Nation (Un)Building and Planet (Un)Building, American-Style

Let me start 2022 by heading back — way, way back — for a moment.

It’s easy to forget just how long this world has been a dangerous place for human beings. I thought about this recently when I stumbled upon a little memoir my Aunt Hilda scrawled, decades ago, in a small notebook. In it, she commented in passing: “I was graduated during that horrible flu epidemic of 1919 and got it.” Badly enough, it turned out, to mess up her entry into high school. She says little more about it.

Still, I was shocked. In all the years when my father and his sister were alive and, from time to time, talked about the past, never had they (or my mother, for that matter) mentioned the disastrous “Spanish Flu” pandemic of 1918-1920. I hadn’t the slightest idea that anyone in my family had been affected by it. In fact, until I read John Barry’s 2005 book, The Great Influenza, I hadn’t even known that a pandemic devastated America (and the rest of the world) early in the last century — in a fashion remarkably similar to, but even worse than, Covid-19 (at least so far) before essentially being tossed out of history and the memory books of most families.

That should stun anyone. After all, at that time, possibly 50 million people died of the waves of that dreaded disease, often in horrific ways, and, even in this country, were sometimes buried in mass graves. Meanwhile, some of the controversies we’ve experienced recently over, for instance, masking went on in a similarly bitter fashion then, before that global disaster was chucked away and forgotten. Almost no one I know whose parents lived through that nightmare had heard anything about it while growing up.

Ducking and Covering

My aunt’s brief comment was, however, a reminder to me that we’ve long inhabited a perilous world and that, in certain ways, it’s only grown more so as the decades have passed. It also left me thinking about how, as with that deathly flu of the World War I era, we often forget (or at least conveniently set aside) such horrors.

After all, in my childhood and youth, in the wake of the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, this country began building a staggering nuclear arsenal and would soon be followed on that path by the Soviet Union. We’re talking about weaponry that could have destroyed this planet many times over and, in those tense Cold War years, it sometimes felt as if such a fate might indeed be ours. I can still remember hearing President John F. Kennedy on the radio as the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 began — I was a freshman in college — and thinking that everyone I knew on the East Coast, myself included, would soon be toast (and we almost were!).

To put that potential fate in perspective, keep in mind that, only two years earlier, the U.S. military had developed a Single Integrated Operational Plan for nuclear war against the Soviet Union and China. In it, a first strike of 3,200 nuclear weapons would be “delivered” to 1,060 targets in the Communist world, including at least 130 cities. If all went “well,” those would have ceased to exist. Official estimates of casualties ran to 285 million dead and 40 million injured — and, given what wasn’t known about the effects of radiation then, not to speak of the “nuclear winter” such an attack would have created on this planet, that was undoubtedly a grotesque underestimate.

When you think about it now (if you ever do), that plan and — to steal Jonathan Schell’s famed phrase — the fate of the earth that went with it should still stun you. After all, until August 6, 1945, Armageddon had been left to the gods. In my youth, however, the possibility of a human-caused, world-ending calamity was hard to forget — and not just because of the Cuban Missile Crisis. In school, we took part in nuclear drills (“ducking and covering” under our desks), just as we did fire drills, just as today most schools conduct active-shooter drills, fearing the possibility of a mass killing on the premises. Similarly, while out walking, you would from time to time pass the symbol for a nuclear shelter, while the media regularly reported on people arguing about whether, in the case of a nuclear alert, to let their neighbors into their private backyard shelters or arm themselves to keep them out.

Even before the Cold War ended, however, the thought that we could all be blasted off this planet faded into the distant background, while the weaponry itself spread around the world. Just ask yourself: In these pandemic days, how often do you think about the fact that we’re always just a trigger finger or two away from nuclear annihilation? And that’s especially true now that we know that even a regional nuclear war between, say, India and Pakistan could create a nuclear-winter scenario in which billions of us might end up starving to death.

And yet, even as this country plans to invest almost $2 trillion in what’s called the “modernization” of its nuclear arsenal, except for news about a potential future Iranian bomb (but never Israel’s actual nukes), such weapons are seldom on anyone’s mind. At least for now, the end of the world, nuclear-style, is essentially forgotten history.

That Good-Old Nation-Building Urge

Right now, of course, the exhausting terror on all our minds is the updated version of that 1918 pandemic. And another terror has come with it: the nightmare of today’s anti-vaxxing, anti-masking, anti-social distancing, anti-whatever-crosses-your-mind version of the Republican Party, so extreme that its mask-less followers will even boo former President Donald Trump for suggesting they get vaccinated.

The question is: What do most of the leaders of the Republican Party actually represent? What terror do they embody? In a sense, the answer’s anything but complicated. In an all-too-literal way, they’re murderers. Given the urge of Republican governors and other legislators, national and local, to cancel vaccination mandates, stop school-masking, and the like, they’ve functionally become serial killers, the disease equivalents of our endless rounds of mass shooters. But putting all that aside for a moment, what else do they represent?

Let me try to answer that question in an indirect way by starting not with the terror they now represent but with America’s “Global War on Terror.” It was, of course, launched by President George W. Bush and his top officials in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Like their neocon supporters, they were convinced that, with the Soviet Union relegated to the history books, the world was rightfully theirs to shape however they wished. The United States was often referred to then as the “sole superpower” on Planet Earth and they felt it was about time that it acted accordingly. As Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld suggested to his aides in the ruins of the Pentagon on 9/11, “Go massive — sweep it all up, things related and not.”

He was, of course, referring not simply to al-Qaeda, whose hijackers had just taken out the World Trade Center and part of the Pentagon, but to the autocratic ruler of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, who had nothing whatsoever to do with that terror group. In other words, to those then in power in Washington, that murderous assault offered the perfect opportunity to demonstrate how, in a world of midgets, the globe’s military and economic giant should act.

It was a moment, as the phrase then went, for “nation building” at the point of a sword (or a drone) and President Bush (who had once been against such efforts) and his top officials came out for them in a major way. As he put it later, the invasion of Afghanistan was “the ultimate nation-building mission,” as would be the invasion of Iraq a year and a half later.

Of course, we now know all too well that the most powerful country on the planet, through its armed might and its uniquely well-funded military, would prove incapable of building anything, no less a new set of national institutions in far-off lands that would be subservient to this country. In great power terms, left alone on Planet Earth, the United States would prove to be the ultimate (un)builder of nations, a dismantler of the first order globally. Compared to Saddam’s Iraq, that country is today a chaotic mess; while Afghanistan, a poor but reasonably stable and decent place (even home to the “hippy trail“) before the Soviets and Americans fought it out there in the 1980s and the U.S. invaded in 2001 is now an almost unimaginable catastrophe zone.

The Republican Party Unbuilds America

Perhaps the strangest thing of all, though, was this: somehow, that powerful, all-American, twenty-first-century urge not to build but unbuild nations seems to have migrated home from our global war on (or, if you prefer, for) terror. As a result, while anything but an Iraq or Afghanistan, the United States has nonetheless begun to resemble a nation in the process of being unbuilt.

I haven’t the slightest doubt that you know what I mean. Think of it this way: thank god the party of Donald Trump was never called the Democratic Party, since it’s now in the process of “lawfully” (law by striking law) doing its best to dismantle the American democratic system as we’ve known it and, as far as that party’s concerned, the process has evidently only begun.

Keep in mind that Donald Trump would never have made it to the White House, nor would that process be so advanced if, under previous presidents, this country hadn’t put its taxpayer dollars to work dismantling the political and social systems of distant lands in such a striking fashion. Without the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, not to speak of the ongoing war against ISIS, al-Shabaab, and other proliferating terror outfits, without the siphoning off of our money into an ever-expanding military-industrial complex and the radical growth of inequality in this country, a former bankruptee and con man would never have found himself in the Oval Office. It would have been similarly inconceivable that, more than five years later, “as many as 60% of Republican voters [would] continue to believe his lies” in an essentially religious fashion.

In a sense, in November 2016, Donald Trump was elected to unbuild a country already beginning to come apart at the seams. In other words, he shouldn’t have been the shock that he was. A presidential version of autocracy had been growing here before he came near the White House, or how would his predecessors have been able to fight those wars abroad without the slightest input from Congress?

And now, of course, this nation is indeed being unbuilt big time by Republicans with the help of that former president and failed coupster. They already have a stranglehold on all too many states with the possibility of taking back Congress in 2022 and the presidency in 2024.

And let’s not forget the obvious. Amid a devastating pandemic and nation-unbuilding on an unnerving scale here at home, there’s another kind of unbuilding going on that couldn’t be more dangerous. After all, we’re living on a planet that is itself being unbuilt in striking ways. In the Christmas season just past, for instance, news about the extremes of weather globally — from a devastating typhoon in the Philippines to staggering flooding in parts of Brazil to the possible melting of the Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica — has been dramatic, to say the least.

Similarly, in this country in the last weeks of 2021, the word “record” was attached to weather events ranging from tornados of an unprecedented sort to winter heat waves to blizzards and drenching rains to — in Alaska of all places — soaring temperatures. And so it goes, as we face an unprecedented climate emergency with those Republicans and that “moderate” Democrat Joe Manchin all too ready not just to unbuild a nation but a world, aided and abetted by the worst criminals in history. And no, in this case, I’m not thinking of Donald Trump and crew, bad as they may be, but of the CEOs of the fossil-fuel companies.

So, here’s what I wonder: Assuming Armageddon doesn’t truly arrive, leaving us all in the dust (or water or fire), if you someday tell your grandchildren about this world of ours and what we’ve lived through, will the Pandemic of 2020-?? and the Climate Crisis of 1900-21?? be forgotten? Many decades from now, might such nightmares be relegated to the scribbled notes found in some ancient relative’s account of his or her life?

As 2022 begins, I can only hope so, which, in itself, couldn’t be a sadder summary of our times.

What Will We Remember of 2022?

Who knew that Martians, inside monstrous tripodal machines taller than many buildings, actually ululated, that they made eerily haunting “ulla, ulla, ulla, ulla” sounds? Well, let me tell you that they do — or rather did when they were devastating London.

I know that because I recently reread H.G. Wells’s 1898 novel War of the Worlds, while revisiting an early moment in my own life. Admittedly, I wasn’t in London when those Martian machines, hooting away, stalked boldly into that city, hungry in the most literal fashion imaginable for human blood. No surprise there, since that was almost a century and a quarter ago. Still, at 77, thanks to that book, I was at least able to revisit a moment that had been mine long enough ago to seem almost like fiction.

Yes, all those years back I had been reading that very same novel for the very first time under the covers by flashlight. I still remember being gripped, thrilled, and scared, at a time when my parents thought I was asleep. And believe me, if you do that at perhaps age 12 or 13, you really do feel as if you’ve been plunged into a futuristic world from hell, ululations and all.

But of course, scary as it might have been, alone in the dark, to secretly live through the Martian desolation of parts of England and the slaughter of countless human beings at their hands (actually, more like the tentacles of octopi), as if they were no more than irritating bugs, I was always aware of another reality as well. After all, there was still the morning (guaranteed to come), my breakfast, my dog Jeff, my bus trip to school with my friend Jim, my anything-but-exciting ordinary life, and my sense, in the ascendant Cold War America of the 1950s, of a future extending to the distant horizon that looked boring as hell, without even a stray Martian in sight. (How wrong I would turn out to be from the Vietnam War years on!)

I felt that I needed some Martians then. I needed something, anything, to shake up that life of mine, but the sad truth is that I don’t need them now, nor do the rest of us. Yet, in so many ways, in an America anything but ascendant, on a planet that looks like it’s in a distinctly War-of-the-Worlds-style version of danger, the reality is that they’re already here.

And sadly enough, we Americans and humanity in general seem little more effective against the various Martian stand-ins of today than the human beings Wells wrote about were then. Remember that his Martians finally went down, but not at the hands of humanity. They were taken out, “after all man’s devices had failed,” as the novelist expressed it then, “by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth.” The conquerors of those otherwise triumphant Martians were, he reported, “the putrefactive and disease bacteria against which their systems were unprepared.”

If only we were so lucky in our own Wellsian, or do I mean Trumptopian (as in dystopian, not utopian) world?

Living in a Science-Fiction (or Science-Fact) Novel?

In the 1950s, I went on to read, among other books, John Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids (about giant killer plants taking humanity apart), Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, and Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy which sent me into distant galaxies. And that was before, in 1966, I boarded the USS Enterprise with Captain James T. Kirk and Mr. Spock to head for deep space in person — at least via my TV screen in that pre-Meta era.

Today, space is evidently something left to billionaires, but in the 1950s and 1960s the terror of invading aliens or plants with a taste for human flesh (even if they had perhaps been bioengineered in the all-too-Earthbound Soviet Union) had a certain strange appeal for the bored boy I was then. The future, it seemed, needed a Martian or two or a Triffid or two. Had I known, it wouldn’t have mattered in the least to me then that Wells had evidently created those Martians, in part, to give his British readers some sense of what it must have felt like for the Tasmanians, living on an island off the coast of Australia, to be conquered and essentially eradicated by British colonists early in the nineteenth century.

So, yes, I was indeed then fascinated by often horrific futures, by what was coming to be known as science fiction. But honestly, if you had told me that, as a grownup, I would find myself living in a science-fiction (or do I mean science-fact?) novel called perhaps Trumptopia, or The Day of the Heat Dome, or something similar, I would have laughed you out of the room. Truly, I never expected to find myself in such a world without either those covers or that flashlight as protection.

As president, Donald Trump would prove to be both a Martian and a Triffid. He would, in fact, be the self-appointed and elected stand-in for what turned out to be little short of madness personified. When a pandemic struck humanity, he would, as in that fictional England of 1898, take on the very role of a Martian, an alien ready to murder on a mass scale. Though few like to think of it that way, we spent almost two years after the Covid-19 pandemic began here being governed (to use a word that now sounds far too polite) by a man who, like his supporters and like various Republican governors today, was ready to slaughter Americans in staggering numbers.

As Trump’s former White House Covid-19 response coordinator Deborah Birx recently testified, by rejecting everything from masking to social distancing in the early months of the pandemic (not to speak of personally hosting mass superspreader events at the White House and elsewhere), he would prove an all-too-literal murderer — though Birx was far too polite to use such a word. In the midst of a pandemic that has, by now, killed an estimated 17 million people globally and perhaps more than a million Americans, he would, she believed, be responsible for at least 130,000 of those early deaths. That’s already slaughter on a monumental scale. (Keep in mind that, in the Trumpian tradition, from Florida’s Ron DeSantis to Texas’s Greg Abbott, Republican governors have continued in that distinctly murderous tradition to this very moment.)


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And when it came to slaughter, the Trumpian/Republican response to Covid-19 will likely prove to be the milder kind of destruction they represented. As a climate denialist (it was a Chinese hoax!) and a major supporter of the fossil-fuel industry (no wonder the Saudis adored him!), The Donald would prove all too ready to all-too-literally boost the means to destroy this planet.

And wouldn’t you say that the various Trump supporters who now make up what’s still, for reasons unknown, called the Republican Party are ululating all too often these days, as they hover over dead and dying Americans, or at least those they would be perfectly willing to see wiped off this planet?

Lights Off, Flashlights On?

Sadly enough, however, you can’t just blame Donald Trump and the Republicans for our increasingly endangered planet. After all, who needs giant Martians or monstrous human-destroying plants when carbon dioxide and methane will, in the long run, do the trick? Who needs aliens like Martians and Triffids, given the global fossil-fuel industry?

Keep in mind that more representatives of that crew were accredited as delegates at the recent Glasgow climate-change talks than of any country on the planet. That industry’s CEOs have long been all too cognizant of climate change and how it could ravage this world of ours. They have also been all too willing to ignore it or even to put significant funds into climate-denial outfits. If, in 2200, there are still historians left to write about this world of ours, I have little doubt that they’ll view those CEOs as the greatest criminals in what has been a sordid tale of human history.

Nor, sadly enough, when it comes to this country, can you leave the Democrats out of the picture of global destruction either. Consider this, for instance: after the recent talks in Glasgow, President Biden returned home reasonably triumphant, swearing he would “lead by example” when it came to climate-change innovation. He was, of course, leaving behind in Scotland visions of a future world where, according to recent calculations, the temperature later in this century could hit 2.4 to 2.7 degrees Celsius (4.32 to 4.86 degrees Fahrenheit) above that of the pre-industrial age. That, of course, would be a formula for destruction on a devastating scale.

Just to consider the first leading “example” around, four days after Glasgow ended, the Biden administration began auctioning off to oil and gas companies leases for drilling rights to 80 million acres of public waters in the Gulf of Mexico. And that, after all, is an administration headed by a president who actually seems committed to doing something about climate change, as in his ever-shrinking Build Back Better bill. But that bill is, of course, being Manchinized right now by a senator who made almost half a million dollars last year off a coal brokerage firm he founded (and that his son now runs). In fact, it may never pass the Senate with its climate-change elements faintly intact. Keep in mind as well that Manchin is hardly alone. One in four senators reportedly still have fossil-fuel investments and the households of at least 28 of them from both parties “hold a combined minimum of $3.7 million and as much as $12.6 million in fossil-fuel investments.”

Take one small story, if you want to grasp where this country seems headed right now. As you may remember, the Trump administration worked assiduously to infringe upon national parks and indigenous lands to produce yet more fossil fuels. Recently, President Biden announced that his administration, having already approved a much-protested $9 billion pipeline to carry significant amounts of oil through tribal lands in Minnesota, would take one small but meaningful remedial step. As the New York Times described it, the administration would move “to block new federal oil and gas leasing within a 10-mile radius around Chaco Canyon in New Mexico, one of the nation’s oldest and most culturally significant Native American sites.”

I know you won’t be shocked by what followed, sadly enough. The response was predictable. As the Times put it, that modest move “generated significant pushback from Republicans and from New Mexico’s oil and gas industry.” Natch! And that, of course, is but the smallest of stories at a time when we have a White House at least officially committed to dealing in some reasonable fashion with the overheating of this planet.

Now, imagine that the Republicans win the House and Senate in the 2022 elections and Donald Trump (or some younger version of the same) takes the 2024 presidential election in a country in which Republican state legislators have already rejiggered so many voting laws and gerrymandered so many voting districts that the results could be devastating. You would then, of course, have a party controlling the White House and Congress that’s filled with climate-change denialists and fossil-fuel enthusiasts of the first order. (Who cares that this country is already being battered by fire, flood, and heat in a devastating fashion?) To grasp what that would mean, all you have to do is expand the ten-mile radius of that New Mexican story to the country as a whole — and then the planet.

And at that point, in all honesty, you could turn off the lights, flick on that old flashlight of mine, and be guaranteed that you, your children, and your grandchildren will experience something in your everyday lives that should have been left under the covers. As almost happened in The War of the Worlds, it’s possible that we could, in essence, kiss this planet goodbye and if that’s not science fiction transformed into fact of the first order, what is?

The Martians Have Arrived

You know, H.G. Wells wasn’t such a dope when it came to the future. After all, his tripodal Martian machines had a “kind of arm [that] carried a complicated metallic case, about which green flashes scintillated, and out of the funnel of this there smoked the Heat-Ray.” In 1898, he was already thinking about how heat of a certain sort could potentially destroy humanity. Today, the “Martians” stepping out of those space capsules happen to be human beings and they, too, are emerging with devastating heat rays.

Just ask my friend journalist Jane Braxton Little, whose town, Greenville, largely burned down in California’s record-breaking Dixie Fire this fall, a climate-change-influenced inferno so vast and fierce that it proved capable of creating its own weather. Imagine that for our future.

Of course, in another sense, you could say that we’ve been living in a science-fiction novel since August 6, 1945, when that first American nuclear bomb devastated Hiroshima. Until then, we humans could do many terrible things, but of one thing we were incapable: the destruction of this world. In the nearly eight decades that followed, however, the Martians have indeed arrived and we human beings have taken over a role once left to the gods: the ability to create Armageddon.

Still, the truth is that we don’t know how our own sci-fi tale will end. As in War of the Worlds, will some equivalent of those bacteria that took down the Martians arrive on the scene, perhaps some scientific discovery about how to deal so much better with the greenhouse gases eternally heading into our atmosphere? Will humanity, Greta Thunberg-style, come together in some new, more powerful way to stop this world from destroying itself? Will some brilliant invention, some remarkable development in alternative energy use, make all the difference in the world? Will the United States, China, and other key fossil-fuel burners finally come together in a way now hardly imaginable?

Or will we truly find ourselves living in Trumptopia?

Stay tuned.

Welcome to the Martians!

Yes, when he was running for president, he did indeed say: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK? It’s, like, incredible.”

Then he won — and this November 3rd (or thereafter), whether he wins or loses, we’re likely to find out that, when it comes to his base, he was right. He may not have lost a vote. Yes, Donald Trump is indeed a murderer, but here’s where his prediction fell desperately short: as president, he’s proven to be anything but a smalltime killer. It wasn’t as if he went out one day, on New York City’s Fifth Avenue or even in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and shot a couple of people.

Nothing so minimalist for The Donald! Nor is it as if, say, he had ploughed “the Beast” (as his presidential Cadillac is known) into a crowd of Black Lives Matter protesters, as so many other drivers have done this year. Let’s face it: that’s for his apprentices, not the showman himself. After all, Donald J. Trump has proven to be America’s twenty-first-century maestro of death and destruction, the P.T. Barnum of, as he put it predictively enough in his Inaugural Address, “American carnage.” In fact, he’s been a master of carnage in a way no one could then have imagined.

Back in 2016, he was way off when it came to the scale of what he could accomplish. As it happens, the killing hasn’t just taken place on Fifth Avenue, or even in his (now hated) former hometown, but on avenues, streets, lanes, and country roads across America. He was, however, right about one thing: he could kill at will and no one who mattered (to him at least) would hold him responsible, including the attorney general of the United States who has been one of his many handymen of mayhem.

His is indeed proving to be a murderous regime, but in quite a different form than even he might have anticipated. Still, a carnage-creator he’s been (and, for god knows how long to come, will be) and here’s the remarkable thing: he’s daily been on “Fifth Avenue” killing passersby in a variety of ways. In fact, it’s worth going through his methods of murder, starting (where else?) with the pandemic that’s still ripping a path from hell across this country.

Death by Disease

We know from Bob Woodward’s new book that, in his own strange way, in February Donald Trump evidently grasped the seriousness of Covid-19 and made a conscious decision to “play it down.” There have been all sorts of calculations since then, but by one modest early estimate, beginning to shut down and social distance in this country even a week earlier in March would have saved 36,000 lives (the equivalent of twelve 9/11s); two weeks earlier and it would have been a striking 54,000 in a country now speeding toward something like 300,000 dead by year’s end. If the president had moved quickly and reasonably, instead of worrying about his reelection or how he looked with a mask on; if he had followed the advice of actual experts; if he had championed masking and social distancing as he’s championed the Confederate flag, military bases named after Confederate generals, and the Proud Boys, we would have been living in a different and less wounded country — and that’s only the beginning of his Fifth Avenue behavior.

After all, no matter what the scientific experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Protection and elsewhere were then saying about the dangers of gathering in mask-less crowds indoors, it was clear that the president just couldn’t bear a world without fans, without crowds cheering his every convoluted word. That would have been like going on the diet from hell. As a result, he conducted his first major rally in June at the Bank of Oklahoma Center in Tulsa.

Admittedly, that particular crowd would be nowhere near as big as he and his advisers had expected. Still, perhaps 6,000 fans, largely unmasked and many in close proximity, cheered on their commander-in-chief there. It was visibly a potential pandemic super-spreader of an event, but the commander-in-chief, mask-less himself, couldn’t have cared less. About three weeks later, when Tulsa experienced a striking rise in coronavirus cases (likely linked to that rally) and former presidential candidate and Trump supporter Herman Cain who had attended unmasked died of Covid-19, it didn’t faze him in the slightest.

He kept right on holding rallies and giving his patented, wildly cheered rambles in the brambles. As Rolling Stone correspondent Andy Kroll put it after attending one of his outdoor rallies in North Carolina, the president’s “remarks” that day (which ran to 37 pages and 18,000 words) were “practically a novella, albeit a novella that makes Finnegan’s Wake look like See Spot Run!

Nothing, certainly not a pandemic, was going to stop Donald J. Trump from sucking up the adoration of his base. Though in the first presidential debate with Joe Biden, he claimed that he’s only been holding his rallies outdoors, in September in Nevada, a state whose governor had banned indoor gatherings of more than 50 people, he held a typically boisterous, adoring indoor rally of 5,000 largely unmasked, jammed-together Trumpsters. When questioned on the obvious dangers of such a gathering, he classically responded, “I’m on a stage and it’s very far away. And so I’m not at all concerned” — i.e. not at all concerned about (or for) them.

If that isn’t the Covid-19 equivalent of a bazooka on Fifth Avenue, what is? And it summed up perfectly Trump’s response to the choice of pursuing his own reelection in the way he loves (and seems so desperately to need) or keeping Americans healthy. During these unending pandemic months, he regularly downplayed every danger and most reasonable responses to them, while at one point even tweeting to his followers to “LIBERATE” (possibly in an armed fashion) states that had imposed stay-at-home orders. He needed what he’s long called the “greatest economy in the history of America” back and reopening everything was naturally the way to go.


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Mimicking his boss’s style, Attorney General William Barr would even essentially compare lockdowns to slavery. As he put it, “A national lockdown. Stay-at-home orders. It’s like house arrest. Other than slavery, which is a different kind of restraint, this is the greatest intrusion on civil liberties in American history.”

Clearly at the president’s behest, “top White House officials” would, according to the New York Times, pressure “the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this summer to play down the risk of sending children back to school, a strikingly political intervention in one of the most sensitive public health debates of the pandemic.” (As the president would tweet in a similar spirit: “The Dems think it would be bad for them politically if U.S. schools open before the November Election, but it is important for the children and families. May cut off funding if not open!”)

In other words, it didn’t matter who might be endangered — his best fans or the nation’s school children — when his reelection, his future wellbeing, was at stake. Murder on Fifth Avenue? A nothing by comparison.

Supreme Assassins?

And his response to the pandemic only launches us on what should qualify as an all-American killing spree from hell. In the end, it could even prove to be the most modest part of it.

For the rest of that death toll, you might start with health care. It’s already estimated that at least 2.3 million Americans have lost their health insurance in the Trump years (and that figure, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, includes 726,000 children, some of whom may now be headed back to school under pandemic conditions). That, in turn, could prove just a drop in the bucket if his administration’s ongoing assault on Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act (ACA) finally succeeds. And after November 3rd, it indeed might if Mitch McConnell is successful in hustling Amy Coney Barrett onto the Supreme Court in place of the dead Ruth Bader Ginsburg (who twice upheld the constitutionality of that act). A supposedly “pro-life” Trump version of the Supreme Court — unless the pandemic were to sweep through it — would undoubtedly turn out to be murderous in its own fashion. Think of them as potential Supreme Assassins.

Barrett, in particular, is known to hold negative views of the ACA and the Court will hear the Trump administration’s case for abolishing that act within a week of Election Day, so you do the math. Wiping it out reportedly means that at least 23 million more Americans would simply lose their health insurance and it could, in the end, leave tens of millions of Americans with “pre-existing medical conditions” in an uninsured hell on earth.

Death? I guarantee it, on and off Fifth Avenue — and it will have been the Donald’s doing.

A Murderous Future

All of the above should be considered nothing more than warm-up exercises for the real deal when it comes to future presidential slaughter. All of it precedes the truly long-term issue of death and destruction that goes by the name of climate change.

It’s hardly news that Donald Trump long ago rejected global warming as a Chinese “hoax.” And as he withdrew from the Paris Climate Accord and, like the child of the fossil-fuelized 1950s that he is, proclaimed a new policy of “American Energy Dominance” (“the golden era of American energy is now underway”), he’s never stopped rejecting it. He did so again recently on a brief visit to burning California amid a historic wildfire season, where he predicted that it would soon get “cooler.” The only exception: when he suddenly feels in the mood to criticize the Chinese for their release of greenhouse gases. As he said in a September 22nd speech to the U.N. General Assembly, “China’s carbon emissions are nearly twice what the U.S. has, and it’s rising fast. By contrast, after I withdrew from the one-sided Paris Climate Accord, last year America reduced its carbon emissions by more than any country in the agreement.”

He and those he’s put in place at the Environmental Protection Agency and elsewhere in his administration have spent his presidency in a remarkably determined fashion trying to destroy the American and global environment. So far, they have rolled back (or are trying to roll back) 100 environmental protections that were in place when he arrived in the Oval Office, including most recently limits on a pesticide that reportedly can stunt brain development in children. Air pollution alone was, according to one study, responsible for 9,700 more deaths in this country in 2018 than in 2016. Above all, at the service of a still expanding American fossil-fuel industry, he and his crew have done their damnedest to open the way for oil, gas, and coal development in just about any imaginable form.

In a season in which the West coast has burned in a previously inconceivable fashion, leaving a historic cloud of smoke in its wake, while fierce storms have flooded the Gulf Coast, he’s continued, for instance, to focus on opening the Alaskan wilderness to oil drilling. In short, he and his administration have, in a rather literal fashon, proven to be pyromaniacs of the first order. They’ve been remarkably intent on ensuring that, in the future, the world will continue to heat in ways certain to unsettle humanity, creating almost unimaginable forms of death and destruction. Despite the fact that Joe Biden called him a “climate arsonist” as the West coast burned, somehow the potentially murderous nature of his environmental policies has barely sunk in this election season.

If the legend was true, the Roman emperor Nero fiddled — actually, he was probably playing the cithara — while the capital of his empire, Rome, burned for six days. He didn’t personally set the fire, however. Trump and his crew are, it seems, intent on setting fire not just to Rome, or New York, or Washington, D.C., but to the Alaskan wilderness, the Brazilian rain forest, and that giant previously iced in landmass he couldn’t figure out how to purchase, Greenland. He’s helping to ensure that even the oceans will, in their own fashion, be on fire; that storms will grow ever more intense and destructive; that the temperature will rise ever higher; and that the planet will become ever less habitable.

Meanwhile, intently maskless and socially undistanced, even he (and his wife Melania) have now contracted the coronavirus, officially becoming part of his own American carnage. The White House, Air Force One, and the president and his aides became the equivalent of Covid-19 superspreaders, as senators and reporters, among others, also began to come down with the disease. It’s now proving a visible all-American nightmare of the first order. 

Donald Trump has, of course, hardly been alone when it comes to burning the planet, but it’s certainly eerie that, at this moment, such an arsonist would stand any chance at all, if he recovers successfully, of being reelected president of the United States. His urge is visibly not just to be an autocrat, but to commit mass murder nationwide and on a planetary scale deep into the future.

Murder, he said, and murder it was, and Fifth Avenue was the least of it.

Murder, He Said

It was August 2017 and Donald Trump had not yet warmed up to Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s portly dictator. In fact, in typical Trumpian fashion, he was pissed at the Korean leader and, no less typically, he lashed out verbally, threatening that country with a literal hell on Earth. As he put it, “They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.” And then, just to make his point more personally, he complained about Kim himself, “He has been very threatening beyond a normal state.”

Only a year and a half later, our asteroidal president would, of course, say of that same man, “We fell in love.” Still, that threat by an American leader to — it was obvious — launch a nuclear strike for the first time since Hiroshima and Nagasaki were nearly obliterated in August 1945 was memorable. The phrase would, in fact, become the title of a 2018 bestselling book, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, by journalist Michael Wolff. Two years later, amid so many other threatening phrases from this president, “fire and fury” has, however, been left in history’s dustbin, largely forgotten by the world.

“This Is Not an Act of God”

Too bad, since it seems so much more relevant now that California, Oregon, and Washington, not to speak of a Southwest already officially in a “megadrought,” have experienced the sort of apocalyptic fire and fury (and heat and smoke) that has turned daytime skies an eerie nighttime orange (or yellow or even purple, claims a friend of mine living in the San Francisco Bay Area). We’re talking about a fire and fury that’s forced cars to put on their headlights at noon; destroyed towns (leaving only armed right-wing militants behind amid the flames to await imagined Antifa looters); burned millions of acres of land, putting hundreds of thousands of Americans under evacuation orders; turned startling numbers of citizens into refugees under pandemic conditions; and crept toward suburbs and cities, imperiling the world as we’ve known it.

In the wake of the hottest summer on record in the Northern Hemisphere, we are, in other words, talking about the sort of apocalyptic conditions that the president undoubtedly had in mind for North Korea back in 2017, but not even faintly for the U. S. of A; we’re talking, that is, about a burning season the likes of which no one in the West has ever seen before, a torching linked to the overheating of this planet thanks to the release of fossil-fuel-produced greenhouse gasses in ever greater quantities. In fact, as Washington Governor Jay Inslee pointed out recently, we shouldn’t even be talking about “wildfires” anymore, but about “climate fires” whose intensity has already outpaced by years the predictions of most climate scientists. (Or, as Inslee put it, “This is not an act of God. This has happened because we have changed the climate of the state of Washington in dramatic ways.”)

Significant hunks of the American West have now been transformed into the natural equivalent of furnaces, with fires even reaching the suburban edges of Portland, Oregon (which, for days, had the worst air quality of any major urban area on the planet), and promising a future in which cities will undoubtedly be swept up in such conflagrations, too. Admittedly, Donald Trump didn’t threaten to launch “fire and fury like the world has never seen” against Portland (though he did send federal agents there to snatch peaceful protesters off its streets and continues to insult and threaten that city’s mayor). If anything, as the fires scorched those states to a crisp, he did his best to avoid the subject of the burning West, as in these years more generally he’s largely treated climate change (that “hoax”) like… well, a pandemic that should be ignored while America stayed “open.”

And it’s not a subject he’s been grilled on much either, not until recently when Western governors began laying into him over his stance on climate change. To offer just one example, as far as I can tell, Bob Woodward, the Washington Post editor and court chronicler of presidents who, for months, had unparalleled access to Trump and grilled him on so many subjects, never bothered to ask him about the most important, most dystopian, most apocalyptic future Americans face. And mainstream Democrats didn’t do much better on the subject while those fires were building to a crescendo until Joe Biden finally called the president a “climate arsonist.” He added, aptly enough, “If you give a climate arsonist four more years in the White House, why would anyone be surprised if we have more of America ablaze?”


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There’s no question that, at the beck and call of the fossil-fuel industry, Donald Trump and his demonic crew have worked without qualms or remorse to ensure that this would be a fiery and furious America. Freeing that industry of restrictions of every sort, withdrawing from the Paris climate accord, opening up yet more areas for oil drilling, wiping out environmental safeguards, and even (at the very moment when the West was burning) appointing a climate-science denier to a top position at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the president and his crew proved themselves to be pyromaniacs of the first order.

Of course, the heating of this planet has been intensifying for decades now. (Don’t forget, for instance, that Barack Obama presided over a U.S. fracking boom that left people referring to us as “Saudi America.”) Still, this president and his top officials have put remarkable energy (so to speak) into releasing yet more carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere. And here’s the strange thing: they made it deep into the present apocalyptic moment in the West without — Greta Thunberg and climate change protesters aside — being held faintly accountable for their urge to fuel the greatest danger humanity faces other than nuclear weapons. In fact, as is increasingly obvious from the torching of the West, what we’re beginning to experience is a slow-motion version of the nuclear apocalypse that Trump once threatened to loose on North Korea.

In an all-too-literal fashion, The Donald is indeed proving to be history’s “fire and fury” president.

And don’t for a moment think that there was no warning about the over-the-top burning now underway in this country. After all, in 2019, parts of Australia were singed to a crisp in a way never before seen, killing at least 25 humans and possibly more than a billion animals. And that country, too, was headed by a climate-change denier, a man who once brought a piece of coal to parliament and handed it around while soothingly telling other legislators, “Don’t be afraid, don’t be scared.” In addition, in recent years, the Arctic (of all places) has been smoking and burning in an unprecedented fashion, heating its permafrost and releasing staggering amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Oh, and this June, the temperature in a small town in Siberia crossed the 100-degree mark for the first time.

By the way, Russia, too, is run by a leader who until recently was a climate denier. I mean, what is it about the urge of so many of us in such a crisis to support those dedicated to quite literally destroying this planet as a livable place for… well, us? (Hey there, Jair Bolsonaro!)

Our Very Own Firenado

An almost unimaginable near-half-century ago on a different planet, I lived in San Francisco. I can still remember the fog rolling in daily, even during summer in one of the coolest, breeziest cities around. Not this year, though. On September 6th, for instance, the temperature there broke 100 degrees, “crushing” the previous record for that day. In Berkeley, across the Bay, where I also once lived long, long ago, it hit 110. As a heat wave swept the state (and the West), temperatures near Los Angeles soared to a record-breaking 121 degrees (almost challenging overheated Baghdad, Iraq, this year), while reaching 130 degrees in the aptly named Death Valley — and that’s just to start down a list of soaring temperatures across the West from the Canadian to the Mexican borders. 

As those fires filled the skies with smoke and ash, turning day into the eeriest of nights, a smoke cloud the likes of which had never before been seen appeared over the coastal West. Meanwhile, firenadoes were spotted and the ash-filled air threatened terrible things for health. As has been true for the last 46 years, I’m thousands of miles away from my old Bay Area haunts. Still, I regularly check in with friends and TomDispatch authors on that coast, some aged like me and locked in their homes lest the smoke and ash, the air from hell, do them in. Meanwhile, their cars are packed to go, their evacuation checklists ready. 

My heart goes out to them and, really, to all of us (and, above all, to those to whom we oldsters will be leaving such a blazing, tumultuous world).

Sadly, among the endless scandals and horrors of the Trump era, the greatest one by far scandalized all too few for all too long among those who officially matter on this beleaguered planet of ours.  Even in 2016, it should have been obvious enough that a vote for Donald Trump was a vote for the apocalypse. Give him credit, though. He made no secret of that fact or that his presidency would be a fossil-fueled nightmare. It was obvious even then that he, not climate change, was the “hoax” and that this planet would suffer in unique ways from his (ad)ministrations.

And in every way imaginable, Donald Trump delivered as promised. He’s been uniquely fiery and furious. In his own fashion, he’s also been a man of his word. He’s already brought “fire and fury” to this country in so many ways and, if he has anything to say about it, he’s just gotten started.

Don’t doubt for a second that, should he be losing on November 3rd (or beyond, given the mail-in vote to come), he’ll declare electoral fraud and balk at leaving the White House. Don’t doubt for a second that he’d be happy to torch that very building and whatever, at this point, is left of the American system with it before he saw himself “lose.”

Since he is, in his own fashion, a parody of everything: a politician, a Republican, an autocrat, even a human being, he sums up in some extreme (if eerily satiric) fashion human efforts to destroy our way of life in these years. In truth, fiery and furiously fueled, he’s a historic cloud of smoke and ash over us all. 

By his very nature, to use those 2017 nuclear words of his, he is “threatening beyond a normal state.” Think of him as the president from hell and here I mean a literal hell. Four more years of him, his crew, and the fossil-fuelized criminals running the major oil, gas, and coal companies who are riding his coattails into profit heaven and planetary misery are the cast of a play, both comedy and tragedy, that none of us should have to sit through. He’s our very own firenado and — it’s not complicated — four more years of him will consign us to a hell on Earth of a sort still only faintly imaginable today.

Fire and Fury Like the World Has Never Seen

The year was 1991 and the United States was suddenly the globe’s lone superpower, its ultimate hyperpower, the last and greatest of its kind, the soon-to-be-indispensable nation. The only one left — alone, utterly alone and triumphant atop the world.

Who could have asked for more? Or better? It had been a Cold War fantasy of the first order — until that other superpower, the Soviet Union, imploded. In fact, even that doesn’t catch the true shock of the moment, since Washington’s leaders simply hadn’t imagined a world in which the Cold War could ever truly end.

Now, go ahead, blame me. In this pandemic moment that should perhaps be considered a sign of a burning, sickening future to come, I’m stoking your nostalgia for better times. Admittedly, even that past was, in truth, a fantasy of the first (or perhaps last) order. After all, in retrospect, that mighty, resplendent, lone superpower, victorious beyond the wildest dreams of its political elite, was already about to embark on its own path of decline. Enwreathed in triumph, it, too, would be heading for the exits, even if so much more slowly than the Soviet Union.

It’s clear enough now that, in 1991, with Ronald Reagan’s former vice president George H.W. Bush in the White House and his son, George W., waiting in the wings of history (while Iraqi autocrat and former U.S. ally Saddam Hussein was still perched in his palace in Baghdad, Iraq), the United States was already launching itself on the path to Donald Trump’s America. No, he didn’t know it. How could he? Who could have possibly imagined him as the president of the United States? He was still a tabloid phenomenon then (masquerading that year as his own publicist “John Miller” in phone interviews with reporters to laud the attractions and sexual conquests of one “Donald Trump”). He was also on the road to bankruptcy court since his five Atlantic City casinos would soon go down in flames. Him as a future candidate to head an America where life for so many would be in decline and its very greatness in need of being “made” great again… well, who coulda dreamt it? Not me, that’s for sure.

Welcome to American Carnage

Let me apologize one more time. Yes, I was playing on your sense of nostalgia in this besieged American moment of ours. Mission accomplished, I assume.

So much, I’m afraid, for such Auld Lang Syne moments, since that one took place in a previous century, even if, remarkably enough, that wasn’t actually so long ago. Only 29 years passed from that singular moment of triumph in Washington (a period that would then be fancied as “the end of history”) to Donald Trump’s America-not-First-but-Last world — to, that is, genuine “American carnage” (and I’m not just thinking about the almost 190,000 Americans who have already died from Covid-19 with no end in sight). Less than a quarter of a century took us from the president who asked God to continue to “bless the United States of America” in the wake of a historic victory to the man who campaigned for president on the declinist slogan of making America great again.

And don’t think Donald Trump was wrong in that 2017 inaugural address of his. A certain level of American carnage (particularly in the form of staggering economic inequality, not to speak of the “forever wars” still being fought so brainlessly by a military on which this country was spending its money rather than on health, education, and infrastructure) had helped bring him to power and he knew it. He even promised to solve just such problems, including ending those forever wars, as he essentially did again in his recent White House acceptance speech, even as he promised to keep “rebuilding” that very military.

Here was the key passage from that long-gone inaugural address of his:

“Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation; an education system, flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of knowledge; and the crime and gangs and drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential. This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.”

Of course, more than 3½ years later, in that seemingly eternal “now” of his, the carnage seemed eternal — whether in the form of those wars he swore he would get us out of; the spending on the military and the rest of what’s still known as the national security state, which only increased; the economic inequality, which just grew, thanks in part to a humongous 2017 tax cut, a bonanza for the wealthiest Americans (and no one else), leaving the government and so the rest of us owing far more money than previously imaginable; and above all, the urge of his administration, from top to bottom, not just to deny that climate change exists but to burn this planet down by “unleashing” a program of “American energy dominance” and taking every imaginable restraint off the exploitation of fossil-fuels and opening up yet more areas for those industries to exploit. In other words, Donald J. Trump has given American carnage new meaning and, in his singular way, lent a remarkable hand to the transformation of this country.

A Simple Math Problem

When The Donald descended that Trump Tower escalator in June 2015 to declare himself a candidate for president, he made a promise to the disgruntled citizens of the American heartland. He would build what he hailed as a “great wall” (that the Mexican government would pay for) to seal us off from the lesser breeds on this planet (Mexican rapists!). Until that moment, of course, there had been just one “great” wall on planet Earth and it had been constructed by various Chinese dynasties over untold centuries to keep out nomadic invaders, the armed “caravans” of that moment.

As Americans would soon learn, however, being second best to or only as good as just about anything wasn’t, to put it mildly, Donald Trump’s signature style. So in that first speech of his, he instantly doubled the “greats” in his wall. He would create nothing less than a “great, great” one.


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In the years that followed, it’s also become clear that neither spelling, nor pronouncing words is among his special skills or, put another way, that he’s a great, great misspeller and mispronouncer. Given that he managed to produce only 300 miles of wall on the U.S.-Mexico border in almost four years in office, almost all of it replacing already existing barriers (at the expense of the American taxpayer and a set of private donors-cum-suckers), we have to assume that the candidate on that first day either misspelled or mispronounced one word in that phrase of his.

Given what’s happened to this country since, it’s hard not to imagine that what he meant was not a great, great wall, but a great, great fall. And in this pandemic hell of a country, with its economy in the kind of tatters that no one has yet faintly come to grips with, its health (and mental health) in crisis mode, parts of it burnt to a crisp and others flooded and clobbered by intensifying storms, if that’s what he meant to say, his leadership of what remains the world’s lone superpower (despite a rising China) has indeed been a great, great success. For such a triumph, however, this country needs some new term, something to replace that old “indispensable nation” (and, for my money, “dispensable nation” doesn’t quite do the trick).

And I have a suggestion. Once upon a time when I was much, much younger, we spoke of three worlds on planet Earth. There was the first world (also known as “the free world”), which included the developed countries of North America, Europe, and Japan (and you could throw in South Korea and Australia, if you wanted); there was the second world, also known as the communist bloc, the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China; and, of course, there was the third world, which included all the other poor and underdeveloped countries, many former European colonies, scattered around the globe’s south and often in terrible shape.

So many years later, with the first billionaire in the Oval Office presiding over an era of American carnage at home rather than in distant lands like Vietnam, I suspect we need a new “world” to capture the nature and state of this country at this moment. So how about fourth world? After all, the U.S. remains the richest, most powerful nation on the planet (first world!), but is also afloat in a sea of autocratic, climate-changing, economic, military, and police carnage that should qualify it as distinctly third world as well.

So, it’s really just a simple math problem: What’s 1 plus 3? Four, of course, making this country once again a leader on this ever less equal planet of ours; the United States, that is, is the first official fourth-world country in history. U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!

Or if you prefer, you could simply think of us as potentially the most powerful, wealthiest failed state on the planet.

A Hell on Earth?

Humanity has so far (and I use that phrase advisedly) managed to create just two ways of destroying human life on this planet. In doing so, it has, of course, taken over tasks that it once left to the gods (Armageddon! Apocalypse!). On both counts, Donald Trump is proving himself a master of destruction.

The first way, of course, would be by nuclear weapons, so far, despite close calls, used only twice, 75 years ago. However, the president and his crew have focused with striking intensity on tearing up nuclear arms pacts signed with the Soviet Union in the final years of the Cold War, backing out of the Iranian nuclear deal, pumping up the “modernization” of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, and threatening other countries with the actual use of such weaponry. (Who could forget, for instance, The Donald’s threat to release “fire and fury like the world has never seen” on North Korea?)

In the process, the Trump administration has loosed what increasingly looks like a new global nuclear arms race, even as tensions grow, especially between China and the United States. In other words, while promising to end America’s “forever wars” (he didn’t), President Trump has actually pumped up the relatively dim possibility since the Cold War ended of using nuclear weapons, which obviously threatens a flash-bang end to human life as we know it.

And keep in mind that, when it comes to world-ending possibilities, that’s the lesser of his two apocalyptic efforts in these years.

While we’re still on the first of those ways of destroying this planet, however, let’s not forget to include not just the increased funding devoted to “modernizing” those nukes, but more generally the ever greater funding of the Pentagon and what’s still called “the national security state.” It hardly matters how little of that money goes to true national security in a twenty-first-century moment when we’re experiencing a pandemic that could be but the beginning of a new Black Plague-style era and the heating up of the atmosphere, oceans, and seas of this world in ways that are already making life increasingly unbearable via ever fiercer storms, ever more frequent wildfires, the ever greater melting of ice sheets, ever more violent flooding, ever greater drought — I mean, you name it, and if it’s somewhere between deeply unpleasant and life (and property) endangering, it’s getting worse in the Trumpian moment.

In that second category when it comes to destroying human life as we’ve known it via the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the president and his men (and they are basically men) have shown a particular flair. I’m still alone in doing so, but I continue to refer to the whole lot of them as pyromaniacs, because their simple denial of the reality of global warming is the least of it. Trump and crew are clearly determined to burn, burn, burn.

And lest you think any of this will ever bother the president or his top officials, think again. After all, having had an essentially mask-less, cheek-by-jowl election rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which spread the coronavirus and may have killed one of the president’s well-known supporters, he then doubled down in his acceptance speech for the presidential nomination. He gave it in front of the White House before the kind of crowd he glories in: 1,500 enthusiastic followers, almost all mask-less, untested for Covid-19, and jammed together cheering him for an hour. That should tell you all you need to know about his concern for the lives of others (even those who adore him) or anyone’s future other than his own.

Perhaps we need a new chant for this election season, something like: “Four more years and this planet will be a hell on earth!”

It was the worst of times, it was… no, wait, in Trumpian terms, it was the worstest of times since no one should ever be able to outdo him. And as CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite would have said in my youth, you (and I and the rest of humanity) were there. We truly were and are. For shame.

Fourth World

Let me be blunt. This wasn’t the world I imagined for my denouement. Not faintly. Of course, I can’t claim I ever really imagined such a place. Who, in their youth, considers their death and the world that might accompany it, the one you might leave behind for younger generations? I’m 76 now. True, if I were lucky (or perhaps unlucky), I could live another 20 years and see yet a newer world born. But for the moment at least, it seems logical enough to consider this pandemic nightmare of a place as the country of my old age, the one that I and my generation (including a guy named Donald J. Trump) will pass on to our children and grandchildren. 

Back in 2001, after the 9/11 attacks, I knew it was going to be bad. I felt it deep in my gut almost immediately and, because of that, stumbled into creating TomDispatch.com, the website I still run. But did I ever think it would be this bad? Not a chance.

I focused back then on what already looked to me like a nightmarish American imperial adventure to come, the response to the 9/11 attacks that the administration of President George W. Bush quickly launched under the rubric of “the Global War on Terror.” And that name (though the word “global” would soon be dropped for the more anodyne “war on terror”) would prove anything but inaccurate. After all, in those first post-9/11 moments, the top officials of that administration were thinking as globally as possible when it came to war. At the damaged Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld almost immediately turned to an aide and told him, “Go massive — sweep it all up, things related and not.” From then on, the emphasis would always be on the more the merrier.

Bush’s top officials were eager to take out not just Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda, whose 19 mostly Saudi hijackers had indeed attacked this country in the most provocative manner possible (at a cost of only $400,000-$500,000), but the Taliban, too, which then controlled much of Afghanistan. And an invasion of that country was seen as but the initial step in a larger, deeply desired project reportedly meant to target more than 60 countries! Above all, George W. Bush and his top officials dreamed of taking down Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein, occupying his oil-rich land, and making the United States, already the unipolar power of the twenty-first century, the overseer of the Greater Middle East and, in the end, perhaps even of a global Pax Americana. Such was the oil-fueled imperial dreamscape of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and crew (including that charmer and now bestselling anti-Trump author John Bolton).

Who Woulda Guessed?

In the years that followed, I would post endless TomDispatch pieces, often by ex-military men, focused on the ongoing nightmare of our country’s soon-to-become forever wars (without a “pax” in sight) and the dangers such spreading conflicts posed to our world and even to us. Still, did I imagine those wars coming home in quite this way? Police forces in American cities and towns thoroughly militarized right down to bayonets, MRAPs, night-vision goggles, and helicopters, thanks to a Pentagon program delivering equipment to police departments nationwide more or less directly off the battlefields of Washington’s never-ending wars? Not for a moment.

Who doesn’t remember those 2014 photos of what looked like an occupying army on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, after the police killing of a Black teenager and the protests that followed? And keep in mind that, to this day, the Republican Senate and the Trump administration have shown not the slightest desire to rein in that Pentagon program to militarize police departments nationwide. Such equipment (and the mentality that goes with it) showed up strikingly on the streets of American cities and towns during the recent Black Lives Matter protests.

Even in 2014, however, I couldn’t have imagined federal agents by the hundreds, dressed as if for a forever-war battlefield, flooding onto those same streets (at least in cities run by Democratic mayors), ready to treat protesters as if they were indeed al-Qaeda (“VIOLENT ANTIFA ANARCHISTS”), or that it would all be part of an election ploy by a needy president. Not a chance.

Or put another way, a president with his own “goon squad” or “stormtroopers” outfitted to look as if they were shipping out for Afghanistan or Iraq but heading for Portland, Albuquerque, Chicago, Seattle, and other American cities? Give me a break! How un-American could you get? A military surveillance drone overhead in at least one of those cities as if this were someone else’s war zone? Give me a break again. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I’d live to witness anything quite like it or a president — and we’ve had a few doozies — even faintly like the man a minority of deeply disgruntled Americans but a majority of electors put in the White House in 2016 to preside over a failing empire.

How about an American president in the year 2020 as a straightforward, no-punches-pulled racist, the sort of guy a newspaper could compare to former segregationist Alabama governor and presidential candidate George Wallace without even blinking? Admittedly, in itself, presidential racism has hardly been unique to this moment in America, despite Joe Biden’s initial claim to the contrary. That couldn’t be the case in the country in which Woodrow Wilson made D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, the infamous silent movie in which the Ku Klux Klan rides to the rescue, the first film ever to be shown in the White House; nor the one in which Richard Nixon used his “Southern strategy” — Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater had earlier labeled it even more redolently “Operation Dixie” — to appeal to the racist fears of Southern whites and so begin to turn that region from a Democratic stronghold into a Republican bastion; nor in the land where Ronald Reagan launched his election campaign of 1980 with a “states’ rights” speech (then still a code phrase for segregation) near Philadelphia, Mississippi, just miles from the earthen dam where three murdered civil rights workers had been found buried in 1964.


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Still, an openly racist president (don’t take that knee!) as an autocrat-in-the-making (or at least in-the-dreaming), one who first descended that Trump Tower escalator in 2015 denouncing Mexican “rapists,” ran for president rabidly on a Muslim ban, and for whom Black lives, including John Lewis’s, have always been immaterial, a president now defending every Confederate monument and military base named after a slave-owning general in sight, while trying to launch a Nixon-style “law and (dis)order” campaign? I mean, who woulda thunk it?

And add to that the once unimaginable: a man without an ounce of empathy in the White House, a figure focused only on himself and his electoral and pecuniary fate (and perhaps those of his billionaire confederates); a man filling his hated “deep state” with congressionally unapproved lackies, flacks, and ass-kissers, many of them previously flacks (aka lobbyists) for major corporations. (Note, by the way, that while The Donald has a distinctly autocratic urge, I don’t describe him as an incipient fascist because, as far as I can see, his sole desire — as in those now-disappeared rallies of his — is to have fans, not lead an actual social movement of any sort. Think of him as Mussolini right down to the look and style with a “base” of cheering MAGA chumps but no urge for an actual fascist movement to lead.)

And who ever imagined that an American president might actually bring up the possibility of delaying an election he fears losing, while denouncing mail-in ballots (“the scandal of our time”) as electoral fraud and doing his damnedest to undermine the Post Office which would deliver them amid an economic downturn that rivals the Great Depression? Who, before this moment, ever imagined that a president might consider refusing to leave the White House even if he did lose his reelection bid? Tell me this doesn’t qualify as something new under the American sun. True, it wasn’t Donald Trump who turned this country’s elections into 1{068cdbfab37e4f27da76d005a9c3d7cc8b4ae1429371040bf09b1dfe920189b4} affairs or made contributions by the staggeringly wealthy and corporations a matter of free speech (thank you, Supreme Court!), but it is Donald Trump who is threatening, in his own unique way, to make elections themselves a thing of the past. And that, believe me, I didn’t count on.

Nor did I conceive of an all-American world of inequality almost beyond imagining. A country in which only the truly wealthy (think tax cuts) and the national security state (think budgets eternally in the stratosphere) are assured of generous funding in the worst of times.

The World to Come?

Oh, and I haven’t even mentioned the pandemic yet, have I? The one that should bring to mind the Black Death of the fourteenth century and the devastating Spanish Flu of a century ago, the one that’s killing Americans in remarkable numbers daily and going wild in this country, aided and abetted in every imaginable way (and some previously unimaginable ones) by the federal government and the president. Who could have dreamed of such a disease running riot, month after month, in the wealthiest, most powerful country on the planet without a national plan for dealing with it? Who could have dreamed of the planet’s most exceptional, indispensable country (as its leaders once loved to call it) being unable to take even the most modest steps to rein in Covid-19, thanks to a president, Republican governors, and Republican congressional representatives who consider science the equivalent of alien DNA? Honestly, who ever imagined such an American world? Think of it not as The Decameron, that fourteenth century tale of 10 people in flight from a pandemic, but the Trumpcameron or perhaps simply Trumpmageddon.

And keep in mind, when assessing this world I’m going to leave behind to those I hold near and dear, that Covid-19 is hardly the worst of it. Behind that pandemic, possibly even linked to it in complex ways, is something so much worse. Yes, the coronavirus and the president’s response to it may seem like the worst of all news as American deaths crest 160,000 with no end in sight, but it isn’t. Not faintly on a planet that’s being heated to the boiling point and whose most powerful country is now run by a crew of pyromaniacs.

It’s hard even to fully conceptualize climate change since it operates on a time scale that’s anything but human. Still, one way to think of it is as a slow-burn planetary version of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And by the way, if you’ll excuse a brief digression, in these years, our president and his men have been intent on ripping up every Cold War nuclear pact in sight, while the tensions between two nuclear-armed powers, the U.S. and China, only intensify and Washington invests staggering sums in “modernizing” its nuclear arsenal. (I mean, how exactly do you “modernize” the already-achieved ability to put an almost instant end to the world as we’ve known it?)

But to return to climate change, remember that 2020 is already threatening to be the warmest year in recorded history, while the five hottest years so far occurred from 2015 to 2019. That should tell you something, no?

The never-ending release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere has been transforming this planet in ways that have now become obvious. My own hometown, New York City, for instance, has officially become part of the humid subtropical climate zone and that’s only a beginning. Everywhere temperatures are rising. They hit 100 degrees this June in, of all places, Siberia. (The Arctic is warming at twice the rate of much of the rest of the planet.) Sea ice is melting fast, while floods and mega-droughts intensify and forests burn in a previously unknown fashion.

And as a recent heat wave across the Middle East — Baghdad hit a record 125 degrees — showed, it’s only going to get hotter. Much hotter and, given how humanity has handled the latest pandemic, how will it handle the chaos that goes with rising sea levels drowning coastlines but also affecting inland populations, ever fiercer storms, and flooding (in recent weeks, the summer monsoon has, for instance, put one third of Bangladesh underwater), not to speak of the migration of refugees from the hardest-hit areas? The answer is likely to be: not well.

And I could go on, but you get the point. This is not the world I either imagined or would ever have dreamed of leaving to those far younger than me. That the men (and they are largely men) who are essentially promoting the pandemicizing and over-heating of this planet will be the greatest criminals in history matters little.

Let’s just hope that, when it comes to creating a better world out of such a god-awful mess, the generations that follow us prove better at it than mine did. If I were a religious man, those would be my prayers.

And here’s my odd hope. As should be obvious from this piece, the recent past, when still the future, was surprisingly unimaginable. There’s no reason to believe that the future — the coming decades — will prove any easier to imagine. No matter the bad news of this moment, who knows what our world might really look like 20 years from now? I only hope, for the sake of my children and grandchildren, that it surprises us all.

It Could Have Been Different

It’s July 2020 and I’m about to turn 76, which, as far as I’m concerned, officially makes me an old man. So put up with my aging, wandering brain here, since (I swear) I wasn’t going to start this piece with Donald J. Trump, no matter his latest wild claims or bizarre statements, increasingly white nationalist and pro-Confederate positions (right down to the saving of the rebel stars and bars), not to speak of the Covid-19 slaughter of Americans he’s helped facilitate. But then I read about his demand for a “National Garden of American Heroes,” described as “a vast outdoor park that will feature the statues of the greatest Americans to ever live” and, honestly, though this piece is officially about something else, I just can’t help myself. I had to start there.

Yes, everyone undoubtedly understands why General George Patton (a Trump obsession) is to be in that garden, not to speak — given the president’s reelection politics — of evangelist Billy Graham, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, and former president Ronald Reagan. Still, my guess is that most of you won’t have the faintest idea why Davy Crockett is included. I’m talking about the frontiersman and Indian killer who died at the Alamo. Given my age, though, I get Donald Trump on this one and it gave me a rare laugh in a distinctly grim moment. That’s why I can’t resist explaining it, even though I guarantee you that the real subject of this piece is Osama bin Laden’s revenge.

After all, The Donald and I grew up in the 1950s in different parts of the same bustling city, New York. We both had TVs, just then flooding into homes nationwide, and I guarantee you that we both were riveted by the same hit show, TV’s first mini-series, Walt Disney’s Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier, starring the actor Fess Parker. Its pop theme song swept the country. (“Born on a mountain top in Tennessee, greenest state in the land of the free… Kilt him a b’ar when he was only three… Davy, Davy Crockett, king of the wild frontier.”) The show also launched a kids’ craze for coonskin caps. (Who among us didn’t have, or at least yearn, for one?) So how could a statue of Fess Parker not be in the Garden of American Heroes?

And since Donald Trump is himself the essence of a bad novel (though he’s also become our reality), I just wonder: What about the Lone Ranger and Tonto, especially since there are no plans for Native Americans in his garden-to-be? They were a crew obviously put on Earth to be wiped out by white colonists, cowboys, and the cavalry in the kinds of Westerns both of us trooped to local movie theaters to see back then.

Or how about Hopalong Cassidy (Hoppy!), that other TV cowboy hero of our childhood? Doesn’t he deserve to ride in that garden next to another Trump military fixation, General Douglas MacArthur? After all, I know that Hoppy was real and this is how: When I was seven or eight, my father had a friend who worked for Pathé News and I rode in front of the tripod of his camera on the roof of that company’s station wagon in a Macy’s Day Parade in my hometown. (I still have the photos.) Somewhere along the route, Hoppy himself — I kid you not! — rode by on his white horse Topper and, since I was atop that station wagon and we were at about the same height, he shook my hand!

And here’s what makes Cassidy especially appropriate for The Donald’s garden landscape: in the 1950s, he was the only cowboy hero who dressed all in black right up to his hat (normally, a sign of the bad guy) and, in the process, created a kid’s craze for black shirts (his version of a coonskin cap), breaking its past association with either Italian fascism or mourning and bringing it back into the culture big time. Tell me honestly, then, don’t you think a garden of “heroes” in the age of Trump should have a few black shirts and an increasingly Mussolini-ish look to it?

An American Garden of Blood

So Donald Trump and I both lived through the same TV world in our childhoods and youth. We also lived through 9/11, still in the same city, although unlike him, I wasn’t practically a “first responder” at the site of those two downed towers, nor did I see all the Muslims celebrating across the river in Jersey City (as he claimed he did). Still, of one thing I’m convinced: Donald Trump is Osama bin Laden’s revenge.

Of course, that was all so long ago. The new century had barely begun. I was only 57 and The Donald 55 when those two hijacked planes suddenly slammed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in our hometown, a third one plunged into the Pentagon in Washington, and a fourth (probably heading for the White House or the Capitol) crashed into a field in Pennsylvania after its passengers fought back. Ever since, all you have to do is write “9/11” and everyone knows (or thinks they know) what it stands for. But on 9/11, there was, of course, no 9/11.

It was a breathtakingly unexpected event (although, to be fair, the CIA had previously briefed President George W. Bush on Osama bin Laden’s desire to hijack commercial planes for possible terror operations… oh, and there was that FBI agent in Phoenix who urged headquarters “to investigate Middle Eastern men enrolled in American flight schools”). Still, the downing of those towers and part of the headquarters of the singularly victorious military of the ultimate superpower of the Cold War, the one already being called “indispensable” and “exceptional” in 2001, was beyond shocking.

Admittedly, there’s history to be remembered here. After all, it wasn’t actually that military or that Pentagon that downed the Soviet Union. In fact, when the American military fought the Soviets in major proxy wars on a planet where nuclear catastrophe was always just around the corner, it found itself remarkably stalemated in Korea and dismally on the losing side in Vietnam.

No, if you want to give credit where it’s due, offer it to the CIA and Washington’s Saudi allies, who invested staggering effort from 1979 to 1989 in funding, supporting, and training the Taliban’s predecessors, groups of Afghan Islamic extremists, to take down the Red Army in their country. Supporting them as well (though, as far as is known, probably not actually funded by the U.S.) was a rich young Saudi militant named, believe it or not, Osama bin Laden who, before that war even ended, had founded a group called “the Base” or al-Qaeda, and would, in 1996, declare “war” on the United States. Oh yes, and though it’s seldom mentioned now, when charges are flying fast and furious about the possible recent Russian funding of Taliban militants to kill at most a few Americans in Afghanistan, in those years the U.S. poured billions of dollars into… well, not to put it too subtly, empowering Islamic extremists to kill the soldiers of that other superpower by the thousands in… yes, Afghanistan. How’s that for shocking?


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In 1989, the defeated Red Army finally limped home from what the Soviet Union’s leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, had taken to calling “the bleeding wound.” Only two years later, his country imploded and the U.S. was left alone, officially victorious, on Planet Earth (despite future fantasies of a horrific “axis of evil” to be faced), the first country in endless centuries of imperial rivalry to find itself so.

And what exactly did that triumphantly indispensable, exceptional superpower do but, a decade later, get dive-bombed by 19 — just 19! — largely Saudi hijackers in the service of tiny al-Qaeda and that wizard of terror Osama bin Laden, whose urge was then to provoke Washington into a genuine war in the Muslim world and so create yet more Islamic extremists. And did he succeed? You bet — and in a fashion even he undoubtedly hadn’t conceived of in his wildest dreams. Think of 9/11, in fact, as the greatest example of “shock and awe” in this century.

Here’s a feeling I still remember from the weeks after the 9/11 attacks when I saw where the administration of President George W. Bush was heading toward the invasion of Afghanistan and then, god save us, Iraq; when I watched our mainstream media narrow its focus to this country as the most victimized yet dominating and exceptional place on Earth and Osama bin Laden as the ultimate evil on this planet; when I watched the never-ending memorial ceremonies begin and what soon came to be called “the war on terror” be launched with up to 60 (count ‘em: 60!) countries in its gun sights, even if I didn’t yet know that, on 9/11 in the damaged Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had turned to an aide and said, “Go Massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not,” with a future invasion of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq clearly in mind, though the Iraqi autocrat had no relation whatsoever to al-Qaeda (something you wouldn’t have known from the top officials in that administration in those years) — when, in short (though I didn’t yet think of it that way), I watched my own country become a “bleeding wound” that has never stopped flowing and, in Donald Trump’s Covid-19 moment, has turned into an American Garden of Blood.

Back in late September 2001, despite having been deeply involved decades earlier in the nightmare of the Vietnam War (and opposition to it), I could already sense war coming and it occurred to me that this was going to be the worst period I had ever experienced. Now that we’re in Donald Trump’s America, with hundreds of Americans dying daily of a disease that a reasonably responsible president and administration could have brought under control, the 3,000 deaths of 9/11 are beginning to look like a drop in the casualty bucket. (By the beginning of April 2020, Covid-19 deaths in New York City alone had already surpassed those of 9/11 by 1,000.)

And I wasn’t wrong in that hunch about this being the worst period, was I? Mind you, it was just a gut feeling then, no more — even though it would soon enough lead, almost inexorably, to the creation of my website, TomDispatch, and its focus on what turned out to be America’s never-ending wars of this century.

A Passport to Nowhere

Let’s get one thing straight, though. If, at that moment, you had told me that this country was going to launch a series of forever wars across what would turn out to be a significant part of the planet and fight them hopelessly for almost two decades or that, the more success proved absent in those same years, the more one administration after another would pour taxpayer dollars into the U.S. military, the 17 “intelligence” agencies, and the rest of the national security state; that what’s still known, with no accuracy whatsoever, as the “defense budget” would years ago have become larger than those of the next seven best-funded military powers on the planet combined and, by 2020, the next 10, and would still be rising; that domestic investment, from infrastructure to pandemic preparedness, would be starved for money in those same years, and that just about no one would protest any of this in the halls of Congress or the streets of America, I would have thought you a madman — or rather, the world’s best writer of dystopian fiction.

If you had told me that, in those very years, of the two great powers of this century, China and the United States — one rising, the other ever more clearly falling — the latter would lose approximately 7,000 military personnel (and at least another 8,000 military contractors) and many more wounded, not to speak of those who came home with PTSD or, under the pressure of repeated deployments to the sorriest of conflicts, committed suicide, while the former, as the New York Times reported recently in the wake of a bloody (but not weaponized) clash on China’s disputed Himalayan border with India, would have lost next to none, I wouldn’t have believed you. (“In four decades,” as the Times wrote, “the People’s Liberation Army had lost just three soldiers to fighting abroad — troops who were killed in United Nations peacekeeping operations in Mali and South Sudan in 2016.”)

If you had told me that, facing a devastating virus, the leader of one would largely suppress it — admittedly using the most authoritarian of methods — while, in his search for reelection, the leader of the other, officially still the greatest power on the planet, would ignore it, open the economy, churches, schools, and institutions of every sort and watch it run wild without a plan in sight; if you had told me that fewer than 5,000 people would die in the first of those countries and more than 134,000 (and still counting) in the other, leaving the American dead of 9/11 and the bloody wars of this century in the shade, and that it was all only getting worse, I wouldn’t have believed you. Not for a second.

And if, above all, you had told me that, deep into those years of bleeding abroad and increasingly at home, a near majority of Americans would vote to (as I wrote during election campaign 2016) send a suicide bomber into the White House, I would have told you that, though Osama bin Laden had been killed by SEAL Team Six in Pakistan and buried in the briny deep in 2011, Donald Trump was his living revenge, and that bin Laden had won twice — once thanks to those ludicrous, murderous forever wars across much of the Muslim world and the second time thanks to the pandemic from hell and the president from the same place.

Imagine if, in 1991 when the Soviet Union imploded, I had told you that, in 2020, not quite three decades distant, an American passport would be, more or less literally, a document for a trip to nowhere. Talk about a bleeding, or even hemorrhaging, wound! In the years to come, I think it will be ever more obvious that Donald Trump was, in fact, proof of Osama bin Laden’s success, of the fact that 9/11 and those 19 hijackers were all that was needed to produce the world of his dreams and the wounds that went with it.

And if, by the way, you wondered why I wrote this piece with the longest sentences I could possibly create, the answer is simple enough: two decades into the twenty-first century, I think it should be obvious that Americans have been given an exceptionally, perhaps even indispensably long sentence without parole on a planet already heating to the boiling point, 94,000,000 miles from the sun.

No, this truly won’t be “the American century,” but I doubt it will be the Chinese one either. By the time this crew is done, it may be nobody’s century. Thanks a heap, Osama! This is your bleeding wound, too.

“The Bleeding Wound”

Let me rant for a moment. I don’t do it often, maybe ever. I’m not Donald Trump. Though I’m only two years older than him, I don’t even know how to tweet and that tells you everything you really need to know about Tom Engelhardt in a world clearly passing me by. Still, after years in which America’s streets were essentially empty, they’ve suddenly filled, day after day, with youthful protesters, bringing back a version of a moment I remember from my youth and that’s a hopeful (if also, given Covid-19, a scary) thing, even if I’m an old man in isolation in this never-ending pandemic moment of ours.

In such isolation, no wonder I have the urge to rant. Our present American world, after all, was both deeply unimaginable — before 2016, no one could have conjured up President Donald Trump as anything but a joke — and yet in some sense, all too imaginable. Think of it this way: the president who launched his candidacy by descending a Trump Tower escalator to denounce Mexican “rapists” and hype the “great, great wall” he would build, the man who, in his election campaign, promised to put a “big, fat, beautiful wall” across our southern border to keep out immigrants (“invaders!”) — my grandpa, by the way, was just such an invader — has, after nearly three and a half years, succeeded only in getting a grotesquely small wall built around the White House; in other words, he’s turned the “people’s house” into a micro-Green Zone in a Washington that, as it filled with National Guard troops and unidentified but militarized police types, was transformed into a Trumpian version of occupied Baghdad. Then he locked himself inside (except for that one block walk to a church through streets forcibly emptied of protesters). All in all, a single redolent phrase from our recent past comes to mind: mission accomplished!

From the second the Soviet Union imploded in 1991 to the spread of Covid-19, developments on this planet have been remarkably inconceivable and yet strangely predictable. Can you even remember that distant moment, almost three decades ago, when a stunned Washington political establishment (since its members had never imagined a world without the other Cold War superpower) suddenly found themselves alone on Planet Earth, freed to do their damnedest in a world lacking enemies of any sort? The globe seemed to be there for the taking, lock, stock, and barrel.

Their promised post-Cold War “peace dividend,” however, would involve arming the U.S. military to the teeth, expanding the country’s “intelligence” agencies until there were (count ’em!) 17 of them, bolstering an already vast national security state, and dispatching this country’s generals to fight “forever wars” that would unsettle the planet, while conquering nothing at all. The folly of this in such a moment on such a planet should have been obvious. And in fact, it was. In early 2003, facing only one small terrorist group and a completely concocted three-nation “axis of evil,” President George W. Bush decided to order the invasion of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Sensing what was coming, millions of people poured into the streets of cities worldwide to tell him the obvious: don’t do it! (“How did USA’s oil get under Iraq’s sand?” a typical protest sign of that moment read.) Of those millions, however, not one dreamed that, 13 years later, as a result of Bush’s decision to ignore them, this country, or at least its Electoral College, would put in the White House a president who would essentially launch the invasion of America.

What else do you need to know about our mad moment than that the president of the land that had, for so long, fought a “war on terror” would call the all-American protesters once again turning out in the streets of hundreds of cities and towns in vast numbers “terrorists”? He would then label a 75-year-old white man shoved over by two cops in Buffalo, New York, and left bleeding on the ground as they walked away an “ANTIFA provocateur.” (He’s still in the hospital.) In this fashion, with the police armed to the teeth with weaponry and equipment off the battlefields of America’s forever wars and George Floyd literally breathless thanks to one of those policemen, the war on terror would come home big time.

Think of it this way: we Americans, the greatest power in history, the ultimate unchallenged victors on this planet as the last century ended, are now living in a disease-ridden parody version of occupied Iraq and my own generation is officially responsible.

A Flattened Planet

Outside that Green Zone in Washington, an age, a system, even a planet as we’ve known it may all be ending and that shouldn’t be taken in without emotion. So many things aren’t obvious when they should be. Still, to give myself a tad of credit, in the years after the invasion of Iraq, I did at least sense that this single superpower world of ours was some kind of sham. In October 2012, for instance, I suggested that

“one thing seems obvious: a superpower military with unparalleled capabilities for one-way destruction no longer has the more basic ability to impose its will anywhere on the planet. Quite the opposite, U.S. military power has been remarkably discredited globally by the most pitiful of forces… Given the lack of enemies — a few thousand jihadis, a small set of minority insurgencies, a couple of feeble regional powers — why this is so, what exactly the force is that prevents Washington’s success, remains mysterious.”

I added, however, that “the end of the Cold War, which put an end… to several centuries of imperial or great power competition… left the sole ‘victor,’ it now seems clear, heading toward the exits wreathed in self-congratulation.”

Now, those exits are truly in sight and the self-congratulation that once filled Washington has been ceded to the walled-in occupant of the Oval Office in a country visibly in dismay and disarray. With a regime that not only has autocratic tendencies but also a remarkable urge to take the planet down environmentally (and possibly via nuclear arms as well), it’s easier to see just how disastrous the post-1991 “sole superpower’s” decisions really were.

Hopeful as the grit and determination of those Black Lives Matter protesters may be in the face of police violence and repression, not to speak of the nastiest virus in memory, we’re also at what looks increasingly like one of those moments when worlds do end and it didn’t have to be this way.


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After all, in a cocoon of seemingly ultimate triumphalism, those who were running the post-1991 American global system did anything — to steal a word from journalist Thomas Friedman’s 2005 book The World Is Flat — but flatten the world they inherited (as in creating a more level playing field of any sort). In fact, the American powers-that-be promptly put their energy into creating the least level playing field imaginable. In it, a single country, the United States, would invest more money in its military than the next 10 powers combined and, by 2017, three Americans would have more wealth than the bottom half of this society. Meanwhile, the wealth of 162 global billionaires would equal that of half of humanity. It was a world in which, once the coronavirus pandemic struck causing almost unspeakable economic disaster, those billionaires would once again make a rather literal killing — another half-trillion dollars-plus.

So Friedman was right, but only if by “flat” he meant the four flat tires on the American Humvee.

Here, in fact, was the strange reality of that moment of ultimate triumph in 1991: the American political ruling class, the people who had seemingly won it all, would prove remarkably brain-dead in a way few grasped then or we wouldn’t be in Donald Trump’s America today. Back then, the one thing they couldn’t imagine in a world without the Soviet Union was an all-American world of flatness, peace, and democracy.

The only thing they could imagine was another version of the militarized style of dominance that had long characterized the American Century, to use the famous phrase Life and Time publisher Henry Luce first put into the language in 1941. Those managing the imperial system that had dotted the planet with military garrisons in a historically unprecedented fashion, while creating a global economy centered on the accumulation of staggering wealth and power, had no idea that the United States would prove to be the second superpower victim of the end of the Cold War.

Saying Goodbye to the American Century

Now, let me truly launch that rant of mine — and note that there will be no more section breaks or breathing room. After all, that’s the nature of a rant in an era in which the man in the Oval Office is quite capable of running the country (into the ground) while tweeting or retweeting 200 times in a single day. Hey, what the hell else is there to do as the president of these disunited states, except tweet, watch Fox News, and disunite them further?

So take my word for it, more or less 75 years after it began, the American Century is over. So long! Au revoir! Arrivederci! Zaijian!

Having been born on July 20, 1944, the day of the failed officers’ plot against Adolf Hitler (and not much else in history), I’ve lived through just about all of that “century” and I’m still here. And yet think of this as an autopsy because the body (of my hopes and those of my generation) now lies in the morgue and a skilled medical examiner should be able to discover just what it died of.

Who knew what I really hoped for back then? I mean, you’re talking to a guy who can still remember reading quite a range of books, but not what was in many of them. So who knows, half a century or so ago, what exactly was in me? After all, I was then the equivalent of a book that I carried around endlessly but never stopped to fully read.

We’re talking about the late 1960s and early 1970s, the years when, for the first time in my life, however briefly, I suddenly felt strangely at home (and also movingly out of place) in this American world of ours. In the late 1960s, the radical politics of that moment blew me out of graduate school where, of all things, I was studying to be a China scholar at Harvard University. Yes, the Ming and Ching dynasties (rather than the Trump dynasty) then had my attention… until, of course, they didn’t. Those were the years when I suddenly became deeply aware that the American world I’d been brought up to admire (even if, in my childhood, my parents seemed to be having an awfully tough time in it) was deeply awry. And it tells you something about this white boy that it wasn’t the Civil Rights Movement that truly brought that home to me (though it should have been, of course) but an all-American conflict and slaughter taking place thousands of miles away.

Called the Vietnam War, it was a brutal American folly in the divided Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia in which millions would die and it would unsettle my mind, my life, my being. Somehow, in those years, as I’ve also written elsewhere, it came to seem as if Vietnamese were being killed right outside my window in peaceful Cambridge, Massachusetts. While I would never end up in the U.S. military — my draft files were destroyed at the time by an activist group that called itself Women Against Daddy Warbucks — I would be mobilized into an anti-military, antiwar movement filled in a fashion unimaginable today with dissenting soldiers, many of whom had fought in Vietnam.

I was swept up by the idea of a better world that I began to imagine might actually come to pass. How naïve I was!

Had you told me at that moment that everything we then dreamt of beyond the ending of that terrible set of American wars would essentially go down in flames; that the U.S. would, in the ensuing nearly half-century, fight two endless conflicts in another Asian land, Afghanistan — one in a kind of open secrecy, the second (now nearly two decades old) in plain sight even as it turns into a pandemic war; that, in this century, my country would invade not only Afghanistan but Iraq and fight a war on “terror” across much of what once would have been known as the Third World; and that all of this would happen without — except for one brief moment — anyone out in the streets protesting or paying much attention at all (except to eternally “thank” the non-conscripted soldiers fighting in those wars), I would have thought you were nuts.

If you had told me that the president of the United States, a man of my generation, would be a narcissistic, autocratic-leaning, utterly self-obsessed version of whatever anyone who mattered to him wanted him to be, a man ready, even eager, to call troops from those distant wars onto American streets to put down a sudden surge of protest amid a viral pandemic and an economic collapse similar to the Great Depression, only to find himself opposed by the very generals, each whiter than the next, who fought the disastrous forever wars that paved his way to power (and that they would be greeted as saviors in the liberal media), I would have thought you mad as a hatter.

And here’s the saddest thing of all from my perspective: if those young people now in the streets can’t perform genuine miracles — and not just when it comes to racism — if they can’t sooner or later turn their mobilized attention to the planet-destroying side of the American ruling class, then forget about it. This world will be heading into a heat hell.

That my generation, whether in the form of Donald Trump or Mitch McConnell, would be responsible for turning imperial America into an autocratic-leaning, collapsing semi-democracy, and a first-class world annihilator, I would have found hard to imagine. If you had told me that, half a century into the future, the world’s fate would rest on a presidential election between a genuine madman and something close to a dead man (that, for all we know, may not prove to be an election at all), I would have dismissed you out of hand.

And yet that, it seems, is the pandemic legacy of my generation for which we should all be ashamed, even as we watch the young, driven by the insanity and inanity of it all, turning out in our diseased streets to protest a country coming apart at the seams.

Think of Donald Trump as the American imperial establishment’s ultimate gift to humanity. Yes, they were as shocked and horrified as so many of the rest of us when he won the 2016 election, but they created the perfect America for him to do so. He couldn’t have won if they hadn’t both built a world that was desperately unflat and been so destructive in the process of unflattening it. He couldn’t have won if they hadn’t launched almost 20 years of disastrous, never-ending wars across parts of Asia, the Greater Middle East, and much of Africa under the heading of the war on terror, conflicts that did indeed bring terror to vast populations and spawn a sea of uprooted refugees who helped spark a new right-wing “populism” across Europe and here. (Remember Donald Trump’s Muslim ban!)

It should have been obvious that, in some fashion, those wars and their failed generals would all come home.

Donald Trump couldn’t have entered the White House if the Republicans, once the party of the environment, hadn’t become the party of billionaires and oil magnates. Donald Trump couldn’t have entered the White House if George W. Bush hadn’t insisted on invading Iraq. Donald Trump couldn’t have happened if Barack Obama, a president who understood climate change as well as anyone imaginable, hadn’t been willing to look the other way while the fracking revolution took place and this country briefly became Saudi America. The oceans are already hotter than they’ve ever been; storms are intensifying, sea levels rising, floods increasing in intensity; the Arctic is burning in an unprecedented fashion, as wildfires growing wilder; and a genuine pyromaniac is in the White House.

The American century is ending decisively with a first-class declinist inside Washington’s Green Zone. My small suggestion: don’t hold your breath for the Chinese century either. I doubt it’s coming.

Whatever happens tomorrow or next week, or next month, or next year, despite the rare gleam of hope those young protesters offer, we are deep in the age of disappointment on (as Donald Trump has only accentuated) an increasingly disposable planet.

So here’s something I wonder about: thirty or forty years from now, when I’m long gone, will there be a modern Edward Gibbon around to write a multi-volume classic, The History of the Decline and Fall of the American Empire? And will she emerge from that movement of young people now in the streets denouncing racism? And will that movement be transformed somehow into a planetary one of people of every age determined to trump the Trumps of our world and save a planet worth saving by forever burying all those fossil fuels and the criminal companies that produce them, or will the dreams of my generation have turned into the nightmare of all times? Will this not just be the end of that foreshortened American century, but — in the deepest sense of the word — the age of disappointment?

And now, for that rant of mine…

The Age of Disappointment?

“Be assured of one thing: whichever candidate you choose at the polls in November, you aren’t just electing a president of the United States; you are also electing an assassin-in-chief.” So I wrote back in June 2012, with a presidential election approaching.

I was referring then to the war on terror’s CIA and military drone assassination programs, which first revved up in parts of the Greater Middle East in the years of George W. Bush’s presidency and only spread thereafter. In the process, such “targeted killings” became, as I wrote at the time, “thoroughly institutionalized, normalized, and bureaucratized around the figure of the president.” In Barack Obama’s years in the Oval Office, they were ramped up further as he joined White House “Terror Tuesday” meetings to choose individual targets for those attacks. They often enough turned out to involve “collateral damage”; that is, the deaths of innocent civilians, including children. In other words, “commander-in-chief” had, by then, gained a deadly new meaning, as the president personally took on the role of a global assassin.

I had little doubt eight years ago that this wouldn’t end soon — and on that I wasn’t wrong. Admittedly, our present commander-in-chief probably doesn’t have the time (given how much of his day he’s spent watching Fox News, tweeting his millions of followers, and, until recently, holding two hour press-briefings-cum-election-rallies on the coronavirus pandemic) or the attention span for “Terror Tuesday” meetings. Still, in his own memorable fashion, he’s managed to make himself America’s assassin-in-chief par excellence.

After all, not only have those drone programs continued to target people in distant lands (including innocent civilians), but they have yet again been ramped up in the Trump years. Meanwhile, still in our pre-Covid-19 American world, President Trump embraced the role of assassin-in-chief in a newly public, deeply enthusiastic way. Previously, such drones had killed non-state actors, but he openly ordered the drone assassination of Major General Qassim Suleimani, the top military figure and number-two man in Iran, as he left Baghdad International Airport for a meeting with the prime minister of Iraq.

Of course, for American presidents such a role was not unknown even before the development of Hellfire-missile-armed drones. Think of John F. Kennedy and the CIA’s (failed) attempts on the life of Cuban leader Fidel Castro or the successful killings of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba, South Vietnamese leader Ngo Dinh Diem, and Dominican Republic head Rafael Trujillo. Or, for a change of pace, consider the Vietnam War-era CIA assassination campaign known as the Phoenix Program in which tens of thousands of supposed “Vietcong” supporters (often enough, civilians swept up in the murderous chaos of the moment) were murdered in that country, a program that was no secret to President Lyndon Johnson.

And it’s true as well that, in this century, our commanders-in-chief have overseen endless conflicts in distant lands from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria to Yemen, Somalia, Niger, and beyond, none of them congressionally declared wars. As a result, they had the ultimate responsibility for the deaths of, at a minimum, tens of thousands of civilians, as well as for the uprooting of millions of their compatriots from settled lives and their flight, as desperate refugees, across significant parts of the planet. It’s a grim record of death and destruction. Until recently, however, it remained a matter of distant deaths, not much noted here.

A New Kind of Drone War on the Pandemic Front

However, the assassin-in-chief may now be coming home, big time, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. Little did I imagine that, by 2020, an American president without a lick of empathy for other human beings, even Americans who loved him to death (so to speak), would be targeting not just civilians here in “the homeland” (as it came to become known after the 9/11 attacks), but his most fervent followers. In the age of Donald Trump, the assassin-in-chief now seems to be in the process of transforming himself into a domestic killer-in-chief.

That reality — at least for me — came into focus only recently. True, until then, even beyond those drone strikes, American presidents have had the ultimate responsibility for the deaths of startling numbers of civilians in faraway lands where the U.S. military has been making war (remarkably fruitlessly) for almost 19 years. The devastating use of American air power generally has only increased during the Trump years in, for instance, both Afghanistan and Somalia, where U.S. airstrikes have hit new levels of destructiveness, as Nick Turse reported recently at the Intercept — more of them in the first four pandemic months of 2020 than in all of the Obama years combined.

Still, historically speaking, killing Afghans or Iraqis or Syrians or Yemenis or Somalis has always been one thing, but Americans? That’s another story entirely, no?

As it happens, the answer is indeed no, not in 2020, and once again, in a sense, air power is at the heart of the matter. In this case, though, we’re talking about the spread of Covid-19, in part through respiratory droplets (think of them as microscopic Hellfire missiles). In that new air-powered context, with the equivalent of a drone virus in the hands of one Donald J. Trump, the president is bringing the role of assassin-in-chief home. He is, in fact, in the process of becoming a killer-in-chief for his very own base — anyone, that is, who listens to what he says and believes fervently in him. Set aside for a moment the deaths he’s undoubtedly responsible for because of, as Juan Cole put it recently at his Informed Comment website, “those two months he pissed away calling [Covid-19] a hoax and setting up the country for Vietnam War-level death tolls.” Put aside as well his repeated and dangerous medical advice to find and take anti-malarial drugs. Put aside as well his suggestion that perhaps people fearing they have the coronavirus should try to inject or internally take disinfectants (which, a recent study showed, do kill that virus on surfaces and in the air), an act medical experts assure us could result in death.


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Think of each of those potential death sentences for his most fervent believers as a striking combination of grotesque ignorance and narcissism. But what about an actual decision, as commander-in-chief and president, to kill off members of his base?

Until a couple of weeks ago, that would have been harder to imagine — until, that is, President Trump noticed the first demonstrations against state shutdowns focused on preventing the deadly Covid-19 virus from spreading. Those protests against “stay-at-home” orders, organized or encouraged by what the New York Times describes as “an informal coalition of influential conservative leaders and groups, some with close connections to the White House,” have continued to bring out demonstrators in Trump-election-like rallies by the dozens, hundreds, or even (in a few cases) thousands.

Often, the demonstrators are not wearing the very masks that the president has recommended for other people (but not himself); nor are they keeping the social distance he has also officially backed (but continues to find it impossible to keep). They sport bizarre signs (“Don’t cancel my golf season,” “My body/my choice, Trump 2020” [with an image of a face mask crossed out], “Give me liberty or give me Covid-19,” “We demand haircuts”), carry American flags and occasional Confederate ones, and are sometimes armed to the teeth (not exactly surprising, given that the protests have been supported by conservative pro-gun or armed militia groups).

The Donald was clearly pleased with the earliest of those demonstrations, being so eager himself to “reopen” America and “the greatest economy in the history of our country” (then headed for the pandemic subbasement). It mattered little that, despite the grim pressures of the moment, polling showed significant numbers of Americans, including Republicans, preferred to keep the U.S. largely shut down for now. In response, he tweeted: “LIBERATE MINNESOTA,” “LIBERATE MICHIGAN,” and then “LIBERATE VIRGINIA, and save your great 2nd Amendment. It is under siege!” All were states run by Democratic governors. And his focus on supporting such demonstrations quickly got the media’s attention, as they began to spread elsewhere.

At one of his nightly coronavirus briefings, the president then said this of the demonstrators: “These are people expressing their views. I see where they are and I see the way they’re working. They seem to be very responsible people to me, but they’ve been treated a little bit rough.”

With his future election campaign undoubtedly in his sightlines and his base in the forefront of his brain, he then began to encourage more of the same from both protesters and governors — and the Republican governor of Georgia broke the ice, so to speak, by attempting to reopen everything down to nail salons and movie theaters (something even the president would later criticize), while the Republican governor of Florida reopened that state’s beaches.

Targeting His Base

Now, here’s the obvious thing in this pandemic moment: if you’re the president of the United States (no less the governor of Georgia, Florida, or other Republican administrations or legislatures in a hurry to reopen the country), you’re encouraging people to sicken and die. To support citizens turning out to protest without either protection or any sense of social distancing is to support people potentially giving each other Covid-19, a disease which clearly spreads best in close quarters like nursing homes, prisons, crowded housing of any sort, or assumedly protests of this very kind. As one epidemiologist put it in response to a gathering of perhaps 2,500 protesters in Seattle, Washington, “I predict a new epidemic surge (incubation time — 5-7 days before onset [of] symptoms, if any, and transmission to associates around that time, even among asymptomatics)… so increase in 2-4 weeks from now.”

At this point, in a country leading the world by a long shot in known cases of, and deaths from, Covid-19, none of this should exactly be rocket science. It’s beyond obvious that if you encourage such demonstrations, you’re increasing the odds that the protesters will both catch and pass on a disease that’s already killed 60,000 Americans, more than U.S. fatalities from 20 years of war in Vietnam.

And that, of course, makes the president of the United States a killer, too. Or thought of another way, the assassin-in-chief in distant lands has just transformed himself into an assassin-in-chief right here at home, a man who might as well have fired Hellfire missiles into such crowds or put a gun to the head of some of those protesters and their wives or husbands or lovers or parents or children (to whom the disease will undoubtedly be spread once they go home) and pulled the trigger.

The act of encouraging members of his base to court death is clearly that of a man without an ounce of empathy, even for those who love and admire him most — and so of a stone-cold killer. You couldn’t ask for more proof that the only sense of empathy he has lies overwhelmingly in his deep and abiding pity for himself (which matches his staggering sense of self-aggrandizement) and perhaps for his children, other billionaires, and fossil-fuel executives. Them, he would save; the rest of us, his base included, are expendable. He’d sacrifice any of us without a second thought if he imagined that it would benefit him or his reelection in any way.

But there’s no point in leaving it at that. After all, as he pushes for a too-swiftly reopened country, he’s declaring open season on Americans of all sorts. And every one of us who will die too soon should be considered another Covidfire missile death and chalked up to a president who, by the time this is over, will truly have given a new meaning to the phrase assassin-in-chief.

You could say, I suppose, that he’s just been putting his stamp of approval on the recent statement of Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, another politician in a rush to reopen his state not to business, but to the business of pandemics. Patrick classically summed up the president’s position (and those of the protesters as well) in this fashion: “there are more important things than living.” Indeed, how true, though not, of course, for Donald Trump, or the Trump Organization, or that hotel of his in Washington, or his other presently sinking properties, or for his reelection in November 2020.

As for the rest of us, in Covid-19 America, we are all now potential Suleimanis.

Murder, He Said

Here’s the truth of it: I’d like a presidential pardon. Really, I would. And I think I deserve it more than Michael Milken or Rod Blagojevich or — because it’s obviously heading our way — Roger Stone (not to speak of Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort). Unlike the rest of them, I genuinely deserve a pardon because I don’t even remember being tried or know what I did. Yet somehow, here I am sentenced to what, if things don’t get better — given my age and his luck — could prove to be life not in prison but in Trumpland (once known as the United States of America).

Or here’s another possibility that came to mind as I was thinking over my predicament: maybe I can still use that old “get out of jail free card” I saved from my childhood Monopoly set. You know, the one at the bottom of which was written: “This card may be kept until needed or sold.” Well, I need it now. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to work anymore, maybe because it was produced before financialization stopped being a kid’s board game and became one for presidents, presidential candidates, and those recently pardoned by you-know-who.

If only this were simply a game I found myself trapped in — Trumpopoly. Unfortunately, it’s no board game, though I must admit that, more than three years later, I’m officially bored with the man who has surely gotten more attention, more words spoken and written about him, than anyone in history. Even if you included Nebuchadnezzar, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong, I doubt he would have any serious competition.

Honestly, who could even contest that statement, given that nothing he does, no matter how trivial, isn’t dealt with as “news” and covered as if the world were ending? When you think about it, it’s little short of remarkable. And I’m not even talking about Donald Trump’s non-stop coverage on his own news service, also known as Fox News. No, what I had in mind was the Fake News Media itself, regularly identified by the president as his major enemy. (“Our primary opponent is the Fake News Media. They are now beyond Fake, they are Corrupt.”) 

He’s not wrong, if by corruption you mean the over-coverage of him. The truth is that, whether you’re talking about the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, or MSNBC, none of them can get enough of him. Ever. They cover his rallies; they cover his tweets; they cover his impromptu news conferences in the north driveway of the White House, often as if nothing else on Earth were going on.

“Cover” might not even be the right word for it, unless you’re thinking about a thick, smothering, orange blanket thrown over our American world.


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Collusion!

In this Trumpian prison of ours, you really have little choice. Whether you like it or not, whether you want to or not, you’re a witness to the vagaries of one Donald J. Trump, morning, noon, and night, day in, day out. I mean, you know what film the president thinks should have won the best-picture Oscar this year, right? Gone With the Wind, which, after he brought it up, promptly shot to number one on topics trending on Twitter. You have a sense of how many years he expects to remain in the White House (up to 26, as he told one of his rally crowds recently, or assumedly until Barron is ready to take over); you know that he’s a “germophobe” (small tip: don’t cough or sneeze in his presence and the next time you meet him, don’t try to shake his hand); you’re probably aware that his properties in India (as well as his pronunciation of Indian names) leave something to be desired, but that the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas is buzzing along (especially when he visits while on the campaign trail). And here are some other things you might have caught as well: that you and I have spent quite a little fortune (up to $650 a night per agent) putting up the Secret Service people protecting him at Trump properties; that, thanks to a tweeted photo of him on a windy day, he has quite a tan line (or that, as he tweeted back, “More Fake News. This was photoshopped, obviously, but the wind was strong and the hair looks good? Anything to demean!”); or that he hates being told, especially by American intelligence officials, no less “Shifty Schiff,” that Vladimir Putin would like to lend his reelection a hand, but loves it that the Russian prexy may have a yen to promote Bernie Sanders in this election season; that his greatest skill (à la The Apprentice and The Celebrity Apprentice) may be firing people he considers personally disloyal to him (even if it’s called purging when you’re the president and they’re government officials or bureaucrats), hence his three years in office represent the greatest turnover in Washington officialdom in presidential memory; or perhaps the way he tweets charges and claims of every sort (that, for instance, Mitt Romney is a “Democratic spy”); or all the people he actually knows but claims he doesn’t; or his urge to slam every imaginable, or even unimaginable, figure ranging from the forewoman of the Roger Stone jury (“She somehow weaseled her way onto the jury and if that’s not a tainted jury then there is no such thing as a tainted jury”) to the 598 “people, places, and things” the New York Times counted him insulting by May 2019, including John McCain (23 times, “last in his class”) and his daughter Meghan (four times, “obnoxious”); oh, and let’s not forget his threats to unleash nuclear weapons on North Korea (“They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.”) and Afghanistan (“And if we wanted to do a certain method of war, we would win that very quickly. But many, many — really, tens of millions of people would be killed…”). And that, of course, is barely a hint of the world we now inhabit, thanks not just to Donald J. Trump, but to the very Fake News Media that he denounces so incessantly.

We’re here in Trump’s version of a prison in part because he and the Fake News Media he hates so much are in eternal collusion as well as eternal collision! Much as they theoretically dislike each other, both the non-Fox mainstream media and the president seem to desperately need each other. After all, in a social media-dominated world, the traditional media has had its troubles. Papers have been losing revenue, folding, drying up, dying. Staffs have been plunging and local news suffering. (In my own hometown rag, the New York Times, undoubtedly because many copyeditors were dumped, small errors now abound in the paper paper, which I still read, in a way that once would have been unimaginable.)  On TV, of course, you have cable news networks that need to talk about something quite literally 24/7.

So what a godsend it must be to be able to assign reporter after reporter and commentator after commentator to the doings of a single man, his words, acts, impulses, tweets, concerns, bizarre comments, strange thoughts, odd acts. Who could doubt that he has, in these years, become the definition of “the news” in a way that once would have been inconceivable but couldn’t be more convenient for a pressed and harried media?

And however much he may endlessly denounce them, he desperately needs them, too. Otherwise, what would he do for attention? They’re, in effect, his servants and he, in some strange way, theirs. No matter what they officially think of each other, this is the definition of collusion — one that has, in the last three years, also helped redefine the nature of our American world. No matter what they say about each other, in his own fashion, he’s always ready to pardon them and they, in their own fashion, him.

And here I am — don’t think I’m not feeling guilty about it — covering him, too, today. It seems I can’t help myself. After all, I’m in the same prison world as everyone else in this country, including reporters.

Pardon Him? You Bet!

By the way, give you-know-who credit where it’s due. He may be 73 years old, but he’s grasped the tweetable moment in a way that’s been beyond impressive from that fateful day in June 2015 when he rode a Trump Tower escalator into the presidential race, praising his future “great, great wall” (to be paid for by Mexico), and denouncing the “Mexican rapists” who had to go. In attention-getting terms, he had anything but a 73-year-old’s sense of how this world actually works and, let’s be honest, that was impressive.

At some basic level, the results of what he grasped are no less so. After all — god save us — he might even find himself in the White House for a second term (if the coronavirus or Bernie Sanders doesn’t take him down first).

Donald Trump is obviously no founding father but, despite his weight, you could perhaps think of him as something like a founding feather, a phenomenon carried by the latest political winds into the grim future of us all. And what a future it’s likely to be if this president, a genuine arsonist when it comes to heating the planet to the boiling point, gets reelected. (He could singlehandedly give William Blake’s classic poem, “Tyger, Tyger, burning bright, in the forests of the night,” new meaning.)

I, on the other hand, find myself trapped in his world but, in a sense, from elsewhere. Sometimes I wonder if I’m really living in the world I seem to inhabit or if I’m not already, in Australian terms, in some kind of midsummer night’s dream or rather nightmare? 

I’m just a couple of years older than The Donald and yet if he represents the most modern of 73-year-old realities, then I’m from a past age. I can’t even tweet, having never learned that modern form of conspiracy haiku.  Has anyone, no matter how much younger than him, grasped as fully or creatively as he did the all-too-modern sense of how to demand and command attention on a 24/7 basis? There has been nothing like him or his version of a presidency in our history.

Now, to be honest with you, I’m sick of both Donald Trump and the fake news media. No, I mean it.  Sometimes, I dream of bringing back my long-dead parents and showing them our Trumpian world in which, for instance, Americans fight a range of endlessly unsuccessful wars across a remarkable swath of the planet. Meanwhile, the Pentagon is indulged in its urge to recreate a militarized version of the Cold War, including a new multi-trillion dollar nuclear arms race; a world in which, however — and this would have been beyond comprehension to them — “infrastructure week” in Washington, the very idea of putting significant sums of money into rebuilding the crumbling basics in this country, has become little short of a joke. Oh, and of course, I’d have to tell them that, since their deaths, we — some of us at least — have accepted that the planet itself, thanks to the burning of fossil fuels, is now overheating in a radical way.

There is, however, one thing I’ve never doubted about The Donald: that, as he did with his five flaming, bankrupt casinos in Atlantic City in the early 1990s, when the moment comes, he’ll jump ship in the nick of time, money in hand, leaving the rest of us to go down on the USS Constitution (with no get-out-of-jail-free card in sight).

Pardon me? Don’t count on it. Pardon you. I wouldn’t hold my breath. But pardon him? You bet! Consider it a done deal.

Pardon Me?

My first question is simple enough: After 18-plus years of our forever wars, where are all the questions?

Almost two decades of failing American wars across a startlingly large part of the planet and I’d like to know, for instance, who’s been fired for them? Who’s been impeached? Who’s even paying attention?

I mean, if another great power had been so fruitlessly fighting a largely undeclared set of conflicts under the label of “the war on terror” for so long, if it had wasted trillions of taxpayer dollars with no end in sight and next to no one in that land was spending much time debating or discussing the matter, what would you think? If nothing else, you’d have a few questions about that, right?

Well, so many years later, I do have a few that continue to haunt me, even if I see them asked practically nowhere and, to my frustration, can’t really answer them myself, not to my satisfaction anyway. In fact, since 2001 — with the exception of the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq when America’s streets suddenly filled with hundreds of thousands of demonstrators asking a range of questions (“How did USA’s oil get under Iraq’s sand?” was a typical protest sign of that moment) — our never-ending wars have seldom been questioned in this country. So think of what follows not as my thoughts on the war in question but on the war in questions.

The Age of Carnage

In October 2001, in response to the 9/11 attacks, the administration of President George W. Bush launched a bombing campaign not just against al-Qaeda, a relatively small group partially holed up in Afghanistan, but the Taliban, an Islamist outfit that controlled much of the country. It was a radical decision not just to target the modest-sized organization whose 19 hijackers, most of them Saudis, had taken out almost 3,000 Americans with a borrowed “air force” of commercial jets, but in the phrase of the moment to “liberate” Afghanistan. These days, who even remembers that, by then, Washington had already fought a CIA-directed, Saudi-backed (and partially financed) war against the Soviet Union in that country for a full decade (1979-1989). To take on the Red Army then, Washington funded, armed, and supported extremist Islamist groups, some of which would still be fighting in Afghanistan (against us) in the twenty-first century.

In the context of that all-American war, a rich young Saudi, Osama bin Laden, would, of course, form al-Qaeda, or “the base.” In 1989, Washington watched as the mighty Red Army limped out of Afghanistan, the “bleeding wound” as its leader then called it. (Afghanistan wasn’t known as “the graveyard of empires” for nothing.) In less than two years, that second great power of the Cold War era would implode, an event that would be considered history’s ultimate victory by many in Washington. President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, the man who first committed the U.S. to its Afghan Wars, would, as last century ended, sum things up this way: “What is more important in world history? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some agitated Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?”

Afghanistan itself would be left in ruins as Washington turned its attention elsewhere, while various local warlords fought it out and, in response, the extremist Taliban rose to power.

Now, let me jump ahead a few years. In 2019, U.S. air power expended more munitions (bombs and missiles) on that country than at any time since figures began to be kept in 2006. Despite that, during the last months of 2019, the Taliban (and other militant groups) launched more attacks on U.S.-and-NATO-trained-and-financed Afghan security forces than at any time since 2010 when (again) records began to be kept. And it tells you something about our American world that, though you could have found both those stories in the news if you were looking carefully, neither was considered worthy of major coverage, front-page headlines, or real attention. All these years later, it won’t surprise you to know that such ho-hum reporting is just par for the course. And when it comes to either of those two on-the-record realities, you certainly would be hard-pressed to find a serious editorial expression of outrage or much of anything else about them in the media.


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At 18-plus years or, if you prefer to combine Washington’s two Afghan wars, 28-plus years, we’re talking about the longest American war in history. The Civil War lasted four years. The American part of World War II, another four. The Korean War less than four (though it never officially ended). The Vietnam War, from the moment the first significant contingent of U.S. advisors arrived, 14, and from the moment the first major U.S. troop contingents arrived, perhaps a decade. In the Trump era, as those air strikes rise, there has been a great deal of talk about possible “peace” and an American withdrawal from that country.  Peace, however, has now seemingly come to be defined in Washington as a reduction of American forces from approximately 12,000 to about 8,500 (and that’s without counting either private military contractors or CIA personnel there).

Meanwhile, of course, the war on terror that began in Afghanistan now stretches from the Philippines across the Greater Middle East and deep into the heart of Africa. Worse yet, it still threatens to expand into a war of some sort with Iran — and that, mind you, is under the ministrations of an officially “antiwar” president who has nonetheless upped American military personnel in the Middle East to record levels in recent years.

Of course, this is a story that you undoubtedly know fairly well. Who, in a sense, doesn’t? But it’s also a story that, so many years and so much — to use a word once-favored by our president — “carnage” later, should raise an endless series of disturbing and unnerving questions here. And that it doesn’t, should raise questions in itself, shouldn’t it?

Still, in a country where opposition to endless war seems constantly to falter or fade out amid a media universe in which Donald Trump’s latest tweet can top any war news, it seems potentially useful to raise some of those questions — at least the ones that occur to me — and perhaps for you to do the same. Isn’t it time, after all, for Americans to ask a few questions about war, American-style, in what might be thought of as the post-9/11 age of carnage?

In any case, here are six of mine to which, as I said, I don’t really have the answers. Maybe you do.

Here goes:

  1. When the Bush administration launched that invasion and occupation of Afghanistan in 2001 and followed it up with an invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003, did we, in some curious fashion, really invade and occupy ourselves? Of course, in these years, across the Greater Middle East and Africa, the U.S. played a remarkable role in creating chaos in country after country, leading to failed states, displaced people in staggering numbers, economic disarray, and the spread of terror groups. But the question is: Did the self-proclaimed most exceptional and indispensable nation on the planet do a version of the same thing to itself in the process? After all, by 2016, the disarray in this country was striking enough and had spread far enough, amid historic economic inequality, social division, partisan divides, and growing anger, that Americans elected as president (if not quite by a majority) a man who had run not on American greatness but on American decline. He promised to make this country great again. (His declinist credentials were not much noted at the time, except among the heartland Americans who voted for him.) So, ask yourself: Would President Donald Trump have been possible if the Bush administration had simply gone after al-Qaeda on September 12, 2001, and left it at that? Since January 2017, under the tutelage of that “very stable genius,” the U.S. political (and possibly global economic) system has, of course, begun to crack open. Is there any connection to those forever wars?
  2. Has there ever been a truly great power in history, still at or near the height of its militarily prowess, that couldn’t win a war? Sure, great imperial powers from the Romans to the Chinese to the British sometimes didn’t win specific wars despite their seeming military dominance, but not a single one? Could that be historically unprecedented and, if so, what does it tell us about our moment? How has the country proclaimed by its leaders to have the finest fighting force the world has ever known won nothing in more than 18 years of unceasing global battle?
  3. How and why did the “hearts and minds” factor move from the nationalist left in the twentieth century to the Islamist right in the twenty-first? The anti-colonial struggles against imperial powers that culminated in America’s first great losing war in Vietnam (think of Korea as kind of a tie) were invariably fought by leftist and communist groups. And whatever the military force arrayed against them, they regularly captured — in that classic Vietnam-era phrase — “the hearts and minds” of what were then called “Third World” peoples and repeatedly outlasted far better armed powers, including, in the case of Vietnam, the United States. In a word, they had the moxie in such conflicts and it didn’t matter that, by the most obvious measures of military power, they were at a vast disadvantage. In the twenty-first century, similar wars are still being fought in a remarkably comparable fashion, Afghanistan being the most obvious.  Again, the weaponry, the money, everything that might seem to pass for the works has been the property of Washington and yet that ability to win local “hearts and minds” has remained in the hands of the rebels. But what I wonder about is how exactly that moxie passed from the nationalist left to the extremist religious right in this century and what exactly was our role, intended or not, in all this? 
  4. When it comes to preparations for war, why can’t we ever stop? After all, when the Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War ended in 1991, the United States essentially had no enemies left on the planet. Yet Washington continued essentially an arms race of one with a finish line so distant — the bomber of 2018, Earth-spanning weapons systems, and weaponry for the heavens of perhaps 2050 — as to imply eternity. The Pentagon and the military-industrial complex surrounding it, including mega-arms manufacturers, advanced weapons labs, university science centers, and the official or semi-official think tanks that churned out strategies for future military domination, went right on without an enemy in sight. In fact, in late 2002, preparing for his coming invasion of Iraq, George W. Bush had to cook up an “axis of evil” — Iran, Iraq, and North Korea, two of which were mortal enemies and the third unrelated in any significant way to either of them — as a justification for what was to come, militarily speaking. Almost 20 years later, investing as much in its military as the next seven countries combined, updating and upgrading its nuclear arsenal to the tune of $1.7 trillion in the coming decades (and having just deployed a new “low-yield” nuclear weapon), and still investing staggering sums in its planes, tanks, aircraft carriers, and the like, the U.S. military now seems intent (without leaving its forever wars) on returning to the era of the Cold War as well. Face-offs against Russia and China are now the military order of the day in what seems like a déjà-vu-all-over-again situation. I’m just curious, but isn’t it ever all over?
  5.  How can Washington’s war system and the military-industrial complex across the country continue to turn failure in war into success and endless dollars at home? Honestly, the one thing in America that clearly works right now is the U.S. military (putting aside those wars abroad). We may no longer invest in domestic infrastructure, but in that military and the giant corporate weapons makers that go with it? You bet! They are the true success stories of the twenty-first century if you’re talking about dollars invested, weaponry bought, and revolving doors greased. On the face of it, failure is the new success and few in this country seem to blink when it comes to any of that. How come?

  6. Why doesn’t the reality of those wars of ours ever really seem to sink in here?  This, to my mind, is at least partially a question about media coverage. Yes, every now and then (as with the Washington Post’s Afghanistan Papers last December), America’s forever wars briefly break through and get some attention. And yes, if you’re a war-coverage news jockey, you can find plenty of daily reports on aspects of our wars in the media. But isn’t it surprising how much of that coverage is essentially a kind of background hum, like Muzak in an elevator? Unless the president personally decides to drone assassinate an Iranian major general and prospective future leader of that country, our wars simply drone on, barely attended to (unless, of course, you happen to be in the U.S. military or a military spouse or child). Eighteen years of failed wars and so many trillions of dollars later, wouldn’t you have expected something else? 

So those are my six questions, the most obvious things that puzzle me about what may be the strangest aspect of this American world of ours, those never-ending wars and the system that goes with them. To begin to answer them, however, would mean beginning to think about ourselves and this country in a different way. 

Perhaps much of this would only make sense if we were to start imagining ourselves or at least much of the leadership crew, that infamous “Blob,” in Washington, as so many war addicts. War — the failing variety — is evidently their drug of choice and not even our “antiwar” president can get off it. Think of forever war, then, as the opioid not of the masses but of the ruling classes.

The War in Questions

Let me betray my age for a moment. Some of you, I know, will be shocked, but I still read an actual newspaper. Words on real paper every day. I’m talking about the New York Times, and something stuck with me from the January 9th edition of that “paper” paper. Of course, in the world of the Internet, that’s already ancient history — medieval times — but (as a reminder) it came only a few days after Donald Trump’s drone assassination of Iranian Major General Qassem Suleimani.

So you won’t be surprised to learn that its front page was essentially all Iran and The Donald. Atop it, there was a large photo of the president heading for a podium with his generals and officials lined up on either side of him. Its caption read: “‘The United States is ready to embrace peace with all who seek it,’ President Trump said Wednesday at the White House.” Beside it, the lead story was headlined “U.S. and Iranians Lower Tensions, at Least for Now.” Below were three more Iran-related pieces, taking up much of the rest of the page. (“A President’s Mixed Messages Unsettle More Than Reassure,” etc.)

At the bottom left, there was a fifth Iran-related article. Inside that 24-page section of the paper, there were seven more full pages of coverage on the subject. Only one other piece of hot news could be squeezed (with photo) onto the bottom right of the front page. And whether you still read actual papers or now live only in the world of the Internet, I doubt you’ll be shocked to learn that it focused on Meghan Markle and Prince Harry, already involved in a crisis among the British Royals that was almost Iranian in its intensity. The headline: “In Stunning Step, Duke and Duchess Seek New Title: Part-Timers.”

Had you then followed the “continued on page A5” below that piece, you would have found the rest of the story about the Duke and Duchess of Sussex (including a second photo of them and an ad for Bloomingdales, the department store) taking up almost all of that inside page. If, however, you had been in a particularly attentive mood, you might also have noticed, squeezed in at the very bottom left of page 5, an 11-paragraph story by Henry Fountain. It had been granted so little space that the year 2019 had to be abbreviated as ’19 in its headline, which read in full: “’19 Was the 2nd-Hottest Year, And July Hottest Month Yet.”

Of course, that literally qualified as the hottest story of the day, but you never would have known it. It began this way:

“The evidence mounted all year. Temperature records were broken in France, Germany and elsewhere; the Greenland ice sheet experienced exceptional melting; and, as 2019 came to a close, broiling temperatures contributed to devastating wildfires that continue in Australia. Now European scientists have confirmed what had been suspected: 2019 was a very hot year, with global average temperatures the second highest on record. Only 2016 was hotter, and not by much — less than one-tenth of a degree Fahrenheit.”

As Fountain pointed out, however briefly, among the records broken in 2019, “The past five years have been the five warmest on record” (as had the last decade).

In another world, either that line or the actual headline should reasonably have been atop that Times front page in blazing letters. After all, that’s the news that someday could do us all in, whatever happens in Iran or to the British royal family. In my own dreamscape, that piece, headlined atop the front page, would have been continued on the obituary page. After all, the climate crisis could someday deliver an obituary for humanity and so many other living things on this planet, or at least for the way of life we humans have known throughout our history.

If you live online and were looking hard, you could have stumbled on the same news, thanks, say, to a similar CNN report on the subject, but it wasn’t the equivalent of headlines there either. Just another hot year… bleh. Who’s going to pay real attention when war with Iran lurks just beneath the surface and Harry and Meghan are heading for Canada?

To give credit where it’s due, however, a week later when that climate news was confirmed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, as well as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, it did finally hit the front page of the January 16th edition of the paper Times. Of course, I wouldn’t be writing this if it had been the day’s blazing headline, but that honor went to impeachment proceedings and a photo of the solemn walk of the seven House impeachment managers, as well as the clerk and sergeant-at-arms, delivering those articles to the Senate.

That photo and two stories about impeachment dominated the top of the page. Trump’s “phase 1” trade deal with China got the mid-page area and various other stories (“Warren Confronts the Skeptics Who Fear Her Plans Go Too Far”) were at page bottom. Stuck between the impeachment headliners and the Warren story was, however, a little insert. You might think of it as the news equivalent of a footnote. It had a tiny chart of global temperatures, 1880 to 2019, a micro-headline (“Warmer and Warmer”), and a note that read: “In the latest sign of global warming’s grip on the planet, the past decade was the hottest on record, researchers said. Page A8.” And, indeed, on that page was Henry Fountain’s latest story on the subject.

As it happened, between the 9th and 16th of January, yet more news about our heating planet had come out that, in a sense, was even grimmer. A new analysis found that the oceans, sinkholes for the heat trapped by greenhouse gas emissions, had also experienced their hottest five years on record (ditto for the last decade). In their case, however, 2019 was the very hottest, not the second hottest, year so far. And that, too, was a Times story, but only online.

Two Kinds of Time

Now, I don’t want you to misunderstand me here. The New York Times is anything but a climate change-denying newspaper. It has some superb environmental and global-warming coverage (including of Australia recently) by top-of-the-line journalists like Somini Sengupta. It’s in no way like Fox News or the rest of Rupert Murdoch’s fervently climate-denying media organization that happens to control more than 70{068cdbfab37e4f27da76d005a9c3d7cc8b4ae1429371040bf09b1dfe920189b4} of newspaper circulation in burning Australia.

The situation I’ve been describing is, I suspect, far more basic and human than that and — my guess — it has to do with time. The time all of us are generally plunged into is, naturally enough, human time, which has a certain obvious immediacy for us — the immediacy, you might say, of everyday life. In human time, for instance, an autocratic-minded showman like Donald Trump can rise to the presidency, be impeached, and fall, or be impeached, stay in office, and pass on his “legacy” to his children until something new comes along to make its mark, fail or end in its own fashion, and go the way of… well, of all of us. That’s human history, again and again.


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And then there’s the time-scape of global warming, which exists on a scale hard for us mortals to truly take in. After all, whatever Donald Trump might do won’t last long, not really — with two possible exceptions: the use of nuclear weapons in an apocalyptic fashion or the help he’s offering fossil-fuel companies in putting yet more greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere, while working to limit the development of alternative energy, both of which will only make the climate crisis to come yet more severe.

Otherwise, his time is all too human. With our normally far less than century-long life spans, we are, in the end, such immediate creatures. Climate change, even though human-caused, works on another scale entirely. Once its effects are locked in, we’re not just talking about 2100 or 2150, dates hard enough for us to get our brains (no less our policy-making) around, but hundreds of years, even millennia. Though we’ve known about climate change for many decades now, we’re dealing with a time scale that our brains simply aren’t prepared to fully take in.

When weighing an Iranian drone assassination or a presidential impeachment or the latest development in election 2020 against news of the long-term transformation of this planet, no matter how disastrous, the immediate tends to win out, whether you’re a New York Times editor or just about anyone else.

It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that it’s been so difficult to truly grasp the import of the warming of this planet, because its effects have, until now, generally been relatively subtle or challenging to grasp. When The Donald is in the White House or Harry and Meghan cause a stir or an Iranian major general is assassinated, that’s riveting, graspable, headlines. Those heating waters, those warming temperatures, the bleaching of coral reefs, the melting of ice shields in Greenland, the Arctic, and the Antarctic leading to rising sea levels that could one day drown coastal cities, maybe not so much, not deep down, not where it truly counts.

The Burning

The real question is: When will climate change truly enter human time — when, that is, will the two time scales intersect in a way that clicks? Perhaps (but just perhaps) we’re finally seeing the beginning of an answer to that question for which you would, I suspect, have to thank two phenomena: Greta Thunberg and Australia’s fires.

In August 2018, all alone, the 15-year-old Thunberg began a Friday school strike in front of the Swedish parliament in Stockholm to make a point: that however all-encompassing the present human moment might seem, she understood in a way that mattered how her future and that of her peers was being stolen by the adults in charge of this planet and the climate crisis they were continuing to feed. The movement of the young she sparked, one that’s still sparking, was a living, breathing version of those two times intersecting. In other words, she somehow grasped and transmitted in a compelling way how a future crisis of staggering proportions was being nailed in place in human time, right at that very moment.

And then, of course, there was — there is — Australia. But one more thing before I get to the devastation of that country. I began writing this piece in New York City on a weekend in January when the temperature hit a record-breaking 65-69 degrees, depending on where in the metropolitan area you were measuring. (A couple of hundred miles north in Boston, it hit 74 degrees!) It was glorious, spring-like, idyllic, everything a human being in “winter” could want — if, that is, you hadn’t made it past Meghan and Harry or Suleimani and Trump, and so didn’t have a sense of what such records might mean on a planet threatening to heat to the boiling point in the coming century. We’re talking, of course, about a world in which Donald Trump and crew were responding to climate change by attempting to open the taps on every kind of fossil fuel and the greenhouse gas emissions that go with their burning. Meanwhile, despite the news that, by 2100, parts of the North China plain with its hundreds of millions of inhabitants could be too hot for habitation, China’s leaders were still pushing a global Belt and Road Initiative that involves the building of at least 63 new coal-fired power plants in 23 countries. Huzzah! And remember that China and the United States are already the top two emitters of greenhouses gases.

Of course, tell that to the Australians whose country, by the way, is the world’s third largest exporter of fossil fuels. For the last month or more, it’s also been a climate-change disaster area of a previously unimaginable sort. Even if you haven’t taken in the acreage that fire has already destroyed (estimated to be the size of South Korea or the state of Virginia) — fire that, by the way, is making its own weather — you’ve certainly seen the coverage of the dead or hurt koalas and roos, right? Maybe you’ve even seen the estimate by one scientist — no way to confirm it yet — that a billion creatures (yes, 1,000,000,000) might already have died in those fires and it’s still not the height of the Australian summer or fire season.

In some fashion, as a climate-change disaster, Australia seems to have broken through. (It probably doesn’t hurt that it has all those cute, endangered animals.) Looking back, we earthlings may someday conclude that, with Greta and with Australia burning, the climate crisis finally began breaking into human time. Yes, there was that less than Edenic November of 2018 in Paradise, California, and there have been other weather disasters, including hurricanes Maria and Dorian, that undoubtedly were heightened by climate-change, but Australia may be the first time that the climate-change time-scape and human history have intersected in a way that truly mattered.

And although, in the midst of winter, this country isn’t burning, we do have something else in common with those Australians: a nation being run by arsonists, by genuine pyromaniacs. After all, earlier in his coal-fired career, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison brought a literal lump of coal into that country’s parliament, soothingly reassuring the other members that “this is coal. Don’t be afraid. Don’t be scared.”

In the election he won in 2019 (against a Labor Party promoting action on climate change), he was in big coal’s back pocket. And like our president, his government has been messing with international attempts to deal with the climate crisis ever since. Again like our president, he’s also been an open denier of the very reality of climate change and so one of a crew of right-wing global leaders seemingly intent on setting this planet afire.

Climate-Change Previews?

Years ago, in my apartment building, someone dozed off while smoking in bed, starting a fire a couple of floors below me. I noticed only when the smoke began filtering under my door. Opening it, I found the hall filled with smoke. Heading downstairs wasn’t an option. In fact, a couple who had tried to do so were trapped on my floor and I quickly took them in. I barely had time to panic, however, before I heard the sirens of the first fire engines. Not long after, the doorbell rang and two firemen were there, instructing me to open all the windows and stuff towels at the bottom of the door to keep the smoke out. I’m sure I’ve never been so happy to greet someone at my door.

That fire was, in the end, contained inside the apartment where it started and I was in no danger, but peering into that smoke-filled hallway I would never have known it. The memory of that long-lost afternoon came back to me in the context of burning Australia, a country where fire fighters had been desperately at work for weeks without being able to douse the hundreds of blazes across that drought-stricken land, which has also recently experienced record high temperatures. It’s been the definition of a living nightmare.

And here’s what I began to wonder on this newest version of planet Earth: Are we all in some sense Australians, whether we know it or not? I don’t mean that as an empathetic statement of solidarity with the suffering people of that land (though I do feel for them). I mean it as a statement of grim fact. Admittedly, it won’t be fire for all of us. For some, it will be rising sea levels, flooding of a never-before-experienced sort, storms or heat waves of a previously unimagined ferocity, and so on.

Still, right now, Australia is our petri dish and unless we get rid of the arsonists who are running too many countries and figure out a way to come together in human time, we’re likely to enter a world where there will be no fire fighters to save us (or our children and grandchildren). Climate change, after all, looks to be nature’s slo-mo version of nuclear war.

In movie terms, think of Australia as the previews. For most of us, the main feature is still to come. The problem is that the schedule for that feature may not be found in your local paper.

The Fate of the Earth

Yes, our infrastructure stinks, our schools are failing, this country’s a nightmare of inequality, and there’s a self-promoting madman in the White House, so isn’t it time to take pride in the rare institutional victories America has had in this century? Arguably, none has been more striking than the triumphal success of the American war system.

Oh, you’re going to bring that up immediately? Okay, you’re right. It’s true enough that the U.S. military can’t win a war anymore. In this century, it’s never come out on top anywhere, not once, not definitively. And yes, just to get a step ahead of you, everywhere it’s set foot across the Greater Middle East and Africa, it seems to have killed startling numbers of people and uprooted so many more, sending lots of them into exile and so unsettling other parts of the world as well. In the process, it’s also had remarkable success spreading failed states and terror groups far and wide.

Al-Qaeda, whose 19 suicidal hijackers so devastatingly struck this country on September 11, 2001, was just a modest outfit then (even if its leader dreamt of drawing the U.S. into conflicts across the Islamic world that would promote his group big time). Nineteen years later, its branches have spread from Yemen to West Africa, while the original al-Qaeda still exists. And don’t forget its horrific progeny, the Islamic State, or ISIS (originally al-Qaeda in Iraq). Though the U.S. military has declared it defeated in its “caliphate” (it isn’t, not truly), its branches have multiplied from the Philippines deep into Africa.

And the Afghan War, that original American invasion of this century, remains hell on Earth more than 18 years later. In December, the Washington Post broke a story about interviews on that conflict conducted by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction with 400 key insiders, military and civilian, revealing that it was a war of (well-grasped) error. As that paper’s reporter, Craig Whitlock, put it: “Senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.”

Many of those generals and other officials who had claimed, year after year, that there was “progress” in Afghanistan, that the U.S. had turned yet another “corner,” admitted to the Inspector General’s interviewers that they had been lying to the rest of us. In truth, so long after the invasion of 2001, this wasn’t exactly news (not if you had been paying attention anyway). And it couldn’t have been more historically familiar. After all, U.S. military commanders and other key officials had, in a similar fashion, regularly hailed “progress” in the Vietnam War years, too. As U.S. war commander General William Westmoreland put it in an address to the National Press Club in 1967, “We have reached an important point where the end begins to come into view,” a sentiment later boiled down by American officialdom to seeing “the light at the end of the tunnel.”

In fact, half a century later, these, too, have proved to be tunnel years for the U.S. military in its global war on terror, which might more accurately be called a global war of error. Take Iraq, the country that, in the spring of 2003, President George W. Bush and crew so triumphantly invaded, claiming a connection between its autocratic ruler, Saddam Hussein, and al-Qaeda, while citing the dangers of the weapons of mass destruction he supposedly possessed. Both claims were, of course, fantasies propagated by officials dreaming of using that invasion to establish a Pax Americana in the oil-rich Middle East forever and a day. (“Mission accomplished!”)

So many years later, Americans are still dying there; American air and drone strikes are still ongoing; and American troops are still being sent in, as Iraqis continue to die in significant numbers in a country turned into a stew of displacement, poverty, protest, and chaos. Meanwhile, ISIS (formed in an American prison camp in Iraq) threatens to resurge amid the never-ending mess that invasion created — and war with Iran seems to be the order of the day.

And just to continue down a list that’s little short of endless, don’t forget Somalia. The U.S. military has been fighting there, on and off, with strikingly negative consequences since the infamous Blackhawk Down disaster of 1993. Last year, American air strikes rose again to record levels there, while — no surprise — the terror outfit Washington has been fighting in that country since 2006, al-Shabaab, an al-Qaeda offshoot, seems only to be gaining strength.

Hey, even the Russians got a (grim) win in Syria; the U.S., nowhere. Not in Libya, a failed state filled with warring militias and bad guys of every sort in the wake of a U.S.-led overthrow of the local autocrat. Not in Niger, where four American soldiers died at the hands of an ISIS terror group that still thrives; not in Yemen, yet another failed state where a Washington-backed Saudi war follows perfectly in the U.S. military’s footsteps in the region. So, yes, you’re right to challenge me with all of that.

How to Run a War of Error

Nonetheless, I stand by my initial statement. In these years, the American war system has proven to be a remarkable institutional success story. Think of it this way: in the military of the twenty-first century, failure is the new success. In order to grasp this, you have to stop looking at Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, and the rest of those embattled lands and start looking instead at Washington, D.C. While you’re at it, you need to stop thinking that the gauge of success in war is victory. That’s so mid-twentieth century of you! In fact, almost the opposite may be true when it comes to the American way of war today.

After more than 18 years of what, once upon a time, would have been considered failure, tell me this: Is the Pentagon receiving more money or less? In fact, it’s now being fed record amounts of tax dollars (as is the whole national security state). Admittedly, Congress can’t find money for the building or rebuilding of American infrastructure — China now has up to 30,000 kilometers of high-speed rail and the U.S. not one — and is riven by party animosities on issue after issue, but funding the Pentagon? No problem. When it comes to that, there’s hardly a question, hardly a dispute at all. Agreement is nearly unanimous.

Failure, in other words, is the new success and that applies as well to the “industrial” part of the military-industrial complex. That reality was caught in a Washington Post headline the day after a CIA drone assassinated General Qassem Suleimani: “Defense stocks spike after airstrike against Iranian commander.” Indeed, the good times clearly lay ahead. In the age of Trump, when the last secretary of defense was a former Boeing executive and the present one a former lobbyist for arms-maker Raytheon, it’s been weapons galore all the way to the bank. Who cares if those weapons really work as advertised or if the wars in which they’re used are winnable, as long as they’re bought at staggering prices (and other countries buy them as well)? If you don’t believe me, just check out Lockheed Martin’s F-35 jet fighter, the most expensive weapons system ever (that doesn’t really work). Hey, in 2019, that company got a $2.43 billion contract just for spare parts for the plane!

And this version of a success story applies not just to funding and weaponry but to the military’s leadership as well. Keep in mind that, after almost two decades without a victory in sight, if you check any poll, you’ll find that the U.S. military remains the most admired institution around (or the one Americans have most “confidence” in). And under the circumstances, tell me that isn’t an accomplishment of the first order.


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For just about every key figure in the U.S. military, you can now safely say that failure continues to be the order of the day. Consider it the twenty-first-century version of a military insurance policy: keep on keeping on without ever thinking outside the box and you’ll be pushed up the chain of command to ever more impressive positions (and, sooner or later, through Washington’s infamous “revolving door” onto the corporate boards of weapons makers and other defense firms). You’ll be hailed as a great and thoughtful commander, a genuine historian of war, and a strategist beyond compare.  You’ll be admired by one and all.

Americans of another age would have found this strange indeed, but not today. Take, for instance, former Secretary of Defense and Marine General James “Mad Dog” Mattis who led troops into Afghanistan in 2001 and again in the invasion of Iraq in 2003. In 2004, as commander of the 1st Marine Division, he was asked about a report that his troops had taken out a wedding party in western Iraq, including the wedding singer and his musicians, killing 43 people, 14 of them children. He responded: “How many people go to the middle of the desert… to hold a wedding 80 miles from the nearest civilization?”

And then, of course, he only rose further, ending up as the head of U.S. Central Command, or CENTCOM, which oversees America’s wars in the Greater Middle East (and you know how that went), until he retired in 2013 and joined the corporate board of General Dynamics, the nation’s fifth largest defense contractor. Then, in 2016, a certain Donald J. Trump took a liking to the very idea of a general nicknamed “mad dog” and appointed him to run the Department of Defense (which should probably be renamed the Department of Offense). There, with full honors, the former four-star general oversaw the very same wars until, in December 2018, deeply admired by Washington journalists among others, he resigned in protest over a presidential decision to withdraw American troops from Syria (and rejoined the board of General Dynamics).

In terms of the system he was in, that may have been his only genuine “error,” his only true “defeat.” Fortunately for the Pentagon, another commander who had risen through the same dead-end wars, four-star Army General Mark Milley, having been appointed head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, knew just what to whisper in the president’s ear — the magic word “oil,” or rather some version of protect (i.e. take) Syrian oil fields — to get him to send American troops back into that country to continue the local version of our never-ending wars.

By now, Milley’s rise to glory will seem familiar to you. In announcing his appointment as Army chief of staff in 2015, for instance, Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter called him “a warrior and a statesman.” He added, “He not only has plenty of operational and joint experience in Afghanistan, in Iraq, and on the Joint Staff, but he also has the intellect and vision to lead change throughout the Army.” Exactly!

Milley had, in fact, fought in both the Afghan and Iraq wars, serving three tours of duty in Afghanistan alone. In other words, the more you don’t win — the more you are, in a sense, in error — the more likely you are to advance. Or as retired General Gordon Sullivan, president of the Association of the United States Army and a former chief of staff himself, put it then, Milley’s command experience in war and peace gave him “firsthand knowledge of what the Army can do and of the impact of resource constraints on its capabilities.”

In other words, he was a man ready to command who knew just how to handle this country’s losing wars and keep them (so to speak) on track. Once upon a time, such a crew of commanders would have been considered a military of losers, but no longer. They are now the eternal winners in America’s war of error.

In September 2013, Milley, then an Army three-star general, typically offered this ludicrously rosy assessment of Afghanistan’s American-trained and American-supplied security forces: “This army and this police force have been very, very effective in combat against the insurgents every single day.”

As Tony Karon wrote recently, “Either Milley was dissembling or he was deluded and therefore grotesquely incompetent.” One thing we know, though: when it comes to public military assessments of the Afghan War (and the global war on terror more generally), he was typical. For such commanders, it was invariably “progress” all the way. 

Just in case you don’t quite see the pattern yet, after the Washington Post‘s Afghanistan Papers came out last December, offering clear evidence that, whatever they said in public, America’s commanders saw little in the way of “progress” in the Afghan War, Milley promptly stepped up to the plate. He labeled that report’s conclusions “mischaracterizations.” He insisted instead that the endlessly optimistic public comments of generals like him had been “honest assessments… never intended to deceive either the Congress or the American people.”

Oh, and here’s a final footnote (as reported in the New York Times last year) on how Milley (and top commanders like him) operated — and not just in Afghanistan either:

“As Army chief of staff, General Milley has come under criticism from some in the Special Operations community for his involvement in the investigation into the 2017 ambush in Niger that left four American soldiers dead. He persuaded Patrick M. Shanahan, who was acting defense secretary, to curtail a broader review, and also protected the career of an officer who some blamed for the ambush. General Milley’s backers said he prevented the officer from leading another combat unit.”

Whatever you do, in other words, don’t give up the ghost (of error). Think of this as the formula for “success” in that most admired of institutions, the U.S. military. After all, Milley and Mattis are just typical of the commanders who rose (and are still rising) to ever more prestigious positions on the basis of losing (or at least not winning) an endless series of conflicts. Those failed wars were their tickets to success. Go figure.

Where Defeat Culture Leads

In other words, the men who fought the twenty-first-century equivalents of Vietnam — though against right-wing Islamists, not left-wing nationalists and communists — the men who never for a second figured out how to win “hearts and minds” any better than General William Westmorland had half a century earlier, are now triumphantly running the show in Washington. Add in the corporate types who endlessly arm them for battle and lobby for more of the same while raking in the dough and you have a system that no one involved would want to change. It’s a formula for success that works like a dream (even if someday that dream is sure to end up looking like a nightmare).

Once upon a time, in the early 1990s, I wrote a book called The End of Victory Culture. In it, I traced how a deeply embedded American culture of triumph evaporated in the Vietnam War years, “its graveyard for all to see,” as “the answers of 1945 dissolved so quickly into the questions of 1965.” Speaking of the impact of that war on American culture, I added: “There was no narrative form that could long have contained the story of a slow-motion defeat inflicted by a nonwhite people in a frontier war in which the statistics of American victory seemed everywhere evident.”

Little did I know then how deeply a version of what might be called “defeat culture” would embed itself in American life. After all, Donald Trump couldn’t have been elected to “make America great again” without it. From the evidence of these years, nowhere was that culture more deeply absorbed (however unconsciously) than in the military itself, which has, in our time, managed to turn it into a version of the ultimate success story.

Afghanistan has, of course, long been known as “the graveyard of empires.” The Soviet Union fought Islamic militants (backed by the Saudis and the United States) for nine years there before, in 1989, the Red Army limped home in defeat to watch a drained empire implode two years later.  That left the U.S. as the “sole superpower” on Planet Earth and its military as the uncontested greatest one of all.

And it took that military just a decade to head for that same graveyard. In this century, Americans have lost trillions of dollars in the never-ending wars Washington has conducted across the Greater Middle East and parts of Africa, wars that represent an eternal reign (rain?) of error. I’ve long suspected that the Soviet Union wasn’t the only superpower with problems in 1991. Though it was anything but obvious at the time, I’ve since written: “It will undoubtedly be clear enough… that the U.S., seemingly at the height of any power’s power in 1991 when the Soviet Union disappeared, began heading for the exits soon thereafter, still enwreathed in self-congratulation and triumphalism.”

The question is: When will the far more powerful of the two superpowers of the Cold War era finally leave that graveyard of empires (now spread across a significant swath of the planet)? Still commanded by the losers of those very wars, will it, like the Red Army, limp home one day to watch its country implode? Will it leave a world of war, of the dead, of countless refugees and rubblized cities, and finally return to see its own society disintegrate in some fashion?

Who knows? But keep your eyes peeled in 2020 and beyond. Someday, the U.S. military’s war of error will come to an end and one thing seems certain: it won’t be pretty.

The Global War of Error

Here’s the question at hand — and I guarantee you that you’ll read it here first: Is Donald Trump the second or even possibly the third 9/11? Because truly, he has to be one or the other.

Let me explain, and while I do, keep this in mind: as 2019 ends, thanks to Brexit and the victory of Boris Johnson in Britain’s recent election, the greatest previous imperial power on this planet is clearly headed for the sub-basement of history. Meanwhile, that other superpower of the Cold War era, the Soviet Union, now Russia, remains a well-sauced Putinesca shadow of its former self. And then, of course, there’s the country that, not so long ago, every major American politician but Donald Trump proclaimed the most exceptional, indispensable nation ever.

As it happens, the United States — if you didn’t catch the reference above — has been looking a bit peaked lately itself. You can’t say that it’s the end of the road for a land of such wealth and staggering military power, enough to finish off several Earth-sized planets. However, it’s clearly a country in decline on a planet in the same condition and its present leader, Tariff Man, however uniquely orange-faced he may be, is just the symptom of the long path to hell in a handbasket its leadership embarked on almost three decades ago as the Cold War ended.

Admittedly, President Trump has proved to be the symptom from hell. To give him full credit, he’s now remarkably hard-at-tweet dismantling the various alliances, agreements, and organizations that U.S. leaders had assembled, since 1945, to make this country the Great Britain (and beyond) of the second half of the twentieth century and that’s an accomplishment of the first order.

And keep in mind the context for so much of this: it’s happening in a country that may be experiencing an unprecedented kind of inequality. It’s producing billionaires at a staggering clip with just three men already possessing wealth equivalent to that of half the rest of the population; this, mind you, at a moment when the globe’s 26 richest people reportedly are worth as much as half of everyone else, or 3.8 billion people. And this in a world in which, as the income of that poorest half of humanity continues to decline, the wealth of billionaires increases by $2.5 billion a day and a new billionaire is minted every two days.

Had all of this not already been so and had a sense of decline not been in the air, it’s inconceivable that those heartland white Americans who had come to feel themselves on the losing end of developments in this country would have sent a charlatan billionaire into the White House to represent them (or at least to give the finger to the Washington establishment). And all this on a planet that itself, in climate terms, appears to be in unprecedented decline.

Think of the above as part of what’s come down, metaphorically speaking, since those towers in New York fell more than 18 years ago.

Looking Back on 9/11

It’s in this context that we should all look back on what truly did come down that Tuesday morning in September 2001, an all-American day of the grimmest sort. That was, of course, the day when this country was attacked by 19 suicidal hijackers, most of them Saudi, using American commercial jets as their four-plane air force. They, in turn, were inspired by a man, Osama bin Laden, and his organization, al-Qaeda, part of a crew of radical Islamists that Washington had backed years earlier in an Afghan War against the Soviet Union. In response to the events of that day — though it seems unimaginable now — we could have joined a world already in pain, one that had experienced horrors largely unimaginable in this country until that moment, in a kind of global solidarity.

Instead, responding to the destruction of those towers in Manhattan and part of the Pentagon, the Bush administration essentially launched a war against much of the planet. They soon dubbed it a “Global War on Terror,” or GWOT, and key officials almost instantly claimed it would have more than 60 countries (or terror groups in them) in its sights. Eighteen years later, the U.S. is still at war across a vast swath of the globe, involved in conflict after conflict from the Philippines to Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq to northern Africa and beyond. In the process, that GWOT has produced failed state after failed state and terror group after terror group, enough to make the original al-Qaeda (still going) look like nothing at all. And of course, in all these years, the U.S. military, hailed here as “the finest fighting force that the world has ever known” (and similar formulations), lacks a single decisive (or even modest) victory. Meanwhile, everywhere, yet more towers, real or metaphorical, continue to fall; in fact, whole cities in the Middle East now lie in rubble.


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The top officials of President George W. Bush’s administration would, at the time, mistake 9/11 for a kind of upside-down stroke of luck, the perfect excuse for launching military operations, including invasions, geared to the ultimate domination of the planet (and its key oil supplies). Via drones armed with missiles and bombs, they would turn any president into an assassin-in-chief. They would, in the end, help spread terror groups in a fashion beyond imagining on September 12, 2001, while their never-ending wars would displace vast numbers of innocent people, creating a refugee crisis of a kind not seen since the end of World War II when significant parts of the planet stood in ruins. And all of that, in turn, would help spark, on a global scale, what came to be known as the “populist right,” in part thanks to the very refugees created by that GWOT. The response to what came down on 9/11, in other words, would create its own hell on Earth.

Who knew back then? Not me, that’s for sure. Not when I started what became TomDispatch 18 years ago, feeling, in the wake of 9/11 and the invasion of Afghanistan, that something was truly wrong with our world, that something more than the World Trade Center might be in the process of coming down around all our ears. I can still remember the feeling in those weeks, as I saw the mainstream media’s focus narrow drastically amid nationwide self-congratulatory celebrations of this country as the greatest survivor, dominator, and victim on the planet. I watched with trepidation as we began to close down to the world, while essentially attempting to take all the roles in the global drama for ourselves except greatest evil doer, which was, of course, left to Osama bin Laden.

I still remember thinking then that the Vietnam years had been the worst and most embattled in my lifetime, but that somehow this — whatever it turned out to be — would be so much worse. And yet whatever I was sensing, whatever I was imagining, wouldn’t prove to be the half of it, not the quarter of it.

If you had told me then that we were heading for Donald Trump’s version of American decline and a corrupt global gilded age of unprecedented proportions, one in which showmanship, scam, and self-serving corruption would become the essence of everything, while god knows what kinds of nightmares — like those subprime mortgages of the 2007 economic meltdown — were quietly piling up somewhere just beyond our view, I would have thought you mad.

The Second 9/11

All these years later, it’s strange to feel something like that moment recurring. Of course, in this elongated Trumpian version of it, no obvious equivalent to those towers in New York has come down. And yet, over the three years of The Donald’s presidency, can’t you just feel that something has indeed been coming down, even as the media’s coverage once again narrowed, this time not to a single self-congratulatory story of greatness and sadness, but to one strange man and his doings. 

If you think about it, I suspect you can feel it, too. Looking back to 2016, mightn’t you agree that Donald Trump rather literally embodied a second 9/11? He certainly was, after a fashion, the hijacker-in-chief of that moment, not sent by al-Qaeda, of course, but… well, by whom? That is, indeed, the question, isn’t it? Whom exactly did he represent? Not his famed “base,” those red-hatted MAGA enthusiasts at his endless rallies who felt they had gotten lost in the shuffle of wealth and politics and corruption in this country. Perhaps, of course, the al-Qaeda of that moment was actually another kind of terrorist crew entirely, the one-percenters who had mistaken this country’s wealth for their own and preferred a billionaire of any sort in the White House for the first time in history. Or maybe, as a presidential hijacker first class, Donald Trump simply represented himself and no one else at all. Perhaps he was ready to bring a whole system to its knees (just as he had once bankrupted those five casinos of his in Atlantic City), as long as he could jump ship in the nick of time with the loot.

On that first 9/11, those towers came down. The second time around, the only thing that came down, at least in the literal sense, was, of course, The Donald himself.  He famously descended that Trump Tower escalator into the presidential race in June 2015, promoting a “great wall” (still unbuilt years later and now, like everything The Donald touches, a cesspool of corruption) and getting rid of Mexican “rapists.”

From that moment on, Donald Trump essentially hijacked our world. I mean, try to tell me that, in the years since, he hasn’t provided living evidence that the greatest power in human history, the one capable of destroying the planet six different ways, has no brain, no real coordination at all. It’s fogged in by a mushroom cloud of largely senseless media coverage and, though still the leading force on the planet, in some rather literal fashion has lost its mind.

No wonder it’s almost impossible to tell what we’re actually living through. Certainly, in a slo-mo version of 9/11, Donald Trump has been taking down the nation as we’ve known it. Admittedly, unlike Bolivia, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, and other such places on this increasingly unsettled planet of ours, true civil strife has (yet) to break out here (though individual mass shootings certainly have). Still, the president and some of his supporters have begun talking about, even threatening, “civil war” for our unsettled future.

On the first 9/11, the greatest power in history struck out at the planet. The second time around, it seems to be preparing to strike out at itself.

Was 11/9 the original 9/11?

Perhaps this is the time to bring up the possibility that September 11, 2001, might not really have been the first 9/11 and that Donald Trump might actually be the third, not the second 9/11.

In a sense, the first 9/11 might really have been 11/9. I’m thinking, of course, of November 9, 1989, the day the Berlin Wall, that symbol of the Cold War, a divided Europe, and a deeply divided world, suddenly began to be torn down by East and West Germans. Believe me, in our nation’s capital, it was an event no less unexpected or shocking than September 11, 2001. Until that moment, Washington’s political class and the crew who ran the national security state had continued to imagine a future dominated by a never-ending Cold War with the Soviet Union. The shock of that moment is still hard to grasp.

Looked at a certain way, that November the people had hijacked history and Washington’s response to it would be no less monumentally misplaced than to the 2001 moment. Once the key officials of George H.W. Bush’s administration had taken in what happened, they essentially declared ultimate victory. Over everything. For all time.

With the U.S., the last standing superpower, ultimately victorious in a way never before imagined, history itself seemed to be at an end. The future was ours, forever, and we had every right to grab it for ourselves. The world in which so many of us had grown up was declared over and done with in a wave of self-congratulatory backslapping in Washington. The planet, it seemed, was now our oyster and ours alone. (And if you want to know how that turned out, just think of Donald Trump in the White House and then read Andrew Bacevich’s new book, The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory.)

It’s in this context that Trump’s could be considered the third hijacking of our era. Given his sense of self, his might even be thought of not as the 1{068cdbfab37e4f27da76d005a9c3d7cc8b4ae1429371040bf09b1dfe920189b4} hijacking moment, but as the .000000001{068cdbfab37e4f27da76d005a9c3d7cc8b4ae1429371040bf09b1dfe920189b4} moment.

And be prepared: the next version of 9/11, however defined, is guaranteed to make Osama bin Laden and his 19 hijackers look like so many pikers. Depending on what tipping points are reached and what happens after that on our rapidly warming planet, so much could come down around humanity’s ears. And if so, that moment in 2015 when Donald Trump rode an escalator down into the presidential contest to the tune of Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World” will look very different — because it will be far clearer than it is even now that he was carrying a blowtorch with him.

Is Donald Trump the Second 9/11?

French king Louis XV reputedly said, “Après moi, le déluge.” (“After me, the flood.”) Whether that line was really his or not remains unclear, but not long after his death did come the French Revolution. We should be so lucky! Our all-American version of Louis XV, Donald I, is incapable, I suspect, of even imagining a world after him. Given the historically unprecedented way he’s covered by the “fake” or “corrupt” news media, that “enemy of the people,” I doubt they really can either.

Never, you might say, have we, as a nation, been plunged quite so fully not just into the ever-present, but into one man’s version of it. In other words, for us, the deluge is distinctly now and it has an orange tint, a hefty body, and the belligerent face of every 1950s father I ever knew — my own, in his angrier moods, included — as well as of redbaiting Senator Joseph McCarthy. Of course, you have to be at least as old as me to remember that Trump-anticipating political showman and his own extreme moment. After all, in distinctly Trumpian fashion (though without Twitter), he accused President Truman’s secretary of defense, George Marshall, and his secretary of state, Dean Acheson, of being Russian agents. As McCarthy said at the time, “How can we account for our present situation unless we believe that men high in this government are concerting to deliver us to disaster?” McCarthy (whose aide, Roy Cohn, was once Donald Trump’s mentor) offers a reminder that Trumpian-style personalities were not unknown in our history and that, in the case of McCarthy, their antics were, however minimally by twenty-first-century standards, actually televised.

Our very own Louis XV is, of course, something else again: a deluge of tweets, insults, self-praise, lies and false claims, and strange acts of almost every imaginable sort. In other words, thanks in significant part to the media and social media, Donald J. Trump is indeed the definition of a deluge and we, the American people, are — thought about a certain way — present-day Venice; we are, that is, six feet under water, even if we don’t quite know it.

And here’s what may be the strangest thing of all: while HE — and, given the last three-plus years, those caps are anything but an exaggeration — is dealt with by the media in deluge fashion, there’s one story that’s in our faces everyday and yet, in some sense — a sense that drives me bonkers — is simply missing in action. To be clear: since 2016, Donald Trump has been covered in our ever-shrinking yet ever-expanding media universe like no other individual in history from Nebuchadnezzar’s moment to our own.

You know that. I know that. Everyone knows that — and yet, in case you haven’t noticed, the fact that HE’s in all our faces like no king, no emperor, no autocrat, no president, no entertainer, no performer ever is hardly being covered, hardly even acknowledged from day to day, week to week, month to month, or even sadly, given how long the Trumpian moment has already lasted, year to year. In other words, HE is eternally there, but the media, omnipresent as it may be when it comes to him, in some sense isn’t.

Winter Is Coming in Trumpian Fashion

The way that omnipresence is linked to his omnipresence must, I suppose, be obvious to everyone. Still, no one is really covering the coverage, not the way it should be covered in all its mind-boggling strangeness. Take the other day, a perfectly typical passing moment in my life in the age of Trump. On my way into the men’s locker room at my local gym, I stopped to have a sandwich in a room with a giant TV screen and a few tables and chairs. On any day as I wander through, the TV is almost invariably on — tuned in to (where else?) CNN, MSNBC, or Fox News — and if you-know-whose angry face isn’t on screen, then there are almost invariably several talking heads discussing HIM or something related to HIM anyway. 

That particular day, when I sat down to eat my sandwich, CNN was on and the story being covered concerned an unscheduled visit the president had paid to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. The White House claimed that Trump was simply getting part of his yearly physical early because he happened to have a free weekend in Washington. But the visit was (gasp!) “unannounced” and evidently unexpected by the hospital staff — as if much that Donald Trump does is announced and expected — and who knew what that meant. 

In truth, the answer was: no one about to be onscreen yakking had much of anything to offer. The only news, beyond the visit itself, was that there was no news at all about HIM. Still, medical experts were interviewed and, by the time I had finished my sandwich and headed into the locker room, the talking heads were still discussing… well, essentially the same nothing much because nothing much was known. 

And when I walked through that same room on my way out after my swim, another set of talking heads was, of course, discussing the president’s unscheduled visit to Walter Reed. Several days later, when I began writing this piece, the issue was still being chewed over by columnists and on TV and, as with so much else about this president, days after Trump’s “mysterious, unannounced visit to the hospital,” as the New York Times put it all too accurately, there remained “a torrent of speculation” about it. Then again, such a description could be applied endlessly to stories about Donald J. Trump.  

Now, there would be nothing particularly wrong with any of this, story by story, if it weren’t seemingly our only media present, past, and future in the Trump era. But the historically unprecedented nature of all this yakking, writing, interviewing, speculating, Tweeting, Facebooking, discussing, arguing, reporting, and perhaps, above all, the 24/7 talking heads on cable news going on and on about everything faintly related to one distinctly over-present personage (who was evidently God’s gift to them in 2016) has yet to truly sink in.

At some level, it’s not even complicated, especially in this impeachment moment. The shambling body of that president of ours — thanks to a set of media decisions about what truly draws eyeballs on this planet — simply blocks out much of the rest of the world, everything but HIM and anything or anyone faintly relevant to or associated with or ready to attack him and his strange imperial solar system. In media terms, he is now something akin to a force of nature, a Category 5 (or maybe 6) hurricane, but so, of course, is the coverage of him.


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There’s obviously a unique history to be written of how King Donald I, still officially “president” of the United States (though he often acts as if he were something far more than that), proved so capable of drawing every camera, every bit of media attention to himself alone, how he kept “the red light” of those cameras and their social media equivalents ever on. It’s a feat for the ages and, it seems, a successful gamble in a media world that found itself in a scramble for ad dollars, for existence and eyeballs, a world that made some hard, if seldom publicly delineated, decisions about what, in the twenty-first century, the news was becoming.

After all, in a world in which so much is, in fact, happening (and going wrong), other decisions, though hard to imagine today, might have been possible and Donald Trump’s all-enveloping, all-absorbing presidency, under less of a media glare and stare, might have taken quite a different turn.

Right now, it doesn’t matter what the subject is: Sports? It’s him. Movies? It’s The Godfather Part II, Roger Stone, and him. And believe me, if there’s an expert on the Godfather films — and I know one! — he’ll be interviewed. Or if you were truly curious about how former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley managed to remain “all in” with the president as her new book comes out (despite a misstep or two and thanks to some advice from Ivanka and Jared), no problem. Hey, believe me, winter is coming and winter, it turns out, is HIM, too. It’s all him, all the time.

This is not, of course, the only way this world could be covered.

The Donald as a Perspective Problem

I remember the first moment I saw this kind of coverage and I was living in a very different world. It was Friday, November 22, 1963, and President John F. Kennedy had just been gunned down. I was 19 years old and, in those days when you didn’t have a screen in every room (or every hand), I was in the basement of my college dorm (along with so many others), near a pool table, watching the only accessible TV around. It was the closest we would come, except perhaps in the O.J. Simpson White Ford Bronco moment, to the sort of 24/7 coverage that has become the norm of the post-9/11 world.

In that case, of course, a president had been assassinated, something that hadn’t happened in my lifetime, not in fact in the lifetime of the TV set. And the reportage on the three major networks of that moment went on without commercials for four days — from soon after the fatal shots were fired that Friday, through the on-camera shooting of suspect Lee Harvey Oswald during a perp walk in the basement of the Dallas police headquarters that Sunday, until Kennedy’s funeral the following Monday (when 81{068cdbfab37e4f27da76d005a9c3d7cc8b4ae1429371040bf09b1dfe920189b4} of home TVs were reportedly on). According to Nielsen, 93{068cdbfab37e4f27da76d005a9c3d7cc8b4ae1429371040bf09b1dfe920189b4} of Americans were watching, “more than half of them for 13 or more straight hours.” But a president had been murdered and the coverage, while unique for its moment, did end.

Donald Trump exists in a very different universe, one in which the screen is with you, day and night, in which HE and you and it are often alone together for what seems like forever. At 75, I’m not quite as screened in as much of our world. I still read an actual newspaper, the New York Times, in print. (Who knows how much longer that will even be possible, as the paper newspaper continues to shrink?) And the truth is that, for me, it’s become a kind of daily nightmare. I have no doubt that the paper, which got rid of a number of its copy editors (and now has visible typos and errors daily), has assigned more reporters to cover you-know-who (& company) than it has ever assigned to cover anyone or anything long-term before. (Back in March 2018, for instance, I counted a typical day on the Trump beat and found “15 reporters, three op-ed writers, and the unnamed people who produced those editorials.”)

On some days, as in the week the impeachment hearings began, it’s no longer uncommon to have up to six interior pages of the paper covered with Trumpian “news” — at least two or three of those pieces continuations from the front page and many of them filled with material that’s distinctly repetitive. Think of it as the newspaper version of those endlessly talking heads on cable TV.

To take a recent example, on November 21st, the morning after U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland testified in the impeachment hearings, of the six columns that normally make up the Times’s front page, three were devoted to giant quotes from Sondland’s testimony in large white and yellow print against a dark background. The other three atop the page were articles on the same subject, all under a single giant headline, another quote from Sondland, “We Followed the President’s Orders.” One was headlined “A Witness Places Pompeo Firmly ‘in the Loop’”; a second, “Democrats Detect Watergate Echo”; a third, “Sondland Names Top Officials in Ukraine Push.” At the bottom of the page was a piece on the Democratic debate of that night, headlined “Democrats Soften Disagreements and Sharpen Attacks on Trump.” Only a single piece, Sabrina Tavernise’s “Moving Vans Idle as Migration Stalls in a Reshaped Economy,” snugly lodged at the bottom right corner of the page, and one of the eight reporters involved in front-page coverage, had nothing to do with the president or his possible impeachment.

On the editorial pages, there was a giant editorial, “Implicating the President and His Men,” while three of the four op-eds opposite it had Trump in their titles (“Should Trump Tromp Rudy?,” “The Cowardice Behind Trump’s Vaping-Ban Retreat,” and “Trump Is Doing What He Was Elected to Do”). Inside the paper, there were another 5½ pages of pieces with Trump in the headline or on subjects related to the impeachment process, involving 11 more reporters. More than 20 reporters, op-ed and editorial writers, in other words, were dealing with the world of Donald Trump on that single day.

And yet that kind of coverage itself is never front-page news, even if he invariably is. In a sense, what that means is that you can neither see him for what he is nor see around him. Once upon a distant time — it was the 1990s, just after the Cold War ended — I wrote a book that I called The End of Victory Culture. In it, I explored how, “between 1945 and 1975, victory culture ended in America” and traced it to “its graveyard for all to see,” the disastrous war in Vietnam,” or as I put it: “It was a bare two decades from the beaches of Normandy to the beachfronts of Danang, from Overlord to Operation Hades, from GIs as liberators to grunts as perpetrators, from home front mobilization to antiwar demonstrations organized by ‘the Mobe.’”

And in truth, despite the dreams of Washington’s political elite in the immediate post-Cold War moment and then of top officials of the Bush administration in the post-9/11 moment, “victory” has turned out to be a truly lost cause for the planet’s most “indispensable” nation, as our never-ending wars of this century have made all too clear. Whether we know it or not, we are now in a distinctly post-post-triumphalist American world. Otherwise, of course, there’s no way Donald Trump would be in the White House.

But here’s my question for someone who isn’t 75 years old and is ready to write a new book: What exactly are we at the end of now? It must be something, mustn’t it? What does the Trump phenomenon really represent? And far more important, what lurks behind all the attention paid to him (other, of course, than a climate-changed planet)?

He’s our “witch hunt” president and, if nothing else, he’s presented us, Escher-style, with a remarkable perspective problem. Thanks to certain essential media decisions about what matters (especially when it comes to gluing eyeballs to screens), we’re eternally in close-up. It isn’t just that Donald Trump is somewhat overweight. He’s the sumo wrestler as president. He fills the screen. Every screen. All the time.

Thanks to the media, he’s impeaching us. But really — and I’m just asking — which witches are we actually hunting these days?

Après Moi, le Déluge…