Joe Biden, at age 79 (going on eighty), is the oldest president of our history. This to me is not unusual. possibly planningTo run again in 2024. After all, who wouldn’t want to end up in the record books? If he were to be nominated, and then beat the also aged Donald Trump, or Florida Governor Ron DeSantisOr even Fox News’s eternally popular Tucker CarlsonHe would continue to occupy the White House until his death at 86.
Honestly, wouldn’t that be perfect in its own way? I mean, what could be more fitting for an America in decline than a president who is in decline? The more radical the better.
Okay, maybe, despite the Republican National Committee’s clip on the subject, when Joe Biden had to be guided to that red carpet in Israel, it wasn’t because he was an increasingly doddering old guy. Still…
I mean, I get it. I really do. I’m only 78, so I’m only one year and four months behind Joe Biden in this aging sweepstakes. You can do anything when you reach something, I promise. close to our ageWhatever the White House might say, you will find that decline is second nature. In fact, I’m right with Joe on that carpet whenever someone brings up a movie I saw or book I read years ago (or was it last month?) and I can’t remember a damn thing about it. To Joe, and to all those of a certain age, I say: Welcome to our club!
It’s strange, if not eerie, to be living through the decline of my country — the once “sole superpower” on Planet Earth — in the very years of my own decline (even if Fox News isn’t picking on me). Given the things I’m now forgetting, there’s something spookily familiar about the decline-and-fall script in the history I do recall. As Joe and his top officials do their best to live life to the fullest by working to recreate a three-decades-gone Cold War, even as this country begins to come apart at the seams, all I can say is: welcome to an ever lousier version of the past (just in case you’re too young to have lived it).
Since the disappearance of the Neanderthals and the arrival of us, tell me that decline hasn’t been among the most basic stories in history. After all, every child knows that what goes up, must… I don’t even have to complete that sentence, do I, whatever your age? Thought of a certain way, decline and fall is the second oldest story around, after the rise and… whatever you want to call it.
Just ask the last emperors of China’s Han dynasty, or the once-upon-a-time rulers of Sparta, or Romulus AugustulusThe last head of the Roman Empire (thanks, a lot) Nero!). This old tale is given a new twist in the third decade. The time when humanity thrived in its own bloody and brutal way, is what we want to talk about. loss of species, destruction of the environment or even more horrendous weather disasters arriving ever more quickly, it’s not just the United States (or me) going down… it’s everything. And don’t think that doesn’t include China, the supposedly rising power on Planet Earth. It also happens that it is releasing far moreThe United States is emitting more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere right now than any other country. suffering accordingly(Even if the United States’ declining power is now, it remains). safely in first placeas the worst carbon emitter of any time
If we humans cannot change our behavior quickly, it seems like only half of our story will be left to tell.
The Rise and Decline of Tom Engelhardt (and Many Other Things)
Personally, I am experiencing three versions that culminate in the ultimate story: my own fall; my country’s; and the rise of a planet that is becoming more habitable. Let me start by telling you about the three stories that are intertwined.
I was born in July 1944 into an America that had been roused from a grotesque depression, the “Great” one as it was known, and was then being transformed into a first-rate military and economic powerhouse by World War II. (My father was in that war. her own fashion(My mother was my mother.) That global conflict, which mobilized the nation in every way, wouldn’t end until, more than a year later, two American B-29s dropped newly invented weapons of disastrous destructive power, atomic bombs, on the Japanese cities of HiroshimaAnd NagasakiThese acts more or less exterminated them. These acts offered the promise of an end to the human story, a kind once left to the gods, for the first times in history. In other words, V-J (or Victory over Japan) Day instantly had an underside that couldn’t have been more ominous.
I was born into an imperial power, a newly established one, with an unmatched global punch. It would soon face off against the Soviet Union (and its newly-communized Chinese ally) in a world-wide battle. This would be the not quite-world war, thanks to nuclear weapons that were multiplied and improved many, many times. We now call it the Cold War. In it, what was then known as the “free world” — although significant parts of it were anything but “free” and the U.S. often worked its wiles to make other parts ever less so — was set against the communized “slave” version of the same.
In the United States, despite fears of a nuclear conflict that left children like me “ducking and covering” under our school desks, Americans experienced the hottest economy imaginable. In the process, an ever wealthier society was transformed from a good one into — as President Lyndon Johnson dubbed it in 1964 — the Great Society. Despite “red scares” and the like, it was one that would indeed prove better for many Americans, including Blacks in the wake of a Civil Rights Movement that finally ended the Jim Crow system of segregation that had succeeded slavery.
In the process, the U.S. developed a global system around what was then called the “Iron Curtain,” the lands the Soviet Union controlled. It would be anchored at military baseson every continent, except Antarctica, and alliances from NATO in Europe through SEATO in Southeast Asia.
Concerning me, I too was still rising (though sometimes as in the Vietnam Years, in). full-scale protestI was against what my country was doing around the world), first as an editor in publishing, then as a journalist. I even wrote a history of my times in a book that I called The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation. I didn’t realize how depressing the world that we had created would be. Meanwhile, in the 1980s and ’90s, during the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, during what came to be known as the neoliberal moment, another kind of rise became more evident domestically. It was a rise in corporate wealth and power as well as an increase in the number of people who could afford it. inequalityThis was something I had never known before.
The Cold War ended abruptly in 1991, at 47 years old. In 1989, the Red Army was established. limped homeAfter a decade-long, disastrous war in Afghanistan, which Washington would learn nothing from, the Soviet Union collapsed quickly. Miracle of miracles, after nearly half a century, the United States was left alone and seemingly victorious, “the sole superpower” on Planet Earth.
The bipolar world order of the past was over and, to use conservative terminology, it is no more. Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, we were now in “the unipolar moment.” Uni because there was only one power that mattered left on this planet. Admittedly, Krauthammer didn’t expect that uni-ness to last long, but too many politicians in Washington felt differently. It turned out that the Bush administrations, Bush the elder and Bush the younger, had every intention to make that moment of unprecedented global success a permanent reality. There were many wars, invading countries, and conflicts that followed, all meant to cement the international order, beginning with President George H.W. Bush’s Operation Desert Storm against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 1991, which (sadly enough) came to be known as the firstGulf War
Hence, too, the missing “peace dividend” that had been promised domestically as the Cold War ended. Hence, too, after “peace” arrived came the never-ending urge to pour yet more taxpayer dollars into the Pentagon, into a “defense” budget beyond compare, and into the weapons manufacturing corporations of the military industrial complex, regardless of what the U.S. military was actually capable.
All of this would be the global legacy that the only superpower left, as its leaders worked to ensure this country would continue to exist until the end. I was shocked by Bush the younger and his top officers’ response to the 9/11 attacks a decade later. TomDispatchThe website that would help me through my years of decline.
Bankruptcy, Inc.
Keep in mind, however, that in those years, climate change was just beginning to gain momentum. We now know that Lyndon Johnson, an American president, was first alerted to climate change by a science advisory panel. in 1965. Jimmy Carter in 1977. He would install solar panels on the White House two years later. removedRonald Reagan in 1986), was warned by his chief science adviser of the possibility of “catastrophic climate change.” And yet, in all the years that followed, remarkably little was done by the sole superpower, though President Barack Obama did playA key role in the negotiation of the Paris Climate Agreement (from which Donald Trump would). dramatically withdrawThis country
In its own fashion, Trump’s victory in 2016 summed up the fate of the unipolar moment. His triumph represented a cry of pain and protest over a society that had gone from “great” to something far grimmer in the lifetime of so many Americans, one that would leave them as apprentices on what increasingly looked like a trip to hell.
This was the life of a narcissistic billionaire and ultimate grifter, as well as a dysfunctional human being. bankruptcy after bankruptcyOnly to emerge at the top. He couldn’t have been a more appropriate symptom and symbol of troubled times, of decline — and anger over it. It wasn’t a coincidence, after all, that the candidate with the slogan Make America Great AgainThat election was won by him. He admitted that the country was no longer great, unlike many politicians at the moment.
Donald Trump would preside over greater domestic inequality as well as further global decline. Worse yet, he would preside over a global power (no longer “sole” with the rise of China) that wasn’t declining on its own. The planet was also in decline by then. The American military would continue to prove that it was inept at winning, and that there would never be another V-J Day.
The political elite was crashing in remarkable ways. One party, the Republicans, would be in almost total denial about the very nature of the world we now find ourselves in — a fate that, in ordinary times, might have proven bad news for them. It only increased the likelihood of a catastrophe for all of us, especially the youngest.
Yes, West Virginia has recently been recognized as such. coal magnateJoe Manchin finally came to the rescue (in return) barrel fullOf favorsHis major donors in the oil-and-gas industry), but the country which created the Manhattan Project, once producing those atomic bombs has become strangely unfamiliar to itself. During World War II the government had invested large sums of cash and mobilized many top scientists to create the nuclear weapons which would destroy Hiroshima or Nagasaki. It continues to put out nuclear weapons even today. staggering sums and effort into “modernizing” the American nuclear arsenal.
Few people in Washington can now imagine creating a modern version the Manhattan Project to find effective ways to combat climate change. It is better to launch a dreadful versionDeal with the truth, not the now-extinct Cold War decline-and-fallThis is the situation that this country and every civilization faces.
Although I did stumble upon a 1990s article that mentioned global heating, I was only acutely aware of it in this century when my own decline began. Even though I was aware of global warming back in the 1990s, I didn’t realize it until my own decline began. TomDispatch, I started writing fervently about climate change, I must admit that I didn’t initially imagine myself living through it in this fashion — as so many of us have in this globally overheatedsummer of 2022. I did not imagine such devastating consequences. fires, floods, droughts, storms would become “normal” in my own lifetime. Nor, I must admit, did I think then that the phenomenon might lead to a future all-too-literal end point for humanity, what some scientists are starting to term a “climate endgame” — in other words, a possible extinction event.
And yet here we are, in a democratic system under unbelievable stress, in a country with a gigantic military (backed by a corporate weapons-making complex of almost imaginable size and power) that’s proven incapable of winning anything of significance, even if funded in a fashionThis might have been impossible to imagine in wartime. In a sense, its only “success” might lie its remarkable ability to further fossil-fuelizeThe world. We now live in America that is falling apart, and the world is at risk of being destroyed.
One thing is certain: as with all of us, when it comes to my personal story, there’s no turning around my own decline and fall. The end of the story is yet to be written in relation to our country and the rest of the world. The question is: Will we find some way to write it that won’t end in the fall not just of this imperial power but of humanity itself?
