Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

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April 10, 2011 Tomgram: Sheila Johnson, "Chal" [Note to TomDispatch readers: As today’s post is devoted to Chalmers Johnson, I wanted to mention that his final book, Dismantling the Empire: America’s Last Best Hope, has just appeared in paperback.  Every personal library with his Blowback Trilogy should have this volume as well, containing as it does the powerful work of his last years.  And a small reminder: if you are an Amazon.com customer and go to that site to buy Johnson’s book or anything else whatsoever via a TomDispatch book link or cover-image link, we get a small cut of whatever you purchase.  It’s a great way to support this site at no extra cost to you.  Tom] Chalmers Johnson was a stalwart of TomDispatch.  He first wrote for this website on January 8, 2003 (“ Iraqi Wars”), barely more than a month after it was launched.  The last piece he wrote in his life (“ Portrait of a Sagging Empire”) was for TomDispatch as well.  In the years between, he penned 28 other TD pieces on a remarkably wide range of subjects, including how the American war in Iraq was harming the human patrimony ( “Smash of Civilizations”), abolishing the CIA, the dangers of our empire of bases (a subject he all but copyrighted), the bloated Pentagon budget, our fading military empire, and how militarism was driving us toward bankruptcy, among a host of subjects.  For good measure, he sat down for a two-part TomDispatch interview with me that was Chalmers all the way.  (“Our encounter,” as I wrote at the time, “is an interview in name only. No one has ever needed an interviewer less. I do begin with a question that had been on my mind, but it's hardly necessary.”) I’ve written about how we first met on the page (as I was his book editor, starting with his now-classic volume Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire) and about his death on November 20, 2010.  I still miss him.  In our present world, overflowing with explosive, unexpected moments, I regularly wonder just what “Chal” would have made of events in Egypt, Libya, Japan, or Washington.  His remarkable, restless, penetrating intelligence is missed.  He was a giant. That said, I’m pleased to offer a special kind of goodbye to him today, a memory piece on his work by Sheila Johnson, his wife, partner in so many endeavors, and an impressive figure in her own right.  It seems like a fitting way to say goodbye, remember the breadth and stature of the man, and take in the scope of his life. In the introduction to his final book, Dismantling the Empire, America’s Last Best Hope (just out in paperback), he took up a recurring topic of interest to him: “the choice between republic and empire,” and the way “our imperial dreams stretch our means to the breaking point and threaten our future.”  Among “the alternatives available to us as a nation,” he wrote, “we are choosing what I call the suicide option.”  He added that “it might not have to be this way, that we could still move in a different direction.”  Those were, in a sense, his last words.  How true they remain three and a half months after his death.  Tom The Blowback World of Chalmers Johnson Remembering the Man and His Work By Sheila K. Johnson In going through my husband’s files, books, and papers after his death, I’ve been forcibly struck by two things.  First, contrary to what many of his obituaries said, his writings and thoughts were remarkably consistent throughout his life. In other words, he was not a right-winger who became more liberal and outspoken as he got older. More than most people suspected, he was a radical all along, whose intellectual impulses were tempered only by his birth in the Depression year of 1931 and his determination to make a decent living without “joining the establishment.” Second -- and it was an unavoidable recollection -- he worked with manic energy and maniacally hard all his life. When we met in the fall of 1956, I was a 19-year-old junior at the University of California, Berkeley, “shacked up” with a boyfriend. Chal, by contrast, was six years older, and just returned from two years with the Navy in Korea, where the ship on which he was the communications officer, LST 883, had been tasked with ferrying Chinese prisoners of war from South Korea back to North Korean ports. He was living at home with his parents in Alameda to save money, and had only recently finished his master's thesis on “thought reform” in Communist China in the period just before and after Mao Zedong took over in 1949. Click here to read more of this dispatch.