Who Cares? Not Them, Not It, Not Him, Not (Evidently) Us

By Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch

21 December 17

 

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Who Cares?
Not Them, Not It, Not Him, Not (Evidently) Us

et’s start with the universe and work our way in. Who cares? Not them because as far as we know they aren’t there. As far as we know, no one exists in our galaxy or perhaps anywhere else but us (and the other creatures on this all-too-modest planet of ours). So don’t count on any aliens out there caring what happens to humanity. They won’t.

As for it -- Earth -- the planet itself can’t, of course, care, no matter what we do to it.  And I’m sure it won’t be news to you that, when it comes to him -- and I mean, of course, President Donald J. Trump, who reputedly has a void where the normal quotient of human empathy might be -- don’t give it a second’s thought.  Beyond himself, his businesses, and possibly (just possibly) his family, he clearly couldn’t give less of a damn about us or, for that matter, what happens to anyone after he departs this planet.

As for us, the rest of us here in the United States at least, we already know something about the nature of our caring.  A Yale study released last March indicated that 70% of us -- a surprising but still less than overwhelming number (given the by-now-well-established apocalyptic dangers involved) -- believe that global warming is actually occurring.  Less than half of us, however, expect to be personally harmed by it.  So, to quote the eminently quotable Alfred E. Newman, "What, me worry?"

Tell that, by the way, to the inhabitants of Ojai and other southern California hotspots -- infernos, actually -- being reduced to cinders this December, a month that not so long ago wasn’t significant when it came to fires in that state.  But such blazes should have been no surprise, thanks to the way fire seasons are lengthening on this warming planet.  A burning December is simply part of what the governor of California, on surveying the fire damage recently, dubbed “the new normal” -- just as ever more powerful Atlantic hurricanes, growing increasingly fierce as they pass over the warming waters of the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico on their way to batter the United States, are likely to be another new normal of our American world. 

In the wake of the hottest year on record, we all now live on a new-normal planet, which means a significantly more extreme one.  Perhaps it’s fitting, then, that the political version of that new normal involves a wildly overheated, overbearing, over-hyped, over-tweeted president (even if only 60-odd percent of us believe that he could truly harm us).  He’s a man who, as the New York Times reported recently, begins to boil with doubt and disturbance if he doesn’t find himself in the headlines, the focus of cable everything, for even a day or two.  He’s a man who seems to thrive only when the pot is boiling and when he’s the center of the universe.  And what a world we’ve prepared for such an incendiary figure!  (More on that later.)

We're all now immersed in an evolving Trumpocalypse.  In a sense, we were there even before The Donald entered the Oval Office.  Just consider what it meant to elect a visibly disturbed human being to the highest office of the most powerful, potentially destructive nation on Earth.  What does that tell you?  One possibility: given the near majority of American voters who sent him to the White House, by campaign 2016 we were already living in a deeply disturbed country.  And considering the coming of 1% elections, the growth of plutocracy, the blooming of a new Gilded Age whose wealth disparities must already be competitive with its nineteenth-century predecessor, the rise of the national security state, our endless wars (now turning “generational”), the increasing militarization of this country, and the demobilization of its people, to mention only a few twenty-first-century American developments, that should hardly be surprising.

Could Donald Trump Be the End of Evolutionary History?

Recently, as I was mulling over the extremity of this Trumpian moment, a depiction of evolution from my youth popped into my head.  Sometimes back then, such illustrations, as I remember them, began with a fish-like creature flippering its way out of the water to be transformed into a reptile, but this one, known as the "March of Progress," started with a hunched over ape-like creature.  What followed were a series of figures that, left to right, grew ever more Homo-sapiens-like and ever more upright to the last guy, a muscular-looking fellow walking oh-so-erectly.

He, of course, was a proud specimen of us and we -- it went without saying at the time -- were the proud end of the line on this planet.  We were it, progress personified!  Even in my youth, however, we were also in the process of updating that evolutionary end point.  At the height of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, the fear of another kind of end, one that might truly be the end of everything, had become a nightmarish commonplace in our lives.

One night almost 60 years ago, for instance, I can still vividly remember myself on my hands and knees crawling through the rubble of an atomically devastated city.  It was just a nightmare, of course, but of a sort that was anything but uncommon for those of us growing up then.  And there were times -- especially during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 -- when those nuclear nightmares left the world of dreams and pop culture for everyday life.  And even before that, if you were a child, you regularly experienced the fear of obliteration, as the air raid sirens wailed outside your classroom window, the radio on your teacher’s desk broadcast warnings from Conelrad, and you “ducked and covered” under your flimsy desk.

With the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991, such fears receded, though they shouldn’t have, since by then, in a world of spreading nuclear states, we already knew about “nuclear winter.” What that meant should have been terrifying.  A perfectly imaginable nuclear war, not between superpowers but regional powers like India and Pakistan, could put so much smoke, so many particulates, into the atmosphere as to absorb sunlight for years, radically cooling the planet and possibly starving out most of humanity.

Only in our moment, however, have such nuclear fears returned in a significant way.  Under the circumstances, more than half a century after that March of Progress imagery became popular, if we were to provisionally update it, we might have to add a singularly recognizable figure to the far right side of that diorama (appropriately enough): a large but slightly stooped man with a jut-chin, a flaming face, and a distinctive orange comb-over. 

Which brings us to a straightforward enough question: Could Donald Trump prove to be the end of evolutionary history? The answer, however provisionally, is that he could. At a minimum, right now he qualifies as the most dangerous man on the planet. He might indeed be the final stopping spot (or at least the person who pointed the way toward it) for human history, for everything that led to this moment, to us.

What Rough Beast, Its Hour Come Round at Last...?

Whatever you do, however, don’t just blame Donald Trump for this.  He was simply the particularly unsettling version of Homo sapiens ushered into the White House on a backlash vote of dissatisfaction in 2016.  When he got there, he unexpectedly found powers beyond compare awaiting him like so many loaded guns.  As was true with the two presidents who preceded him, he automatically became not just the commander-in-chief of this country but its assassin-in-chief; that is, he found himself in personal control of an armada of drone aircraft that could be sent just about anywhere on Earth at his command to kill just about anyone of his choosing.  At his beck and call, he also had the equivalent of what historian Chalmers Johnson once called the president’s own private army (now, armies): both the CIA irregulars Johnson was familiar with and the U.S. military’s vast, secretive Special Operations forces.  Above all, however, he found himself in charge of the planet’s largest nuclear arsenal, weaponry that he and he alone could order into use.

In short, like this country’s other presidents since August 1945, he was fully weaponized and capable of singlehandedly turning this planet, or significant parts of it, into an instant inferno, a wasteland of -- in his incendiary phrase in relation to North Korea -- “fire and fury.”  On January 20, 2017, in other words, he became the personification of a duck-and-cover planet (even though, as had been true since the 1950s, there was really nowhere to hide).  It made no difference that he himself was woefully ignorant about the nature and power of such weaponry.

And speaking of planetary infernos, he also found himself weaponized when it came to a second set of instruments of ultimate destruction about which he was no less ignorant and to which he was even more in thrall.  He brought to the Oval Office -- Make America Great Again! -- a nostalgia for his fossil-fuelized childhood world of the 1950s.  Weaponized by Big Energy, he arrived prepared to ensure that the wealthiest and most powerful country on the planet would clear the way for yet more pipelines, fracking, offshore drilling, and just about every other imaginable form of exploitation of oil, natural gas, and coal (but not alternative energy). All of this was intended to create, as he proclaimed, a new “golden age,” not just of American energy independence but of “energy dominance” on a planetary scale. And here's what that really means: through his executive orders and the decisions of the stunning range of climate deniers and Big Oil enthusiasts he appointed to key posts in his administration, he can indeed ensure that ever more greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of fossil fuels will enter the atmosphere in the years to come, creating the basis for another kind of apocalypse.

On the promotion of global warming in his first year in office, it’s reasonable to say, with a certain Trumpian pride, that the president has once again made the United States the planet’s truly “exceptional” nation. In November, only five months after President Trump announced that the U.S. would withdraw as soon as possible from the Paris climate agreement to fight global warming, Syria (of all countries) finally signed onto it, the last nation on Earth to do so.  That meant this country was truly... well, you can't say left out in the "cold," not on this planet anymore, but quite literally exceptional in its single-minded efforts to ensure the destruction of the very environment that had for so long ensured humanity’s well-being and made the creation of those illustrations of evolutionary progress possible.

Still, you can’t just blame President Trump for this either.  He’s not responsible for the ingenuity, that gift of evolution, that led us, wittingly in the case of nuclear weapons and (initially) unwittingly in the case of climate change, to take powers once relegated to the gods and place them in our own hands -- as of January 20, 2017, in fact, in the hands of Donald J. Trump.  Don’t blame him alone for the fact that the most apocalyptic moment in our history might come not via an asteroid from outer space, but from Trump Tower.

So here we are, living with a man whose ultimate urge seems to be to bring the world to a boil around himself.  It’s possible that he might indeed be the first president since Harry Truman in 1945 to order the use of nuclear weapons.  As Nobel Prize winner Beatrice Fihn, director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, recently commented, the world might be only “a tiny tantrum” away from nuclear war in Asia.  At the very least, he may already be helping to launch a new global nuclear arms race in which countries from South Korea and Japan to Iran and Saudi Arabia could find themselves with world-ending arsenals, leaving nuclear winter in the hands of... well, don’t even think about it.

Now, imagine that amended evolutionary chart again or perhaps -- in honor of The Donald’s recent announcement that the U.S. was recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital -- call to mind poet William Butler Yeats’s words about a world in which “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity,” while some “rough beast, its hour come round at last” is slouching “towards Bethlehem to be born.”  Think then of what a genuine horror it is that so much world-ending power is in the hands of any single human being, no less such a disturbed and disturbing one. 

Of course, while Donald Trump might represent the end of the line that began in some African valley so many millennia ago, nothing on this planet is graven in stone, not when it comes to us.  We still have the potential freedom to choose otherwise, to do otherwise.  We have the capacity for wonders as well as horrors.  We have the ability to create as well as to destroy.

In the phrase of Jonathan Schell, the fate of the Earth remains not just in his hands, but in ours.  If they, those nonexistent aliens, don’t care and the planet can’t care and the alien in the White House doesn’t give a damn, then it’s up to us to care.  It’s up to us to protest, resist, and change, to communicate and convince, to fight for life rather than its destruction. If you’re of a certain age, all you have to do is look at your children or grandchildren (or those of your friends and neighbors) and you know that no one, Donald Trump included, should have the right to consign them to the flames. What did they ever do to end up in a hell on Earth?

2018 is on the horizon.  Let's make it a better time, not the end of time. 

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Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He is a fellow of the Nation Institute and runs TomDispatch.com. His latest book is Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, as well as John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, John Feffer's dystopian novel Splinterlands, Nick Turse’s Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead, and Tom Engelhardt's Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.

How Democrats Can Win the Spin War Over the Trump Tax Cuts

By Frank Rich, New York Magazine

21 December 17

Most weeks, New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich speaks with contributor Alex Carp about the biggest stories in politics and culture. Today: the political effects of the GOP tax cuts, the state of relations between the Trump White House and Special Counsel Bob Mueller, and Steven Spielberg’s The Post.

s the Republican tax bill hurtles toward being a done deal, opposition to it has soared, with two-thirds of the public now seeing it as a boon to the wealthy, according to a CNN poll. What will be the consequences of pushing through something that’s so deeply unpopular?

You don’t need to hear from me all the ways in which this egregious bill is a boon to the wealthiest Americans at the expense of everyone else. But the immediate political consequences of the bill are less clearcut. Yes, as things stand now, the bill has the “lowest level of public support for any major piece of legislation enacted in the past three decades,” as USA Today put it; even Obamacare polled higher upon passage in 2009. But it would be foolish for Democrats to assume this makes 2018 a slam dunk: Among other gimmicks, the bill is cleverly structured so that most Americans will see some sort of tax cut, however nominal, in their paychecks next year. Much of the bill’s dire longer-term impact on the middle class and the poor won’t kick in by the 2018 midterms.

This means that the political consequences of the tax bill’s passage could be up for grabs next year. Already, the GOP’s biggest donors, the bill’s biggest beneficiaries, have been pouring money into campaigns to sell it to voters. It’s up to Democrats to get into the trenches with tough and clever counter-messaging that will explain in concrete and un-wonky terms why the bill is a disaster for most Americans. Mere scare words (eg., Nancy Pelosi’s invocation of “Armageddon”) will not reach those turned-off-by-Trump suburbanites who have been defecting from the GOP in special elections this year, from Virginia to Alabama.

The midterms could well be a wave election but not if Democrats fail to make their case and instead repeat the Clinton campaign error of expecting anti-Trumpism to do most of the work for them. In that regard, I have to confess to being baffled by the prevailing liberal political spot on television these days — the ad in which the Democratic billionaire Tom Steyer calls for Trump’s impeachment. David Axelrod was exactly right when he called it “more of a vanity project than a call for action.” What is the ad’s point after all? As long as Congress remains in GOP hands, there will be no impeachment. Period. What anti-Trump voter (now nearly two-thirds of the country) needs to be reminded that this president is unfit for the White House? This ad amounts to little more than a masturbatory diversion, wasting time, energy, and money that could instead be poured into the blistering economic argument required to flip one or both chambers to the Democrats.

Nonetheless, though the Democrats cannot count on Trump doing their work for them, he may yet be a help. He has oversold the tax bill’s potential dividends with his usual panoply of lies and misinformation from the start, and will keep doing so, since it’s the only legislative victory of his presidency. It’s also possible that with this bill in hand — the bill that Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan have cared most passionately about — the GOP will feel free to foil other Trump legislation (if there is any), thus raising already dangerous levels of pique and self-immolation even higher. That’s one unintended consequence of this atrocious legislation that may actually prove enjoyable.

Robert Mueller’s team is expected to meet with President Trump’s lawyers in the coming days, following a wave of partisan attacks on the Mueller investigation.  Will the meeting smooth things over, or is this the beginning of the end of the White House’s cooperation?

Since Thanksgiving, the White House and its auxiliaries, led by Fox News, has been seizing on anything it can to smear the Mueller investigation as biased and corrupt. Many feel, not without reason, that this disinformation campaign is a prelude to Trump firing Mueller, no matter how frequently the White House denies it has any such plan in mind. In any case, nothing will be smoothed over.

But the Washington Post report this week that Trump’s lawyers are meeting with Mueller’s to sound them out on when the investigation will reach its conclusion adds another fascinating element to the portrait of the president’s precarious mental state. As the Post explains, Trump has fully bought into his lawyers’ repeated predictions that the Mueller probe is about to wrap up — an imaginary deadline they first said would be reached by Thanksgiving and then by Christmas and that they now say will be early next year. Though no one can say with certainty what the virtually leakproof Mueller operation’s timetable will be, the Post did find that members of his team have said that their work would take most of 2018, at the least. Yet Trump has completely bought into the fantasy that his long Mueller nightmare is over and that his exoneration is around the corner.

Those sympathetic to Trump are constantly giving blind quotes to the press about the ineptitude of his legal team. That may well be the case. But what’s more revealing is that Trump is so insulated from reality — and surely not just about the Mueller investigation — that he would believe the phony optimism peddled by his lawyers despite publicly known developments (the plea deal of Michael Flynn, for instance) suggesting that the probe is accelerating, not retreating. A 4-year-old who believes in Santa Claus is arguably more in touch with reality than the ostensible leader of the most powerful nation on Earth.

This weekend Steven Spielberg releases The Post, his movie about the publication of the Pentagon Papers and, more broadly, an adversarial press facing off against the White House.  Will his film rally audiences to real news? 

It is hard to imagine a better-timed movie than Spielberg’s retelling of the Post’s decision to join the New York Times in its historic legal and journalistic battle to publish the classified internal history of Vietnam War decision-making, the Pentagon Papers, in 1971, after the Nixon Administration attempted to stop the presses. And the film takes on another timely issue that sets it apart from, say, Spotlight (with which it shares a screenwriter): the role of a brave female corporate pioneer — Katharine Graham, the Post’s publisher, inevitably played by Meryl Streep — in leading her paper into an existential battle despite the often condescending opposition of most of the powerful men in her business orbit and her elite Georgetown social circle.

The focus on Graham is a refreshing creative decision on the part of the filmmakers (which includes several female producers): She might well have been dramatized as second fiddle to the Post’s flamboyant and crusading editor, Ben Bradlee, particularly since Bradlee is portrayed by Tom Hanks. But even Hanks’s performance defers generously to Streep’s Graham; his characterization is determinedly non-showy, an unexpected departure from both the public Bradlee persona and the bravura Jason Robards turn in All the President’s Men.

That said, I don’t for a second believe that this movie will be seen by many Americans who dismiss legitimate news media as “fake news” or win over any who wander in by default because they couldn’t get into The Last Jedi. Not unlike those Tom Steyer impeachment ads, The Post will preach, however eloquently, to the choir.