TOM ENGELHARDT: Will the America we die in be Hot, Racist, Unequal, Sickly and Authoritarian? // How did Americans become such Wimps? Silence as Trump kills tens of Thousands...
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 76 now. True, if I were lucky (or perhaps unlucky), I could live another 20 years and see yet a newer world born. But for the moment at least, it seems logical enough to consider this pandemic nightmare of a place as the country of my old age, the one that I and my generation (including a guy named Donald J. Trump) will pass on to our children and grandchildren. Back in 2001, after the 9/11 attacks, I knew it was going to be bad.
I felt it deep in my gut almost immediately and, because of that, stumbled into creating TomDispatch.com, the website I still run. But did I ever think it would be this bad? Not a chance. I focused back then on what already looked to me like a nightmarish American imperial adventure to come, the response to the 9/11 attacks that the administration of President George W. Bush quickly launched under the rubric of “the Global War on Terror.” And that name (though the word “global” would soon be dropped for the more anodyne “war on terror”) would prove anything but inaccurate. After all, in those first post-9/11 moments, the top officials of that administration were thinking as globally as possible when it came to war. At the damaged Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld almost immediately turned to an aide and told him, “Go massive - sweep it all up, things related and not.” From then on, the emphasis would always be on the more the merrier….
I felt it deep in my gut almost immediately and, because of that, stumbled into creating TomDispatch.com, the website I still run. But did I ever think it would be this bad? Not a chance. I focused back then on what already looked to me like a nightmarish American imperial adventure to come, the response to the 9/11 attacks that the administration of President George W. Bush quickly launched under the rubric of “the Global War on Terror.” And that name (though the word “global” would soon be dropped for the more anodyne “war on terror”) would prove anything but inaccurate. After all, in those first post-9/11 moments, the top officials of that administration were thinking as globally as possible when it came to war. At the damaged Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld almost immediately turned to an aide and told him, “Go massive - sweep it all up, things related and not.” From then on, the emphasis would always be on the more the merrier….
Nicole
Winfield and Lisa Marie Pane at the Associated Press write at the
unbelief with which Europeans are staring at the United States, as we head for
300,000 dead from the corona-virus and our economy shrank 33% on an annualized
basis last quarter, and we just appear to be all right with that. Not only are we
perfectly willing to toss grandma in an early grave on Trump’s say-so, but we
are supine as he openly engineers the destruction of social security and medicare,
and of the post office, on behalf of himself and the billionaire class he
represents. That is after we sat by while he completely gutted all
environmental regulations that got in the way of corporations making money off
poisoning us.
I don’t think the neutering of the EPA has even been reported on
daytime cable news, though the prime time magazine shows on MSNBC have at least
brought it up. Americans imagine
themselves rugged individualists. A cartoonist did a satire on us showing
brawny guys, shirts off, with the logo “Rugged individualism works best when we
obey.” In fact, Americans are
masochistic sheeple who let the rich and powerful walk all over them and thank
them for the privilege. We have become wimps.
The word wimp may come from “whimper.” It was used in a newspaper in 1920, and
then not again until 1960. Since then it may have been influenced by the
character of “Wimpy” in the Popeye cartoons, who did not have much gumption. He
was only good at mooching off people in search of a hamburger. I always thought
Americans were the plucky Popeye, who knew how to get iron in their diets and
show some spunk. Turns out we have been
reduced to begging for our meals....
