Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2011
*
VISUALS
I have started making sandwiches again, searching older pictures for material since new sandwich-suitable work has become impossible to produce. The savage isolation of elderly people characteristic of capitalism combines with the puritanical malice implicit in the “dirty old man” archetype to guarantee I will never again have access to nude models.
At the same time I am also prohibited from doing street photography. Firstly there is the disturbing fact all but the cheapest or most obviously obsolete cameras are thug magnets. Secondly there is the far uglier truth any elderly person in any U.S. city is increasingly seen as nothing more than prey. Lastly there is the self-inflicted curse of my bad decision-making skills: the fact I am doomed to spend my remaining years in the one U.S. jurisdiction in which street photography is effectively illegal: photograph anyone in Washington state without their express permission – even someone in a public place – and you're fair game for a nastily punitive invasion-of-privacy lawsuit. Nor – as the Washington Post-owned Everett Herald learned to its astonishment in the late 1970s – is a press card any protection. Even if you're a staff photographer shooting a legitimate assignment, you'll still lose in court.
Years ago I'd be chanting that immortal line by which Bob Dylan underscored the reality expressed so well by James Baldwin in his title Another Country, which Manhattan genuinely is (or at least was during the years I knew it). Dylan merely put it to music: “I'm goin back to New York City; I do believe I've had enough.”
Yes I've sung that song before. Trouble is now I'm too old, too crippled by chronic ailments, too impoverished in mind and body and soul. Too unprofitable – that is, too old to be exploitable for profit. Such is life – and death – under capitalism: naught but remnants from which to make art; sandwiches made from leftovers.
Hence the above image combines a commissioned portrait of lovers I made during the middle 1970s with a photograph of intertwined trees I made last fall. The portrait, in black and white (M2 Leica; 35mm Summicron; Tri-X at 320) was among the workprints I had taken with me back to the City in 1983 and thus survived the fire; the trees (Rolleiflex F; Kodak 400 color-negative portrait film) I photographed merely on a hunch: “maybe I can use this image...”
A couple months later I scanned the two pictures together and then – to combat the tonal clash between color and black-and-white – electronically deleted the color and electronically sepia toned the result. (It sounds a lot easier than it was; the process was one of discovery by trial and error and took most of a weekend.)
Meanwhile I photograph much less than I'd like (what little I do is never more than volunteer work) and I write much more than I am comfortable with: surely there is no greater contradiction in terms than “dyslexic writer” – probably no endeavor more absurd, either. Thus my abilities slowly die of frustration.
*****
NULLE BASTARDO CARBURENDUM
News of yet another significant anti-capitalist rally was suppressed by Ruling Class Media last week, when approximately 1000 red-clad Registered Nurses and their supporters marched on Wall Street chanting, “Wall Street got bailed out/we got sold out.”
The demonstration, on 22 June, was covered extensively by its sponsor, National Nurses United, with text and (fairly dramatic) photographs on its website:
http://www.nationalnursesunited.org/blog/entry/nurses-take-on-wall-street1/
There is semiotic significance here too: note (again, as at Madison) the return of red as the color of protest, defiance and resistance.
Sadly red's original symbolism has mostly been purged from our conscious minds – until the deliberate (and deliberately confusing) co-optation of red by the U.S. Ruling Class and its Republican storm troopers, red always represented the blood of slain workers – but it appears the memory lingers at least subconsciously.
Perhaps soon we will again see red banners raised in rightful anger.
***
A study by the Justice Policy Institute not only proves mass arrests mean bigger slave-labor profits for the Prison Industrial Complex but reveals that PIC lobbyists are busy bribing politicians to ensure a steadily increasing supply of convicts: that is, slaves.
Some of the biggest names in the private prison slave industry have given $835,514 to federal candidates since 2000 and a stunning $6,092,331 to state politicians in the last five elections cycles, the report says.
“A lot of it is focused on the state level because a lot of the people in prison are in state facilities,” said Paul Aston, an author of the report.
“With most states and the federal government operating under record deficits and decreasing budgets, private prison companies have a growing desire to establish influential connections with policymakers, with two goals: pitching private prisons as a lower cost alternative to building or maintaining state facilities; and fighting policies that might reduce the use of incarceration.”
The report also points to the revolving door between the private prison companies and the government agencies that control their financing.
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/06/24-2
In other words, the politicians now have a double incentive to put us all in concentration camps: not just to silence us, but to increase – via capitalism – the already obscene flow of bribery money into their pockets and bank accounts.
Which is yet another example of the paradigm of capitalist governance newly imposed on the United States as it is converted into the aristocracy's United Estates: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation and genocidal poverty for all the rest of us.
***
A Ruling Class Media report late last week revealed Apple is developing the technology to suppress the use of cell-phone cameras:
As electronic freedom advocates quickly grasped, this would give the Ruling Class and its representatives in government unlimited ability to block cell-phone camera users from recording atrocities.
As I commented on the associated Common Dreams thread:
At last an undeniable and memorably vivid demonstration of the Big Lies of Internet "freedom" and its potential for "revolution."
As I have been saying for years, any medium that can be suppressed merely by the flick of a switch offers neither freedom nor revolutionary potential.
Indeed the primary function of the computer and its associated technologies is to further enslave us: tens of millions of jobs abolished forever, the advent of surveillance technologies of which the Nazis could only dream. Why else would the Ruling Class have so enthusiastically embraced it?
As I myself can attest, in the fields of journalism, publishing and graphic arts alone, the advent of the computer reduced employment by as much as 75 percent: a single newspaper reporter now, thanks to computers, does all the work formerly done by at least five people: copy editor, linotype operator, engraver, stereotyper, proof reader: all these jobs gone forever, the workers typically flung into permanent under-employment or unemployment, their skills and careers sacrificed on the altar of capitalist greed.
Meanwhile by our consumeroid acceptance of not just computers but every other associated gew-gaw we have imposed on ourselves a surveillance network that enables the government and/or the Ruling Class to not only monitor us 24/7 but -- literally by the aforementioned flick -- render us deaf, mute, blind and therefore utterly powerless.
Somewhere in Hell, Heinrich Himmler is surely cackling with glee.
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/06/22-8
(Originally intended for “Dialogues” but posted instead in “Nulle Bastardo” because of its informational significance: a story apparently not covered by any other news outlet.)
***
While Ruling Class Media has been distracting Moron Nation with reports of DemocRat Weiner-wagging, GOPorker presidential squabbling and Bristol Palin's chastity, we (unlike the rest of the industrial world) have been methodically denied reports on the apocalyptic events at Fukushima.
Meanwhile – even as Germany and Italy prove their definitively greater degrees of self-protective civilization by preparing to minimize and eventually abolish their nuclear power facilities – U.S. politicians continue to spout the Big Lie nukes are the safest, most environmentally sound form of electrical generation available to us.
Via Common Dreams, here is a vital and – yes – terrifying report by Anne Landman of PR Watch:
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/06/24-0
Given our craven submissiveness – which labels our sullen refusal to acknowledge our utter powerlessness as ultimate forms of self-deception or hypocrisy – it is increasingly evident we are the industrial world's most methodically oppressed population.
*****
DIALOGUES
Dominated as it is by capitalism – not to mention a subtle Ayn Rand undercurrent of socioeconomic exclusionism – U.S. feminism remains uniquely and stubbornly in denial about the vicious reality of class struggle. Alas the blogger Amanda Marcotte is no exception, though that does not make her analysis of Moron Nation's newly emergent war against female sexuality and its murderous “shoot the slut” mentality any less alarming.
The facts and associated atrocities are as she reports them: “it's not just the nearly 1000 bills in state legislatures aimed at punishing or controlling female sexuality by depriging women of access to birth control and abortion...(it's the fact) female celebrities whose only 'sin' seems to be having spent the night at a man’s house are photographed and mocked, as if their behavior fell way outside of social norms.” Ms. Marcotte's failure is to set these trends in context by showing how misogyny is an (essential) expression of capitalism, a revelation she is still too bourgeois – too much identified with the Ruling Class – to dare make.
Hence my commentary on her essay:
Like most of the alleged U.S. "Leftists," Ms. Marcotte not only rejects the historical truth of class struggle but also denies the huge importance of religion in shaping and controlling human consciousness. Thus she fails to recognize the conditions by which she is legitimately outraged are infinitely more ominous than just "a cultural bout of misogyny."
What is happening in today's United States – the real motive behind the Ruling Class war against female sexuality – is nothing less than the methodical imposition of capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation and genocidal poverty for all the rest of us.
A key element in the subjugation process is the re-imposition of Christian theocracy: a draconian conditioning-for-submissiveness in which the suppression of female sexuality plays a vital role – this because (precisely as America's capitalist psychological warfare experts learned from their Nazi tutors after World War II) – the shortest path to total control of a conquered population is through its mothers and wives.
Were Ms. Marcotte schooled in class-struggle, she would recognize instantly the extent to which we in the the U.S. Working Class – all of us who are not part of the tiny but all-powerful ruling aristocracy -- are effectively a conquered population. We have lost the class war; we as a class have no representatives in government at any level. And now – given the plethora of studies proving that devout Christians make the "best" (that is, most submissively obedient, dependably anti-union) employees and servants – the victors are imposing Christianity with all its traditionally misogynistic horrors.
The Ruling Class war on female sexuality meanwhile serves two purposes. Firstly, the same studies that prove the superior exploitability of Christians also prove a close relationship between compulsively high productivity and the sexual frustrations associated with the Judaeo/Christian/Islamic hatred of sex and sexuality: the more sexually obstructed the employee, the more likely the employee will substitute productivity and acquisitiveness for sex. Secondly, the more sexually frustrated a woman is – again as proven by multiple studies in what was formerly termed "industrial psychology" -- the more likely it is she will turn to Christian fanaticism or its Judaic or Islamic counterpart.
Beneath this – all of it stark proof we underestimate the diabolical cunning of the Ruling Class at our own greatest peril – is the historical fact the anger of women is most often the spark that ignites revolution. Demonstrations by the women of Paris in 1789 began the French Revolution. And it was the unimaginably heroic women of the Lesnoy Textile Works who boiled into the streets of Petrograd on 8 March 1917 to defy the Tsar's soldiers, Cossacks and Okhrana (secret police) agents, thereby triggering the Russian Revolution.
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/06/13-3
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Politics has never been far beneath the surface of the simmering debate over building a new deep-water shipping terminal north of Bellingham to export coal to China, but events last week brought the community's divisions to a boil, prompting me to comment as follows:
Interesting as this controversy may be to sociologists or journalists, it is just another example of the ultimate American Big Lie: the ongoing illusion of democratic process by which the Ruling Class deceives the gullible – that is, most of us – into believing we have some control over the circumstances of our lives.
Having spent about half my boyhood and most of the earliest years of my journalism career in Appalachia – where coal is not just king but tyrant – I recognize the politics of this matter all too well. The coal companies have absolute power: whatever they want they get, whether by payoffs, thuggery or some combination of both. Thus the irremediably post-apocalyptic conditions in so much of West Virginia, Eastern Kentucky and East Tennessee: no matter how diligently the people might work to preserve their environments – and contrary to certain nastily smug bigots, Appalachian folk fight damn hard for the mountains they love – the coal operators always win.
The Evergreen State coal port and its environmentally ruinous increase in Big Business toxicity (locomotive exhaust, coal dust, the maximum-filth emissions of idling automotive engines in the colossal traffic jams inflicted by the hourly passage of mile-long trains) – all this was irrevocably imposed on us long before it was publicly announced. The Ruling Class had met in some walnut-paneled sanctuary of greed to decree Washington state would be despoiled from Spokane west to Vancouver and thence north to Bellingham. It was, as always, entirely about profit: the public be damned. We the victims might be allowed a few years of <i>pro forma</i> tantrums – protests doomed before conception – but there was never any doubt the port would be built.
As to Bellingham's unexpressed but obvious hope intervention by state officials might provide some environmental sanity to ameliorate an environmentally insane decision, it seems Mayor Dan Pike is unaware of the accolade President Obama recently paid Gov. Gregoire, applauding her as “a fierce advocate for American businesses.” That obviously answers the question posed not just by the mayor but by an old-time anthem of the coal-field unions, a song aptly titled “Which Side Are You On?”
While I can't blame Mr. Pike for his naivety – reports of the Obama/Gregoire quote were limited mostly to the labor press, and Bellingham's so-called “Leftists” (never mind their allegedly “progressive” views) tend to be as venomously anti-union as any Ku Klux Klanner – the mayor's apparent optimism is nevertheless quite moving. Somehow it reminds me of boyhood conversations I had with barefoot urchins, hard-eyed boys and stark-faced girls compelled to gather spilled lumps of winter coal along the Louisville-Nashville tracks to provide their mothers sufficient fuel to cook their suppers and perhaps breakfasts too, the every-afternoon going-home-from-school chore of begrimed and ragged children who yet dared imagine Santa Claus might bring joy to the weathered clapboard shacks in which they and their families dwelt. Indeed Mayor Pike's cause is no less hopeless: from Barack the Betrayer to Christine the Cruel, the Democrats are dropping all pretense of being anything but Republicans in disguise – final proof the coal port will be rammed down our throats here just as union-busting and strip-mining was jammed down the throats of Appalachians.
It cannot be said too often that such is merely capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation, genocidal poverty and environmental ruin for all the rest of us.
*****
MISCELLANY
In recent decades, a number of blind people have developed a bat-like method of determining their surroundings using tongue clicks. Following recent success in Berlin, the technique – which was originated by a blind man named David Kish in the United States – could become more widespread in Germany. Some even use "flash sonar" to ride bikes and go hiking in the mountains.
An interesting, compelling, profoundly optimistic report from der Spiegel for which free registration may be required:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,768868,00.html
The text and pictures leave me with two profoundly troubling questions: why must we so often go far outside our borders for stories such as these, and why – given such renewed evidence of our native ingenuity – are we so maliciously oppressed by the politicians and the capitalists these tyrants represent?
LB/25 June 2011
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