( Tomdispatch.com) – 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 […]
Gatsbyed Half to Death: Is America’s Trump Gilded Age another 9/11?
(Tomdispatch.com) – 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 […]
Winter is Coming: Is Trump Impeaching us rather than the Other Way Around?
(Tomdispatch.com) – French king Louis XV reputedly said, “Après moi, le déluge.” (“After me, the flood.”) Whether that line was really his 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 […]
Trump in Blunder-land or Down the Rabbit-Hole
(Tomdispatch.com) – There can be no question about it. Donald Trump is Lewis Carroll’s Queen of Hearts. “Off with his head!” was the president’s essential suggestion for — to offer just one example — a certain whistleblower who fingered him on that now notorious Ukrainian phone call. And if The Donald hasn’t also been playing […]
Amerexit? Trump and the End of the Anglo-American Order
( Tomdispatch.com ) – Donald Trump may prove to be the ultimate Brexiteer. Back in August 2016, in the midst of his presidential campaign, he proudly tweeted, “They will soon be calling me MR. BREXIT!” On the subject of the British leaving the European Union (EU) he’s neither faltered nor wavered. That June, he was […]
Make America Greta Again
By Tom Engelhardt | – (Tomdispatch.com) – Look what Greta started and what she did to me! I took part in the recent climate-strike march in New York City — one of a quarter-million people (or maybe 60,000) who turned out there, along with four million others across all seven continents. Then I came home […]
The Greatest Crime of All: Climate Emergency and Inter-Generational Genocide
(Tomdispatch.com) – Worlds end. Every day. We all die sooner or later. When you get to my age, it’s a subject that can’t help but be on your mind. What’s unusual is this: it’s not just increasingly ancient folks like me who should be thinking such thoughts anymore. After all, worlds of a far larger […]
Trumpism as the Invasion of the Attention-Snatchers, & Other Invasions
(Tomdispatch.com ) – He crossed the border without permission or, as far as I could tell, documentation of any sort. I’m speaking about Donald Trump’s uninvited, unasked-for invasion of my personal space. He’s there daily, often hourly, whether I like it or not, and I don’t have a Department of Homeland Security to separate him […]
2084? Is Trump the one who Takes us into the Age of Big Brother?
(Tomdispatch.com) – I, Winston Smith… I mean, Tom Engelhardt… have not just been reading a dystopian novel, but, it seems, living one — and I suspect I’ve been living one all my life. Yes, I recently reread George Orwell’s classic 1949 novel, 1984. In it, Winston Smith, a secret opponent of the totalitarian world of […]