The Breathtaking Hypocrisy Of The Anti-Transit Evergreen State (Loren Bliss: Dispatches from Dystopia)

Economic Collapse: Capitalist Death-Blow To Public Services?

Is This Negativity – Or Good Work In A Very Bad Time?

The Breathtaking Hypocrisy Of The Anti-Transit Evergreen State

29 April 2010

Washington has long claimed to be the most environmentally consciousness state in the nation – an alleged Ecotopia of green-minded infallibility that was (s)trumpted to the (exhaust-befouled) heavens even before Seattle began calling itself “The Emerald City.”

The name is curiously apt, not for the environmentalism it is intended to proclaim nor the illiteracy it accidentally reveals, but for the fact the original Emerald City made famous by L. Frank Baum in TheWizard of Oz was a realm of deception. The wizardly facade that so astounded Baum's Dorothy is a near-perfect analogy for the environmental denial and deceptiveness characteristic of Seattle and the Land of WA in general.

Nowhere are these attributes more evident than in the hostility to mass transit that defines Evergreen State political attitudes. Five of seven Seattle-area regional transit measures have been slain since 1968; four were rejected by the voters, another – the most ambitious project of all (a federally funded light rail system linking the cities along the Interstate 5 corridor from the Oregon state line to the Canadian border) – was killed by the legislature. The result is that Pugetopolis – the metropolitan sprawl from Olympia north through Tacoma and Seattle to Everett and Bellingham – has the worst mass transit of any comparable urban area in the United States: 40 years behind that of its demographic equivalents.

Such a uniquely dismal record refutes – with the undeniable finality of a capsized garbage barge – Washington's strident claims to ecotopian consciousness. It also exposes what is perhaps the most breathtaking political hypocrisy in all U.S. history. “Emerald City” indeed: “bah, humbug!”

The question now is whether local and regional voters will approve the minuscule sales-tax increases – in every case no more than some fraction of a penny on a dollar – that are essential to preserve such transit systems as already exist in this Nevergreen state.

Without those tiny tax hikes, transit users in the Puget Sound region are facing service reductions approaching 60 percent – radical decreases in the frequency of urban bus runs and already-minimal rail operations, the abandonment and isolation of outlying areas by termination of all service.

While transit officials are publicly optimistic the tax increases will be approved – like athletic coaches, they are forbidden to acknowledge unavoidable defeat even when it is certain – I have grave doubts. I fear the revenue reductions inflicted by the Great Recession have sent Pugetopolis transit to its deathbed – and very probably have done likewise for public transport in most of the nation.

There are two issues here, one national, the other apparently local.

The national issue – which I discussed in “Economic Collapse: Capitalist Death-Stroke To Hated Public Services?” (27 April 2010; linked above the headline) – is whether the collapse and its subsequent Great Recession are engineered to fulfill a seemingly unthinkable Ruling Class purpose. Is it deliberate escalation of the seven-decade Ruling Class war on governmental services? Is it to kill transit, education, welfare, unemployment insurance, health care, environmental protection? Is it intended to preserve only those services – chiefly military and infrastructure – that directly contribute to capitalist profits?

If I have read the indications correctly, the answers to these questions are affirmative. The economic crisis is eliminating government services exactly as intended. Which means Teabagger thuggery will probably be mobilized against save-our-transit efforts just as it was against health care reform.

The local issue – though it too may portend a national trend – is a seldom-acknowledged and hard-to-document component of the Pugetopolan mindset: the huge and apparently growing segment of its motoring majority that is brazenly hateful – deliberately sadistic and not infrequently violent – toward transit users, bicyclists and pedestrians in general.

I have never encountered its like. My lifetime itinerary includes New York City, the New Jersey metropolitan area, Washington D.C., Philadelphia, Chicago, Baltimore, Detroit, Jacksonville, San Francisco and Portland; Montreal and Vancouver; lesser cities in Michigan, Tennessee, Virginia, North Carolina and West Virginia; a working summer on Cape Cod; military postings in South Carolina, Maryland, Georgia and Korea – in other words, a fair sampling.

While I have seen motorists bristle at pedestrians and bicyclists in most of those places, I've never witnessed anything remotely akin to what happens here every day – especially the malicious targeting of transit users. Nor is its sometimes murderous intensity anything new; a state trooper told me in 1978 that hit-and-run victimizations of pedestrians and bicyclists are among Washington's most commonly unsolved crimes.

Though I would not knowingly choose to live amidst such hatefulness, I was stranded here in 1970 by an odd conjunction of improbable disasters, another story for another time. That first year in Washington, profoundly unpleasant for any number of reasons, is also memorable for the hit-and-run murder of a bicyclist whose presence on a rural road apparently provoked a deadly vehicular assault. The victim, though not someone I knew, had been close enough with several acquaintances they were heartbroken.

My first month in Seattle, where I lived from 1972 through 1976, I witnessed a morning-rush motorist attack a bicyclist. The motorist deliberately veered toward the bicyclist, forced him into a curb so high it wrecked the bike; the impact catapulted the bicyclist over the handlebars and onto an adjacent greensward. Then the motorist pelted the bicyclist with empty soft-drink cans, finally speeding away when I jumped out of my own automobile to intervene.

The bike was destroyed, the bicyclist's trousers shredded, his knees skinned and bleeding, his ribs painfully bruised. I offered to drive him to an emergency room or to his destination, both of which he declined. So I gave him the license number of his assailant and later added my testimony to a police report.

After several more such incidents – at least one in which I was the target – I who had fearlessly peddled all over Manhattan on a Raleigh 3-speed became afraid to bike even on Seattle's side streets and sold the 10-speed I had bought to accommodate the city's mountain-steep grades.

I have never dared bicycle here since.

Now of course I am too crippled to bicycle anywhere.

Apart from an interrupted return to Manhattan during the mid-1980s – a promising and joyful professional resurrection ironically terminated by the arson fire here in Washington that destroyed all my work and robbed me of any possibility of further journalistic success – I have been a resident of this state for nearly 40 years. But until my automobile died last July, I was unaware the majority's smoldering antagonism toward bicyclists had burst into a conflagration of hatred against anyone without a car or truck.

The first week I rode buses in Tacoma was even more disturbingly eye-opening than my long-ago effort to bicycle in Seattle. Tacoma motorists nearly ran me down in crosswalks a half-dozen times. One driver shouted “hurry up and die,” and while I was waiting in a bus-stop shelter, another driver cursed me as a “fucking bum.” A couple of days later I was targeted by a man in a shiny new gas-guzzler pickup truck (what else), who blared his horn and swerved toward me when I stepped off a curb while (presumably) protected by a “walk” signal; his passengers cackled with malevolent glee when I nearly tripped over my own cane as I leapt out of his way.

Now after 10 months of riding buses – the permanence of Jobless Recovery guarantees not only that I will never own an automobile again but that I am probably stuck here in anti-transit land until death – I assume any such trip will include at least one encounter with a pedestrian-hating motorist.

Most of my fellow transit-riders – those with whom I have chatted at bus stops or en route somewhere – report similar experiences. The common denominator is some road-raging driver spewing toxins from a cesspool mouth: “buy a car you piece of shit.” The denunciations of choice for obviously elderly, obviously crippled pedestrians like myself are typically “useless motherfucker,” “goddamn grandpa” or “fucking gimp.”

Today I was obviously burdened with groceries, obviously moving at maximum hobble to catch an approaching bus, but not one driver in a long line of at least 20 vehicles turning through a crosswalk would allow me the right of way that would have let me catch the bus. There is no question the bumper-to-bumper obstruction was deliberate – many of the motorists were laughing, jeering and giving me the finger. A women shouted “get a heart attack”; a man yelled “fuck you drop dead.”

And yes, as a result of the obstructionism I missed the bus.

The 30-minute wait for the next bus is the 30 minutes of angry contemplation now boiling over onto this page.

But at least now it is clear to me we are damned not merely by politicians in lucrative servitude to Big Automotive and Big Oil and therefore bribed to minimize the reality of petroleum bankruptcy. We are also cursed by horsepower-as-virility males terrified of impending castration and automobile-as-adornment females hysterical at their looming loss of glamor – a hopelessly enslaved population that so desperately loves its vehicular bondage it will literally kill to maintain it.

Probably – Sarah Palinoid denials not withstanding – these vindictive motorheads are also panicked (as well they should be) by terminal climate change. Whatever their psychological trigger, they are now consumed by the Moron Nation psychosis of blaming the poor for the crimes of the rich – hence the antagonism toward transit exploding into the malevolence toward transit users I encounter every time I ride the bus.

Meanwhile the local aristocracy demonstrates a unique and breathtaking hostility to electrically powered rail transport. It clearly believes those of us who cannot afford automobiles should be condemned to busing: allowed only herky-jerky people-compactors – roving ovens in summer, traveling Petri dishes in winter – Third World transport for the New Third World.

What makes this bus bias even more astonishing is that Washington is served by Bonneville Power – a kind of mini-Tennessee Valley Authority (and like TVA another legacy of the New Deal) – that provides the state with the second cheapest electricity in the nation.

Perfect for electrically powered public transport, right?

So we might assume, but we'd be dead wrong.

Even in the post-oil-embargo '70s, Seattle's Metro Transit was secretly junking its electrically powered trackless trolleys and replacing them with fossil-fueled, internal-combustion-engined buses – a scandal exposed (and stopped) by The Seattle Sun, the alternative weekly of which I was the founding photographer.

Most of us from elsewhere instinctively expect better from a place so smugly, even arrogantly eco-preachy.

But eventually – if we pay attention – we see past the Emerald City smiley face and the politically correct hokum to something presumably a bit more akin to reality.

There's also the fact the Evergreen State was named not for its environmental zealotry but for its annual tree-kill: the evergreen harvest beloved of its timber barons.

And we should never forget the Ehrlichman Function: Seattle Felon John Ehrlichman's admission during the Watergate Hearings that Washington is the testing-ground of choice whenever the Ruling Class wants to try out a new technique of oppression.

Such is the Oz-like wizardry that governs the land of ecotopian deception, where the reality described by “evergreen” is the flow of Big Business funding that ensures the DemocRats remain indistinguishable from GOPorkers save in rhetoric; where “sustainability” is the chief attribute of that quid pro quo; and where – as a result – no politician dares publicly admit that bus-dependency merely perpetuates our enslavement to the Big Oil/Big Automotive oligarchy.

It is the most glaring example of Ruling Class tyranny – and Moron Nation stupidity – I have witnessed outside the South.

But even if the voters do the improbable and approve these tiny save-transit tax-nudges – “nudges” because “hikes” is far too strong – the fact all the state's systems are inseparably wedded to buses dooms them to eventual self-destruction.

It cannot be said too often that buses are no different from cars and trucks in being hopelessly subject to skyrocketing fossil-fuel prices and the looming fuel-supply shortfalls imposed by petroleum bankruptcy.

This dependence on finite and therefore ever-more-expensive propellants is what makes all bus-centered transit systems ultimately a colossal waste of funds – money that (given the permanence of Jobless Recovery) – will never again be available.

Knowing the malevolent depths of capitalist hostility to any governmental service not exploitable for profit, I cannot but wonder if this built-in termination mechanism is the real reason the Ruling Class so relentlessly opposes the rail systems that could entrain us to socioeconomic sustainability.

*****

And Now If You Need More Specific Proof...

I had intended to include the two stories below in my Earth Day anthology, but I cut them because their added length crashed the TypePad server. Then I resurrected them here because of their obvious relevance.

The first demonstrates how the Ruling Class continues to fight rail transit with the same closed-minded stubbornness that characterized the efforts of die-hard segregationists half a century ago in the South. The second proves that – again exactly as in the South – tyranny in Washington state is born of Ruling Class domination of government. My responses – for which scroll down the comment threads – elaborate on these themes.

The summaries are mine; the headlines – including the scare-screamer immediately following – are as they appeared:

***

Public-transport foes claim we're still in denial about Sound Transit costs

Ted Van Dyk, a writer for Crosscut, a Seattle online daily, continues the attack against adequate transit. I reply by pointing out just how outrageously backward Pugetopolan transit is already.

http://crosscut.com/2010/04/21/sound-transit/19756/

***

Who killed the water quality tax?

Daniel Jack Chasan, also of Crosscut, reveals how DemocRats and GOPorkers collaborated to kill an important environmental protection measure, severely wounding a plethora of victims including “Puget Sound water quality, Washington's cash-strapped municipal governments, and unemployed laborers and teamsters.” I point out the measure's death is merely more evidence of how the state's politicians are wholly owned subsidiaries of Big Oil and Big Automotive.

http://crosscut.com/2010/04/16/washington-legislature/19749/

*****

Welcome to the Evergreen State. Step right up.

LB/29 April 2010

(-30-)

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INTRODUCTION

For about 25 of my 65 years as a writer and photographer, newspaper journalism seemed a promising career. But as my colleagues moved stealthily rightward, I moved ever-more-openly leftward, until eventually I was left...outside. Permanently. Hence "Outside Agitator's Notebook," which evolved into the more closely focused "Dispatches from Dystopia." Under either name it was originally a regularly updated anthology of reports, analyses, commentaries, photographs and other anti-capitalist testimony from the ecogenocidal dystopia that neoliberal capitalism -- our species' newest euphemism for resurrected nazism -- has made of our world. But the shock of a censorship incident (see "Probable Final Dispatches, End of Dispatches," 17 April 2020) has reduced it to far less frequent publication. Meanwhile our species' dystopian epicenter remains the post-humanitarian United States of America, which with its ruling cabal of morally imbecilic plutocrats, its hopelessly subjugated and often vindictively craven Moronic Majority and its Moron Nation empire of global-conquest racism and general malevolence, is indeed the de facto Fourth Reich, the actual birthdate of which will eventually be recognized as 22 November 1963 – that is, if our species somehow miraculously survives the terrifying thermonuclear/biochemical arsenal that maintains the Empire's ecogenocidal omnipotence. (¶)-Dispatches will nevertheless continue -- albeit on a far more relaxed schedule -- to chronicle our relentless subjugation by neoliberal capitalism as it (inevitably) reverts to its traditional might-makes-right savagery. Just as capitalism previously transformed itself into Italian Fascism and German Nazism, capitalism now matures into a nazism of uniquely USian form and content. By examining the more devastating details of what is being done to us, DfD shows how ours is a dystopia characterized as much by the mindlessness of Moron Nation's "zieg-heil"-equivalent chanting of “USA! USA! USA!” as by the brutality such chanting invariably celebrates – the ecogenocidal atrocities the capitalist ruling cabal perpetrates in the name of “profit,” “growth” and USian “exceptionalism.” (¶)-Why “USian” rather than "American"? Because to call this exceptionally fascist empire “America” is to slander as fascists or nazis all humanitarian-minded peoples of North and South America who valiantly and often fatally resist enslavement by USian nazis, whose obscene present-day skills at the imposition of tyranny and enslavement were perfected by the legions of German Nazi war criminals the government and its capitalist owners adopted as advisors and comrades-at-arms c. 1944-1947. And, yes, “humanitarian” versus “anti-humanitarian” are the only terms that adequately differentiate the two now eternally hostile subspecies into which capitalism has finally divided Homo sapiens sapiens. On one side are those of us who cling to the so-called Golden Rule and its variants, “do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” the ultimate form of which is Marxism's “from each according to ability, to each according to need.” On the other side are the moral imbeciles – nazis, fascists, Ayn Rand disciples and all the other psychological zombies that are Capitalism's unique and uniquely apocalyptic spawn. (¶)-But what then is capitalism? Though traditionally defined as economics alone, it is in fact the quintessential patriarchal ethos, the diabolical methodology of building a global empire by conquest and genocide both obvious and clandestine, with post-conquest world governance originally patterned after the despotic management of antebellum slave plantations. Capitalism is thus the forefather of fascism and Nazism, which are its only possible socioeconomic offspring. Behind its seductive cloak of euphemisms and Big Lies (“manifest destiny,” “easy credit,” “economic freedom,” “self-made man,” “entrepreneur,” “no down payment,” “rugged individualist,” “you too can be rich,” “free will,” etc. ad nauseam), capitalism is the stench of burning flesh and rotting corpses; the shrieks of napalmed children; the despair of families evicted into the permanent degradation of filth, untreated disease and constant fear of murder, enslavement by arrest or kidnapping that defines USian homelessness; the final agonies of maliciously abandoned patients condemned to death by the deliberately genocidal costs of health care. (¶)-Ultimately capitalism is the boundless Evil of global dictatorship by the Christian white male .01 Percent, a tiny, ruthless cabal of capitalist aristocrats for whom infinite greed is ultimate virtue and for whom the snuff-film sadism of class warfare provides the ultimate entertainment. Under capitalism's Fukushima-deadly, Ayn Rand credo of serial-killer moral imbecility – absolute power and unlimited profit for the .01 Percent and its ruling-class vassals, zero-tolerance oppression and bottomless poverty for all the rest of us – these obscenely wealthy despots now impose on us their increasingly overt paradigm of nazi governance. Not that we the (formerly exempt) people should be surprised; the merciless regimen that is now ours is how the capitalists have always tyrannized our sisters and brothers in America's First Nations, in the USian ghettos and in all capitalism's victim-realms abroad. (¶)-Moreover much of our plight is of our own making. We the people of the United States long ago surrendered to our capitalist overlords. We submit to denial of health care that is everywhere else on this planet deemed a human right; we submit to enslavement by debt; to the outsourcing of our jobs; to bankruptcy; to foreclosure; to eviction and homelessness; to imprisonment in numbers hitherto unequaled in human history; and most of all to the biggest Big Lie of all – the suicidal delusion we somehow remain free despite the capitalists' no-longer-deniable theft of our liberty and their snickering revocation of the few prefaces to economic democracy our now-powerless unions had once managed to win. Our confinement is ensured, not just by our cowardice but by the invisible but inescapable cage of total surveillance: the electronic barbed wire that has reduced our entire planet to a monstrous concentration camp. (¶)-Cast off as “surplus human capital” when we are deemed no longer exploitable for profit, we are then methodically exterminated. We are slaughtered as cannon-fodder in the empire's endless wars of profit and conquest; we are murdered by the bullets and truncheons of the federalized and militarized local police; we are fatally poisoned by capitalism's malignant toxification of our environment; we are slain by denials of health care and social services that are in fact deliberate, euphemism-cloaked policies of slow-motion genocide. (¶)-Meanwhile our overlords pornographically multiply their own wealth by knowingly destroying the planetary conditions upon which all sentient life depends. More recently – as if to demonstrate the infinite magnitude of their Evil by provoking unsurvivable thermonuclear apocalypse (and not coincidentally in fulfillment of a malevolent scheme by Adolf Hitler himself) – they have imposed on the Ukraine the anti-Russian war-mongering and anti-Jewish violence of an avowedly nazi puppet government. And now the USian tyrannosaur has come home to gorge on its final and terminally ironic meal, the denizens of Moron Nation itself, not just the Moronic Majority who by their conditioned ignorance and prideful hatefulness loosed this demonically insatiable monster on the entire world, but every last one of us, every child, woman and man who is not part of the ruling aristocracy. (¶)-In these times -- the darkest and most hopeless era of our species 200,000-odd years -- our ability to effectively resist is obstructed not only by the USian regime of inescapable surveillance, but by the dreadful undertow of Moron Nation's intellectual and psychological paralysis: the deliberate deceptions and outright ignorance fostered by the capitalist “education” system; by capitalism's “mainstream media” propaganda machine (which is owned by the same smirking plutocrats whose vassal politicians so gleefully oppress us); and by the never-ending physical and psychic terrorism of capitalism's manufactured crises. (¶)-Yet resist we must. As always, art – sometimes even unwittingly – depicts our present circumstances and so foretells our future. The pagan renaissance, its resurrection of our Mother Earth as the variously named Great Goddess and the emergence of the Gaia Hypothesis as the scientific endorsement of our planet as "alive, conscious and self-regulating" tell us that even now -- though the fires of liberation seem extinguished by Stygian darkness -- their embers yet glow hot beneath the ashes, there to be once more blown aflame should we somehow find the courage and will to do so. As is said in "Biko" by the poet/musician Peter Gabriel, "You can blow out a candle/ But you can't blow out a fire/ Once the flames begin to catch/ The wind will blow it higher." Or as is said in "The Dawn Will Come" by the poet/composer Trevor Morris, "Shadows fall/ And hope has fled/ Steel your heart/ The dawn will come." (Links to each work below.)

For More Information...

A far more complete and autobiographically detailed version of "Introduction"
was published as a regular blog post – its substantially larger type also making it much more easily readable – on 23 March 2017 under the title “New Name, New Urgency as Capitalism Bares Its Nazi Fangs.”

Links relevant to Introduction

"...actual birthdate of which will eventually be recognized as 22 November 1963 -- that is, if our species somehow survives...""
The late Mae Brussell was perhaps the world's most diligent researcher into the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, whose (technically unsolved) murder marks the beginning of the USian descent into its own form of nazism.
"...chronicle our relentless subjugation by capitalism..."
We the people of the 99.9 Percent are being methodically reduced to slavery and serfdom by capitalist governance -- absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent and their ruling class vassals, zero-tolerance oppression for all the rest of us -- and the CIA's Operation Chaos exemplifies capitalism's darkest and most malevolent aspects.
"Once the flame begins to catch/ The wind will blow it higher."
Peter Gabriel's eulogy for Stephen Biko, one of the martyrs of the South African anti-apartheid movement.
"Shadows fall and hope has fled; steel your heart; the dawn will come..."
Whether wittingly or not, composer/poet Trevor Morris has in this piece come closer than any human bard to answering an ancient riddle: "what song do the Birds of Rhiannon sing, and to what quest are we thereby summoned?"

Fire Survivors

These are some of the very few photographs that survived the 1 September 1983 arson fire that destroyed my life's work, not just most of my pictures but nearly all my writing including three books in progress and all the associated research, which I had stored with a friend in Washington state for safekeeping until I had achieved a permanent address after my return to New York City. Significantly, the fire was ignited at the exact instant I was meeting with the late Cicely Nichols, an influential book editor who believed my meticulously researched, photographically illustrated 150-thousand-word "Glimpses of a Pale Dancer" and its re-definition of the 1960s Counterculture as the first wave of a spontaneous revolution against patriarchy would be one of the most important works of the 20th Century; she had thus promised to mother it to mainstream publication. Some of the photos shown here escaped the flames because they accompanied me to Manhattan in my portfolio case; others were produced digitally from negatives dug out of the rubble a year later. The images of obvious print-quality were made on DuPont Varilure paper, which had the highest silver content of all commercial papers and thus produced such intense tonalities, they often seemed illuminated by their own internal light sources. But that sort of photographic quality is now forever beyond our common reach, either gone like Varilure or so prohibitively expensive it is available only to the obscenely pampered dilettantes who produce the aesthetic pabulum favored by the .01 Percent. Photography as I knew it is dead -- as dead as my career was after the fire and its ensuing clinical depression -- but this body of work provides a glimpse of what was lost both in "Dancer" and in my more general photojournalism. All photos copyright Loren Bliss.

Sandwiches for Mind and Spirit

In photography, a sandwich is a collage made by printing two or more negatives simultaneously. Collage is a medium that has fascinated me for as long as I can remember -- probably since I was a child experimenting with finger paints, glue and newspapers -- but I never took it seriously until, sometime in my early 20s and still thinking myself a painter-to-be, I discovered the works of Jasper Johns. Now it seems to me making sandwiches is to conventional photography what poetry is to prose: not just an intellectual exercise, but the opening of a doorway to the Mysterious Otherness I know as the Muse, from whom (sometimes in fulfillment of that Jungian/McLuhanesque notion of art as prophecy) the currents of real creation invariably flow, whether swift and startling as a lightening strike or slow and soft as cottonwood seeds adrift on subtle summer air. (Collage and photographic sandwiches copyright Loren Bliss 2009-2012.)

Graffiti: a Sampler

When I returned to New York City in 1965 I was immediately impressed by the contrast between the graffiti I had encountered "out in America" -- the South and Middle West -- and what I saw in Manhattan. While the form and content of graffiti is sociologically important – possibly a semiotic indicator without peer -- I found the graffiti of Manhattan singularly appealing, the intellectual and aesthetic equivalents of a long-overdue breath of fresh air, and within a few days I had begun documenting it with 35mm and 120 film. (The opening photograph of this series was obviously made far from Manhattan, but I included it to establish an essential contrast.) Many more details about this particular body of work, which I briefly resumed when I went back to the City again in 1983, then abandoned after that year's career-terminating fire, are in my post of January 7, 2010. Yes I regard the best urban graffiti as genuine art, but too much of it, alas, is nothing more than a human variant on the mammalian practice of marking territory with spurts of urine: "I wuz here." All photos by Loren Bliss, copyright dates as noted.

Faces of the Fight

Supporters of health care reform and a much smaller number of health care reform's opponents -- each faction identified by its picket-signs -- gathered for the "town hall" meeting called by U.S. Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA) in Lakewood on August 25, 2009. Originally set for Lakewood City Hall, the event was rescheduled and moved to Lang Stadium to accommodate an unprecedented mobilization of pro-reform people. Cops estimated the crowd at about 2500. Photos by Loren Bliss copyright 2009.

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