These days, everyone has experienced a little moment of shock when the unimaginable became American. In my case, it was a relatively small thing in my hometown that recently reminded me I was in a different universe. New York City has always had one of the great urban public transportation systems. No one ever claimed it was a thing of beauty to look at or ride, but it got you, with remarkable efficiency and without complaint, from anywhere you happened to be to just about anywhere you wanted to go.
No longer. New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), which runs the city’s bus and subway lines, finds itself (like many other transportation systems across urban America) facing a sudden financial “shortfall” -- in the MTA's case, almost $400 million, which means severe cuts in service just when we couldn’t be more in need of public transportation. Whole subway and bus lines lopped off or significantly scaled back in places like the borough of Queens, which guarantees that, for many, getting to and from work, especially in the off-hours, will be a nightmare, or in some cases for late night workers essentially impossible. “The cuts,” reported the New York Times, “would eliminate two subway lines, create more crowding on subways and buses, and reduce frequency at off-peak hours. Service on dozens of bus lines would be reduced or ended, and disabled riders would find it more difficult to get around.”
But the prospective change that stunned me, that left me feeling I was indeed living in a new America, was the MTA’s decision to “phase out” what, when I was a kid, we used to call “bus passes.” Today’s version of these still ensures that any student can get to any school and back for free or for at most half-fare. According to the MTA’s latest plans, all students will be paying full fare on public transport by 2011.
This has one practical meaning. If you’re poor and young in New York and your family can’t afford approximately $4 a day in subway or bus fares, you’re stuck in your neighborhood, maybe at the crumbling, overcrowded school around the corner. No hope of better. The finest, most competitive schools in the city’s public school system will be left for those who can afford to get to them. It’s a small thing on the scale of this planet’s problems, but it tells you a good deal about the direction this country is heading in and even if the MTA reverses its decision under pressure, the thinking behind it goes with an America I’ve never known.
I offer this as my small addition to Orville Schell’s listing below of what works and what (mostly) doesn’t work in this formerly fair country of ours. Tom
The Melting of America
The Story of a Can’t-Do Nation
By Orville SchellLately, I’ve been studying the climate-change induced melting of glaciers in the Greater Himalaya. Understanding the cascading effects of the slow-motion downsizing of one of the planet’s most magnificent landforms has, to put it politely, left me dispirited. Spending time considering the deleterious downstream effects on the two billion people (from the North China Plain to Afghanistan) who depend on the river systems -- the Yellow, Yangtze, Mekong, Salween, Irrawaddy, Brahmaputra, Ganges, Indus, Amu Darya and Tarim -- that arise in these mountains isn’t much of an antidote to malaise either.
If you focus on those Himalayan highlands, a deep sense of loss creeps over you -- the kind that comes from contemplating the possible end of something once imagined as immovable, immutable, eternal, something that has unexpectedly become vulnerable and perishable as it has slipped into irreversible decline. Those magnificent glaciers, known as the Third Pole because they contain the most ice in the world short of the two polar regions, are now wasting away on an overheated planet and no one knows what to do about it.
You can already see a new style of writing about China emerging in our American world. The New York Times set it off recently by publishing a front-page piece on a $3.4 billion Chinese investment in one of the planet’s last great copper reserves -- in Afghanistan. In passing, reporter Michael Wines also pointed out that Chinese energy companies had gained a stronger foothold in the future exploitation of Iraq’s massive oil reserves than had U.S. multinationals. The ironies were legion and painfully visible.
Our two wars have been sucking us dry in two countries where state-owned Chinese companies have just scored significant economic victories. “While the United States spends hundreds of billions of dollars fighting the Taliban and Al Qaeda [in Afghanistan],” wrote Wines, “China is securing raw material for its voracious economy. The world’s superpower is focused on security. Its fastest rising competitor concentrates on commerce.”
Already, the follow-up pieces are starting to come out and heady cocktails they are: one part awe and one part bitterness mixed with one part despair. In Esquire online, Thomas P.M. Barnett put it this way: “Worse still: Will the rest of the world end up profiting from our blood and money?... The reason why Obama neglects to mention any regional interests like Pakistan's? Admitting the larger logic of regionalization would make too painfully obvious the nature of our current strategic bankruptcy. Because it would suggest that the only 'victory' to be found would be 'won' by those neighboring powers who did nothing to stabilize the situation. In other words, their 'treasure' and our 'blood.'" At Foreign Policy online, Stephen M. Walt chimed in: “While we've been running around playing whack-a-mole with the Taliban and 'investing' billions each year in the corrupt Karzai government, China has been investing in things that might actually be of some value, like a big copper mine.”
Under George W. Bush, the U.S. set out, in part, to turn the Greater Middle East into an American “lake” of energy reserves via two invasions, and you know how that worked out. The Chinese, on the other hand, only last year sent their warships abroad -- to hunt pirates as part of an international flotilla in the Gulf of Aden -- for the first time since the eunuch Zheng He commanded a Ming dynasty armada that reached Africa six centuries ago. Unfortunately, as Michael Klare, TomDispatch regular and author of Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy, makes clear below, China’s leaders are as unlikely to learn from our deepest mistakes as they were 30-odd years ago when China’s post-Cultural Revolution leadership looked our way and made a logical but calamitous decision: that the auto industry -- all those millions of individual cars burning fossil fuels -- would be a crucial pillar of their future industrial development.
Right now, they may still seem to be acting out a key lesson of this American moment: Stay off the hard stuff. You know, all that advanced weaponry (and the military-industrial complex that goes with it), all those aircraft carrier battle groups, all those “expeditionary forces” ready to be sent thousands of miles from home to fight “little wars.” Once again, however, as Klare suggests, our present symbols of “power” are likely to be their paragon and the future will be a mess. It’s not enough, it seems, to make money, not war. Once you have the money, it has to be spent on something and our imaginations remain so limited.
Too bad. Here’s where you could only wish the future might be a little less predictable. No such luck, Klare tells us, when it comes to military power as the measure of greatness on planet Earth in the second decade of the twenty-first century. Tom
The Second Decade
The World in 2020
By Michael T. KlareAs the second decade of the twenty-first century begins, we find ourselves at one of those relatively rare moments in history when major power shifts become visible to all. If the first decade of the century witnessed profound changes, the world of 2009 nonetheless looked at least somewhat like the world of 1999 in certain fundamental respects: the United States remained the world’s paramount military power, the dollar remained the world’s dominant currency, and NATO remained its foremost military alliance, to name just three.
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: We’re back for 2010! Many thanks to those of you who ended the year with a contribution to the site -- or purchased something off one of our Amazon links. Your generosity was startling and will help make this year a good and, I hope, expansive one for us. One small note about last year. In his final Bill Moyers Journal of 2009, Moyers offered his favorite book of the year: “There's one book in particular I would put in everybody's stocking if I could. It's not new -- it was actually published three years ago. But I read it again this month, and found its message more relevant than ever.” It was Chalmers Johnson’s Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, and since Johnson has been such a mainstay of this site and it’s a book we’ve long recommended, we, at TomDispatch, took pride in the moment and didn’t want to let it pass without mention. Tom]
An American World of War
What to Watch for in 2010
By Tom Engelhardt and Nick Turse
According to the Chinese calendar, 2010 is the Year of the Tiger. We don’t name our years, but if we did, this one might prospectively be called the Year of the Assassin.
We, of course, think of ourselves as something like the peaceable kingdom. After all, the shock of September 11, 2001 was that “war” came to “the homeland,” a mighty blow delivered against the very symbols of our economic, military, and -- had Flight 93 not gone down in a field in Pennsylvania -- political power.
Since that day, however, war has been a stranger in our land. With the rarest of exceptions, like Army psychiatrist Major Nidal Hasan’s massacre at Fort Hood, Texas, this country has remained a world without war or any kind of mobilization for war. No other major terrorist attacks, not even victory gardens, scrap-metal collecting, or rationing. And certainly no war tax to pay for our post-9/11 trillion-dollar “expeditionary forces” sent into battle abroad. Had we the foresight to name them, the last few years domestically might have reflected a different kind of carnage -- 2006, the Year of the Subprime Mortgage; 2007, the Year of the Bonus; 2008, the Year of the Meltdown; 2009, the Year of the Bailout. And perhaps some would want to label 2010, prematurely or not, the Year of Recovery.
Although our country delivers war regularly to distant lands in the name of our “safety,” we don’t really consider ourselves at war (despite the endless talk of “supporting our troops”), and the money that has simply poured into Pentagon coffers, and then into weaponry and conflicts is, with rare exceptions, never linked to economic distress in this country. And yet, if we are no nation of warriors, from the point of view of the rest of the world we are certainly the planet’s foremost war-makers. If money talks, then war may be what we care most about as a society and fund above all else, with the least possible discussion or debate.
In fact, according to military expert William Hartung, the Pentagon budget has risen in every year of the new century, an unprecedented run in our history. We dominate the global arms trade, monopolizing almost 70% of the arms business in 2008, with Italy coming in a vanishingly distant second. We put more money into the funding of war, our armed forces, and the weaponry of war than the next 25 countries combined (and that’s without even including Iraq and Afghan war costs). We garrison the planet in a way no empire or nation in history has ever done. And we plan for the future, for “the next war” -- on the ground, on the seas, and in space -- in a way that is surely unique. If our two major wars of the twenty-first century in Iraq and Afghanistan are any measure, we also get less bang for our buck than any nation in recent history.
So, let’s pause a moment as the New Year begins and take stock of ourselves as what we truly are: the preeminent war-making machine on planet Earth. Let’s peer into the future, and consider just what the American way of war might have in store for us in 2010. Here are 10 questions, the answers to which might offer reasonable hints as to just how much U.S. war efforts are likely to intensify in the Greater Middle East, as well as Central and South Asia, in the year to come.
[Holiday Note for TomDispatch Readers: With this post, TomDispatch closes (as it does every year at about this time) until January 4th. So here’s a last thanks to readers for the generosity with which you’ve contributed to the site this year, for all your letters (the university of my later life) which I always read and answer when I can, for signing up new “recruits,” and for passing TD pieces around. You’ve been wonderful in 2009! As this year ends, I would also like to offer heartfelt thanks to the TomDispatch crew -- Joe Duax of the Nation Institute, who keeps the site humming flawlessly; Associate Editor Nick Turse, who not only regularly writes powerful pieces for TD but, when needed, is the fastest researcher I’ve ever met; and eagle-eyed copyeditors Christopher Holmes and Tam Turse, who keep TD as error-free as is humanly possible. Here's a warm welcome as well to new Associate Editor Andy Kroll, just coming aboard the good ship TomDispatch. Tom]
In Nightmares Begin Responsibilities
Why War Will Take No Holiday in 2010
By Tom Engelhardt
Excuse the gloom in the holiday season, but I feel like we’re all locked inside a malign version of the movie Groundhog Day. You remember, the one in which the characters are forced to relive the same 24 hours endlessly. Put more personally, TomDispatch started in November 2001 as an email to friends in response to the first moments of our latest Afghan War. More than eight years later... well, you know the story.
Worse yet, the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll indicates that a startling 58% of Americans, otherwise in a mighty gloomy mood, support the president’s latest “surge” in Afghanistan which will extend that war into the dismal future. And worse than that, in Afghanistan as in Iraq, from the point of view of official Washington, next year won’t really count for much. The crucial decisions on both wars will evidently leapfrog 2010. So, on that score, we might as well just mark the year off on our calendars now.
2010: pure loss. But before I go into the details, let me try this another way.
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: For those of you rushing to make your last minute purchases at Amazon, remember that if you click there from a book link or book-cover image at this site and buy anything, TomDispatch gets a modest cut of your purchase. And in the holiday gifting frenzy, you might consider giving a copy of Rebecca Solnit’s recent book A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster to a friend. It’s fantastic and, unfortunately given the topic, a book for our moment -- or if your friend is in a gloomy mood this holiday season, try picking up Solnit’s Hope in the Dark or her incandescent little book, A Field Guide to Getting Lost. And to make a rare plug for my own work, those of you who have been reading me at this site and are curious about how we got here, historically speaking, might consider buying a copy of The End of Victory Culture, my history of American triumphalism from its high-point to its crash-and-burn trajectory in Vietnam and again in Iraq and Afghanistan; or, if you’re in the mood for fiction, my portrait of the other world in which I’ve lived my life (as a book editor), The Last Days of Publishing, released in 2003 but eerily up-to-the-second -- I even imagined a Kindle-like machine I dubbed the “Q” -- for this downbeat book publishing moment.]
Just last week, a little air armada of at least five Hellfire-missile-armed unmanned aerial vehicles -- robot planes to you -- attacked an area in North Waziristan in Pakistan’s tribal borderlands, reportedly killing 15 or more people. It’s unclear whether these were all Predator drones or some were the more advanced Reapers -- names that might well have come out of the sci-fi memory banks of the generation now flying them via console from hundreds, or even thousands, of miles away.
Late in the spring of 2010, the first three heavily-armed Reapers will reportedly gain a new all-seeing eye, a video system capable of filming “an area, two-and-a-half miles around, from 12 different angles” and be able to provide “up to 10 video streams simultaneously to 10 different users on the ground ‘within a wide area.’” In the future, improved versions of the system will be able to provide up to 65 video streams simultaneously. The system’s name is “Gorgon Stare.” The stare of a Gorgon, of course, comes from the deepest annals of sci-fi, ancient Greek-style, and could turn a human to stone. The stares of our Gorgons are far more likely to turn stone to rubble.
So consider the irony. If you’ve seen any of the Terminator movies or their ilk, you’ve probably noticed that the machines always seem to go after us. Strange, then, that in sci-fi terms if you live in Los Angeles or Topeka, the world of the Terminator films is nowhere in sight. Only if you happen to live in the Pakistani borderlands or in al-Anbar Province, Iraq, could you be pardoned (after viewing some pirated video) if you thought that that grim movie world in which machines implacably hunt and destroy humans was indeed springing into existence over your very skies.
In the meantime, as Rebecca Solnit, who often helps end the year at TomDispatch, points out, it’s our implacably dumb machines that are doing us in. Tom
Terminator 2009
Judgment Days in Copenhagen
By Rebecca SolnitFor Isaac Francisco Solnit, born December 17, 2009
It’s clear now that, from her immoveable titanium bangs to her chaotic approximation of human speech, Sarah Palin is a Terminator cyborg sent from the future to destroy something -- but what? It could be the Republican Party she’ll ravage by herding the fundamentalists and extremists into a place where sane fiscal conservatives and swing voters can’t follow. Or maybe she was sent to destroy civilization at this crucial moment by preaching the gospel of climate-change denial, abetted by tools like the Washington Post, which ran a factually outrageous editorial by her on the subject earlier this month. No one (even her, undoubtedly) knows, but we do know that this month we all hover on the brink.
