OK, Boomers: Will the America we die in be unprecedentedly Hot, Racist,
Unequal, Sickly and Authoritarian?
TOM ENGELHARDT
08/10/2020
92SHARES
( Tomdispatch.com ) - 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, dressedas 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.
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% 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.