beyond) the email provided by one's ISP.
Such arbitrarily misappropriated and thus misused words are incomprehensible to those of us who respect English and try to avoid its post-modern form, a language in which – given the postmodern notion meaning is never more than subjective – anything can mean anything. The resultant language gap – the fact Nurdish arbitrarily assigns to words meanings that have absolutely no relationship to their original definitions – is THE reason so much about computers remains forever incomprehensible to people of my generation.
Not only do these linguistic travesties thus stubbornly remain beyond logical understanding; they also elude even intuitive grasp.
We geezers are not stupid; we have merely escaped the implicit schizophrenia of post-modernism.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1772013&highlight=loren+bliss
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The proper label for what is deceptively called "global warming" is "terminal climate change," which – influenced as I am by James Lovelock – I first began using in my own writing c. 2007.
Though I have no idea who conceived the deliberately misleading euphemism "global warming," I cannot doubt it was carefully analyzed by capitalist psycholinguists and was thus selected both for its implicitly soothing tone and its function as a provocateur of (unresolvable) controversy, e.g,, the apparent conflict between "warming" and record blizzards.
Thus – again demonstrating its truly diabolical capacity for deceptive manipulation – does capitalism perpetuate itself.
The fact the capitalists rule with such malevolent cunning – a cunning that literally has no counterpart in human experience – is why I agree with Dr. Lovelock's scientific projection our species is doomed.
But I nevertheless retain the (ever-fainter) hope there will yet be a great awakening: that we will at last recognize capitalism for what it is: the ultimate enemy of eco-human survival.
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/06/16-3
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The hatred and contempt for lower-income peoples expressed on this local-newspaper thread about social-service cutbacks is terrifying, not the least because it has become so commonplace: the selfsame bigotry boiled over during the February debate on whether to preserve or destroy local public transport.
To those of us who know history, such sentiments are wrenchingly reminiscent of the expressions that preceded the Holocaust. Note especially how – exactly as Jews were made hate-objects during the Great Depression in Germany – lower-income peoples in the United States are now methodically blamed for the troubles inflicted on all of us by capitalism.
Elderly, disabled (I am both), long-term unemployed, chronically poor – we are all jeopardized by such hate-mongering. Worse, the political leadership whether Democrat or Republican now obviously shares the same hateful views, a bitter truth the savage cutbacks inflicted by Olympia, Washington D.C. and our own local governments are proving beyond dispute.
With poverty already a de facto crime – note again the attitudes expressed herein – all that remains is for it to be declared a de jure felony, exactly as it was in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. (Yes, many concentration camp inmates were imprisoned merely because they could not find jobs: such was the Nazi/Fascist solution to chronic unemployment.)
http://www.thenewstribune.com/2011/06/15/1706330/east-side-children-face-long-summer.html
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Relevant notes on lost eco-history and the relationship between Christianity, capitalism, class-war and misogyny, originally titled "Responses to two posters" on the same Common Dreams thread linked above in "language and naming":
Tiddas at 5:15 p.m.: "...as species disappear, the whole ecosystem collapses because species are interdependent...to create the conditions and balance in which all life forms thrive."
Good point. But notably missing in Mr. Ward's recounting of ecological interdependence is the subspecies of H. sapiens sapiens the Euro-Christian invaders "disappeared" from the ecosystem: specifically the First Nations peoples who were genocidally murdered to clear the Americas for Euro-Christian settlement.
One small example of First Nations' contribution to North American ecological stability is preserved in the archaic term "squaw wood" – i.e., dead wood gathered by girls and women from the forest floor for lodge and ceremonial fires. Regular collection of this fuel – a practice halted by the murder of the collectors – minimized the potential for wildfires.
Agelbert at 6:09 p.m.: "...the central problem that has turned humanity into such a destructive force against his fellow humans, other creatures and the ecosphere is the inability...to see the oneness of life. This accursed perceived separateness is the fatal flaw of humanity."
True indeed. But too few of us recognize the source of our species' fatal curse is patriarchy, particularly as fulfilled by the Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity, Islam.
As proven by their scriptures, these three cults despise Nature as demonic and in response conceptually sever our species from the ecosystem by proclaiming us "made in the image of God," the male deity whose masculinity is so powerful he was able to create the universe without help from Nature or woman. Hence "creation" – as if God somehow masturbated the cosmos into being – the first definitively unnatural act.
(I have capitalized God as a proper noun because that is precisely how the term is used by the Abrahamic cultists.)
What is methodically censored and therefore remains hidden from far too many of us is the fact the political purpose behind the Abrahamic cults was the overthrow of the Great Goddess, our species' original deity, the divine mother who was the central psychodynamic symbol of human community, its place in the ecosystem and the ethos by which it was sustained. Given that women are literally the source of life, matriarchy was thus our natural social order (as it is with nearly all species) and prevailed globally until only about 4000 years ago.
Given too that woman is microcosm to Nature's macrocosm – it is biological truth all life is female at conception (hence the perpetual war between science and Abrahamic doctrine) – Abrahamic misogyny quickly morphed into hatred of all Nature.
From the wars of patriarchal conquest also grew the present-day systems of hierarchy and caste – the command structures and associated tyrannies essential to preserve the unnatural condition of male supremacy. Thus the mutual dependence of capitalism and Abrahamic religion: the cult as brain police, as theological slavemaster – which is why the intensifying savagery of capitalism is necessarily accompanied by ever-more-oppressive imposition of theocracy
Not surprisingly, patriarchy has struggled from its inception to suppress our knowledge of the Great Goddess and the psychological, political and economic conditions her symbolism facilitated. Hence for example the censorship implicit in the horrors of the Burning Times; hence too the capitalist (ultimately patriarchal) terror of Marxist restrictions on Abrahamic cultism: spared the interference of priests, preachers, rabbis and imams, humanity might rediscover its genuine heritage.
And many clues to the sorts of societies and civilizations that evolved in the name of the Great Goddess do indeed remain. They are concealed in a wealth of pre-Christian British and European folklore: who is Janet of the ballad Tam Lin but a personification of the goddess? Who is Jack Orion but her lover? What is the vengeful Rusalka but an ancient archetype of the young Soviet women who became the deadliest snipers and partisans in military history? Is the exceptional ferocity with which these women battled the Nazi invaders of Rodina – the Motherland – a mere coincidence?
In more tangible form such clues are typified by the archaeology of Minoan Crete, a realm in which there were neither slums nor mansions, a civilization that – though you will only learn this from sources east of the Oder River – was undoubtedly the fulfillment of tribal proto-communisms that evolved during the preceding 100,000 years. The Minoan structures today's capitalist-funded archaeologists are compelled to catalogue as "palaces" were more likely to have been administrative centers, which is precisely how they are described in archaeological studies financed by socialist or Communist sources.
Proof such an administrative apparatus existed is provided by the near-miraculous evacuation of Callisté aka Thera aka Santorini in advance of the volcanic debacle that fatally weakened the thousand-year-old Minoan society (for which Google). The Minoans evacuated at least 25,000 people (and perhaps as many as 250,000) with all their pets, livestock and movable goods from the island before the explosion of the volcano reduced it to a seven-mile-wide crater in the Mediterranean Sea, this about 1650 BCE.
To understand the difference between Minoans and ourselves, we need only contrast the evacuation of Callisté with U.S. abandonment of New Orleans to Katrina. Thus many archaeologists say in private Minoan civilization was undoubtedly the apex of human achievement – that it has been downhill for our species ever since.
Thus too capitalism – its infinite greed the fulfillment of the suicidal Abrahamic commandment to pillage Earth – is our final slide toward extinction: exactly as if patriarchy were a lethal virus seeded here thousands of years ago to clear the planet for takeover by some Borg-like species from beyond our solar system.
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/06/16-3
LB/19 June 2011 (edited for clarity 23 June 2011).
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