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Andrew Bacevich, Duck and (Re)Cover?

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I can still remember sneaking into one of those old Broadway movie palaces (of the sort you can see in Edward Hopper’s classic painting) with two friends. It was 1959, in the midst of a global “Cold War,” and I was 15 years old, too young as I recall to be allowed in to see Stanley Kramer’s On the Beach without a grown-up.

We sat in the first row of the balcony (it was a thrill!) and watched the movie version of Neville Shute’s 1957 novel about — yes, there’s no way to prettify it (though a cast including Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, and — a blast from the past — Fred Astaire didn’t hurt) — World War III. As that movie opens the northern hemisphere has been totally nuked and wiped out, while the fallout is now being carried south — the film is set in Australia — and will, sooner or later, extinguish the rest of humanity, including Peck, Gardner, and Astaire.

And no, it didn’t actually happen (not yet anyway), but like TomDispatch regular Andrew Bacevich, author most recently of On Shedding an Obsolete Past: Bidding Farewell to the American Century, I grew up in a world whose end seemed eerily in sight. After all, as he reminds us today, On the Beach was just one of so many end-of-the-world movies, books, and magazine articles of that “duck and cover” era.

In our present world, some sixty-odd years later, no schoolchildren are taught to save themselves from atomic destruction by leaping under their desks, hands over their heads. We’re in a world where “the end,” the potential dystopian finale of human civilization via the fossil-fuelized overheating of this planet, won’t come in a moment. No ducking and covering like Bert the Turtle of my school childhood years when climate change is the culprit. But cheer up, as Bacevich suggests, those old nuclear war films may still have something to teach us in the Ukrainian moment of the twenty-first century. Tom

On Missing Dr. Strangelove

Or How Americans Learned to Stop Worrying and Forgot the Bomb

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Bosley Crowther, chief film critic for the New York Times, didn’t quite know what to make of Dr. Strangelove at the time of its release in January 1964. Stanley Kubrick’s dark antiwar satire was “beyond any question the most shattering sick joke I've ever come across,” he wrote. But if the film had its hilarious moments, Crowther found its overall effect distinctly unnerving. What exactly was Kubrick’s point? “When virtually everybody turns up stupid or insane -- or, what is worse, psychopathic -- I want to know what this picture proves.”

We may find it odd for an influential critic to expect a movie to “prove” anything. Kubrick’s aim was manifestly not to prove, but to subvert and discomfit.

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Rebecca Gordon, Singing the “Bourgeois Blues”

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On my way home from the doctor’s office, I regularly pass the New York apartment building where I grew up. I would invariably stop, stare, and feel an overwhelming desire to visit the place I hadn’t seen in perhaps 60 years. The street door hadn’t changed a bit.

A few months ago, on a whim, I looked for the buzzer to apartment 6D, pressed it, and a woman’s voice answered. I promptly said, “Hi, I’m Tom Engelhardt. I grew up in the apartment you now live in and was wondering whether you’d let me see it again.” To my amazement — yes, this is New York City! — she promptly buzzed me in and I found myself riding to the 6th floor on the barely updated gate elevator I used as a kid. Ours was, I must tell you, a remarkable apartment. Even to get to it, you had to step out of the elevator, walk down a short corridor out onto a covered but open catwalk (where you can still see the roofs of New York around you), and then down another corridor.

So many years later, I did just that and, when the present resident of 6D let me in, felt overwhelmed with memories as I saw the staircase to the second floor where my old bedroom was, the living room with the remarkable skylight under which my mother drew her caricatures, and even the little porch beyond it. And yes, it sounds, I know, like quite a place, which it was (and remains). Today, fully renovated, it’s undoubtedly a wildly expensive coop or condo, but, in 1946, when my parents got that duplex apartment, just after my father left the Air Force in the wake of World War II, it was rent-controlled and cheap as hell. (Lucky for them as, in the 1950s when I was a kid, they were eternally short on cash.) But no surprise then either. After all, at the time, all of New York was rent-controlled and veterans stood a reasonable chance of getting a fine apartment they could actually afford.

As in much of the country now, rent control in New York is largely a thing of the past as rents here have all too literally gone through the roof, with even studio apartments soaring toward $4,000 a month. As Bloomberg News reports, there’s never been a worse time to rent in the big city. More than three bedrooms will cost you an average of $9,592 per month. And yes, that’s to rent, not buy! Imagine that! Once upon a time, that apartment of mine was something like $190 per month! And with that in mind, let TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon fill you in on rent madness in twenty-first-century America. Tom

Don’t Try to Find a Home in Washington, D.C.

Or Pretty Much Anywhere Else If You’re a Renter

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In 1937, the American folklorist Alan Lomax invited Louisiana folksinger Huddie Ledbetter (better known as Lead Belly) to record some of his songs for the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Lead Belly and his wife Martha searched in vain for a place to spend a few nights nearby. But they were Black and no hotel would give them shelter, nor would any Black landlord let them in, because they were accompanied by Lomax, who was white. A white friend of Lomax’s finally agreed to put them up, although his landlord screamed abuse at him and threatened to call the police.

In response to this encounter with D.C.’s Jim Crow laws, Lead Belly wrote a song, "The Bourgeois Blues," recounting his and Martha’s humiliation and warning Blacks to avoid the capital if they were looking for a place to live. The chorus goes,

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Michael Klare, Is War with China Inevitable?

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News flash! Ten thousand Marines and other U.S. troops recently invaded southern California and captured Twentynine Palms in the Mojave Desert — 1,200 square miles of desert seized! Oh, wait, my mistake! Those were just a series of war games in which U.S. bases took the place of islands in the Pacific, while our military began preparing to fight its next war against… yes, China. Meanwhile, tensions with that country continue to rise as Republican House leader Kevin McCarthy plays out his own war scenario by inviting Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen to meet him in California. (If you think the Chinese went nuts over former House leader Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, just wait for this one!)

Yes, imagine (as Michael Klare has already done) that the U.S. military is now preparing to fight an updated version of World War II in the Pacific, island by island, with the Chinese military. How cheery! Indeed, the Marines are planning to retrofit several regiments for just such an island campaign, equipping them with new anti-ship missiles and drones, while renaming them “littoral” (no not literal, but as in islands and shorelines) regiments.

Exactly what this world needs right now: the two greatest greenhouse-gas-emitting countries preparing for a potential war against each other. Honestly, if that doesn’t help the state of this planet, what will? And while Chinese leader Xi Jinping has started to angrily use the old American Cold War term “containment” for this country’s strategy toward his, the Republicans are already entering a warlike state in relation to China (which will undoubtedly mean more money for the Pentagon!) — and so is the Biden administration. Peace, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing!

In that context, let TomDispatch regular Michael Klare offer you a look at the unlikelihood that China will actually invade Taiwan, while considering what might lie ahead for us all. I mean, what could possibly go wrong? Tom

Is a Chinese Invasion of Taiwan Imminent?

Or Is Washington in a Tizzy over Nothing?

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Is China really on the verge of invading the island of Taiwan, as so many top American officials seem to believe? If the answer is “yes” and the U.S. intervenes on Taiwan’s side -- as President Biden has sworn it would -- we could find ourselves in a major-power conflict, possibly even a nuclear one, in the not-too-distant future. Even if confined to Asia and fought with conventional weaponry alone -- no sure thing -- such a conflict would still result in human and economic damage on a far greater scale than observed in Ukraine today.  

But what if the answer is “no,” which seems at least as likely? Wouldn't that pave the way for the U.S. to work with its friends and allies, no less than with China itself, to reduce tensions in the region and possibly open a space for the launching of peaceful negotiations between Taiwan and the mainland? If nothing else, it would eliminate the need to boost the Pentagon budget by many billions of dollars annually, as now advocated by China hawks in Congress.

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