A Note on the Text
Thirty-two of the thirty-three pieces that make up this book were written between April 2010 and mid-2011, thirty-one for my website TomDispatch.com. Barely more than a year on the calendar, but given our exploding world, it seemed like years, not months. Has there ever been a time—not in my life anyway—when so much seemed to happen all at once? So consider this my small record of a period when, for all the fear-suffused attempts to lock America down, the world came pouring in anyway. It’s important, however, to note that the essays included here are not the originals I wrote. They were edited, trimmed or cut down, modestly updated, and woven into book form. The tell-tale signs of the immediate moment—all the recentlys and next weeks, along with examples that were gripping then but are forgotten today—have been removed; as have most of the thematic repetitions that are bound to pop up in any set of weekly responses to ongoing events. Nothing basic or significant about them has, however, been changed; for better or worse, nothing had to be, which tells you something about our present world.
Though this book generally moves chronologically within its chapters, for the sake of whatever flow it may have, I decided not to include in the text the original date on which each piece was posted. For the record, and in case readers should wish to check out any of the essays in their original form at TomDispatch.com, below is a list of them with the dates they were posted (and their original titles, if changed). Note that the second piece in the book was written for, and published in a slightly different form by, Harper’s Magazine. “The Nuclear Story That Refuses to Go Away” is the sole other intruder. I wrote it in 2004 on a subject that’s haunted me from childhood and feels hardly less relevant now.
American Warscapes—October 17, 2010
How the Movies Saved My Life (Harper’s Magazine—October 2011)
The United States of Fear—November 30, 2010
Welcome to Post-Legal America—May 30, 2010
The 100 Percent Doctrine in Washington—June 9, 2011
Obama’s Bush-League World—July 12, 2011
Washington Drunk on War—June 15, 2010
The Urge to Surge—January 4, 2011
Osama bin Laden’s American Legacy—May 5, 2011
Goodbye to All That—February 7, 2011
The View from Mount Olympus—April 13, 2010
The Perfect American Weapon—June 24, 2010
Whose Hands, Whose Blood?—August 5, 2010
One November’s Dead—December 7, 2010
Obama’s Af-Pak Flip-Flop—May 16, 2010
Clueless in Afghanistan—and Washington—July 26, 2010 (also included in this section is part of The Petraeus Syndrome—July 11, 2010)
Forever War—September 30, 2010
The Stimulus Package in Kabul—November 14, 2010
How to Schedule a War—November 23, 2010
Numbers to Die For—April 6, 2010
A Reluctance to Leave (original title: The Urge to Stay)—April 24, 2010
Will Our Generals Ever Shut Up?—September 7, 2010
Cutting $100 Billion—Easy, If Only Washington Had a Brain—February 17, 2011
Ballot Box Blues—November 2, 2010
The Nuclear Story That Refuses to Go Away (original title: Three Characters, No Dialogue)—August 5, 2004
Nine War Words That Define Our World—June 23, 2011
Living in the Fifty-First State (of Denial)—June 1, 2010
One and a Half Cheers for American Decline—September 21, 2010
Life in the Echo Chamber (original title: Washington’s Echo Chamber)—February 24, 2011
Signs of the Great American Unraveling—June 30, 2011
Sleepingwalking into the Imperial Dark—April 19, 2011
All the World’s a Stage (for Us)—March 25, 2010
Acknowledgments
No man is an island. If that sentence applies to anything these days, it has to be to book writing in particular and to this book specifically. The lone (and lonely) author? Not me, at least. In fact, this book wouldn’t exist without the ministrations of Anthony Arnove, my friend and editor at Haymarket Books. Among his many other talents he’s a wizard on the page, and it was he who wove my TomDispatch essays of the past year into the book I now truly believe this is. I owe him thanks galore. He, in turn, is no island, being surrounded by the hardworking crowd from Haymarket Books, including eagle-eyed copy editor/proofreader J. Gabriel Boylan, and especially that key trio of Rachel Cohen, Julie Fain, and Dao X. Tran. They have my thanks as well.
When it comes to TomDispatch.com, it’s land all the way to the horizon. I hardly know where to begin. How could I do it without my many friends who keep TomDispatch alive and kicking with their remarkable pieces, or the Nation Institute, which supports the site (special thanks to Taya Kitman), or Patrick Lannan and Lannan Foundation, who have made all the difference, or Joe Duax, Andy Kroll, Christopher Holmes, and Timothy MacBain, who ensure that the site remains always above the rising waters, or my pal Nick Turse, who hears from me far too often and keeps me sane in life and honest on the page. And speaking about a world of islands so close that they’re just a raft’s ride across any channel, I would never want to forget all the wonderful people at other websites—too many to name—who repost TomDispatch pieces and whom I e-meet or even, on occasion, see face to face.
And then, of course, there are those who matter most of alclass="underline" my wife, Nancy Garrity, and my children, Maggie and Will. They make life worth living.
And oh, yes, there’s the world itself that has to be acknowledged somehow. But can I really thank it for offering up enough folly and misery to keep TomDispatch rolling along or for being, in TomDispatch terms, the gift that just keeps on giving? Perhaps not. So let me just stick to the people who matter most to me. A deep bow of thanks to all of you.
About TomDispatch
Tom Engelhardt launched TomDispatch.com in October 2001 as an email publication offering commentary and collected articles from the world press. In December 2002, it gained its name, became a project of the Nation Institute, and went online as “a regular antidote to the mainstream media.” The site now features three articles a week, all original. These include Engelhardt’s regular commentaries as well as the work of authors ranging from Rebecca Solnit, Bill McKibben, Andrew Bacevich, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Mike Davis to Michael Klare, Adam Hochschild, Noam Chomsky, and Karen J. Greenberg. Nick Turse, who also writes for the site, is its associate editor and research director. Andy Kroll is an associate editor and its economic correspondent. Timothy MacBain produces regular TomCast audio interviews with the authors who write the site’s weekly pieces. TomDispatch is intended to introduce readers to voices and perspectives from elsewhere (even when the elsewhere is here). Its mission is to connect some of the global dots regularly left unconnected by the mainstream media and to offer a clearer sense of how this imperial globe of ours actually works.