Author: Tom Engelhardt

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

Let me offer a piece of advice to anyone whose parents are still alive: don’t wait. Think about the questions you want to ask them when it comes to themselves, their lives, their past, and then do it! Not tomorrow, not next week, but today.

I didn’t and I suspect I was pretty typical in that. Honestly, what did I care then about my parents’ lives or their past? All I wanted read more

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

The United States is a war state of the strangest sort. Your taxes go to war — in this century, losing wars — in ever more extravagant amounts. There’s simply no end to it. In fact, it’s safe to say that investing yet greater sums in the military-industrial complex is about the only subject read more

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

My father was in the U.S. Air Force in World War II when it was still the Army Air Corps. He was operations officer for the First Air Commandos in Burma. Years later, when I was boy, I can still remember sitting in the back seat of our car with our big black poodle, while my father drove us somewhere, read more

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

A Duck-and-Cover World? Welcome to the Ukraine Moment By Tom Engelhardt

Face it, we’re living in a world that, while anything but exceptional, is increasingly the exception to every rule.  Only the other day, 93-year-old Noam Chomsky had something to say about that. Mind you, he’s seen a bit of our world since, in 1939, he wrote his first article for his elementary school newspaper on the fall of the Spanish city of Barcelona amid a “grim read more

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

You could say metaphorically that the poor in America have long lived under pandemic conditions. In the last two-plus years, however, that metaphorical reality became all too literal, as indicated in a recent pandemic report read more

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At some level, it seems so obvious. At the very least, there should be a steep price to pay for invading another country and fighting a war of aggression there. The question that Alfred McCoy, TomDispatch read more

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

Back in September 2008, Senator Joe Biden offered a bit of wisdom while running for vice president on Barack Obama’s ticket. In a speech criticizing the Republican presidential campaign of senatorial colleague John McCain, he claimed to be quoting his own father when he said: “Show me your budget and I’ll tell you what you value.”

Almost 14 years later, how apt his father read more

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

I have to admit that, as I read the nightmarish front-page stories daily — and yes, I’m old enough to still read the New York Times in print every morning — and absorb the latest read more

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

I don’t normally do this, but in the context of TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon’s latest all-too-well-timed piece on paying (or rather not paying) one’s taxes, let me quote a couple of paragraphs I once wrote for this site about my own distant past and then briefly explain why:

“And here’s a little story from the Neolithic age we now call ‘the Sixties’ about read more

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

Ukraine in Perspective A Historical Feast of Death and Destruction from the Peloponnesian Wars to Late Tomorrow Night By Tom Engelhardt

Excuse me if I wander a little today — and if it bothers you, don’t blame me, blame Vladimir Putin.  After all, I didn’t decide to invade Ukraine, the place my grandfather fled almost 140 years ago. I suspect, in fact, that I was an adult before I even knew such a place existed.  If I could be accused of anything, maybe you could say that, for most of my life, read more