A blog about a criminal enterprise
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Donald Trump May Not Be Herbert Hoover
A Graduation Speech for an Age of Collapse
By Tom Engelhardt
Class of 2020, wherever you are, I had planned to address you on this graduation day. But how can I?
Yes, I know that former President Obama, Oprah
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Believe me, moments like this one will haunt a generation for rest of their lives. I was born in 1944. I knew nothing of the Great Depression of the 1930s and yet, in retrospect, it haunted me indirectly. So many decades later, I can still sense how memories of that economic disaster hovered over my parents’ world. Looking back, I can still feel its presence in those years
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Consider it strange. The U.S. has been fighting in Somalia on and off (mostly on) since the early 1990s. (Who, of a certain age, doesn’t remember the “Black Hawk Down” fiasco?) Almost 30 years later, at a time when the U.N. secretary-general, supported by dozens of countries, has reasonably
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Let me quote a rare good guy and once-upon-a-time leader on this increasingly godforsaken planet of ours, former Soviet president and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Mikhail Gorbachev. He recently wrote: “What we urgently need
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We are in a strangely viral religious moment. Only recently, a White House in which little, including the deaths of Americans, counts for more than the support of evangelicals rejected initial guidelines prepared by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for “re-opening” America. A major reason: because those
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It’s old news by now that President Trump has compared the arrival of the coronavirus in America to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and al-Qaeda’s 9/11 assault on key symbols of this country — the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon in Washington, and possibly even the White House
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In March, as casualty figures were starting to pile up, he labeled himself a “wartime president.” Almost two months later, with the U.S. having long outstripped every other country on Earth in Covid-19 cases
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Someday, America’s Afghan Wars — the first was against the Soviet Union, 1979-1989; the second began with the post-9/11 invasion of that country and has never ended — may be seen as follies of an unprecedented sort. Certainly, the wars that invasion set off across
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Somehow, it seemed apt to do a different kind of introduction today to TomDispatch regular Belle Chesler’s piece. After all, she’s the daughter of my first childhood friend from the building in New York City where I grew up in another
This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.
The greatest American stories have always been fictions. I mean this both literally and figuratively. I mean The Great Gatsby, Moby-Dick, Invisible Man, and Little Women, but I also mean American exceptionalism, “good” wars, rags to riches, and liberty and justice for all. What, then, is the great American non-fiction story? I submit