Loren Bliss: 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.