Abutments: an Encounter in the Northern Michigan Woods

(Asked how I -- outspokenly Marxian and assertively agnostic -- can also be a Gaian Pagan, I answer that Paganism chose me, and did so in a way that sustains the revolutionary skepticism in which I was raised. What follows is the true and eerie story of how that choosing happened. It is reprinted from Dispatches from Dystopia, which was slain and purged by its server's death.)   

By Loren Bliss
I BEGAN KEEPING a journal in my 16th summer, a few months before I got my first newspaper job, and despite the discouragements inflicted by severe dyslexia, I have done so ever since. Though nearly all these annual collections of notes and letters and poetry fragments and other such personal memorabilia were destroyed by arson in 1983, the dynamic of memorization and recall that is a central part of writing enables me to remember enough of a given event – what occurred and how I felt about it – to be reasonably comfortable applying the first-person form to anything that happened in my life from mid-1956 onward.

But my pre-journal years are notably different: though thanks to my father's encouraging gifts of cameras I was already committed to a lifetime of photography, I remained a boy who had yet to discover the advantage of inked or typewritten paper mnemonics, a reality underscored by the present-day fact that while my pre-journal memories remain vivid, the emotional anesthesia that is both the curse and blessing of nonverbal time has given them a curiously once-removed quality akin to that of film footage or old sepia-toned photographs, of events in which I was an observer rather than a participant or – if reincarnation is more than just a comforting fiction – perhaps of memories from other lifetimes.

Clearly this is why whenever I try to write of my boyhood years before the decisive moment I committed myself also to a lifetime of writing, it seems gravely dishonest to do so in anything other than the third person, presumably a recognition that these circumstances demand the I (and eye) of the autobiographical present be replaced by the visually reportorial he and him – an expression of necessity and therefore not of some Norman Mailer affectation.

There is also the fact that until my emotional and intellectual vocabularies had expended to something approaching maturity – another milestone I associate with journal-keeping and its origin in my decision to study and practice accurate description – there was much that happened during my pre-journal years I frankly found impossible to verbalize until years later; I lacked both the words and the vital sense of metaphorical relationships – for example the clear image of Nature as a womanliness so huge and powerful and yes seductive that even now I can find no adequate synonyms for her timeless magnificence in any language beyond the visual arts or the haunting virtuosity of music. It is especially evident in tribal woodwinds, their summons like fire-blue Clyfford Still brush-strokes against an umber cadence of drums; the heartbeat of a forest; some clear and troutly river that yet murmurs in the Mother Tongue -- all the reflections and emanations of pure wildness and wilderness so beloved of Celtic or First Nations peoples.

The following describes an event I as a boy never dared reveal, one of those pre-journal episodes I can only relate in the third person, a true story I could not write until I was a 70-year-old cripple and no longer gave a damn if people thought me a liar or crazy or both.

Bear in mind too that children of my generation yet enjoyed a freedom that in the United States of today has become not only unthinkable but is in many jurisdictions suppressed as an imaginary felony perpetrated by parents falsely accused of criminal neglect.

*****

THE BOY WALKED in conifer-dappled sunlight along a road so old and unused it was scarcely more than an underbrush-obscured trace through the forest. He had long wondered where the road might lead and what he might find along the way, and now today he followed its hide-and-seek ruts of pale yellow sand westward from the charred remnants of a mysteriously destroyed bridge that in the late 19th Century had briefly sought to span the South Branch of Michigan's Au Sable River.

Local elders called the former bridge-site “The Abutments” and – curiously, the boy thought – spoke of it with the same subtle implied-capitals proper-noun reticence he observed in adult conversations about graveyards and funerals or disasters, a fact the boy had noted immediately. After the boy had seen the reality of the place, the name had perplexed him even more, the quiet weight of its syllables clearly unexplained by what was there: the bridge could never have been anything but a crude structure built of hand-hewn logs, and that scarcely a single lane wide. It had twice briefly spanned a watercourse no more than 30 yards across even at maximum flood. Now, decades later, its telltale relics were merely two pairs of fire-blackened pilings, one pair on each side of the river in the shallows just beyond its banks, each piling a tight cluster of three or four maybe 12-inch diameter logs bound together by wraps of iron cable that had long ago oxidized into bands of dull brown coagulation now barely discernible from the underlying charcoal, each bank's pair matched like gateposts perhaps 10 feet apart.

There was mystery here also, another quality the boy sensed about the place: the fact The Abutments was where his maternal grandfather dug pale-gray clay from the otherwise mostly brightly pebbled riverbed for the boy's aunt to use in her ceramic sculptures. Hence -- or so the boy assumed (because he correctly recognized his mother's older sister as his sole defender amongst maternal kin otherwise poisoned to unrelenting hatefulness by the toxins of dysfunction and divorce) – such a place, if only by its association with the sanctuary of his aunt's studio, should therefore have emanated the same comforting sense of home with which the rest of the river unfailingly welcomed him, its murmur like the gentle voices of women conversing fondly in some immediately adjacent room, voices that sometimes even seemed to call one's name – an eerie but somehow comforting quality the river guides and their adult-fisherman clients would acknowledge only after several whiskeys and about which the boy thus knew to keep silent. But uniquely the clear water that coursed past The Abutments offered no such comfort; it gurgled ominously, and though the bottom beyond its clay-bed shallows and ruined pilings plunged quickly to the come-fish-me depths of big-trout habitat, the boy could not comfortably cast into it or even look long into its cold green shadows without involuntarily shuddering, as if someone had drowned there or something deadly dangerous lurked just out of sight within its strong currents.

As a result everything about The Abutments aroused his curiosity, and he repeatedly questioned his elders about what had happened there until finally his persistence pried out of his maternal grandmother a reluctant, obviously pared-to-the-bones story about bridge-builders twice thwarted by fire that  struck at night and did so inexplicably, without apparent cause or motive, so that after the second blaze had dropped the second span of timbers into the river and for the second time left only monoliths of charred pilings, the builders surrendered to whatever pyromaniacal namelessness seemed to rule there and abandoned not just the bridge but the entire road-building project, never mind it had been hailed as the shortest, easiest-to-complete route from Luzerne to Grayling and back.

Again in that oddly wordless childhood mode of reasoning, the boy soon concluded the reality that echoed in his elders' voices was neither explained by his grandmother's story nor by the fact a place so seemingly innocuous – at least until you peered into its deeper waters – would bear a name so subtly ominous.

Denied all other sources, the boy's curiosity took the sort of quantum-leap that would someday preface his investigative journalism: he began wondering what the road itself might tell him – and now today he intended to find out.

*****

YOU GOT TO the Abutments by a seldom-traveled and severely potholed two-rut road that followed the river maybe a half mile along its west bank downstream from the self-consciously rustic cabins of the sprawling George Mason Estate and ended in the sandy expanse of a turnaround that sloped gently to the water's edge, an obvious if curiously underutilized launching-site for canoes and the AuSable's uniquely long and flat-bottomed riverboats.

Here a Norway pine, the oblong vertical scales of its bark the color of red rust, had sprung from the middle of the intended Luzerne-to-Grayling roadway maybe a dozen yards beyond  where the west end of the bridge had been. The tree had since grown to a towering height, as if it were adding its own exclamation point of obstruction to the message of the fires.

On the river's east bank the old road had long ago vanished, conquered by an unlikely jungle of marsh grass that grew chest-high beneath a grove of white-trunked paper-birch, but here on the west side of the river the way had been preserved well into the 20th Century, probably by hunters using it to access the deep woods beyond. What was now a turnaround had until sometime in the '40s been a riverside junction on the upstream side of the big pine, a 90-degree L-shaped intersection that ended the north-south road from the Mason Estate by connecting it to the remnant of the Luzerne-Grayling road that continued westward toward Grayling to whatever point the roadbuilders had reached when the project was terminated by the fires that twice destroyed their bridge. But this passage too had finally been by closed by winter windfalls that for some unknown reason no one had troubled themselves to clear away and now it was dwindling to just another of the innumerable forgotten tracks that thread northern Lower Michigan's ruggedly mature second-growth forest: scrubby jack pine and its less frequent but far more stately cousins, white pine, blue spruce, other Norway pines like the one that seemed to stand sentry here where the boy began his quest.

It was 1952, near the end of that fondly remembered era when the electric lines and telephone wires went no closer to the South Branch country below Chase Bridge than Grayling, the Crawford County seat a dozen crow-miles further west. Though the entire region had been clear-cut to a biblical barren during the 1860s – raped for profit and then burned to an ashy wasteland by the Great Michigan Fire of 1871 – in '52 its distance from modern utilities had preserved its wildness and fostered the ecological healing that made it also a place of healing for humans. It was middle August, hot and nearly without wind; the sky that pure late-summer-and-early-autumn back-country royal blue you never see much below 44 degrees North latitude; the few clouds white and billowy as raw cotton; the late morning air pungent with sweet fern, loud with birdsong.

The boy's every step flushed huge coveys of those big brown Midwest grasshoppers that always make you think of butterflies as they fly away on purple-black wings edged in yellow or orange. Small for his age, the boy nevertheless had already learned from his father how to move with the watchfulness of a seasoned hunter, the quiet economy of the boy's stride and his obvious comfort in woodland solitude a rebuttal of both their urban origins, his receptivity to his father's teachings probably bolstered by the fraction of First Nations blood inherited from his maternal ancestors, genes that colored his hair black as coal and gave his darkly greenish brown eyes their vaguely Asiatic shape. He was dressed in khaki work clothes and a floppy-brim khaki field hat of the type the Army had issued at the beginning of World War II; he wore a razor-sharp six-inch-blade hunting knife in a brown leather sheath belted on his right hip and carried a .22 rim fire bolt-action Remington target rifle, its six-round clip charged with high-velocity hollow-points, the weapon loaded and locked safe and slung by an oiled leather sling diagonally across his back; the area was infamous for its small but notably deadly Massassauga rattlers, its packs of feral dogs and its occasional rabid animals, but his distinguished-rifleman father had already taught him to shoot so well he feared nothing in his environment, and he was supremely confident of his ability to perceive any incipient risk in time to defend himself against it, especially now in the state of ultra-observant mindfulness his father had taught him during jaunts in the woods and the marksmanship training begun shortly after the boy's fourth birthday. It was an elemental version of paying attention later proven professionally invaluable, eyes focused on nothing yet somehow also on everything, scanning his surroundings seeing whatever might thrust itself into his consciousness: perhaps a snake on which he might otherwise have stepped; perhaps a quick subtle whisk of tail revealing the presence of another mammal whether belligerent or benign; perhaps a discarded tool or the rusted relics of a logging camp from the 19th Century; perhaps a clear-water spring otherwise hidden beneath sweet fern and bracken, its tiny brook expanding to a swamp, a pond, even a new place to fish; perhaps another vanishing passage through the woods; perhaps more of the so-called "Indian Mounds" he sensed might explain the mysteries suggested by the twice-burned bridge and this fading remnant of road.

Songbird morning gave way to cicada afternoon; a vast chorus of insects droned in Gaian harmony; a Yellowhammer drilled a hollow snag for beetles. The day basked in post-Lughnasadh summer fulfillment, at ease with itself.

The road curved slightly upward along a low knoll, dipped toward a shallow basin – now bone dry but every spring a vernal pond – a space shadowed to momentary cool by a dense grove of spruce; the boy welcomed the quick respite from the heat, paused for just a moment to relish it, then walked on.

When he re-entered the dappled sunlight on the far side of the stand of spruce, he remembered that time in Florida when he was six years old and he had wandered away from his playmates and followed a white-sand causeway road deep into the perpetual shade of a cypress swamp; a year earlier on Summer Solstice Eve his mother had tried to murder him and kill his father too, but his father had subdued her and a few weeks after the violent aftermath of frantic adults and sirens and cops his father and his new and obviously loving stepmother had promised him his birthmother was safely locked away forever and that she would never be able to hurt him and that he would never have to see her again. Because it was easier to try to make sense of it when he was alone, he began spending as much time in solitude as the relatively unlimited childhood freedom of that era would allow, but at last in the cypress swamp that afternoon he sensed he was going too far and he stopped walking and looked out over the suddenly ominous expanse of dark water on both sides of the road: the cypress knees reminded him of the swollen ankles of a beggar he had seen on a street corner in downtown Jacksonville and the Spanish moss looked like witch hair on Hallowe'en and off in the distance something big enough to eat him announced its presence with a swirl of disturbing ripples and suddenly he was a little frightened. But he did not run; somehow he already knew better. He merely turned back and walked in the direction from which he had come and when he walked out into the hot sunlight and then beneath the towering shade of a huge tulip poplar growing to his left just outside the swamp a leaf spiraled downward from the tree and touched his forehead and it felt like a kiss, exactly the kind of kiss he had seen other mothers bestow on their own children, and all at once he sensed he was being embraced not by a woman but by something female he could not describe: a sense of womanliness itself, womanliness big as nature that had just kissed him as if to tell him not only that she would be his mother from now on but that unlike his birthmother she would never betray him.

Remembering those moments in Florida momentarily brought to mind his present circumstances. A divorce court had voided the no-contact promise; the boy was in Michigan only because of a judge's bad-luck mandate he summer with his birthmother until he turned 18; he was in the good-luck South Branch region of the Au Sable River wilderness -- which he would realize in old age was the one and only place in the dry-land world he had ever truly felt spiritually at home -- only because that was where his maternal grandparents, upon whom his birthmother would be dependent until their deaths, maintained "the cottage," the vacation home they built on the six remaining acres of the much more vast acreage the state of Michigan had in 1866 awarded his maternal grandmother's father, Henry Heber Woodruff, a Civil War hero and later a state circuit judge.

But now the boy's fleeting and not entirely welcome contemplation of his decidedly mixed fortune was abruptly ended by the raucous jeering of a squadron of blue jays somewhere off to his left in the middle distance. Vaguely startling, it instantly refocused his mind on his quest; he wondered what might have disturbed the jays and remembered a fight he had witnessed between jays and a nest-raiding red squirrel who had climbed the branch-bare lower trunk of the largest of the three blue spruce that grew 10 yards beyond the cottage-wide screened front porch where they ate their summer meals and the ever-audible voice of the river as it coursed a cluster of boulders 20 more yards beyond. The squirrel was searching for eggs to suck; the jays had flown at the squirrel before it reached their nest amongst the tree's dense branches and fiercely pecked its head until bright droplets of blood appeared on its russet-colored fur and it abruptly turned and fled down the tree.

But the boy quickly dismissed the jays' warning as having no significance to himself, and so he continued westward, his boot-heels lifting tiny puffs of dust from the sandy spots where the abandoned ruts were not yet overgrown.

Cicadas buzzed and rasped; a woodland aviary of small birds twittered.

A new bird warbled -- its voice clear and compelling as a minor-keyed flute-solo, a brush-stroke of vibrant blue gliding like a caress across the beige canvas of the August afternoon -- a seven-note melody so indescribably exquisite the boy gasped at its beauty.

It was birdsong he had never heard before – a startling but delightful surprise to one who was sure he had already learned every bird and bird call in that forest – and now the call was repeated, again and again, each note drawn out with the same slow poignant sensuality, every note pure as cleanest clearest water, a spirit-caress more powerful than anything his flesh had ever known or imagined.

The boy stopped amidst the dwindling road, gained a few inches of height by stepping atop the weed-grown hump that divided its two faded ruts, searched the surrounding trees, expected to see birds even fractionally as lovely as their song, its compelling suddenness suggesting a mental choreography of something he could not quite remember, perhaps – because already he had begun to understand the associations of sound and color and geometry – a recollection of his aunt at work on one of her paintings while her own daughter practiced the flute, an ephemeral construct of twilight blue and lunar-white he could see in his mind but not verbalize; perhaps though not his Aunt Alecia and his cousin Pamela at all; perhaps (though how could that be?) some phantom echo of memories far older.

He envisioned feathers of green and gold; the size of the song suggested birds at least as big as ravens.

Perhaps someone's parrots had escaped their cage.

He watched, waited; he knew songbirds typically flitted from limb to limb. Surely one of

these wondrous birds would soon move and the boy would spot them all by the motion of one. But jackpine and blue spruce remained birdless. There was nothing save the song – its notes so unfathomably lovely each was its own microcosm of ecstasy.

No, the boy thought, this couldn't be – birdsong so intense and yes getting closer, louder – but no birds anywhere to be seen.

Perhaps it was another human with a flute like that on which he had heard his cousin sometimes practice modal scales curiously similar to the obviously avian melody that now seemed to surrounded him. Perhaps it was somebody with a flute hiding and playing a joke or trying to frighten him.

He thought of tramps, of grubby men said to prey on children.

The boy unslung the Remington, thumb positioned to release its safety, trigger finger resting in readiness on the edge of its blued steel trigger guard: “I'm armed,” he warned; “I'll shoot.”

Yet even as he spoke he sensed the Remington was somehow irrelevant and he reslung it as he realized the forest had absorbed his shout as completely as if he had whispered into a blanket or yelled into a down pillow and he had a fleeting sense of being trapped in one of those awful dreams in which your life depends on your ability to scream but you cannot make your vocal cords produce even a tiny squeak. Yet the boy knew he was not dreaming; he knew it was 1952 on an August mid-afternoon and he was here in the Au Sable country, the only place on earth that felt like it actually welcomed him, and he was wide awake and all the lesser birds and now even all the insects had fallen dead silent yet these birds of the strange indescribably lovely song seemed to be circling directly above him and now yes around him at no more than arm's length yet there were no birds to be seen anywhere and now the color of the day was changing, the air becoming somehow iridescent, darkening to a kind of greenish stormlight though out beyond where he stood on the abandoned road, the sky remained impossibly cloudless and the sun was bright as ever but something inside the darkening air that same arms-length from his face and eerily also of the air itself was shaping itself into what appeared to be a phantom image of an opening, the beginning of a passageway no more substantial than shadow…

Such terror as the boy had never known or imagined engulfed him from head to foot. He became terror personified, terror the verb, terror his entire internal universe.

He turned and fled. He ran east toward the river. He ran harder and faster than he had ever run, probably harder and faster than he would ever run again even under maximum duress. He leapt windfalls, dodged saplings, his lungs painfully craving air, his heart seemingly loud as thunder. He ran until he could no longer hear the strange birds and the forest was again alive with bugsong and casual twittering and there was just the very late August afternoon and the abandoned road and its grasshoppers and the hot westering sun and the air tangy with the cinnamon citrus scent of sweet fern and in the bracken off to his right a whitetail doe with two spotted fawns standing motionless as if amused by his retreat and now finally the Norway pine on guard by the river.

He shrugged out of the Remington's sling and sat himself down at the big Norway pine's suddenly protective base and laid the rifle across his legs and pulled off the hat that had been discarded in 1946 by another maternal aunt's Army Air Corps husband and mopped his sweaty face with the hat's coarse cotton floppiness and leaned back against the tree's rough bark until he finally stopped panting and caught his breath.

The boy was surprised to discover the sun was nearly setting; somehow his hike along the abandoned road and his frantic retreat to the place of The Abutments had taken at least five hours more than he had realized.

He stood; he unlatched the Remington's safety and lifted its bolt handle so the rifle could not possibly fire and leaned the rifle against the tree, grounding its butt securely enough in the sand it could not slip sideways. Then he strode down to the river and knelt on the damp sand between the western bank's abutments and dowsed his face with double handfuls of the river's icy water. Even now nearly 70 years after the final fire had destroyed the second bridge the close proximity of the charred logs smelled subtly of wet charcoal.

The current gurgled as if in warning. The boy stood again and dried his hands on his pantlegs and fetched the Remington and restored it to locked-safety readiness and slung it diagonally across his back and picked up the sweat-darkened hat and put it on his head and began walking the river road quickly upstream toward his grandparents' vacation home.

Later that night while he could still remember the melody he whistled it for his grandmother, asking if she knew what species of bird it might be.

“No,” she said, focusing on the boy with a lingering glance so acutely searching it seemed to him she looked not at him but more deeply into him than anyone had ever looked, and for an instant he glimpsed in the robin's-egg blue of her eyes a vastly older and more purely wild female spirit somehow close kin to the powerful womanliness he had sensed in the kiss of that falling poplar-leaf in Florida.

“No,” the boy's grandmother repeated; “there's no bird alive in these woods sings like that.”

*****

TWO DECADES AFTERWARD, In what would become one of the most memorable moments of the 24 years of evenings, weekends and vacations I worked on my own time to document what I still regard as the 20th Century's biggest unreported story – the beginning of anti-patriarchal global revolution implicit in the old Counterculture's eerily spontaneous resurrection of the breathtakingly ancient ethos of the Great Goddess – I happened in my research to read of a phenomenon described in pre-Christian Celtic myth as "the Birds of Rhiannon": goddess-sent messengers feathered green and gold, avian couriers dispatched by Rhiannon herself either as a dire warning or as a summons that is fated and therefore cannot be refused, their song said to be the most hauntingly exquisite music in the universe. They are said to dwell in another dimension, which is why they remain invisible even when they sound as if they are within reach.

Until that reading I had never so much as imagined a connection between my odd late-boyhood encounter in the Michigan woods and my growing certainty the pagan-liturgy-resurrecting folk renaissance of the later 1950s was the beginning of an event far greater than itself; I assumed the compulsion that since my 19th year and my second quarter at the University of Tennessee had nagged me to pursue the story wherever it might lead was merely journalistic intuition on overdrive. But having learned of the Birds of Rhiannon, I could only begin to wonder if my efforts were far less self-assigned than I had imagined them to be.

And apropos that missing time, now (18 April 2024) in what by post-Covid diagnosis is most likely at age 84 my penultimate year, I cannot but wonder if I entered that passageway, and if that from which I fled in such terror five hours later was not the Goddess-centered blessedness I like a latter-day Thomas Rhymer might have witnessed therein, but the prophecy of endless wretchedness implicit in its mandate that I spend the rest of my life (as indeed I have) struggling to convey its species-preserving exquisiteness to mostly hostile audiences.

Wretchedness indeed: for the remainder of my childhood and adolescence and nearly all my adulthood, I was ruled by my left brain. I was outspokenly, even caustically agnostic, and I was profoundly skeptical of all so-called spiritual or religious experience including my own, but in that instant of reading I was smitten by a gooseflesh chill so powerfully indicative I knew what had shown itself to me in those Michigan woods was nothing less than what Robert Graves calls “poetic truth,” and I remembered the odd piercing look my grandmother had given me when I whistled for her the song of those ineffable birds of strange, her eyes with their almost surreptitious flash of recognition an involuntary reflex that by 1972 I had learned is a telling characteristic of women who are in touch with the goddess-symbol even if they cannot (or dare not) speak her name – women who, had my "Glimpses of a Pale Dancer" not been destroyed by arson just as it seemed on the brink of mainstream publication, might themselves have said of it what my late friend Helen Farias said to me after reading its earliest draft in the spring of 1971: “you have given me the words to describe what I have always known to be true but never had the vocabulary to express, and I cannot thank you enough.”

Since my 70s, I have recognized Helen's praise as among the finest, most telling, most significant accolades of my life.

And eventually Helen would express her gratitude in the best way possible: in 1987, returned stateside with her intellectual prowess confirmed by a Master of Fine Arts degree from the prestigious University of London, she founded the quarterly Beltane Papers and its monthly supplement Octava, journals of feminist spirituality that steadily gained credibility and circulation until metastasized breast cancer -- eerily the fatal plague of so many feminist activists -- killed her on the autumnal equinox of 1994.

No matter my “Dancer” had been burned to cinders 11 years earlier, undoubtedly because the government and its owners regard any real threat to patriarchy as dangerously subversive; no matter the spare-time, 24-year reportorial investigation that was to have been my bridge to prosperity and the crowning glory of my journalism career died in flames with its irreplaceable research notes and its forever lost photography and all the rest of my life's work, text and pictures alike. No matter the fire was ignited at literally at the same instant I was meeting with a well-known Manhattan book-editor¹ who was assuring me she could mother "Dancer" to mainstream publication, insisting it would be one of the 20th Century's most influential volumes; no matter but for the fire I would have scooped the world on this the first visible wave of our species' survive-or-die revolution against patriarchal ecogenocide -- our first obvious mustering against the Apocalypse the patriarchs and their direct descendants the Capitalists are intentionally inflicting on us all. No matter the indescribable pain of loss and defeat remains the branding-iron on my psyche and the knife-blade in my heart it has been since the fire and ever shall be for as long as my consciousness survives. The odyssey that now in retrospect seems the irresistible mandate of that long ago August afternoon in the Au Sable River country yet prevails as my own solitary quest, its beginning a priceless gift I failed to recognize until 18 years after the fact, now in the brutally honest retrospection of terminal old age an almost-sacramental confirmation that endures even amidst the ashes and inescapable poverty of my post-fire existence. No matter there will never be for me any professional laurels or material gain from it; in the emotional, spiritual, purely aesthetic sense it remains as compelling as ever, precisely as Robert Graves proclaims in the poem entitled "To Juan at the Winter Solstice":

Her sea-blue eyes were wild
But nothing promised that is not performed.²

^{_______________________________}

¹The late Cicely Nichols, a longtime friend and one of the primary facilitators of Sisterhood is Powerful (Vintage Books edition: 1970), acknowledged as "a sister in struggle" to whom the anthology's editor Robin Morgan is "especially grateful.." 

²Graves, Robert; The Poems of Robert Graves, Doubleday Anchor Books, New York: 1958 (pgs. 200-201)

*****
LB/May 2010-January 2011 (with additional minor editing to improve accessibility and eliminate typos, 2018-2019; 2022; 2024; 2025.)

-30-

 

Censorship: Lessons from Ralph Nader and a Knoxville Atrocity

(Originally published 08 September 2013; republished here 4 October 2025 after the original publisher, TypePad, destroyed its archives and went out of business.)

*********

By LOREN BLISS 

RALPH NADER, FOR whom I have never voted but for whom I have the greatest respect, has written for Reader Supported News a denunciation of President Barack Obama that will undoubtedly be noted by historians as the most bravely outspoken such commentary by any public figure to date.

Hence I urge all of you not just to read it but to disseminate it as widely as possible and communicate your approval to RSN, even if only with a word or two, as in the traditional “Yes man yes!” by which we long-ago beatniks used to shout our approval of exceptional poetry or music. My own applause is already included in the associated comment thread.

That said, in the interest of full disclosure and as a long-overdue expression of gratitude, I should acknowledge I owe Nader a big debt of thanks. In 1964 he entrusted me with the revelations that, a year later, would be published in Unsafe at Any Speed, his exposé of capitalism in action, specifically of how the U.S. automobile manufacturers were maximizing profits by minimizing vehicular safety.

At the time I was the sports editor and one of three news-reporter/photographers for The Oak Ridger, a small but notably excellent East Tennessee daily. It was in acknowledgment of all these roles I had been assigned to interview Nader about his research. Not only had I added car stuff to our sports coverage -- I was then the proud owner of a 1958 Porsche super-coupe -- I had also demonstrated a knack for unusual news stories, and Nader's findings felt like the biggest scoop of my career to date. But this piece never saw the proverbial light of day. It was killed by Managing Editor Dick Smyser, who in one of those indicative ironies of USian history was also the chairman of the Associated Press Managing Editors' Freedom of Information Committee.

It was my second bitter schooling in the harsh realities of censorship that are cleverly hidden beneath the claim the United States has “freedom of the press,” and it was memorably painful because I had expected better -- much better -- from The Oak Ridger. Why? Because its top executives, Publisher Don McKay, Business Manager Tom Hill and Smyser himself had been courageous enough to hire me despite The Knoxville Journal's continuing effort to slander me into professional and personal oblivion.

That episode is a story unto itself. I had worked for The Journal since September 1957, first as a part-time sports stringer through the fall of 1959, when finances forced me to drop out of college and sign up for a six-year hitch in the U.S. Army. In September 1962, having served 16 months in Korea and finished my required three-year term of active duty, I returned to Knoxville and was immediately rehired by The Journal as a full-time staff sportswriter. Obviously the paper liked me and my reporting; Assistant Sports Editor Ben Byrd once told me he believed I was destined for The New York Times or some equally prestigious publication.

But on 2 June 1963, a raid by a combined force of Knoxville cops and Knox County sheriff's deputies jailed a racially mixed group of 40 men and women on charges I knew to be utterly without basis in fact. I had been there, had been arrested and on the strength of my press card subsequently released, and now -- naive idiot that I was -- I believed I could convince Journal Editor/Publisher Guy L. Smith and City Editor Dick Evans the arrests were at the very least a terrible mistake and more probably a deliberate atrocity. Soon Smith and Evans concluded I was what in the parlance of the Jim Crow South was called a “nigger-lover” -- probably a Communist as well -- and Smith had me re-arrested in his newsroom, then publicly fired me on Page One of his newspaper.

My termination notice was a maliciously slanderous story by Ron McMahan, who knowingly wrote a deliberate Big Lie that would have been equally at home in Adolf Hitler's Völkischer Beobachter: “Forty Negroes and whites, most of them students at the University of Tennessee, were arrested early Sunday morning during what police described as 'a drunken sex orgy' at a South Knoxville residence...Booked at county jail on a charge of disorderly conduct was Loren Bliss, 23, of 1537 Laurel Avenue, a former Journal sportswriter.”

There was of course neither orgy nor drunkenness; the gathering was nothing more than a quiet garden party, attended by nearly as many UT faculty members, civil rights activists, young local professionals and business executives as older students. It celebrated the graduation of a woman named Maline Robinson, who had just earned a master-of-fine-arts degree from UT and who would later teach art history at the University of Wisconsin. Despite The Journal's lurid prose (“partly-clad couples were lying all over the front lawn...on tables, in closets and on the floor...Lewdness charges were not placed against anyone because during the melee everyone scattered”), the sexual allegations were nothing more than typical fabrications of the forever undiminished, never-to-be-quenched hatefulness that rules the vindictively pornographic Southron mind. Such is the racist fear, blood-lust and never-to-be-acknowledged envy implicit in the old joke that asks, “what is ten inches long and white,” then answers, “nothing.”

That the police raid occurred just as the local Ku Klux Klan and its many affiliated mainstream churches were pulpit-pounding against “interracial love feasts” was hardly coincidental. Martin Southern, the ironically named American Civil Liberties Union lawyer in Knoxville, said he believed the raid had been carefully planned by a cabal of high ranking officials at UT, the sheriff's office and the police department plus top executives of The Journal and The Knoxville News-Sentinel to facilitate purging not only the university but the entire Knoxville area of anyone the local Ruling Class deemed “trouble-makers” and/or “outside agitators.”

Southern warned me that because I was the one genuinely credible witness to everything that had actually occurred -- he said I was “the fly, as it were, in the segregationist ointment” -- my own life was probably in danger. Not many days later, a would-be killer tried to invade my ground-floor apartment via its kitchen window, but the attempted hit was thwarted by my vigilant German shepherd Brunhilda and my own expert-class skill with a handgun -- a story for another time. For now suffice it to say dear Brunhilda quickly got to the meat of the problem, bit the malefactor in his blue-jeaned crotch, seized him by his penis and testicles and dragged him down from the window just as I was aligning my sights on the bridge of his nose to shoot him between the eyes.

Meanwhile Marion Barry, then Tennessee field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, later the mayor of Washington D.C., had arranged for me to cover the mass-arrest story for a local African-American weekly.

But that report too was extensively censored, not by Blacks but by two white civil rights activists, Congress of Racial Equality¹ members Steve Wagner² and Phillip Bacon, who inadvertently revealed their own white-supremacist beliefs by insisting accurate description of the incident's more telling moments would be too much truth for Black readers and would therefore discredit the narrative as “sensationalism.”

In other words -- bottom line --  Moron Nation's meticulously conditioned hatred of the First Amendment had suddenly become as evident on the USian Left as it had always been on the USian Right.

Thus to my eternal regret I surrendered to the two CORE activists, allowing them to cut several key passages from my original text. One of the most important disclosures Wagner and Bacon whited-out  -- pun intended -- was the word-for-word report on my confrontation with Smith, in which the Nazi-sympathizing publisher/editor had made it clear I would either obey his command to fabricate a dangerously provocative Big Lie describing an interracial sex orgy that never took place, or I would suffer grave but unspecified professional afflictions in retaliation for my disobedience. Wagner and Bacon also suppressed every word of my eyewitness account of the police assault on Milton Vargas, a Panamanian diplomat who was among the party's invited guests. Never mind I was less than six feet away and saw and heard everything that happened: Vargas, neatly clad in a dark suit, white shirt and dark necktie, politely held out his diplomatic credentials to one of the invading Knoxville cops, saying "excuse me, I am..." but the cop interrupted him, snarling "yew a goddamn Mexican nigger, an yew better shut yore mouth" as he slapped Vargas' identity papers to the floor and slugged him in the face -- a wanton violation of diplomatic immunity so outrageous it provoked several days of anti-U.S. riots in Panama. As to the post-party attempt on my life -- the incident that arguably confirmed attorney Southern's hypothesis of a Rightist conspiracy far broader than a mere police raid -- Wagner and Bacon were nearly hysterical in their insistence no public mention ever be made of it.  

Barry allowed these white bourgeois tyrannies only because he believed -- probably correctly -- such compromise was vital to retain the Caucasian support implicit in the slogan, "Black and White Together."  The following, under my own byline, is all that remained after Bacon and Wagner finished censoring it. It's from the 3 August 1963 edition of The Knoxville Flashlight-Herald:

Although The Knoxville Journal had opportunity to publish a staff member's eye-witness account of the now-famed graduation party held for some University of Tennessee students by Mr. and Mrs. Malcolm Ottaway, it declined to utilize that source and relied instead upon police and sheriff's reports.

That those reports were something less than reliable has since been proven in Knox County Sessions Court.

This writer, at the time a sports reporter for The Journal, attended the party with friends and was subsequently arrested, then freed after deputies learned he was a Journal staff member. He was re-arrested and booked some 14 hours later after unsuccessfully attempting to interest Journal City Editor Dick Evans in a factual account of events before and during the arrests...

Included in this writer's report would have been a statement that the party was quiet and proper despite the number of persons present and information that police and deputies had acted without grounds...

Those taken to city jail, where there is a drunkometer (a Breathalyzer by which suspects can challenge a drunkenness charge), were not charged with drunkenness, but those taken to county jail, where there is no drunkometer, were charged with drunkenness in addition to disorderly conduct...

Cases against those charged by Knox County, including this writer, were dismissed July 1. City Court cases were continued by order of Journal-supported Judge Charles Kelly and will be heard in October.

Included on the city docket is Milton Vargas, the Panamanian Vice-Consul here. Mr. Vargas, who has filed a full report with the Panamanian government, has charged he was slapped by police officers...

The only uncensored coverage of the arrests was provided by TASS -- Tyelyegrafnoye agyentstvo Sovyetskogo Soyuza or Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union. The story appeared on page one of Pravda, as I recall in the 5 June edition. It was also -- or so I was told by several UT students -- broadcast in English by Radio Moscow, as were reports of the subsequent Panama riots.  

Given the prurient hatefulness that so often defines southern racism, The Oak Ridger's bravery in hiring me in mid-August, even before all the court cases had been decided, was beyond exceptional. Indeed, since The Journal's vindictively aggressive slanders were blacklisting me even amongst Northern employers, until The Oak Ridger came to my rescue I had feared my journalism career was over.

Which brings us back to Ralph Nader. Maybe a year after the Knoxville incident, he was in Oak Ridge visiting his sister, a scientist with some big-league connection to what today would be called the nuclear energy cartel. My boss Dick Smyser arranged for me to interview Nader,  exactly where I no longer remember. What I do recall is that I questioned Nader for hours, that eventually we adjourned to continue the interview at his sister's apartment, and that after I photographed him with the paper's Polaroid-back Speed Graphic, we talked literally until dawn.

Nader doubted the story would run. Citing the paper's bold defiance of the region's ubiquitous racism, I assured him it would.

Then I drove from his sister's place directly to the The Oak Ridger building on Tyrone Road, put the sports page to bed as quickly as I could and hammered out the Nader story on my issue Royal Standard typewriter. My lead said something like “'Unsafe at any speed' -- that's how Ralph Nader describes many of Detroit's best-selling automobiles.” The second graf laid out Nader's credentials -- a Harvard-educated lawyer, he had been campaigning for safer cars since the late 1950s -- and the remainder detailed his complaints against Chevrolet's Corvair. The text ran to at least six takes -- six double-spaced typewritten pages of about 300 words apiece.

Despite the befogged mind that even at age 24 is the penance we pay for a sleepless all-nighter, I thought I'd done a damn fine job of reporting. But -- perhaps not the least because Smyser himself drove a sherbet-green Corvair -- the story evoked not the anticipated thank you for the warning but instead provoked him to such fury, he shouted his denunciation the length of the newsroom, visibly startling the other members of the five-person staff. It was one of  two times he actually raged at me -- the only occasions I ever heard him raise his voice at anyone.  

That other episode, again in the newsroom  -- once more startling my colleagues with its volume (and this time a personal attack shouted into my face at bad-breath range) -- was his response to my rejection of the ballistic impossibilities set fourth as gospel by the Warren Commission. It was late in 1964, a post-deadline afternoon, probably on a Friday and therefore normally a time of relaxation, but Smyser had surprised us all by interrogating each of us about our reactions to the commission's report. (Its 888 pages had been summarized by the Associated Press in a 366-page hardbound book distributed as a freebie to news staffers at AP-member dailies and peddled for $1 apiece by their circulation departments or given away as a bonus to new subscribers.) Smyser's questions, I remember, made me very uncomfortable; they were obviously phrased to compel agreement with the commission's findings. The rest of the staff dutifully submitted. I -- an expert shot with rifles and handguns since my teens and already well versed in the technical aspects of ballistics -- could not. Smyser responded by damning me at the top of his voice, his bespectacled face red with rage, denouncing me as an uppity brat so stupidly arrogant I dared question government authority.

From then on, for the few more weeks I remained at The Oak Ridger, his simmering hostility, an entirely new element in our relationship, convinced me my answer had put my continued employment  at grave risk -- one of the many reasons I fled back to my New-York-City birthplace in the first week of 1965. In those days, before the socioeconomic cleansing euphemistically disguised as gentrification, the City truly was what James Baldwin had so perceptively labeled it in his 1962 novel: Another Country. 

Twenty years later, in conversations with other New York City journalists -- all of whom had been working elsewhere as reporters in 1964 --  I would learn the same sorts of editorial-staff interrogations had taken place on most (if not all) U.S. dailies -- for me the first conclusive evidence not only of the assassination conspiracy itself but of the extent to which upper-echelon management of the Mainstream Media Propaganda Machine (MMPM) was actively collaborating with the government to ensure no  "accredited" journalist  dared question the Warren Commission's findings.  By then -- the 1980s -- we knew that "government" was in fact the Central Intelligence Agency, which since the early 1950s has controlled MMPM for our Masters, much as the Gestapo controlled German media for Hitler and Goebbels.

Though in 1964 I never dared say so to anyone save my lover, I had already concluded the murder of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was  some sort of cleverly disguised coup. My suspicions were kindled by AP reports out of Dallas in the minutes and hours immediately after the killing, some of which indicated the president had been slain by multiple shooters, with at least one assassin firing from the infamous grassy knoll.  Suspicion solidified to near certainty when Jack Ruby murdered Lee Harvey Oswald on 24 November -- a killing typical of the clean-up operations by which the world's intelligence agencies insure their crimes are kept secret -- an atrocity I watched live on NBC television in a Bristol, Va, hotel room over breakfast with my then lover, an art major at Virginia Intermont College. I will never forget how, immediately after Oswald was shot, she turned to me, horror-stricken olive-green eyes brimming with tears,  and whispered exactly what I was thinking: "my god, we live in a banana republic." 

All that said,  Smyser was nevertheless a notably skillful editor, one who taught me a great many useful lessons about reporting. Even so, my memory still flinches at how he shouted down my objection to the Warren Commission's "magic bullet" hypothesis  and how he grimaced as he dropped the Nader copy into the circular gray waist-high trash bin that stood guard beside his desk. His expression suggested he was disposing of something grossly distasteful, at least as repugnant as a cat turd.

When I phoned Nader later than day and apologetically told him there would be no story, he nevertheless thanked me for my effort. Years after that I realized I was the one who should have thanked him -- not just for all the time he spent telling me about the built-in hazards of those Detroit cars, but for the lesson in journalistic reality.

Such is the USian variant of a “free press,” its invisible restrictions so effective, no official censorship is necessary, the result uncomfortably reminiscent of the society typified by a slogan in George Orwell's breathtakingly prophetic 1984: “Ignorance Is Strength.”

_________________________
¹The Congress of Racial Equality, CORE -- the martyrdom of activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner not withstanding -- has since been credibly exposed both as a front for the global energy cartel and as a cover for domestic operations of the Central Intelligence Agency -- see examples here, here (scroll to "Just as the Phoenix program...") and here.  Hence I cannot but wonder if the CIA was the real source of the censorship by which Wagner and Bacon purged my Flashlight-Herald report of its most vital details.

²I am uncertain as to the correct spelling of Wagner -- there are at least three possibilities --  and I thus apologize if I have misspelled his familial name. But apart from the few Oak Ridger and Knoxville Journal reports that were with me in my clip book (my portfolio of best published stories), the arsonist(s) destroyed all my records of those years; in fact -- outside my two working portfolios (text and photographs) -- absolutely nothing of my 1956-1969 work, journals and personal correspondence included -- survived the 1 September 1983 fire.    

LB/8 September 2013 (Additional details added 8 June and 9 September 2020)

-30-

 

To Transcend Despair, We Must Acknowledge How Bottomlessly Horrible Our Circumstances Truly Are

 21 June 2025

 

"Premonitions of the Twilight": I had  intended to illustrate this essay with a red-hued variant, but decided -- for reasons I can't yet verbalize except to say they  relate to both the Celtic deity   Morrigan and the Norse notion of  Götterdämmerung -- the blue variant is more appropriate. A "sandwich"-- a photo collage -- the imagery is from some of my 1967 camera work. (Loren Bliss ©1968,1974,2025)  

*****

FOR ME, THE death of the American Republic and the threatened death of our Mother Earth called into question a notion that had been the one certain conviction within my personal ethos of general agnosticism: that each and every atom in the entire cosmos contained within itself not just the known structure of nucleus, electrons and protons but an unseen, undetected yet overwhelmingly powerful inertial momentum toward consciousness. Influenced by collegiate studies in astronomy, I had concluded sentient life could not have come into existence -- could not have "evolved from the substance of the stars" (as one professor put it) -- without such a positive dynamic.

Our matriarchal ancestors recognized this force and anthropomorphized it as the Great Goddess, the Mother of All Being, which to me feels more metaphorically apt than any other hypothesis about our cosmic source and often – in my younger years whenever I was amidst wilderness or at sea or otherwise beyond urban distractions -- felt objectively real, as it ever-more-frequently does now in the meditative solitude of my final years.

But I would be dishonest were I not to confess that the outcome of 5 November spawned the most painful doubts I have ever known. For a terrible few weeks I believed the election’s ultimate message is that our undetected atomic dynamics are in fact ruled by a much stronger negative force, an antithetical inertial momentum that redefines the universe itself. It tells us what we foolishly view as the inexpressibly beautiful choreography of creation is instead a maliciously seductive dance of destruction, the final revelation of which -- our last lesson as a doomed species on a dying planet we ourselves have fatally wounded -- is naught but its unspeakable hideousness.

Such was my own woundedness, challenged at last by phenomena I could not ignore: near-nightly dreams of intellectually and emotionally supportive, physically affectionate young women, each woman a stranger, yet each eerily familiar; two wide-awake occasions when, while sitting alone amongst this apartment-building’s courtyard gardens, I was joined by a solitary raven who perched on a branch less than an arms length distant in comfortably shared contemplative solitude; and then finally a wide-awake, seemingly coincidental encounter with a young woman of skill and wisdom, whose interpretation of these events -- all the more meaningful because she did not know my cardiologist says I'll probably be dead by September -- was phrased in modern English but identical to the promise contained in an ancient lay of magick cited by Robert Graves in The White Goddess, his life-changing epic of spiritual and aesthetic revolution: “Thus shalt thou be fetch-ed hame.”

*****

DESPITE OUR SPECIES' rightfully terrified, head-in-the-sand refusal to acknowledge it, Trump's victory in the 5 November election makes permanent the U.S. government’s formerly undeclared policy -- first publicly exemplified by President Carter's endorsement of the viciously misogynistic Hyde Amendment -- of reversing all the humanitarian advancements that resulted from the U.S. Civil War and World War II. It is now as if the Confederacy won in 1865 and Hitler triumphed in 1945 -- and with every passing day, it becomes more undeniable we must soon anticipate the methodical reversal of every humanitarian gain our species ever achieved.

Meanwhile, given the new regime's brazenly public affirmation of the nation's rejection of all moral, ethical and constitutional restraint, a renewed Holocaust – the zero-tolerance, no-exception extermination of all "enemies within" – becomes ever more likely, not only in the U.S., but throughout U.S. capitalism's neoliberalism- nazified global empire.

With the Soviet Union slain, its Red Army disbanded and every nation terrified to submission by the U.S. empire's bipartisan "Better-Dead-Than-Red" intent -- its pledge to fulfill Hitler's last-minute yearning to destroy the world -- Trump and his like-minded predecessors, whether overt (Reagan et al) or clandestine (Truman, Eisenhower, Johnson, Carter, Clinton ad nauseam), have already achieved der Führer's intended subjugation of the entire planet. What we are witnessing now is not the conquest but its consequence -- the triumph of Absolute Evil.

Protected by modern technology in fulfillment of the doomsday purpose that is the sole motive for its invention, it is increasingly possible the Christonazi Reich cannot be overthrown. The promised thermonuclear enforcement of “Better Dead Than Red” guarantees no nation will ever dare attempt Trump's overthrow from without, and it seems increasingly probable We the (Humanitarian) People are congenitally unable to evolve the courage, solidarity and discipline to subverted it from within. This would mean Christonazism is literally "forever" -- that is, until the end of human time itself. Or at the very least, that it will reign supreme until some apocalyptic event neutralizes the weaponry that perpetuates its terrorism. In either case, our species is not likely to survive. Neither is our Mother Earth, already threatened with reduction to a world uninhabitable by any conceivable life form and thus to permanent Precambrian lifelessness. Those are the horrors to which we unconditionally submit if we surrender. And that is precisely why we must fight on even when it seems hopeless.

Perhaps the words of Jean-Paul Sartre can help us find our own strength:

“We were never more free than during the German occupation. We had lost all our rights, beginning with the right to talk. Every day we were insulted to our faces and had to take it in silence. Under one pretext or another, as workers, as Jews, or political prisoners, we were deported en masse. Everywhere, on billboards, in the newspapers, on the screen, we encountered the revolting and insipid picture of ourselves that our suppressors wanted us to accept. And because of this we were free. Because the Nazi venom seeped into our thoughts, every accurate thought was a conquest. Because an all-powerful police tried to force us to hold our tongues, every word took on the value of a declaration of principles. Because we were hunted down, every one of our gestures had the weight of a solemn commitment... And the choice that each of us made of his life was an authentic choice because it was made face to face with death... And here I am not speaking of the elite among us who were real Resistants, but of all Frenchmen who, at every hour of the night and day throughout four years, answered "No.”

Or perhaps we will find inspiration in the wrenching example of the courageous defenders of Fortress Brest, whose valiant resistance is here accurately portrayed in a 2010 historical-reenactment film. The Brest garrison was as doomed as that of Wake Island, and like that sadly forgotten stand by U.S. Marines, the Red Army’s defense of Brest was one of our species’ greatest epics of bravery and heroism. It is entirely appropriate the Brest film has earned “best-such-work-ever” ratings from a number of European critics; and it should vex us severely the equally courageous Wake Island fight is not similarly memorialized.

Perhaps too, after the fate of the Martyred Minnesotans leaves no doubt We the (Humanitarian) People are mortally jeopardized by badge-protected gangs of run-amok thugs – no matter whether they are assassins disguised as cops sicced on us by Christonazi Obersturmbannführers or the real cops and soldiers likewise conditioned to robotic obedience and ordered by Trump and his MAGAstapo Chief Kristi Noem to “liberate” any cities allegedly compelled by “socialism” to defend its residents’ Constitutional rights -- we will at last awaken to the magnitude of the Evil that assails us.

And perhaps we will even re-awaken to the lesson taught us by the Deacons for Defense and Justice. Perhaps – realizing we are all now potential targets of roving Christonazi assassins – we will at long last unshackle ourselves from the pseudo-left’s suicidal, useful-idiot collaboration with Christonazism implicit in its fanatical, “all-gun-owners-are-fascists” insistence on forcible civilian disarmament, repeal of the Second Amendment and the vindictive, “politically correct” imposition of mandatory pacifism and compulsory victimhood. As my Distinguished Rifleman father often said, “It is far better to have a firearm but not need it, than to need a firearm but not have it.” To which I, a military-qualified Expert with the M1911 .45-caliber service pistol, will add only that, “it is far better we have trained and practice-sustained skill with firearms, but no immediate need for it, than to discover – often terminally – we desperately need the skill but tragically lack it.”

Additionally, given the unprecedentedly grim future that looms – an astrologer friend tells me the planetary configurations on the U.S. Sibley Chart are like the American Revolution, the Civil War and World War Two combined, and many psychics claim Trump is the actual reincarnation of Hitler – I have three categories of cautions for my fellow activists.

First is an axiomatic statement by Lev Bronstein, the “nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn” known to history as Leon Trotsky: “In every gathering of three revolutionaries, there is at least one agent of the Okhrana.”


Second is the axiom that governs the craft of intelligence analysis: Once is coincidence; twice is suspicious; three times is enemy action.”

Third is a five-point body of self-protective, keep-your-head-down advice that can be as life-saving for non-violent protestors as it is for soldiers: (1)-Learn and practice the mindfulness necessary for situational awareness – that is, the art of paying attention, of knowing at all times what is going on around you – which is an acquired skill (one that, thanks to my father, I learned in childhood); (2)-Learn first aid; consult local service centers for information about free courses; once trained, never forget its three basic principles, still the same as the U.S. Army taught me 66 years ago: “keep ‘em breathing; stop the bleeding; treat for shock”; (3)-Learn to identify cover (that which will turn bullets and maybe even grenade or shell fragments) and distinguish it from concealment (that which merely hides you); note that contrary to Hollywood, motor vehicles are not effective cover; (4)-Learn to do the low crawl and other individual movement techniques, which can save your life if protests come under fire; (5)-Learn these additional self-protective techniques for surviving gunfire in urban areas.

(I offer the above with unapologetic acknowledgment the pseudo-left is sure to be antagonized by the sources of some of its content.)

*****

TWO HEADLINES WE will never see in mainstream media:

Assured of Pardons, Gleeful Christonazis Run Amok,
Slaying, Beating and Jailing Führer Trump's Opponents

and

Trumpites Weaponize Social Security, Veterans Benefits,
Medicare, Entire Safety Net to Enforce Christonazi Theocracy

As usual, the true significance of these atrocities is methodically suppressed, not only by the mainstream media, but by our alleged leaders as well.

In the first instance, it is now axiomatic the penalties for opposing der neu Führer include extrajudicial murder. (Given the 100-percent corruption of the nation’s law-enforcement agencies and military-command structure by Christonazification, were I a gambling man, which I am not, I’d have bet substantial sums the Minnesota murderer would be allowed to escape. Now that he has finally been captured, I’d bet the Trump Regime ensures he escapes punishment with an insanity plea and then later, when no one is looking, grants him a full pard.)

Meanwhile, let us not forget there is no question Vance Boelter was doing the regime’s intended work.

Apropos the second headline – and very much an extension of the first – do not for a moment doubt that Trump and his cabal of Christonazi/Neoconfederate terrorists are now able to vindictively stop federal disbursements including individual Social Security checks literally at will, thereby silencing (and no doubt murdering by the resultant starvation and homelessness) any stipend-dependent retired or disabled person who dares criticize the new Führer by whom We the (Humanitarian) People, our nation, our species and our Mother Earth are now cursed. The real story – the terrible truth too many of us are too naive, too stupid or simply too deluded by fear to acknowledge — is that there is literally no limit to the horrors that are to be inflicted on us. Hence a third headline we will never see in mainstream media:

MAGA Is Christonazism’s Renewed Holocaust: It Repeals
Many People’s Right to Live – or Even to Survive Beyond Birth

But that is the ultimate truth of it, displayed with murder-weapon potency by 18 June's sure-to-be-fatal Supreme Court ruling that transgender people have no right to be born or continue living in the United States. It was predictably announced with all the smirking, pridefully self-righteous sadism that historically defines Christianity as manifest Evil, and it just as predictably furthers the process of turning the Christian cross into a symbol as ominously threatening as the Original Nazis' swastika. It is the most genocidal triumph yet of Trump’s adaptation of Hitler’s master plan, the subjugation of a nation by capturing its judiciary, and the victors are gloating accordingly.

The most our so-called progressive leaders are doing -- in all probability the most they will ever do – is suppress or downplay the unmitigated horrors of Trumpite intent. Beyond that -- and I am speaking of the entire “Democratic” (sic) pseudo-opposition -- all they do is rationalize their submissiveness and whimper. Were they not irremediably compromised by their (morally imbecilic) terror of fomenting anti-capitalist revolution, they would recognize they owe us the service of at least acknowledging our true plight. But they have abandoned us to the conquering Christonazis as surely as they have forsaken their sworn duty to defend our (former) Constitution.

Of course the Mainstream Media Monopoly— the world’s first (and no doubt last) privately owned, for-maximum-profit variant of Goebbels’ Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda, the infamous Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda — has downplayed or suppressed these facts entirely, and most of the so-called alternative media does likewise due to amateurish incompetence, demographic isolation, masochistic faithfulness to the Fifth Column Democrats or some combination thereof.

Whether by intention or ineptitude, such censorship perpetuates the submissiveness and denial fostered by the national cults of mandatory optimism and prideful ignorance and the Trump Regime’s open encouragement of genocidal bigotry. It camouflages the regime’s murderous intent. It also hides the appropriately terrifying fact the regime’s illegal but permanent termination of public-assistance privacy renders us all vulnerable to ruinous political ambush of the sort that was inflicted on me in December 1982 by a vengeful disciple of Hitler who was protectively closeted in the Washington State Department of Employment Security. Remembering me as one of the leaders of the group of male and female GI Bill students who got her fired from Western Washington State College in 1971 for illegally attempting to expel us in retaliation for our anti-Vietnam-War activism, she deleted my entire unemployment-compensation file, leaving me without any income whatsoever, destroying a promising career-change in mid-process and forcing my return to New York City, where I found immediate re-employment in the working press.

In response to my enraged protests -- I repeatedly badgered every Washington state politico I knew -- the department (eventually) paid me the thousand-plus dollars of unemployment compensation I would otherwise have received. But by then I’d been back in the City six months, so the money hardly mattered. And cashing the check formally ended my ability to seek the revenge I was due for the Hitlerite’s ruinously felonious malfeasance, which thus went entirely unpunished.

Such is capitalism in action even during the best of times, with favoritism guaranteeing the bureaucrats are often as corrupt as the politicians themselves. What now threatens us is infinitely worse -- for many inconceivably so.

****

LET US THEN review our situation:

Recent history proves the “Republican” (sic) Party is -- both literally and figuratively -- operating under a false flag. Its proper name is implicit in its Christonazi/Neoconfederate identity. Its true flag is therefore most assuredly not the Stars and Stripes of our slain Republic. Its true banners -- brazenly displayed during the attempted coup of 6 January 2020 and in Charlottesville, Virginia in the 11-12 August 2017 prelude to the martyrdom of Heather Heyer -- are instead the swastika of the 17-million-victim Nazi German Holocaust and the Stars and Bars of the 750,000-casualty Confederate mutiny that would have set the South apart as the slavemasters' white male supremacist Christian theocracy.

Its ideology is a nightmare symbiosis of methodically resurrected Ku-Klux-Klan bigotry intensified by Christianity's self-righteous murderousness sharpened to conquering lynch-mob fanaticism by the cunning application of strategy and tactics perfected by Adolf Hitler and refined into the Mein-Kampf equivalents of the Powell Memo and Project 2025. The result is an avowedly ecogenocidal manifestation of Absolute Evil maliciously vectored by a political party that has become a white Christian version of the Taliban. It has made itself unstoppably powerful by its conquest of the entire federal apparatus, at least 28 of the 50 state governments and every law-enforcement agency in the nation.

The same history proves the “Democratic” (sic) Party, irremediably compromised by its role in the coup of 22 November 1963, is actually the Fifth Column – that is, the clandestine subversion unit – of the Christonazi/Neoconfederate kampfbund. The resultant institutional reality is unalterable by anything short of genuine revolution because both parties, their elected officials and their supportive bureaucracies are the wholly owned properties and puppets of the capitalist ruling class. Government policies whether federal, state or local are therefore the increasingly brazen expression of ruling class will, which -- as proven by its nauseatingly repetitive Triangle-Shirtwaist, Blair Mountain and Bhopal atrocities -- is always the forcible extraction of maximum profit with minimal cost to itself and maximal victimization of its workers.

Now the ruling class is replacing us with computers, robots and artificial intelligence – exiling us to permanent unemployment, fatal poverty and boiling revolutionary anger -- and in fearful response, with chaos and political sleight-of-hand to cover its intent, it is obviously intent on eliminating those of us they deem "surplus" by renewing the Holocaust, with Trump as Führer. The capitalists clearly expect him to Christonazify as many as he can, exterminate the rest of us and march any survivors into inescapable slavery.

History also tells us this failed nation’s citizenry now has only a Potemkin Village of socioeconomic or political representation and is thus reduced, de facto, to the disempowered defenselessness that precedes enslavement. Many of our fellow citizens have been methodically battered to slavery's silent submissiveness by neoliberalism’s decades of social-Darwinism. Already they are too fretfully obsessed by the dire necessities of day-to-day survival to dare make any effort to restore the Constitution slain by the voters on 5 November 2025. Many younger silent submissives see no reason to try; their embittered complaint -- "your Constitution was never protected us even when it was supposedly still in full force" -- is increasingly the defining truth of U.S. politics.

Though the slaying of the Constitution began with 1954's addition of "under God" to the "Pledge of Allegiance" -- the capitalized "G" is de facto recognition of the sadistic deity of Christian theocracy; the "under" declares him our omnipotent master -- its slow-motion murder did not become overwhelmingly obvious until Carter the Clandestine Theocrat declared war against women with his comments about the Hyde Amendment in 1977. Here we encounter both a vivid example of the party's post-JFK Fifth-Column function and an apt prelude to its present-day Neville Chamberlain treachery. Thus was misogyny made official federal policy, not by the nazified Republican Ronald Reagan, as we often incorrectly assume, but by a Democrat's controversial legislative ambush.


Whether or not this sort of betrayal is a silent submissive's sole experience of political truth seems immaterial; the same hopeless sense of inescapable powerlessness afflicts even many citizens who are old enough to remember when the U.S. was -- at least for most whites -- a genuinely democratic republic and a notably comfortable realm in which to live. Who then are these persons? I suspect they're the dominant segment of the 36.1 percent who did not vote in November and the vast majority of the approximately 94 percent of anti-Trump voters who refuse to protest now. (See "largest protest" link, below, for an authoritative estimate of the demonstrators' numbers.) Though the submissives include many who regard Christonazism as repugnant, it appears they are too abjectly fearful to ever find the courage to openly oppose the unmitigated horror of the Christonazi onslaught. Young or old, I suspect the degree of their submissiveness is a measurement of the extent to which they've internalized the futility-of-hope factor paradoxically implicit in Ayn Rand's toxic ethos of self-obsessed moral imbecility, the neoliberal credo with which we're all perpetually dosed by mainstream media and the brain-policing that passes for education.

Undoubtedly by intent, neoliberalism is suppressing our individual and collective capability for humanitarian empathy. Robbing us of our ability to achieve solidarity, the resultant politically terminal deficiency was first exemplified by the gradual deterioration of '60s radicalism into the late-'70s Me-Generation avarice that would define the entire decade of the '80s. By 2012, this Ayn Rand poison -- its aggressive self-obsession now bolstered by open scorn for empathy -- was strong enough to kill Occupy within a few months. The movement thus collapsed into the spasms of egotistic clashes and identity-politics squabbling that enabled its defeat by government forces. In retrospect, it seems obvious Occupy was destroyed to clear the way for Hillary, which appears now to have been the plausibly deniable guarantee of Trump's ascendance.

Though Trump unquestionably spearheads capitalism’s inevitable transformation into hard-core nazism, his buffoonish or erratic behavior makes it difficult for some people to recognize him as a genuinely apocalyptic threat It's not an uncommon ploy; the serial murderer John Wayne Gacy disguised himself as a clown. Too many people thus continue to dismiss Trump's genocidal rhetoric as political hyperbole, sensational but ultimately meaningless. Nevertheless, his predatory purpose becomes more undeniable with every outrage. Obviously he intends to complete the nullification of the Constitution, thereby rewarding the vengefully white-male-supremacist Neoconfederates by forever reversing the outcome of the (first?) Civil War. He would simultaneously reward the Christonazis by enabling them to transform the nation into a theocratic American variant of Hitler's Germany. Their plan is to make the former U.S. a new Auschwitz, invisibly fenced and policed by inescapable electronic surveillance, a continent-sized death camp for exterminating everyone on their hate lists – note again not only Boelter’s intended victims but the approximately 300,000 transgender children the Supreme Court just added to their targets. Once the corpses have been ground and baked to fertilizer and the execution-complexes converted to Disneylands and shopping malls, the former Republic would become a theocratic re-education camp for cradle-to-grave zero-tolerance Christonazi mind-warping.

Given the regime's stated intent to weaponize science as a tool of theocracy, I cannot doubt its agenda includes research to determine if it is possible to genetically detect LGBTQ tendencies at birth -- with immediate extermination for any newborn in whom such tendencies are diagnosed -- and death as heretics for any parents who dare protest.

Our masters and their puppets would have us believe the horrors inflicted on us by the 5 November vote are an anomaly that will be undone by next year's congressional midterms. That is another Big Lie. Trump has repeatedly stated his election is to be the nation's last. Compelling circumstantial evidence indicates his emergence as Führer fulfills the intent of the Bankers’ Plot the retired Marine General Smedley Butler heroically interdicted in 1933. A Wall Street scheme to make the U.S. a satellite of Nazi Germany, its details still remain so classified we have to google at least half-a-dozen sources to obtain even a vague indication of its magnitude and depth. (Note especially the indications of ruling-class-mandated grants of presidential and congressional immunity that in 1934 and early 1935 seem to have given the plotters the protected status of a de facto permanent working group, a clandestine precursor to the infamous Trump/Musk Department of Government Efficiency.) Ninety years later – precisely as we witness in the transgender atrocity – its outrages are routinely approved by a Supreme Court deliberately packed with Christonazis specifically chosen to legitimize the new Führer’s will. As we of the (real) left repeatedly sought to warn the nation, this is an especially glaring example of how the Trump applies the strategies and tactics his messiah Hitler used to conquer the Weimar Republic.

Another adaptation of Hitler’s blueprint for subversion, the nazification of schoolchildren, has been accomplished by decades of psychological conditioning vectored by mandatory reading of Ayn Rand’s fictionalizations of the Mein Kampf/übermenschen ethos. The result guarantees Trump’s “Unified Reich” a new, official, easily metastasized, infinitely malignant national mindset. In its utterly merciless Trumpite/Christonazi/Neoconfederate intensity, it is a relentlessly ecogenocidal symbiosis of fanatical selfishness, prideful ignorance, sadistic bigotry and murderous anti-intellectualism that is tyranically hostile to any humanitarian instinct or desire for collective human kindness. Above all else, it is obscenely eager to manifest the public hatefulness legitimized by the Atlas-Shrugged (Elon Musk) variant of nazism. Thus it is not only absurd but clinically delusional to imagine the Trumpites have any potential for conversion to humanitarianism. The terrible magnitude of their triumph is in fact proven by the chronic absence of (effective) opposition; the silent submissives I described above are in actuality among the initial victims of the Trumpite kampfbund's weaponization of Ayn Rand's brand of moral imbecility. Though Rand proclaimed herself an atheist, the Christonazis sanctify her by filtering her venom through their prosperity gospel, using her sociopathy to reinforce their assertion that greed is good and ecogenocidal greed is truly godly.

Thus the global aristocrats and their lynch-mob puppets celebrate with infinitely sadistic glee -- the aristocrats because they now have official permission to sedate themselves with a suicidal orgy of ecogenocidal avarice as terminal climate change hooks our species from the cosmic stage and drops the final curtain on the misogynistic war against our Mother Earth. The Christonazis and Neoconfederates -- incorrigibles every one -- celebrate because they view Trump's “Unified Reich” as the obliteration of each and every humanitarian achievement, the reversal of evolution for which they and their doctrinal forebears have always so hatefully yearned. Make no mistake; this blitzkrieg of malignancy -- with unimaginably worse to come -- is what we face. Welcome to the suffocating darkness of our species' darkest most apocalyptic Dark Age -- precisely why I dearly hope my cardiologist's estimate of my longevity proves accurate.

*****

MY PESSIMISM ABOUT the U.S. potential to evolve an effective liberation movement is by no means unsupported. In the 1920s, H.L. Mencken began lamenting the growing dominance of our national cult of prideful ignorance and compulsory stupidity. In the 1950s, Vance Packard documented the extent to which we were already conditioned to reliably abject conformity and submissiveness. In 1992, a year after the defeat and destruction of the Soviet Union, Canadian media ferreted out a particularly damning Soviet estimate that characterized the U.S. as lacking adequate revolutionary potential even during the allegedly radical 1960s and early 1970s.

As best I recall – I apologetically confess I have not yet recovered the requisite source material despite how carefully I originally filed it away1 -- it was Maclean’s Magazine that so scooped the world. It reported the conclusion of the Committee for State Security (KGB) that while the U.S. minority communities of Blacks, Hispanics and First Nations peoples had indeed evolved the consciousness prerequisite to successful revolution, the revolutionary intent seemingly manifest by most of the Caucasians who supported the civil rights, anti-military-draft, anti-Vietnam War, feminist and environmentalist movements was merely a charade, a fad, a false consciousness that would vanish (or revert to existential-fascist norms) as soon as circumstances allowed. Implicit in the analysts’ view was their recognition most U.S. whites were even then too cowardly for the hazardous work of revolution and were already too aggressively self-centered to grow the requisite solidarity with other victims of capitalism.

The absolute correctness of the KGB’s dismaying hypothesis was proven beyond equivocation by the breathtaking speed with which U.S. whites abandoned all anti-war activism after abolition of the draft on 27 January 1973. Nearly all the white activists, most of them university students, instantly returned to the conventionally exploitative pursuits that define the capitalist elite, ignoring the fact the war raged on until 30 April 1975. The late Jerry Rubin, pseudo-revolutionary turned unapologetic Me-Generation millionaire, was typical.

White feminism reversed itself too, albeit less obviously. What had begun as an expansion of the anti-patriarchal mindfulness that defines Marxism was reduced to an ideologically reactionary campaign for individual achievement of implicitly white-supremacist petite bourgeois advantage and the fostering of anti-male hatred, all within the context of improving capitalism. Its hate-mongering built an impenetrable barrier to solidarity and served as the springboard for the identity politics that have since combined with neoliberalism-maximized moral imbecility to thrust revolutionary socialist solidarity seemingly forever beyond U.S. reach.

Around the same time – a trend I witnessed as an adjunct-faculty photography instructor c. 1975-1981 -- environmentalism began rejecting its initial Earth Day diversity and deteriorating into an elitist, esoterica-segregated movement that in symbiosis with what might be termed Nurdism would achieve its ultimate notoriety with its belief – audible in the increasingly white-male-supremacist groves of environmental and computer-science academia nearly three decades before Eric Pianka made it public in 2006 – that a pandemic that killed off 90 percent of the global human population was the only way to save our Mother Earth from the permanent reduction back to the Precambrian lifelessness that looms as the consequence of our masters’ thermonuclear, biochemical and industrial follies. Though Pianka never urged such a Final Solution, nor identified its targets, it was always obvious the vast majority of victims would come from the working class, the 99.9 percent of our species who are forever dependent on paychecks for survival.

As for how the ruling class would survive any pandemic it would presumably unleash, by the late 1970s, the bankers were already building bunkers.

Significantly, the sorts of ideological reversals that followed the ‘60s are a defining characteristic of U.S. political history: note the transformations of the Republicans and the Democrats, the former from Abolitionist to Conservative to Christonazi/Neoconfederate, the latter from pro-slavery stalwarts to advocacy of the New Deal and then their post-JFK retreat to functioning as the Christonazi/Neoconfederate Fifth Column. Note too the transformation of Reconstruction to Jim Crow, its relief via the (brief) Civil Rights interregnum followed by the (probably permanent) reversion to the genocidal racism of Christonazism. These transformations illustrate how the effective the slavemaster-minded capitalist ruling class is – and always has been -- at conditioning the white majority to self-destructively shackle itself with hard-right ideology whenever its grievances intensify enough to threaten humanitarian revolution or even provoke attempts at significant reform.

It is something of an aside, but in the above pattern we witness history's unequivocal refutation of our species' ultimate Big Lie: the historically false notion the "moral arc" of the universe "bends toward justice." Bend it does, though any honest reading of the data proves its curvature under patriarchy is exclusively toward ever-more-inescapably apocalyptic tyranny. We also see that as the arc of patriarchal history curves toward ever-more-advanced technology, it merges with and becomes indistinguishable from the curve of tyranny. Was pre-patriarchal history any different? The misogyny-tabooed scholarship by Marija Gimbutas, Alexander Marshack, Gerald Hawkins, Barry Fell, Gavin Menzies, Barbara Mor and Robert Graves tell us it surely was – that in societies which evolved as extensions of motherhood, the source-model and psychodynamic impetus of matriarchy, technological advancements were shared for collective benefit rather than weaponized as assets of tyranny. Cooperation -- not competition -- was the primary means of survival. Otherwise we could not have sustained ourselves through at least 300 millennia of ice ages and epic geological disasters. In profoundly alarming contrast, the imposition of patriarchy -- by talking snakes, burning wheels in the sky and self-proclaimed deities that descend to earth in thunderous clouds of smoke and fire -- has brought us to the brink of terminal apocalypse in a mere six thousand years, a terrifying nemesis that suggests patriarchy is indeed the cosmic equivalent of smallpox-contaminated blankets.

The resultant lynch-mob nazism of the white U.S. working class is often affirmed in blood, as in the 1921 Tulsa massacre, or when an estimated 400 white construction workers and 800 white office workers attacked, savagely beat and hospitalized hundreds of peace demonstrators in New York City on 8 May 1970. That atrocity, encouraged by openly approving cops, resoundingly applauded by leaders of both major parties and endorsed by most of the nation’s labor unions, is an obvious prelude to the present-day atrocities perpetrated – invariably with obvious police support – by the Neoconfederates, the Christonazis and the Trumpite kampfbund in general, the membership of which continues to grow. Aristocrat or lumpenproletarian, not a one of their sort would ever accept socialism; the former have mandated the relentless indoctrination of the latter by their churches to reject socialism as demonic, by their schools to fear it as enslavement and by mass media to regard it as a euphemism for race-mixing, homosexuality and emasculation.

Not only is their fanatical bigotry and methodically sustained ignorance irremediable; it has always been, as documented by Steven Hahn in Illiberal America (W.W. Norton & Company: 2004) – the definitive ethos of the nation's white majority. Now -- and probably forever -- it is the triumphantly official policy of the federal government. Eventually it will the prescribed dogma of all but a coastal dozen of the 50 states. It is irrefutable proof the U.S. is now as purposefully hateful as the Germany it inspired. Apropos which, see James Q. Whitman, Hitler’s American Model: the United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (Princeton University Press: 2017).

To understand the true bottomlessness of our enemy’s sociopathy, read “The Last Article,” here. As I have said elsewhere, the Lyudmila Pavlichenko formulation applies to the whole blood-thirsty lot, leaders and followers alike: they are indeed “fascists not humans.”

But now there may be a tiny defiant flicker of fiery hope within the all-smothering darkness. Trump's sneeringly sadistic, Pinochet-caliber "economic shock therapy" -- runaway food-price inflation sneakily imposed by tariffs and mass deportations (lean ground beef up 68 percent in a single month) -- is growing the resistance with a speed as apparently unprecedented as the true-but-censored rate of inflation itself. Thus the 14 June anti-Trump "No Kings" campaign produced what are now said to be the largest protest demonstrations in U.S. history. And as it says in "Biko," Peter Gabriel's evocative anti-apartheid anthem,2 "Once the flames begin to catch/the wind will blow it higher."

__________________

1In 2004, as a result of family treachery – the ultimate triumph of an older, now-dead half-sibling who had long despised me – I was evicted from the rural, forest-and-garden acreage I had been assured would be my home for as long as I chose to remain there. I’m now guessing that during the resultant move – of necessity made in great haste and under constant threat of violence – I accidentally disposed of the relevant file. But I am still searching for it – I have two four-drawer filing cabinets of material to sort – and if I do find it, I will post it as bibliographical references.

2A musically superior "Biko," unfortunately marred by an intrusively discordant introduction of musicians following the performance, is here.

(For M, in recognition and gratitude.)

LB/30 January-20 June 2025

-30




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