Hello, Ms. McMillian. Thank you for your comments. Thanks also to a computer engineer I dare not name lest public association with my radicalism taint his business; without his pro bono services I would remain electronically dead.
By way of introducing a self-introduction that hopefully defines my hopelessness let me point out, again with real gratitude, that you have inspired me to write an entire essay in response, a genuine first in my blogging experience and something that happened maybe only four times during my entire journalism career, which spanned slightly more than half a century.
Nevertheless (and in fulfillment of the underlying intent of these opening paragraphs), I would be remiss if I did not also point out the brutally honest retrospection characteristic of encroaching age makes it obvious my journalistic efforts served no good purpose whatsoever – a reaction especially embittering when I contrast my personal goals (“comfort the undeservedly afflicted/afflict the undeservedly comfortable”) with today's socioeconomic and political reality (the U.S. as the veritable Fourth Reich, and no Red Army to rescue us from capitalism's inevitable death-camp future, not ever again).
I should point out too that my sense of a lifetime squandered is by no means unique.
All the real journalists I have ever known – at least all those of my generation and its immediate predecessors – were men and women of good heart, drawn to newspaper reporting and news photography by the strong sense it was the only sure way a bright and perceptive non-aristocrat might actually gain enough power and influence to change the human condition for the better. Our values were the embodiment of the old Scripps-Howard slogan: "Give the people light and they will find their own way."
Children of the New Deal – years away from learning the New Deal was never more than deception, a false facade of bogus humanitarianism to temporarily hide the true savagery of capitalism – we believed fiercely in reform-by-disclosure and justice-by-exposé. None of us could foresee the wrenching moments of realization when it dawned on us – typically far too late for us to change the courses of our lives – that we were allowed our editorial freedom only because it was meaningless: that Moron Nation was already anesthetized beyond agitation; that there was no revelation in any language powerful enough to inspire it to rise up intelligently angry; that even if such knowledge somehow became real, it would be deftly co-opted (just as U.S. feminism was co-opted) into yet another rationalization for individual selfishness in support of marketing strategies for expanded corporate profit – that the Ruling Class about which many of us had been lectured by Marxian fathers and bohemian aunts was not only real but implacably powerful.
We did not lose the fight; the fight was never winnable, and we ourselves were never more than fools to have believed otherwise.
Such was the carrot of the American Dream. Step Right Up: your pointedly accurate three-elevator analogy once again proven true.
But also past tense; the Ruling Class is now replacing the carrot with truncheons and Tazers.
Not just a born New Yorker but the son of an unreconstructed Marxian, I damn well should have seen through the scam of the American Dream a helluva lot sooner, at least soon enough to do something genuinely useful with my life, as I did for example during 1982, which I spent mostly as the engineer and one of the deckhands on a 96-foot purse seiner: helping catch Puget Sound salmon with 280 fathom of l2-fathom web. It was a too-brief interlude I increasingly regard as the best time of my adult years – not the least because there is a part of my being that comes so alive at sea, my first hours back ashore always bear an eerie taint of visitation to an alien realm. It was also a job that actually feeds people – hard and yes often invigoratingly dangerous work – which had I discovered it say at age 22, I would have joyfully embraced as a career.
But by 1982 it was far too late; I was 42 years old and already succumbing to injuries and afflictions that would make me officially a cripple 26 years later.
So back to journalism I went, back to Manhattan, mentally chanting the Dylan mantra of urban return (“I'm going back to New York City/I do believe I've had enough”), resuming the waste of mindfulness and determination I had begun in 1956 on The Grand Rapids Herald, one of the better a.m. dailies in Michigan, my favorite of the several beyond-the-Hudson realms to which I was exiled by the familial dysfunction brought on by my unwelcome presence in various matrimonial equations. Herald Managing Editor Charles Clapp hired me as a copyboy and very soon afterward Sports Editor Bob Host added me to his stringer list.
Sports however was never more than a doorway. After a couple more years of the involuntary familial geographic shuttle and the three-year detour of a post-high-school Army enlistment that included extended duty in Korea – none of this conducive to any enduring belief in aeronautical apple pie – I made the long-desired transition from the vapid meaninglessness of sports into the energizing realities of hard news.
Alas the transition itself was anything but triumphant: the sports-to-news vehicle was the Black Mariah that hauled me off to jail after my arrest in a notorious civil rights case – Knoxville's Gestapo-like 3 June 1963 roundup of “Forty Negroes and whites, most of them students at the University of Tennessee” – an atrocity jointly plotted by the avowedly racist local media (including my employer The Knoxville Journal), John Birch elements in the university administration and Ku Klux goons in the Knoxville Police Department and the Knox County Sheriff's Department.
The legacy of that incident – undeserved termination on page one of The Journal and malicious slander that continued for years despite acquittal on grounds of outrageously false arrest – ensured I would never be hired by The New York Times or any other major daily. Essentially my career was dead; I remained in journalism partly from inertia – no other marketable skills – partly because I loved the work, partly because I began thinking of it as buying the time and access to more important projects. That's why – though after l963 mine was never more than a minor-newspaper resume – it eventually included one national investigative-reporting coup and several such scoops at the state and local levels plus a dozen statewide awards and commendations.
But even that minimal success was cut short in 1987, ended by a sequence of events that remain so painful I still have difficulty reporting them.
Three years earlier, on 1 September 1983, a mysterious fire had destroyed the rural Washington state farmhouse where I had temporarily stored literally all my life's work including two books in progress, my tear sheets of published text and photographs, three decades of unpublished manuscripts and photographs, a four-drawer filing cabinet of research dating to 1959, even my collection of award certificates and letters of commendation. The house, which was burned to its foundation, had belonged to a dear friend who was at work at the time of the fire and therefore escaped physical injury; the friend had done me the huge favor of providing two unused rooms as free storage space and was to ship me my files and household goods as soon as I found an apartment in Manhattan and sent money to pay the freight bill.
The most important of the now-forever-lost books, working-titled “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer,” was a manuscript of photographs and meticulously researched text that documented the unrecognized (or more probably methodically suppressed) psychological and sociological realities of Countercultural rebellion. It argued that – beneath the sensationalism of music and art and the hurly-burly of a seemingly irreconcilable clash of feminist, environmentalist, anti-war, back-to-the-land and alternative-media factions with each other and (paradoxically) against the entire movement's own anarchistic instincts – was a wellspring of profoundly uniform vision that promised, among other things, an unprecedented solidarity.
All the Counterculture lacked was the vocabulary by which to recognize its implicit unity – the very void I intended “Dancer” to fill. I regarded it – in fact still regard it – as the most important untold story of the 20th Century; the late Cicely Nichols, the editor who had hoped to mother it into publication, said she it believed it would rank among the era's most influential books, and during at least one of our many conversations (we were longtime friends), she predicted it would be the most pivotal work of the century. But the fire obliterated all of it, especially the research notes from which I might otherwise have reconstructed the text even though most of the photography was of course irreplaceable.
The loss was bad enough, a 24-year effort reduced to ashes from which no Phoenix could possibly arise, but what transformed the fire into a singularly malevolent message of oppression was its timing. Allegedly ignited by an improbably malfunctioning clock that inexplicably failed to trip a circuit-breaker, the fire began on the same day and at the exact instant Cicely and I were meeting in New York to finalize our approach to “Dancer.”
Welcome to the real United States of America.
Predictably, post-traumatic clinical depression soon followed, and by 1987 I was unable to work at even menial jobs. The resultant professional odium nullified my talent, reduced my achievements to irrelevance and in ugly truth condemned me to spend the remainder of my life irremediably beyond the pale of human (ergo capitalist) respectability. (Yes my implication “human” is synonymous with “capitalist” is intentional: any other equivalence – especially any other psycholinguistic equivalence – is now expressly forbidden, at least in the lexicons of Moron Nation.) In any case, when you are damned via computer, the damnation is literally everlasting, which – surely not coincidentally – exactly duplicates the always-vindictive judgment of Yehveh/Jesu/Allah in much the same way the oppressive powers of the present-day Ruling Class invariably fulfill his tyrannical assertions of sadistic omnipotence.
Thus it was to my greatest surprise my journalism career once more spluttered into a kind of low-grade life six years ago. But this was quickly proven by circumstance to be nothing more than final spasms of editorial desperation, a frantic outreaching-by-default to those of us in the ranks of the blacklisted and the damned, an inevitable response to a basement-level employee shortage generated by the viciously mercenary, maliciously careerist disdain of the palace stenographers and imperial scribes who today call themselves “journalists.” Raised in the increasingly unimaginable luxury with which capitalism rewards the infinite-selfishness-as-maximum-virtue credo of its aristocrats and their Ayn Rand enablers (no real slum kids ever again dare apply); methodically screened for the psychological attributes that ensure they will each reliably function as a perfect Little Goebbels (familial dysfunctionoids like myself carefully excluded); schooled to a truly Bourbon sense of entitlement by an academia that regards wealth as the ultimate determinant of fitness for admission: these obscenely privileged creatures – the soullessly predatory men and women for whom the cultural theorist Henry Giroux finds such appropriate metaphors in zombies and vampires – had naught but scorn for the sweatshop wages paid by impoverished nonprofits and the few lesser newspapers that remained in publication.
Initially of course even an arch-cynic such as I could not resist the notion my recall might represent another shot at the proverbial brass ring – again that chronically seductive Step-Right-Up delusion – but that was quickly revealed as a perfect personal example of what the Obama presidency has since proven to the entire nation: the imbecility of hope.
And now, with capitalism's longstanding efforts to suppress public access to information already imposing a 75-percent reduction in journalistic employment – whatever photographic and textual potential I might have retained is undeniably FUBAR, a military term-of-art denoting destruction beyond any possibility of repair.
“Yeah I coulda been a contenda...”
So I probably need say no more about my attitude toward hope – save the one undeniable revelation of the fire is the ultimate purpose of hope is also the final demonstration of the relentless sadism of god, fate, karma, happenstance, capitalism or whatever other suprahuman force we might suspect governs our lives: the abyss of one's grief is directly proportionate to peaks of one's hope. Nor is reason any defense: the more rationally inflated our hope, the greater and more permanent the devastation inflicted by its betrayal, whether by disaster or deceit.
Lastly to clear up a few matters of protocol and grammar:
Ms. McMillan – if I may call you Franetta you may surely call me Loren – I'm very sorry I subjected you to an involuntary change of genders and hope I can reassure you it was not some recurrent misogynistic reflex. Probably the first U.S. journalist to identify what the late Walter Bowart called “revolution in consciousness” as actually the resurrection of the goddess (or to use Gary Snyder's terminology, the spontaneous rebirth of the ethos that died with the sack of Knossos), I well and truly hope I am far beyond male-supremacist relapses. Instead I was guilty of bad scholarship and faulty hypothesis, also the victim of (defective?) Internet transmission. I scanned Brokenturtleblog looking for the identity of the “Is Change Impossible” poster – the text as originally opened by this computer bore no signature (indeed the only visible sig was on Mr. Bannowsky's comments) – and I concluded on the preponderance of evidence the site was primarily Steven Leech's and that (again given the absence of a signature) it was to his three-part essay both Mr. Bannowsky and I were responding.
As to my capitalization of the castes into which we are being inescapably divided by what Karl Marx would surely recognize as final-stage capitalism – Working Class and Ruling Class (does it seem there's a pun lurking somewhere amidst all this capital?) – I do so not in accommodation of archaic practice but because these divisions are becoming at least as relevant today as they were in Tsarist Russia or pre-revolutionary France. More to the point, the two classes are acquiring a permanence and exclusivity – a gradual maximizing of oppression truly global in scope – that is probably without precedent since the socioeconomic aftermath of the fall of Rome in 476 CE hurled Europe into a thousand-year darkness.
While my usage can surely be rejected as nothing more than a histrionic act of editorial license (perhaps even of an editor with a poetic license long ago expired), socioeconomic reality suggests it is instead rather prophetic, in which context see Maude Barlow, “The World Has Divided into Rich and Poor as at No Time in History” (http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/07/02-6), not to mention the myriad and ever-more-frequent reports “Jobless Recovery” is truly forever.
Though it is a bit of an aside, it is my belief the clandestine purpose of the economic collapse is to do exactly what it is doing: imposing the total elimination of all government services that do not directly increase profits. Why else would the Ruling Class have slashed the throat of its own golden-egg goose?
Next – the timing is significant – we were given an impossible choice: the undeniable eloquence of Barack Obama versus the dwindling health of McCain and the fanatical ranting of Palin (an eerie and terrifying echo of the von Hindenberg/Hitler relationship, for which see my collage “Sometimes It Comes Back Female,” http://lorenbliss.typepad.com/loren-bliss-outside-agitators-notebook/2009/11/my-feelings-as-a-christian-point-me-to-my-lord-and-savior-as-a-fighteras-a-christian-i-have-also-a-d.html Note too the quote is from der Führer: I am not only agnostic but opposed in principle to organized religions, especially those that – originating as they did from the harsh patriarchal mentalities of the desert – would reduce the entire planet to arid wasteland).
Finally though here on the Big Plantation of the United Estates, Obama is (of course) the victor – note how Ruling Class financing favored him nearly three to one – and his promises prove to be nothing more than Big Lies. Moreover they impose – ironically as the one “change we can (truly) believe in” – an unprecedented disaffection with politics that will undoubtedly last until conditions in the United States become so ghetto/Appalachian wretched there is actual rebellion, by which time the mercenary armies of the Ruling Class will be sufficiently schooled in murder-on-command they will unhesitatingly exterminate the surplus members of the Working Class and enslave all the survivors. It is a process already rehearsed many times in microcosm: Pinochet's Chile, for example. Or Franco's Spain.
In the parlance of the 'Hood, capitalism a travelin muthafucka an our house be nex.
Lastly, an explanation of the relationship between scholarship and hope. My sentence was unintentionally confusing – a reflection on me the writer not you the reader. My meaning would have surely been clear had I used “investigation” (and perhaps also “meditation”) in place of “scholarship.” My point was that hope as I know it – hope that is definitively rational and therefore worthy of making one's own – is born of only knowledge. Slaves in the antebellum South had scant hope of escaping slavery until they learned the directions encoded in the Drinking Gourd song; they had no real opportunity until the Civil War. A Union Army marching song says it all: “Hurrah, hurrah, we bring the Jubilee; Hurrah, hurrah, the flag that makes you free.”
But now there is neither Jubliee nor Flag, and hardly any water.
Nevertheless the Unknown still beckons. As much of the above surely implies, it is a realm with which I have some prior acquaintance. And where else is there to go?
Especially if one believes -- as I do -- that in these times, survival itself is a revolutionary act.
LB/26 July 2010
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