TomDispatch.com

[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Even TD knows when it’s beat. Thursday is clearly a media day reserved for pure Trumpery. There’s no point in fighting it, so this site is taking it off. The next post will be on Sunday, July 24th. Tom]

At almost 72, I recently went to The Legend of Tarzan, the IMAX version, with a screen so big I almost stepped inside it and a soundscape so all-enveloping that my already pathetic hearing might have been blown away for good.  Still, however “immersive” the experience was meant to be, I found it so much less thrilling than the 3-D of my childhood.  I’ll never forget watching Fort Ti in 1953 at age nine and hitting the floor the moment the first flaming arrow headed directly for me.

As for Tarzan, what were they thinking in Hollywood?  I watched bemused as the Ape Man flexed his creaking joints, swung from vine to vine, and fought all manner of friend and foe in an effort to be up-to-date.  If you want to see a white savior film that’s more of our moment, check out The Free State of Jones, set in the “jungles” of southern Mississippi in the Civil War era, with plenty of Tarzan-style vines to go around.  All I can say is that, as far as I was concerned, only the animated great apes -- Tarzan’s buddies and rivals -- showed a spark of real life.

Still, I wouldn’t have missed the film for the world. After all, it’s the first action movie that -- as you’ll see from TomDispatch regular Adam Hochschild’s piece today -- has ever based itself in any way on a book I edited, in this case his classic King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa.  As a result, I left the theater filled with wild fantasies.  (Even editors can dream, can't they?)  I began to imagine Who Rules the World?, Noam Chomsky’s latest book, absorbed into a future X-Men: Apocalypse America. Or the late Chalmers Johnson’s Dismantling the Empire as the basis for the next Jason Bourne romp.  Or Ann Jones’s They Were Soldiers at the grim heart of American Sniper: The Next Generation.  Or, in Tarzan-style, Andrew Bacevich’s writing on America’s twenty-first-century Middle Eastern wars as part of a reboot of Lawrence of Arabia -- perhaps King David of Iraq: The Surge to Nowhere.

Now, let me dream on while you read about Adam Hochschild’s encounter with what might be thought of as the latest version of Planet of the Apes. Tom

Me Tarzan, You Adam
How I Met the Ghosts of My Own Work in a Local Multiplex
By Adam Hochschild

Some time ago I wrote a book about one of the great crimes of the last 150 years: the conquest and exploitation of the Congo by King Leopold II of Belgium. When King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa was published, I thought I had found all the major characters in that brutal patch of history. But a few weeks ago I realized that I had left one out: Tarzan.

Let me explain. Although a documentary film based on my book did appear, I often imagined what Hollywood might do with such a story. It would, of course, have featured the avaricious King Leopold, who imposed a slave labor system on his colony to extract its vast wealth in ivory and wild rubber, with millions dying in the process. And it would surely have included the remarkable array of heroic figures who resisted or exposed his misdeeds. Among them were African rebel leaders like Chief Mulume Niama, who fought to the death trying to preserve the independence of his Sanga people; an Irishman, Roger Casement, whose exposure to the Congo made him realize that his own country was an exploited colony and who was later hanged by the British; two black Americans who courageously managed to get information to the outside world; and the Nigerian-born Hezekiah Andrew Shanu, a small businessman who secretly leaked documents to a British journalist and was hounded to death for doing so. Into the middle of this horror show, traveling up the Congo River as a steamboat officer in training, came a young seaman profoundly shocked by what he saw. When he finally got his impressions onto the page, he would produce the most widely read short novel in English, Heart of Darkness.

How could all of this not make a great film?

Read more »

[Note for TomDispatch Readers: I think you're just great! What a response TD subscribers gave to my recent request for donations in a pitch letter themed for honesty. ("Rest assured, TomDispatch is not down to its last dollar; it’s not sinking in a sea of red ink. We’re not going to shut down if you don’t give us something. We’re okay.") It says something about who you are and what this site means to you (and warms my heart). Thanks to so many of you who decided to contribute, TD writers will all get paid a little more this year and I'll have some extra bucks for expenses of all sorts.  It's a godsend and I can't thank you enough.  If there were any of you who meant to give something and were distracted by life before you did, it's never too late.  Just visit our donation page any time. Tom]

Strangely, amid the spike in racial tensions after the killing of two black men by police in Louisiana and Minnesota, and of five white police officers by a black sharpshooter in Dallas, one American reality has gone unmentioned.  The U.S. has been fighting wars -- declared, half-declared, and undeclared -- for almost 15 years and, distant as they are, they’ve been coming home in all sorts of barely noted ways.  In the years in which the U.S. has up-armored globally, the country has also seen an arms race developing on the domestic front.  As vets have returned from their Iraq and Afghan tours of duty, striking numbers of them have gone into police work at a time when American weaponry, vehicles, and military equipment -- including, for instance, MRAPs (mine-resistant ambush protected vehicles) -- have poured off America’s distant battlefields and, via the Pentagon, into police departments nationwide.  And while the police were militarizing, gun companies have been marketing battlefield-style assault rifles to Americans by the millions, at the very moment when it has become ever more possible for citizens to carry weapons of every sort in a concealed or open fashion in public.

The result in Dallas: Micah Johnson, a disturbed Army Reserves veteran, who spent a tour of duty in Afghanistan and practiced military tactics in his backyard, armed with an SKS semi-automatic assault rifle, wearing full body armor, and angry over police killings of black civilians, took out those five white officers.  One of them was a Navy vet who had served three tours of duty in Iraq and another a former Marine who had trained local police for DynCorp, a private contractor, in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Meanwhile, civilian protesters, also armed with assault rifles (quite legal in the streets of Dallas), scattered as the first shots rang out and were, in some cases, taken in by the police as suspects.  And at least two unarmed protesters were wounded by Johnson.  (Think of that, in his terms, as “collateral damage.”)  In the end, he would be killed by a Remotec Andros F5 robot, built by weapons-maker Northrop Grumman, carrying a pound of C4 plastic explosive, and typical of robots that police departments now possess.

In other words, this incident was capped by the first use of deadly force by a drone in the United States.  Consider that a war-comes-home upping of the ante.  Already, reports the Defense One website, makers of military-grade robots -- a burgeoning field for the Pentagon -- are imagining other ways to employ such armed bots not only on our distant battlefields but at home in a future in which they will be “useful, cheap, and ubiquitous,” and capable of Tasing as well as killing.

Of course, among the many things that have also come home from the country’s wars, Predator and Reaper drones are now flying over “the homeland” on missions for the Pentagon, not to mention the FBI, the Border Patrol, and other domestic agencies.  So the future stage is set.  Once you’ve used any kind of drone in the U.S. to kill by remote control, it’s only logical -- given some future extreme situation -- to extend that use to the skies and so consider firing a missile at some U.S. target, as the CIA and the Air Force have been doing regularly for years in places like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. And of course, in our domestic arms race, with small drones commercially available to anyone and the first of them armed (no matter the rudimentary nature of that armament), it’s not hard to imagine a future Micah Johnson, white or black, using one of them sooner or later.  After all, Johnson was already talking about planting “IEDs” (the term for insurgent roadside bombs in our war zones) and a flying IED is a relatively modest step from there.

So, welcome to the “home front,” folks.  And speaking of drones, it’s worth giving a little thought to what might, in fact, still come home, to the sort of example that two administrations have set by turning the president into an assassin-in-chief and regularly creating law for themselves when it comes to the targeting of distant peoples.  In that light, TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon considers America’s Trojan Horse technology of death and just what it may someday smuggle into “the homeland.” Tom

The Trojan Drone
An Illegal Military Strategy Disguised as Technological Advance
By Rebecca Gordon

Think of it as the Trojan Drone, the ultimate techno-weapon of American warfare in these years, a single remotely operated plane sent to take out a single key figure. It's a shiny video game for grown ups -- a Mortal Kombat or Call of Duty where the animated enemies bleed real blood. Just like the giant wooden horse the Greeks convinced the Trojans to bring inside their gates, however, the drone carries something deadly in its belly: a new and illegal military strategy disguised as an impressive piece of technology.

The technical advances embodied in drone technology distract us from a more fundamental change in military strategy. However it is achieved -- whether through conventional air strikes, cruise missiles fired from ships, or by drone -- the United States has now embraced extrajudicial executions on foreign soil. Successive administrations have implemented this momentous change with little public discussion. And most of the discussion we’ve had has focused more on the new instrument (drone technology) than on its purpose (assassination). It’s a case of the means justifying the end. The drones work so well that it must be all right to kill people with them.

Read more »

Think of them as omens of our age.  While global temperatures have been soaring lately -- May was the 13th month in a row to break all-time heat records -- the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration just reported, more parochially, that this was the hottest June on record for the lower 48 states. (USA! USA!)  No state came in below the norm and in the West and Southwest, it was hot as hell. Record hot.

Then consider this: Arctic summer sea ice is heading for oblivion at a remarkable pace (which, since ice reflects sunlight, means that those waters will now be absorbing yet more heat).  In June, that ice was disappearing at a rate 70% faster than the norm.  Looked at over the longer term, as Suzanne Goldenberg of the Guardian explained, “a vast expanse of ice -- an area about twice the size of Texas -- has vanished over the past 30 years, and the rate of that retreat has accelerated.”

By the way, if you want to keep your eye on the horizon for future such omens, a possible 2016 record is already looming when it comes to billion-dollar-plus weather disasters with eight of them so far this year. The average had once been five annually, but in recent years has been around 11.

If you’ll excuse a mixed (but appropriate) metaphor, given the subject TomDispatch regular Michael Klare takes up today, there seem to be an awful lot of canaries in the coal mines at the moment, and wherever you turn, they’re expiring. Klare’s latest report on our fossil-fueled planet suggests that the use of coal, oil, and natural gas will not fall, but actually continue to rise in the next decades and so, of omens, there will be plenty to come. Tom

Hooked!
The Unyielding Grip of Fossil Fuels on Global Life
By Michael T. Klare

Here’s the good news: wind power, solar power, and other renewable forms of energy are expanding far more quickly than anyone expected, ensuring that these systems will provide an ever-increasing share of our future energy supply.  According to the most recent projections from the Energy Information Administration (EIA) of the U.S. Department of Energy, global consumption of wind, solar, hydropower, and other renewables will double between now and 2040, jumping from 64 to 131 quadrillion British thermal units (BTUs).

And here’s the bad news: the consumption of oil, coal, and natural gas is also growing, making it likely that, whatever the advances of renewable energy, fossil fuels will continue to dominate the global landscape for decades to come, accelerating the pace of global warming and ensuring the intensification of climate-change catastrophes.

Read more »

Imagine a secret government facility buried deep in the bowels of a mountain; a deluxe bomb shelter -- encased within dense, almost fissure-less rock -- for top government officials to ride out doomsday.

I did. A lot.

I spent an inordinate amount of time as a child reading everything I could find about a top secret complex -- a White-House-in-waiting, hospital, television studio, government offices, subterranean reservoirs, and who knows what else -- all entombed in a Virginia mountain. It was difficult for a youngster to locate much on it in those pre-Internet days, but what I did find out about Mount Weather fascinated me.

Looking back, I realize that I was captivated, and perhaps subconsciously unnerved, by the prospect of World War III. That future conflict was seemingly omnipresent, looming large in the pop cultural broth in which my brain was regularly bathed. Red Dawn and The Day After offered two possible scenarios for how such a war might be fought -- Vietnam-style in the U.S.A. or as a full-scale nuclear exchange between America and the Soviet Union. The president of that moment suggested that we might be spared the atomic devastation of The Day After through mammoth spending on a space-based missile defense system that, in the cinematic spirit of the moment, critics dubbed “Star Wars.” WarGames, on the other hand, indicated that some combination of dumb luck, a smart computer, and an impossibly young Matthew Broderick would -- at the very last moment -- save the day. (Thanks, Ferris Bueller!) And what child of the 1980s can forget that moment when your last city was destroyed in Atari’s “Missile Command”?

A survey of 1,000 grammar and high-school students conducted by an American Psychiatric Association task force from 1978 to 1980 found “the imminent threat of nuclear annihilation has penetrated deeply into their consciousness.” Their answers to questionnaires “showed that these adolescents are deeply disturbed by the threat of nuclear war, have doubt about the future, and about their own survival,” wrote John Mack, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and a member of the task force. I don’t recall being distressed by the prospect myself, but it certainly caught my attention.

While I was reading and re-reading John Bradley’s lavishly illustrated coffee-table book, World War III: Strategies, Tactics, and Weapons, and playing with my G.I. Joes, TomDispatch regular William Astore was heading deep into another secret government facility buried within a mountain, another ground zero designed to withstand (but by then likely to be incinerated in) a nuclear holocaust. Today, Astore takes us from his younger days at shadowy Cheyenne Mountain to the darkened recesses of the cinema, where a steady diet of "space operas" and "alien disaster movies," from the iconic Star Wars to the recent U.S. box-office bomb Independence Day: Resurgence, provide a window on the twenty-first-century American experience and a funhouse mirror offering unflattering reflections of ourselves and our foundering, floundering wars. Nick Turse

We Are The Empire
Of U.S. Military Interventions, Alien Disaster Movies, and Star Wars
By William J. Astore

Perhaps you’ve heard the expression: “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Cartoonist Walt Kelly’s famed possum, Pogo, first uttered that cry. In light of alien disaster movies like the recent sequel Independence Day: Resurgence and America’s disastrous wars of the twenty-first century, I’d like to suggest a slight change in that classic phrase: we have met the alien and he is us.

Read more »

Give the guy credit.  Donald Trump makes perspective -- on him at least -- almost inconceivable, and that’s no small accomplishment.  Is he heading up or down?  Polling well or poorly?  Going to win or lose?  Who knows?  Take Nate Silver whose FiveThirtyEight website recently launched its poll of polls with The Donald having only a 19% chance of taking the presidency.  Silver was remarkably on target in election years 2008 and 2012, but he’s been off when it comes to Trump (and he's hardly alone), so who really has a clue what that 19% may really mean on November 8th?

For months and months, Trump has performed a masterful version of media jiu-jitsu, leveraging the interest in him from what seems like every journalist, newspaper, website, and cable news network on Earth into more free publicity and coverage than any individual may ever have gotten.  It’s been impossible to escape the man. There probably wasn't a day in months without a Donald Trump story (or often multiple ones) and he’s regularly dominated the news cycle with his latest outrageous statement or provocation, no matter what else is going on.  There is no Brexit without Donald Brexit; no ISIS without Donald ISIS, no Hillary without Donald Hillary.  He hires, fires, invites, rejects, embraces, insults, tweets, challenges, denies, refuses, ingratiates, blackballs -- and whatever he does, it’s news.  By definition.  And don’t forget the endless scribblers and talking heads, faced with his all-invasive version of reality, who cough up reams of “analysis” about him, which only furthers the way he Trumps the world, no matter what they write or say.

You can almost hear the echoing voice from some ninth rate horror film echoing down the corridors: I tell you, you can run, but you can’t hide, ha, ha, ha, ha...

In Donald Trump’s world, as far as I can tell, there is only one reality that matters and it can be summed up in two words that begin with D and T.  Were he to become president, he would give Louis XIV’s famed phrase -- whether or not the French king actually said it -- “L'état, c'est moi” (“I am the state”), new meaning.  

During these past many months of Trumpery, Nomi Prins has been sorting out the nature of the money game in American politics (onshore and off) for TomDispatch.  Now, she turns to the billionaire who has taken possession of us all.  Her focus: his frenetic version of “You’re fired!” this election season and how that’s played out with the Republican establishment, without whom (and without whose money) she doubts he can make it to the Oval Office. Tom

Donald Trump’s Anti-Establishment Scam
The Insider Posing as an Outsider Trying to Get Back on the Inside
By Nomi Prins with Craig Wilson

“Establishment: A group in a society exercising power and influence over matters of policy, opinion, or taste, and seen as resisting change.” -- Oxford Dictionary

Early on in his presidential bid, Donald Trump began touting his anti-establishment credentials. When it worked, he ran with it. It was a posture that proved pure gold in the Republican primaries, and was even, in one sense, true. After all, he’d never been part of the political establishment nor held public office, nor had any of his family members or wives.

His actual relationship to the establishment is, however, complex in an opportunistic way. He’s regularly tweeted his disdain for it. (“I wish good luck to all of the Republican candidates that traveled to California to beg for money etc. from the Koch Brothers. Puppets?”) And yet, he clearly considered himself part of it and has, at times, yearned for it. As he said early on in his run for the presidency, “I want the establishment -- look, I was part of the establishment.  Let me explain. I was the establishment two months ago. I was like the fair-haired boy. I was a giver, a big giver. Once I decided to run, all of a sudden I’m sort of semi-anti-establishment.”

An outsider looking to shake up the government status quo? An insider looking to leverage that establishment for his own benefit?   What was he?  He may not himself have known.

Read more »