Why Aren't We Talking More About Trump's Nihilism?

By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone

03 October 10

The White House now says we might as well pollute because global catastrophe is inevitable

hile America was consumed with the Brett Kavanaugh drama last week, the Washington Post unearthed a crazy tidbit in the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s (NHTSA) latest environmental impact statement.

The study predicts a rise in global temperatures of about four degrees Celsius, or seven degrees Fahrenheit, by the year 2100. Worse, it asserts global warming is such an inevitable reality, there’s no point in reducing auto emissions, as we’re screwed anyway.

“The emissions reductions necessary to keep global emissions within this carbon budget could not be achieved solely with drastic reductions in emissions from the U.S. passenger car and light truck vehicle fleet,” is how the report put it.

To make a real difference, it adds we’d have to “move away from the use of fossil fuels,” which is “not currently technologically feasible or economically practicable.”

There’s been just a flutter of media attention about this, mostly focusing on the hypocrisy. Trump, as is his wont, has at one point or another occupied basically every inch of territory on the spectrum of global warming opinions.

He went from urging President Obama to act to prevent “catastrophic and irreversible consequences… for our planet” (2009), to calling global warming a Chinese conspiracy (2012), to calling it an “expensive hoax” (2013), and “bullshit” (2014), to switching up again during the election to concede the existence of “naturally occurring” (i.e., not man-made) climate change.

Now comes this Linda Blair-style head turn. The NHTSA report deftly leaps past standard wing-nut climate denial and lands on a new nihilistic construct, in which action is useless precisely because climate change exists and is caused by fossil fuels.

The more you read of this impact statement, the weirder it seems. After the document lays out its argument for doing nothing, it runs a series of bar graphs comparing the impact of various action plans with scenarios in which the entire world did nothing (labeled the “no action” alternative).

These absurd illustrations make Thomas Friedman’s time-traveling efforts to graph the future seem like the work of a Nobel laureate.

“A textbook example of how to lie with statistics,” is how MIT professor John Sterman described it to the Post.

There’s obviously a danger at overinterpreting this paper, which mostly seems like a desperate bureaucratic attempt to square science with Trump’s determination to roll back environmental policies for his business pals.

But even as accidental symbolism, it’s powerful stuff. A policy that not only recognizes but embraces inevitable global catastrophe is the ultimate expression of Trump’s somehow under-reported nihilism.

While the press has focused in the past two years either on the president’s daily lunacies or his various scandals, the really dangerous work of Trump’s administration has gone on behind the scenes, in his systematic wreckage of the state.

Implicit in this campaign of bureaucratic dismantling has been the message that pandemonium is a price Trump is very willing to pay, in service of breaking the “disaster” of government. Many of his top appointees have been distinguished by their screw-it-all mentality.

Remember, he appointed Mick Mulvaney, a man who had once inspired a downgrade of America’s credit rating by threatening to default on the debt, to be his budget director.

He later put Mulvaney in charge of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, where he fired his own 25-person advisory board — after requesting a budget of $0 and promising to fulfill the bureau’s mission “no further.”

Trump’s original EPA chief, Scott Pruitt, was best known for having used his time as Oklahoma’s attorney general to sue the EPA repeatedly and zero out the environmental-enforcement budget. Trump made a robotization enthusiast his choice for labor secretary, chose a hockey-team owner to run the Army (he withdrew, thankfully), and so on.

There are still hundreds of top federal jobs left unmanned, and some of the non-appointments seem like Nero-level acts of madness. Trump asked for 25 percent cuts to the whole State Department on the grounds that they were “prioritizing the efficient use of taxpayer resources.” But what country goes without ambassadors for years? Trump fired dozens upon inauguration and to this day still has 34 vacancies. We have no ambassador in South Africa, Sweden, Saudi Arabia, even Mexico. We’re a ghost state with nukes.

All of this is part and parcel of Trump’s doomsday message. He’s been a textbook example of Richard Hofstadter’s famed theory of paranoid politics. See if any of this (especially the line about “barricades”) sounds familiar:

The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms — he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization… Like religious millennialists, he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days…

From Day One of Trump’s campaign, pundits have reached for traditional political explanations to describe both his behavior and his appeal. Because we’re trained to talk in terms of left and right, progress and reaction, we tried to understand him in those terms.

But Trump sold something more primal. His core message was relentless, hounding negativity, lambasting audiences with images of death and disaster.

His first campaign speech was basically a non-denominational end-times sermon, in which America was either kaput or close to it, surrounded on all sides by bloodthirsty enemies. “They kill us,” he preached. “They beat us all the time… We have nothing…”

He ranted about a system befouled by false prophets. “Politicians are all talk, no action,” he howled. “They will not bring us— believe me — to the promised land.”

The “What have you got to lose?” line he pulled out later was supposedly just a pitch to African-American voters, but all of Trump’s audiences picked up on the “it just doesn’t matter” theme. (If you want to be wigged out, check out the similarities between Trump speeches and the famed Bill Murray speech from Meatballs. Just substitute “China” for “Mohawk.”)

Obese and rotting, close enough to the physical end himself (and long ago spiritually dead), Trump essentially told his frustrated, pessimistic crowds that America was doomed anyway, so we might as well stop worrying and floor it to the end.

If that meant a trade war, environmental catastrophe, broken alliances, so be it. “Let’s just get this shit over with,” is how Trump’s unofficial campaign slogan was described in the show Horace and Pete, one of the few outlets to pick up on Trump’s Freudian death-wish rhetoric.

Trump made lots of loony promises to bring us back to the joyous Fifties (literally to Happy Days, if you go by his choice of Scott Baio as a convention speaker). But even his audiences didn’t seem to believe this fable.

The more credible promise of his campaign was a teardown of the international order, which he’s actually begun as president. Trade deals, environmental accords, the EU, NATO, he’s undercut all of them, while ripping government in half like a phone book.

He keeps inviting destruction like it’s a desirable outcome. He even pushed through legislation for “low-yield” nuclear weapons, whose only purpose is to be more theoretically usable than the other kind (although he’s wrong about this, too).

His fans even cheered when he played nuclear chicken with Kim Jong-un, tweeting that his “nuclear button” was “bigger & more powerful” than Kim’s (and “my Button works!”).

It’s easy to understand the nationalist sentiment behind reversing trade deals or backing Brexit. But what’s the populist angle on burning the planet, or nuclear war? How does hating elites explain cheering a guy on for turning nuclear diplomacy into a penis-measuring contest?

On a policy level, this apocalypse politics is pure corporate cynicism, with Trump’s big-business buddies showing a willingness to kill us all for a few dollars now.

The broader electoral pitch is just an evil version of every nuclear-age dance tune ever, “99 Luftballoons” or “1999.” The world is ending, so fuck it, let’s party. As crazy as it is, it’s a seductive message for a country steeped in hate and pessimism. Democrats still don’t understand it. Trump’s turning America into a death cult, with us as involuntary members.

A Child at World's End, a Mother Thinks About the Inheritance of Children

By Frida Berrigan, TomDispatch

02 October 18

 

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One genuine joy in my life is spending time with my grandson. He’s six, like TomDispatch regular Frida Berrigan’s son Seamus, and he reminds me constantly of just how remarkable -- how clever, quick, quirky, inquisitive, and ready to absorb the world -- we human beings are. Unlike a new-born foal that, on arrival, struggles to its feet almost instantly and stumbles into its life, we’re slow to fully enter this world of ours, but once we’re truly here: wow! Seeing a life, a mind, unfold is certainly a small but never-ending wonder. And yet in any afternoon we spend together there’s always what I think of as that moment. I mean the one when I suddenly find myself thinking about the planet I'll leave to him, the planet I won’t be on, and my heart sinks -- not because I won’t be there but because he will and it’s increasingly clear that it will be an ever more extreme place.

Just the other day, for instance, Drew Shindell, a Duke University climate scientist, indicated that an upcoming report he co-authored from the prestigious Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will suggest that the world’s governments are now “nowhere near on track” to keep the planet’s temperature from passing the 1.5 degrees Centigrade mark (above the pre-industrial moment).  That was the aspirational goal of the Paris climate accord before Donald Trump insisted that he would take the globe’s second largest emitter of greenhouse gases out of it.

While few are going to be shocked by such a report on such a planet, it’s bad news nonetheless -- and keeping that rise under 2 degrees Centigrade seems unlikely, too, or even possibly under 4 degrees. As anyone paying any attention at all to last summer's heat waves or the havoc recently wrought by Hurricane Florence in the Carolinas would know, we're already living on a new (and degraded) planet. This is no longer a prospective matter. It’s here -- now -- and if certain feedback loops kick in, it could prove even worse than most of us imagine in that future my grandson will inherit.

I must admit that such thoughts, and a certain feeling of helplessness, weigh me down sometimes when I’m with him. On the other hand, being there to see firsthand the ingenuity of humanity in a single being also gives me a certain hope that somehow, somewhere along the line, in some way, we’ll pull it off, which brings me to Frida Berrigan, her son, Seamus, and the cheetahs...

-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch

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don’t want to live in a world without cheetahs, Mom.”

Seamus loves cheetahs and what’s not to love -- unless you are a Thomson’s gazelle? Cheetahs are the fastest mammals on the planet, formidable predators, sleek, saucy looking, and they even have spots.

My six-year-old boy can’t imagine a future without his favorite animal, but we live in the small city of New London, Connecticut. Unlike coyotes, cheetahs are, to say the least, rare here. The nearest zoo is more than an hour away. I’m not sure where his love for cheetahs came from, since he doesn’t watch much television, not even nature shows. Still, here we are, my six-year-old boy and me talking about those cheetahs and the end of nature on a Sunday morning.

His observation actually turned out to be remarkably on point when it comes to our current situation, globally and environmentally. He made it during a week in which nature was hitting back hard. If cheetahs are indeed endangered, so were surprising numbers of human beings that week as killer storms struck from the Philippines to North Carolina. With rage and rain, an increasingly overheated, climate-changed Mother Nature briefly reclaimed some of her territory, which we had defiled, dividing it up into endlessly buildable lots all the way to the high-tide line, pocking it with hog farms, studding it with nuclear power plants. Hurricane Florence and Super Typhoon Mangkhut flooded the works, making the whole sodden mess hers again, at least for a time, and sending a signal about what humans and cheetahs are up against in the decades to come.

Unlike Seamus, I haven’t given cheetahs much thought. Still, after he expressed his worries about that cat and his life, I did a little research. Cheetahs, you won’t be surprised to learn, live throughout Africa (northern, eastern, and southern), as well as -- and this was news to me -- in India and Iran. There are only seven or eight thousand cheetahs left on Earth. Once upon a time (and not so long ago) there must have been 100,000. They are speedy and range widely over their habitats. They want to move. They are also killed as pests by farmers, taken as trophies by big-game hunters, and regularly hit by cars careening down the growing number of roads crisscrossing their territories.

Headed Toward Oblivion

I’ve never seen a cheetah in real life. Neither has my son. And, if truth be told, I’m no cheetah champion either. I don't even particularly like tabby cats. Still, I found that, in the wake of our conversation, I didn’t want to live in a world without them either.

In 2012, when Seamus was born, 196 species of mammals were already “critically endangered,” the animals closest to extinction. Today 199 are in this most endangered category and 37 more species than when he was born are “endangered,” the next level down, according to the “Red Lists” maintained by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. We don’t see this dramatic decline of species variety in our little corner of the world. It’s all squirrels and raccoons here and they seem to be winning always, but what scientists are calling “the sixth extinction” is as real as the possum now going through my recycling bin.

From cheetahs and other endangered big mammals, it’s only a short hop to what environmental reporter Elizabeth Kolbert says are “a third of all fresh-water mollusks, a third of sharks and rays,[...] a fifth of all reptiles, and a sixth of all birds” that are “headed toward oblivion.” And it’s but another short hop to other forms of obliteration and climate collapse, including the rapid decline of coral reefs, the growth of ocean dead zones, the retreat of sub-Arctic boreal forests, the “new-normal” of a raging fire season, the cracking and melting of what was once the strongest ice in the Arctic...

I could, of course, go on, but the mind shudders. Or thought of another way, the mind shutters. It forms a protective shell against what it can't truly take in -- or, at least, what it can’t comprehend without radical change.

Seamus and I could head deeper into the world of the potentially vanishing cheetah. I could find a cheetah sanctuary in southern Africa and encourage him to use his piggy bank coins to “adopt” one of those cats. But I haven’t gone there yet. I haven’t told him why cheetahs are teetering on the edge of oblivion. We haven’t started talking about why people kill such animals for sport or how increasingly few truly wild corners of this planet are left for “wild animals.”

Still, I must admit that, after our conversation, I started to wonder why I hadn’t taken his cheetah angst and turned it into the sort of teachable moment that parents are supposed to love when it comes to all that’s wrong in the world. Could my mind have been shuddering and shuttering at the same time? Might I have feared sinking into an abiding helplessness in the face of catastrophic climate change and passing that on to my son?

I mean... what in the world can I -- or Seamus -- really do about the fate of the cheetah? About the fate of the whole miraculous wild world? What in the world could I really teach my child to do?

I don’t want you to think that our family does nothing. My husband and I do what we can and frame it for our kids in the context of ecological responsibility. We live below the poverty line in intentional simplicity. We grow vegetables and conserve water. We eat a largely vegetarian diet, compost, and brew our own beer. We have solar panels and we shower only when necessary. We live in a dense urban area and can both walk to work. We don’t fly a lot and drive only when necessary. None of these are exactly radical sacrifices, but they are not nothing either.

Still, they aren’t faintly enough to save the cheetahs... or ourselves, for that matter.

Two Minutes to Midnight

Remembering my own fears as a six year-old, my son’s seem decontextualized and vague. And thank God for that. As a child, I lived in concentrated, daily, physical dread of nuclear war.

When I was six years old, in 1980, the Cold War was still a hot worry and, for reasons I’ll explain, I already lived in terror of becoming extinct.

In that very year, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the hands of its famed Doomsday Clock from nine to seven minutes to nuclear midnight, chiding the Soviet Union and the United States for acting like “‘nucleo-holics, drunks who continue to insist that the drink being consumed is positively ‘the last one,’ but who can always find a good excuse for ‘just one more round.’”

In the spring of 1979, my family and I had driven from our home in Baltimore to the mountains of West Virginia to stay with friends after the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania suffered a critical meltdown. We lived less than a two-hour drive from that ill-fated plant, which went critical on March 28th -- just days before my fifth birthday. We stayed with our friends for two weeks. I have a vague memory that their similarly aged daughter and I had the same flowered corduroy overalls and bonded over how painful wearing our hair in pigtails could be.

But mostly I was afraid. So afraid. Nuclear disaster seemed both real and imminent to me then -- and no wonder I felt that way. My parents, Phil Berrigan and Liz McAlister, were well-known antinuclear activists, as well as members of a radical Christian community of people committed to nonviolent resistance to war and nuclear culture. In those days, it seemed to me that all they did was focus on nuclear weapons and nuclear power, while experimenting with different ways to get other people to acknowledge the terrible danger we were all in. Their daily focus was on rising up against those who were making the bad decisions that left this planet prone to a nuclear Armageddon instead of ensuring a future for all of us.

At six, I already had a front row seat at their experiments. Or, more accurately, there were no seats. Like everyone else, I stood. Over and over and over again, I watched as my parents and their friends and fellow travelers in the peace movement of that time made dramatic, noisy, provocative messes all over Washington, D.C., and beyond. They dug graves on the parade ground at the Pentagon. They made giant cardboard warheads painted with the American and Soviet flags and set them afire in front of the building that housed the Pentagon’s nuclear division.

Men dressed as specters screamed, moaned, and laughed maniacally, while other friends dusted themselves with ashes and writhed on the ground in front of the White House. Women cut off their hair and burned it in a bowl on the steps of the Pentagon’s river entrance (from which I can still conjure up the cloying, sick smell of nuclear death that wafted over us that morning). I can remember my father -- more than once -- pulling a bottle of blood from his coat pocket and hurling it as high as he could at the pillars of the Pentagon, so that it would drip dramatically down the white marble.

My parents and their friends made such messes at least 100 times in attempting to remind a distracted public that nuclear war could be imminent and that it was both unwinnable and close to inevitable unless the two superpowers made the decision to disarm. I certainly wasn’t their target audience, but I doubt anyone saw what they did more often than me. Most people -- even Pentagon employees -- caught such mini-spectacles just once or twice a year. I saw it repeatedly and nearly 40 years later, I’m still freaking out about it.

After all, today the danger isn’t the mutual assured destruction tango of the massive superpowers. There are nine nuclear weapons states with an estimated 14,500 nuclear weapons and quarrels aplenty between some of them. Just imagine that in a “limited” nuclear war between India and Pakistan up to 20 million people could die from the blasts, fire, and radiation, while a nuclear winter could be triggered in which, it is believed, up to a billion people might starve to death. And keep in mind that the technology has been democratized to a point where some analysts fear that a “dirty bomb” detonated by some non-state actor might be more likely than an Israeli or Pakistani nuclear strike or, for that matter, a post-Cold War faceoff between the Russians or the Chinese and ourselves.

Keep in mind as well that we’re no longer at seven minutes to nuclear midnight. We’re now at two minutes, according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and the clock is still ticking. As the president and CEO of that publication put it at the beginning of this year: "In 2017, world leaders failed to respond effectively to the looming threats of nuclear war and climate change, making the world security situation more dangerous than it was a year ago -- and as dangerous as it has been since World War II."

Hope, Not Fear

Some people find the prospect of Trump's small hands on the nuclear button particularly unsettling, but the capacity to destroy the world and the notion that a nuclear war might in any sense be winnable made Washington a "crazytown" long before he hit the Oval Office. The United States may not have detonated a nuclear warhead as an act of war since August 1945, but it’s spent an incredible fortune endlessly developing its nuclear arsenal and continues to do so. The 30-year “modernization” of that arsenal alone (started under the president who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his urge to abolish them) is expected to cost some $1.7 trillion dollars. And the U.S. has already been spending about $20 billion a year to maintain the U.S. nuclear advantage and that is set to increase under President Trump.

As the dangers and the dollars rise, nuclear weapons aren’t even a concern or a preoccupation around here, much less a worry. They represent little but minor background noise in this country. Catastrophic climate change is so much more likely to claim front-page real estate these days with the epic storms, fires, and floods that occur ever more often. But the big question is: What do we do about it (especially in the age of Donald Trump)? How do we conquer our fears with action? And what kind of action will that be?

Those are hard questions to answer. My parents answered them one way and even though their answers terrified me, I appreciate that they tried -- and that, at 78, my mother is still trying. (She is in jail now, awaiting trial for trespass and property destruction at the Kings Bay Naval Submarine Base in Georgia.)

Save the cheetahs almost seems simple by comparison!

The human polluting of the planet with the emissions from the burning of fossil fuels represents a slower-paced Armageddon than the red-button pushing “we begin bombing in five minutes” of thermonuclear warfare. But they are both too big for any one of us to hold alone: me or you or my six-year-old son. Today, at 44, facing a world in which there are now two forms of potential humanly induced global annihilation -- the fast and slow ones -- I don’t simply want to dump them on Seamus.

It’s true that the last decades have brought us closer to the nuclear brink even as the world slowly warms toward another kind of annihilation entirely, but for so many, fear doesn’t activate. It doesn’t lead to meaningful change. In fact, it’s just as likely to shutter us all in.

So I don’t want my son’s fears to be my starting point -- or his. I want to start with his love, his hope. Save the cheetahs!

Frida Berrigan, a TomDispatch regular, writes the Little Insurrections blog for WagingNonviolence.org, is the author of It Runs In The Family: On Being Raised By Radicals and Growing Into Rebellious Motherhood, and lives in New London, Connecticut.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, Beverly Gologorsky's novel Every Body Has a Story and Tom Engelhardt's A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, and John Feffer's dystopian novel Splinterlands.