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This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

History’s a joke, right? We know that from our president who creates laughable moments of history daily — as when, reading from a script recently, he pronounced America’s famed Yosemite National Park “Yo-Semite.” In that context, let me bring read more

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

It Could Have Been Different
My World and (Unfortunately) Welcome to It
By Tom Engelhardt

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 read more

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

In the midst of the pandemic from hell, with a president who seems incapable of grasping the reality of, no less dealing with, the spreading virus, as deaths mount and cases cascade, in a land where a Covid-19 “second wave” in the fall isn’t conceivable because the first will never have ended, it’s easy to forget about pandemics past. In fact, I did.

But I did live through read more

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

No question about it. In 1991, it was the greatest power on the face of the Earth. There had never been anything like it — or so it seemed when the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union, that other superpower of the Cold War era, imploded. Left alone on the planet, read more

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

Yes, it’s possible that a vaccine for Covid-19 could be available by spring. I mean, I wouldn’t put my money on it, but it seems at least conceivable. Here’s something I would put a few bucks on, though: when a vaccine appears, the Trump administration will have so botched things that read more

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

Our lives are, of course, our histories, which makes us all, however inadvertently, historians. Part of my own history, my other life — not the TomDispatch one that’s consumed me for the last 14 years — has been editing books. I have no idea how many books I’ve edited since I was in my twenties, but undoubtedly hundreds. Recently, I began rereading read more

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

It wasn’t magic. It wasn’t astrology. Not faintly. But it was in the stars. No, not this specific pandemic, but a pandemic. In fact, back in 2010, TomDispatch ran a piece by John Barry on that very subject. He’s the expert on the “Spanish Flu,” the 1918-1919 pandemic that killed an estimated 50 read more

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

He sent what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called his “unidentified storm troopers” togged out like soldiers in a war zone onto streets filled with read more

I lean more toward moving offensive monuments out of central squares and providing context and explanation in less prominent locations, as well as favoring the creation of numerous non-offensive public artworks. But if you’re going to tear anything down (or blast anything into outerspace), shouldn’t the bust of Wernher von Braun in Huntsville, Alabama, be considered for inclusion on the list?

Out of a long list of major wars there are only a few the United States claims to have ever read more