Once Upon a Time (and Not Any Time Either!)
My Strange Tale of How the War on Terror Came Home in the Age of Donald J. Trump
Okay, here's what this old man remembers nearly a quarter of a century later.
I was living in New York City (as I still am) when, on September 11, 2001, two hijacked planes full of passengers hit the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, killing almost 3,000 innocent people. Until that moment, of course, such a thing would have been beyond inconceivable, no less watchable on TV, in the United States of America. Had someone written up such a plot with Osama bin Laden and crew in the cast of characters, it would have been treated as the worst kind of unpublishable science fiction.
But, of course, it did indeed happen and, in some strange sense, in its wake (an all-too-appropriate word under the circumstances), our world did indeed seem to flip upside down. That was, of course, after President George W. Bush responded early that October by -- god save us! -- invading Afghanistan (which, at least to me, was a shock and a half in its own right) and launching his disastrous "Global War on Terror." Sometime in the weeks that followed, my memory (not exactly trustworthy at almost 82 years of age) is that I saw an article deep inside the print New York Times (which, by the way, I still read daily on actual paper) noting that U.S. soldiers were by then fighting in parts of Afghanistan where the troops of the Soviet Union had struggled endlessly (and lost badly) during that imperial power's disastrous Afghan war of the previous century, which did indeed help take it down. And that, too, in some grim fashion, stunned me. Talk about mistakes that history had all too clearly signaled should never happen again (and again and again)!
I was at the time (even if barely) online and so I copied that piece into an email and sent it out with a note to a small set of friends. And somehow that began the process that led to TomDispatch.
I soon realized that, thanks to the online world, I could actually read around the globe -- the British Guardian, Le Monde Diplomatique, etc. -- and that out there in the rest of the universe, there were other ways this ever-stranger world of ours was being looked at than the ones that largely dominated attention here in the U.S., post-9/11. And so, as I began stumbling across ever more pieces that seemed to offer different perspectives on our increasingly eerie world, I started emailing them to a growing list of friends and acquaintances. And after a time -- to my complete surprise -- people I hardly knew or didn't know at all emailed me that they wanted to be added to my list. And with those send-outs, I began including little introductory explanatory notes or sets of comments (which launched the future TomDispatch form with my eternal little introductions -- literally thousands of them over these nearly 25 years -- to every piece I posted at TD except my own).
And I remember exactly the moment when I suddenly realized that something out of the ordinary was happening not just in the ever-stranger world out there, but to me, too. Susan Sontag, a writer I had long admired but didn't know from a hole in the wall, suddenly emailed me out of the blue and asked to be added to what would become the TomDispatch email list (though it wasn't yet called that). I was stunned. And soon, I was sending out to -- I no longer remember exactly how many -- but certainly several hundred people (with more being added every week). And that was the moment when someone I hardly knew (though he, too, was on my mailing list), Hamilton Fish of the Nation Institute, called me out of the blue and asked if I might, in the future, be interested in turning those emails of mine into a website that he then did indeed set up for me and that he -- not I -- called "TomDispatch."
Initially, at the new site, I simply did what I had been doing in my emails. I continued to find interesting pieces published elsewhere about our ever stranger and more disturbing world, wrote little introductions of my own, and then put in their headlines and first paragraphs with a link to the full piece wherever it had first appeared. At some point, however, I started writing longer commentaries of my own on a world that seemed to grow stranger by the week. Then it suddenly occurred to me that I knew a surprising number of writers whose voices, I thought, were distinctly needed in the strange post-9/11 world we were already living through.
After all, among other things, I had been an editor, first at Pantheon Books for 15 years in the previous century and later, in this one, at Metropolitan Books, the publishing house my old friend (and Pantheon coeditor) Sara Bershtel had set up. I had, for instance, published Chalmers Johnson's remarkable book Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire at Metropolitan in 2000 to essentially no attention, minimal (and not particularly good) reviews, and few sales. Osama bin Laden's assault on New York City and Washington, D.C., however, turned that book into a nationwide bestseller and put that title word of his into the language in a big-time fashion (and he would indeed write for TomDispatch memorably in the War on Terror years that followed).
The War on Terror Comes Home, A Terrible Science Fiction Novel
And yes, Osama bin Laden's 9/11 attacks were indeed a nightmare, but this country responded to them almost unimaginably badly by creating a full-scale, seemingly never-ending set of further nightmares in Afghanistan and Iraq (and, of course, over the years from Guanta'namo Bay, Cuba, to Somalia in Africa, not to speak of all those global CIA "black sites" meant for the torture of Global War on Terror prisoners). And out of all those nightmares and so much more (none of which I ever would have imagined possible once upon a time) came the presidencies (and who would have believed that there could be two of them!) of Donald (the mad duck) Trump.
From the start, TomDispatch was witnessing and reporting on America's distinctly imperial fate. I was watching with both horror and fascination as the greatest power (perhaps ever) on planet Earth (once the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991) was somehow going down, down, down, without even a helping hand from an opposing imperial power. After all, early in this century, China had yet truly to rise and now that it has, it's not acting like a typical imperial power of history. It has (at least as yet) not launched its own version of a Global War on Terror and its leaders seem remarkably intent not on colonizing the rest of Asia in some unexpected fashion, but on making a fortune producing the world's green energy machinery (including, at the moment, 80% of global solar energy panels), even if they're also still outdoing every other country on this planet -- despite Donald Trump's efforts -- in burning fossil fuels and pouring greenhouse gases into the atmosphere).
In some strange fashion, I watched and recorded at TomDispatch just how my country was playing out its grim version of the predictable decline of all imperial powers, historically speaking, in a distinctly up-close-and-personal fashion. And of course, in 2016, this country gave decline a remarkable new meaning on an increasingly strange and disturbed planet by electing Donald J. Trump as president.
As my version of TomDispatch ends (and Nick Turse's launches), I find myself at my advanced age (with my friends beginning to die around me) in a world I simply could never have imagined. Don't even get me started on artificial intelligence, which, as Bernie Sanders has pointed out, could someday "replace humans in controlling the planet"! Unreligious as I may be, I'm with the Pope on AI -- though perhaps even more so. My own feeling is that no genuine intelligence could have been senseless enough to create such an obvious nightmare to come.
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