Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2011 (click on image to view it full-frame).
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VISUALS
The I Ching, humanity's oldest book of oracular wisdom, says restraint often leads to refinement, that limitation prompts examination “of virtue and correct conduct.”
Perhaps that is what is happening here. The restraints and limitations of which I complained so bitterly last week – the compulsory isolation in which we elderly are ghettoized (no doubt to prevent our recollections of a far less tyrannical United States from subverting the present Moron Nation coda of hopeless submission to capitalist exploitation); the viciously Christian “dirty old man” bigotry that now forever denies me nude models; the fact cameras are thug magnets and seniors are prey – all this forces me, exactly as I said last week, to rely on the manipulation of old work for new images. But maybe that is not entirely bad: maybe it is a kind of resuscitation. Thus the above: the first sandwich I ever made (late 1968 or early 1969) now perhaps given new life by the computer, specifically the techniques of colorization and posterization.
The notion of combining the two images – an early graffiti picture (“Tuch and the Manikin People,” 1966 or 1967) with the nude portrait of a friend I had made during the same years – came to me completely by surprise. It was at the end of a lengthy darkroom session fulfilling a big print order from a longtime social-documentary client; I remember I was whiling away the hour it took the prints to wash, that I was sitting at my desk idly shuffling through a stack of my work prints when I saw what amounted to a mental vision of the two photos merged as in double exposure. I was so taken by this particular Muse-gift I darted back into the darkroom to make it real, and after some experimentation to get the exposure time right, I had the original black-and-white version of the picture above.
It was only many months later, after I had made several additional sandwiches, I began to understand what I was doing; the initial impulses had been purely visual, utterly devoid of words whether conceptual description or any other mental captions. But finally someone – probably Adrienne – pointed out how my sandwiches articulated what had come to me in Central Park during the Easter Be-In, 30 March 1967 (which also happened to be my 27th birthday): realization the Countercultures's “Revolution in Consciousness” (the apt phrase coined by the late Walter Bowart), was nothing less than spontaneous resurrection of the mindset associated with humanity's oldest deity, the Great Goddess or Divine Mother. Hence the title of that first series of sandwiches: “Emergence.”
Like the negatives that produced the image, the associated technical data was lost in the 1983 fire. All I can say for certain is the film was Tri-X. That and the fact I'd appreciate if you posted your reactions to this new (and I believe somewhat stronger) variant on an old theme.
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NULLE BASTARDO CARBURENDUM
As we celebrate the Fourth of July – the 236th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence – I wonder how many people realize the United States is the only nation on today's earth so unspeakably vicious as to threaten elderly and disabled people with the de facto genocide of terminating the Social Security and Medicare stipends upon which we depend for shelter and medicine.
Yes, genocide – deliberately inflicted extermination – and you read it here first because no other journalist dares say it.
Such is the death that will undoubtedly result if the Republicans succeed in their malicious effort to tank the U.S. and global economies and thus (further) discredit President Barack Obama, who is either the nation's most inept chief executive or, as Barack the Betrayer, the most successfully manipulative politician in human history.
In either case the impending federal default – the result of Republican obstructionism (deliberately?) enabled by Democrat betrayals – will indeed cut off Social Security and Medicare: every government spokesperson has already told us that.
What the spokespeople dare not tell us – not yet anyway – is that Social Security and Medicare cutoffs will not only fling tens of thousands of us – more likely millions of us – into homelessness; it will also deny us health care, including access to life-sustaining prescription drugs.
As a direct result, untold numbers of us will die: literally murdered by the politicians whose sole allegiance is to the capitalist pigs – the dark lords of Big Business and the robber barons of Wall Street – those anti-Americans who have banished the American dream and subverted the American experiment in constitutional governance.
Surely the Republicans know this; surely the Democrats knew this would happen when their betrayals reanimated the Republican Party and so enabled the 2010 GOP landslide.
What though will happen when the military-pay and welfare-check cutoffs hit home? Will the military revolt? Will the ghettos rise up? Or will we all submit in sullen silence?
Perhaps that's why the U.S. government now employs the largest mercenary force in human history – a private army that presumably would continue to get paid (and therefore continue to follow orders) even with the government in default.
In any case – recognizing as I do an essential practice of capitalism is ridding its world of anything unprofitable (a principle that includes not just ventures and machines but all of us who are no longer exploitable for profit) – I cannot doubt the genocide-effect is every bit as intentional as the Nazi death camps. For what is Nazism but capitalism carried to its logical extreme?
Meanwhile, as we await the unspeakable horrors of default, the stress this is imposing is itself lethal, especially amongst people in my age group. The growing fear is palpable; the unthinkable is now at hand. Such is the awful truth of capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, subjugation and death for all the rest of us.
As Churchill said on the eve of the Battle of Britain: “only a miracle can save us now.”
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/06/26/988997/-Budget-Deficit-Hysteria:-
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More outrageous still – in fact quite possibly the most vicious act of anti-Americanism perpetrated by any politician in memory – is the fact the leading Republican budget negotiator is literally betting on default: investing in a stock that will skyrocket once the government is unable to pay its bills.
Salon exposes Rep. Eric Cantor's GOPorker malevolence in a story linked here via the AFL/CIO website:
http://blog.aflcio.org/2011/06/29/will-rep-cantor-rake-in-massive-windfall-if-government-defaults/
(Though Salon requires registration, the link provided by the AFL/CIO will get you directly to the report.)
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As if the socioeconomic horrors of default were not sufficient proof what the United States has become, now there is statistical confirmation we are the most oppressed people in the industrial world.
Not only does U.S. capitalism miser out the worst, most prohibitively expensive “health care”; our slavemaster bosses also work us much harder. An In These Times report picked up by Common Dreams summarizes the ugly details:
“The massive layoffs of the Great Recession have vastly increased the workloads of those still working...the average American worker clocked 1,804 hours of work in 2006, the highest in the world...three full-time weeks more per year than the average British workers, six more weeks than the average French worker, and nine more weeks than the average German worker.“
“Before Corporate America’s big wave of unionbusting – under which union sympathizers are routinely fired (31,358 in 2005 alone) and unionized plants are especially targeted for closing – labor was powerful enough to establish a decent level of leisure time. Nonunion firms carefully copied the standards in union facilities as a means of remaining non-union. But with unionization now diminished to just under 12 percent of the total workforce, unions are no longer a sufficient force to negotiate a standard for their members that will then become the norm for nonunion firms as well.
“U.S. law doesn't mandate any level of guaranteed vacation days. In fact, it doesn’t even guarantee you a half-hour lunch break, which is provided (or not) at the employer‘s whim...The U.S. is the only advanced nation that does not legislate a minimum number of days of vacation.”
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/06/29-3
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The DemocRats – cap “R” to denote closet Republicans – continue to serve the capitalists by enabling the Republicans' tyrannical agenda. Here in addition to DemocRat complicity in the impending default are two especially outrageous examples:
“The White House stated yesterday the President is taking repealing the Bush tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires off the table. Which leaves mostly spending cuts targeting working families still on the table. Looks like...America's oligarchs win again.”
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Barack the Betrayer strikes again: while Medicaid advocates have been fighting Republican proposals to cut the program, they’re just waking up to the threat of a sneaky cutback proposed by the Obama administration:
“It’s an idea to change the way federal matching funds work and save money in the process — and it would probably do it by shifting costs to the states. If that happens...the states will just pass on the cuts to providers and, ultimately, the patients.”
“In the budget blueprint unveiled in April, President Barack Obama proposed adjusting the way federal matching funds paid to the states are calculated for Medicaid and its companion, the Children’s Health Insurance Program. Sources close to the administration tell Politico that White House officials have been trying to develop the idea into a version that could become part of a deal in the ongoing deficit reduction talks.”
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0611/57976.html
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The Betrayer is also (again) joining Republicans in the capitalists' war against Social Security:
“President Obama on Wednesday reiterated his push to extend an existing payroll tax holiday through 2012 – a move denounced by liberal Democrats who fear the reduction in revenues will undermine Social Security. 'I think that it makes perfect sense for us to take a look at, can we extend the payroll tax, for example, an additional year,' Obama said during a lengthy press conference at the White House.”
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The public trashing of the fascist demagogue Glenn Beck in Manhattan's Bryant Park bolsters my fiercely sustained pride in being a born New Yorker, even exiled as I am by the City's gentrification:
(Site is being jammed and link may be difficult to open.)
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DIALOGUES
I had little to add to Internet discussions this week. My one contribution was to the Common Dreams thread engendered by a Robert Parry piece, “How Greed Destroys America”:
Mr. Parry's summation of U.S. economic history is accurate as far as it goes, but he leaves out three important facts -- and his omissions reveal that despite his apparently progressive stance, he writes from a hopelessly (and uselessly) bourgeois Ruling Class perspective.
Indeed he even echoes the implicitly fascist elitism of Ayn Rand by denouncing us -- the Working Class (which in today's economy is anyone who is not part of the ruling 1 percent) -- as as the perpetrators of our own victimhood. Whether through racism, fear, ignorance or some combination of these factors, the vast majority of us -- at least according to Mr. Parry -- "position (our) own necks under the boots of corporate masters."
The three facts he cleverly omits in his anti-Working-Class screed are these:
(1)-that the outcome of the 2010 election (and the near-certainty of a Republican landslide in 2012) are the direct result of breathtaking, historically unprecedented betrayals of the popular will by President Obama and the Democrats in general;
(2)-that the reforms enacted by the administrations of Republican Theodore Roosevelt and Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt were not prompted by sudden conversions to humanitarian beliefs but were instead compelled by the truly bottomless Ruling Class terror of Communist revolution;
(3)-that with the death of the Soviet Union, the Ruling Class no longer has any fear of Communism and is therefore free to express its infinitely greedy, infinitely malevolent selfhood.
Here too is the reason the Democrats have so brazenly (and so ruinously) betrayed their Working Class constituents. As Bill Moyers points out, U.S. democracy has long been a charade in which one party functions as a noise machine to conceal the treachery and malfeasance of the other. (See particularly http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/blog/2009/07/bill_moyers_michael_winship_so.html) But now with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics destroyed, the capitalist ruling class no longer has any need to conceal its agenda of tyrannical greed: hence capitalist governance in the U.S. is becoming indistinguishable from capitalist governance anywhere else in the world: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation and genocidal poverty for all the rest of us.
While it is surely true the U.S.S.R. never lived up to its claim to be a "workers' paradise," it is equally true the U.S. has never lived up to its claims of "liberty and justice for all." But the U.S.S.R. -- with its global network of professional revolutionary agitators -- was undeniably a facilitator of progressive change: this in direct contrast to the U.S. history of supporting an endless succession of fascist dictators. Thus despite its many flaws the Soviet Union was the sole protector of Working Class interests everywhere on Earth.
But Mr. Parry omits all these vital facts, no doubt because he fears the direction it might take us were he to acknowledge them -- particularly the lesson implicit in the history of Communism: that capitalism is evil of such unprecedented magnitude, only the most disciplined organized resistance can ever prevail against it.
Meanwhile as Mr. Parry remains intellectually imprisoned by his identification with the oppressors -- the capitalists and capitalism in general -- he seeks to reinforce our own imprisonment as well. Thus he neither tells us anything we don't already know, nor does he dare suggest we the explore one proven way out from under the capitalist jackboot.
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/06/28-12#comment-1865901
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MISCELLANY
Remember, as you read the following, that ravens (which as Corvus are often mis-identified as “big crows”), are a sacred bird, both to the Pacific Northwest Coastal tribes and to the ancient peoples of Britain. To the Salish folk, Raven is the Changer, the Light-Bringer who singed his feathers permanently black by stealing fire from the gods and fetching light into the world; to the proto-Celts – the goddess-worshipers who built Avebury Circle and Stonehenge – Raven was a totem bird, the avian personification of Bendegeid Vron, Bran the Blessed, the divine son who is god of eloquence, of music and poetry, and who is lord of the winds. The Eiru, the people of prehistoric Ireland, regarded Raven as the prime familiar of the Morrigan, the midnight-haired goddess of war and fate.
Such believers despite their ethnicity would thus see an omen of great significance in Puget Sound's newly emergent supremacy of crow over eagle:
“A few years ago a murder of crows mobbing an eagle was a novel spectacle in Seattle. It’s still spectacular, but it’s hardly novel now. Bald eagles are the comeback poster kids of conservation; 50 years after DDT and hunters nearly extirpated them from the Lower 48, more than a thousand roost around Puget Sound and this state’s other waterways. Their nemesis now is not homo sapiens but the crows that have meanwhile multiplied by the tens of thousands, thriving in the jumbled, disturbed landscapes we create.”
“Some days it’s hard not to think this is the crows’ city and we just live in it, so cockily do they preside over our backyards and roadsides. Like Pashtuns and Sicilians, they’re famously loyal to their clans and fierce toward their foes, whose ranks include anyone they think has tried to menace their nests or offspring.”
Indeed I am reminded of the very optimistic prophecy contained in Taliesin's “Cad Goddeu” (“Battle of the Trees”), here as translated by Robert Graves:
The tops of the beech trees
Have sprouted of late
Are changed and renewed
From their withered state...
LB/3 July 2011
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Always learn something reading your blog. Thanks for taking the the "reins" at the last Writers Group...hope everyone had a great time.
See you on July 16th! Bill J
Posted by: Bill J | 07/04/2011 at 08:16 PM