Rebecca Gordon arrived at TomDispatch in 2014. The very first of the 98 pieces she's produced for this site (with today's, of course, being her 99th) was on -- sigh -- torture. As she grimly put it then, "In such a frightening new world, we were assured, our survival depended in part on brave men and women willing to break precedent and torture some of our enemies for information that would save civilization itself. As part of a new American creed, we learned that torture was the price of security." That was, of course, still the Barack Obama moment, in the wake of those two torturers-in-chief, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.
And it's unsettling for me to think that, as long as Rebecca has been at TomDispatch, writing so vividly on the all-American world that led us to Donald Trump's ever stranger version of American life (twice!), I've been here even longer. After all, I started this site soon after the 9/11 attacks in 2001! Here, for instance, is how I began just one of the hundreds of pieces I've written for TomDispatch -- this one, "Assassin-in-Chief," in June 2012 (at the end of Obama's first term): "And be assured of one thing: whichever candidate you choose at the polls in November, you aren't just electing a president of the United States; you are also electing an assassin-in-chief." Indeed, it's strange now, in Donald Trump's world, to remember that this was anything but a shiningly innocent land in the years before he appeared on the political scene.
Unsettling as The Donald may indeed be, including the way he's recently become a kidnapper-in-chief in Venezuela as he fulfills the Donroe Doctrine, he's hardly been unique as president when it comes to subjects like assassination, the mistreatment of prisoners, or the endless bombings of other lands (or, for that matter, ships at sea) -- seven places in the last year alone -- something you would know well, if you had read Gordon's pieces over all these years. And with that in mind, let her look back at this country's record of torture, extrajudicial killings, and murder by drone, as she reviews her own remarkable work over the last eleven and a half years. Tom
Reflections on a Low, Dishonest Decade
And Nearly 100 Essays for TomDispatch
"Tom, I got nothin'." That's all I wanted to say to Tom Engelhardt, the kindly and incisive editor of TomDispatch.com. He'd called to check in and see what I was planning for my next piece. I wanted to tell him, "I'm staring at starvation and genocide, the destruction of American democracy and the rule of law, along with the ongoing incineration of our planet. I'm a damp ball of grief, and I've got nothing useful to say about any of it." Furthermore, I wanted to add, "Anything I could say about the present disaster has already been said comprehensively and better by someone else." That "someone else" includes myriad excellent journalists who have departed (voluntarily or otherwise) from a mainstream media that has repeatedly acquiesced to Trump, succumbing to a malaise of self-censorship at flagship newspapers like the Washington Post and even the New York Times.
People with nothing to say would generally be wise to shut up. Unfortunately, the wisdom to choose to remain silent has never been my most salient characteristic, something even strangers seem to notice about me. Years ago, I was introduced to a woman at a party. Before I'd even opened my mouth, she said, "Oh, good, another short, pushy Jewish dyke from New York!" Must be something in the way I move.
In any case, having nothing for Tom this time around led me to think about all the times I have had something to say and how grateful I am to have had TomDispatch as a place to say it.
So, feeling stuck, I decided to examine my output over all these years. As it happens, there's a lot of it, 98 pieces in all. I began during Barack Obama's somewhat disappointing second presidential term, observed with horror Trump's first time around, slogged through the Biden years, and now find myself reaching for a noun more resonant than "horror" to describe my reaction to the first year (and counting) of Trump 2.0.
It was far too much to read through in one sitting, but not surprisingly, a few general themes did emerge. Most of them had to do with the importance of working to discern -- and tell -- the truth about the world we live in.
Thinking about Epistemological Anarchy"
My first TomDispatch piece appeared in 2014. It marked the beginning of an oddly personal chronicle of a time that the poet W.H. Auden might once have called "a low dishonest decade."
That's the phrase Auden used to describe the period leading up to September 1, 1939, the day Adolf Hitler's German army invaded Poland, marking the official beginning of World War II. I think we can fairly say that the Trump years, and even those preceding his first election, constitute a low, dishonest decade.
Of course, Trump himself is an avatar -- a human embodiment -- of the principle of dishonesty. Indeed, the Washington Post recorded more than 30,000 "false or misleading claims" he made during his first four years as president. This time around, most media outlets have given up counting, although several marked his first 100 days with reports on his 10 (or more) most egregious lies. The purpose of "flooding the zone with sh*t," as right-wing podcaster and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon once put it, is not really to convince anyone that any particular lie is true but, as I wrote during Trump's first term, to convince everyone that it's impossible to know whether anything is true. As I argued then:
"We are used to thinking of propaganda (a word whose Latin roots mean "towards action") as intended to move people to think or act in a particular way. And indeed that kind of propaganda has long existed, as with, for example, wartime books, posters, and movies designed to inflame patriotism and hatred of the enemy. But there was a different quality to totalitarian propaganda. Its purpose was not just to create certainty (the enemy is evil incarnate), but a curious kind of doubt. 'In fact,' as Russian e'migre'e and New Yorker writer Masha Gessen has put it, 'the purpose of totalitarian propaganda is to take away your ability to perceive reality.'"
Back in 2019, I was writing about "totalitarian propaganda" in the past tense, speaking of twentieth-century authoritarian regimes. But I was already worried about what Trump's wild epistemological anarchy portended. "Eroding the very ability to distinguish between reality and fantasy has been," I wrote, "however instinctively, the mode of the Trumpian moment as well, both the presidential one and that of so many right-wing conspiracy theorists now populating the online world." For many Americans, it was no longer worth the effort to discern the truth. "When everybody lies, anything can indeed be true. And when everybody -- or even a significant chunk of everybody -- believes this, the effect can be profoundly anti-democratic."
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