Author: Tom Engelhardt

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

Of all the things I don’t remember anymore, here’s one I do. As a boy, I dreamt about being a foreign correspondent, a war reporter in particular — and I think that Bob Shaplen must have been the reason why. He was a friend of my family’s, perhaps because, in the 1950s and 1960s, he was the New Yorker’s Far East correspondent and my mother drew for that read more

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

Say one thing about the world of sports: in some fashion, it invariably reflects developments in the larger world. It hardly matters whether the subject is war or inequality. read more

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

I remember well the antiwar movement of the Vietnam era. I was in it and it was distinctly in the streets, big time. I was typical, for instance, in traveling to Washington in October 1967 for a march on the Pentagon, which proved to be the largest antiwar protest read more

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Yes, they’re now known as the “greatest generation,” while the generation that followed them is sometimes referred to as the “silent” one. In my own limited experience, however, those World War II vets, the ones I knew anyway, were remarkably silent about their wartime lives. My dad was one of them. Yes, read more

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In early October 2016, as the most staggering presidential election campaign of our lives was nearing its end, I wrote this about the man whom, I suggested, heartland working-class whites might consider dispatching to the White House as an American version of a “suicide bomber”:

“In relation to his Republican rivals, and now Hillary Clinton, he stands alone in accepting read more

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If Donald Trump Is the Symptom…
Then What’s the Disease?
By Tom Engelhardt

Don’t try to deny it! The political temperature of this country is rising fast. Call it Trump change or Trump warming, if you want, but grasp one thing: increasingly, you’re in a different land and, whatever happens to Donald Trump, the results down the line are likely to be ever less pretty. read more

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

It’s been almost 18 years of “infinite” war, carnage, the mass displacement of peoples, read more

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I watch NBC Nightly News regularly to get a sense of what version of our world a slice of America is regularly offered. In recent weeks, most of those newscasts — which usually begin with Lester Holt exclaiming, “Breaking news tonight!” — led with unprecedented rainfall, read more

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How about a little round of Auld Lang Syne? After all, when it comes to war crimes, whatever he ends up doing, Donald Trump will still be a johnny-come-lately. Remember, for instance, that top officials in the administration of George W. Bush, including Vice President Dick Cheney and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, reportedly read more

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

In those pre-seat-belt years — it might have been 1953 — I can remember being in the back seat of the family car with our dog. My dad was driving, my mom sitting next to him. And I can still practically hear them launching, with remarkable gusto, into the first verse of the Air Force song:

“Off we go into the wild blue yonder,
Climbing high into the sun.
read more