Reading Obituaries
And Murdering Time in the Age of Donald Trump
Having reached a certain age and long been fascinated by obituaries, I sometimes think about both Donald Trump's and my own. At 79, he's just slightly less than two years younger than me, though of course I wasn't the 45th president of the United States or the 47th one either. And eight chaotic years (or more?) as president (assuming he makes it that far) guarantee him a monster (and I do indeed use that word advisedly) set of obituaries when he dies, whereas almost a quarter-century at TomDispatch guarantees me nothing at all.
And I wouldn't argue with that for a second. After all, Donald Trump has been (and continues to be) a truly one-of-a-kind president of the United States -- though the word "kind" (as opposed to "king") doesn't actually apply to him, does it? Think of him, in fact, as the mad hatter of American presidents. If you remember, that Alice in Wonderland character was accused of "murdering the time." And that, in its own strange fashion, seems like quite a reasonable description of at least one of the crimes of President Donald Trump.
The man who believes that climate change is a "green new scam" has tried, among other things, to shut down every major East Coast offshore wind power project in sight (though judges, including one he appointed to the bench, have so far denied him that right). Meanwhile, he's been working to ensure that coal, the dirtiest of all fossil fuels, remains a major source of American energy. He and his crew aren't even letting major coal-burning power plants whose days are all too literally past close.
Phew, that paragraph left me out of breath -- so much for my wind power! -- and I didn't even get everything in. After all, he's also had the urge to pull every last barrel of oil out of Venezuela (even if, once upon a time, he did all too accurately call that country's petroleum the "worst oil probably anywhere in the world" and "garbage"). And in the process, he is indeed engaged in murdering time -- at least, the time we humans have left to live reasonably decent lives on this planet, which is, it seems, no longer truly ours but, at least for now, significantly his.
In some sense, you might say that Donald Trump is hard at work trying to ensure not only that he'll get a major obituary on his death, but that humanity will, too. In that sense, give him credit. He's trying to put us all in the paper and give us all the experience he's had of being "the news."
And I wonder if someday, if not your obituary and mine, perhaps those of our children or grandchildren will start out something like this: "He/she died in his/her home in the midst of a blinding heat wave/a devastating storm/a historically unprecedented flood [or you name it] on a planet still growing hotter and more uncomfortable by the decade, if not the year."
The U.S. Is an Increasingly Violent Petro State
When it comes to obituaries, don't think it's just the climate that's the problem. We are living in a distinctly mad world of the living (and the dead). And OMG, it's increasingly apparent that, on a planet where wars are still proliferating from Ukraine to Gaza to Sudan (and the burning of fossil fuels to fight them is already adding significantly to the devastation of the planet), things are unlikely to get better any time soon. As the Costs of War project reminds us: "The U.S. Department of Defense is the world's single largest institutional consumer of oil -- and as a result, one of the world's top greenhouse gas emitters."
And just to take one grim example, "my" president wants to take our tax dollars and apply them even more strikingly -- in fact, in a blindingly record fashion -- to the Pentagon budget, the thing that, once upon a time, was called, however inaccurately, the "defense budget." It's already at somewhere close to a trillion dollars a year and, give him credit, he only wants to raise it by another half-trillion dollars to $1.5 trillion.
And no, that is not a typo! Believe me, there's no misprint there! That's what he thinks he needs to do to create a "dream military," which (at least in his mind) would undoubtedly ensure that Greenland will become the 51st state, Canada the 52nd, Cuba the 53rd, and Colombia the 54th. The 55th, then, could well be China. (Or so he might dream anyway. Or perhaps the phrase should be: so he might nightmare anyway.) And don't fret. That increase in the military budget is only likely to mean a $6 trillion increase in our taxes over the next decade (or roughly $45,000 per family).
Oh, wait, this is already the nation with by far the largest military budget on Earth that, over all the endless decades since it emerged globally victorious from World War II, couldn't win a single significant war -- not in Korea, nor in Vietnam, nor Afghanistan, nor Iraq, nor even, possibly, in the weeks to come on the streets of Minneapolis. Nowhere. And count on this, another half-trillion dollars a year will ensure only one thing: that the United States won't win yet more wars ever more extravagantly, whether in Greenland or somewhere else entirely, while never learning even the most obvious lessons from such a grim reality.
And no, for some reason, Donald Trump has never actually used the word "nightmare" either in relation to himself or his presidency, though he certainly did accuse the Democrats of being the party of "the socialist nightmare." Nor did he use it in his recent interview with the New York Times when he was asked about whether there were any limits whatsoever on his own global power. Instead, he responded this way: "Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It's the only thing that can stop me."
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