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| December 23, 2014 Tomgram: Rebecca Solnit, Challenging the Divine Right of Big Energy
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: With this post, TomDispatchcloses for the holidays. We’ll be back on the morning of Tuesday, January 6th, ready to roll into 2015. In the meantime, we wish you the best holiday season possible. I couldn’t end the year without thanking Managing Editor Nick Turse, who will help open 2015 with a new piece on U.S. special ops forces and continue his groundbreaking work on the American military in Africa and elsewhere on this planet. Thanks also go to crackerjack Associate Editor Andy Kroll who enters the last phone booth on Earth daily and emerges in his non-TD role as a super-reporter for Mother Jonesmagazine; to our social media director Erika Eichelberger, who strums Twitter like a guitar; to our never-miss-a-beat-or-an-error copy editor extraordinaire from Tokyo, Christopher Holmes; to our old buddy and techo-whiz Joe Duax; to the director of the Nation Institute (which houses this website), Taya Kitman, whose magic touch makes such a difference; and to that Institute wonder-worker Annelise Whitley. Let me not forget all the TD authors whose superlative work makes this site -- I’m proud to say -- something different in the online world. There’s also the amazing Anthony Arnove and the whole team at Haymarket, including Jim Plank and Rory Fanning, who make books that look like gems, and are giving meaning to my private dreams of DIY publishing by turning Dispatch Books -- including Ann Jones’s powerful They Were Soldiers and Rebecca Solnit’s indie bestseller Men Explain Things to Me (on everybest of the year list in town) -- into a thriving reality. Finally, there’s Lannan Foundation, which makes it all happen when it comes toTomDispatch. Without all of you, I would be high and dry somewhere, wondering about the point of life. So a deep bow of thanks. You collectively make TomDispatch what it is.
Only one figure was left out of that last paragraph -- and that’s you, the reader. And yet without you, TD has no meaning at all. So my deepest bow goes to you and especially to the more than 120 of you who showed staggering generosity by contributing to our year-ending drive for donations. You’ve ensured that we’ll start 2015 with the kind of backing that should help make it a banner year! Of course, 2014 isn’t over yet, not by a long shot. If you still want to contribute, justcheck out our donation page where, for $100 (or more), you can get a variety of signed, personalized books, including my latest, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World (which "Moyers & Co." just put amongits top 20 of the year!). See you in January! Tom] No one would call TomDispatch a traditional website. Still, we do have our traditions. Among them, none is more “traditional” -- a full decade old at a website that just turned 13 this November -- than having Rebecca Solnit end our year. Sometimes as the year winds down, she’s dreaming of the future, sometimes thinking about the past, sometimes focused on the last few seconds, but always, as was true from her very first moment at this website, she offers some version of hope in the face of a reality that others find almost too grim and obdurate to consider. As this year ends, Solnit, the author of the 2014 hit book Men Explain Things to Me and an even more recent collection of essays,The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness, considers humanity’s latest breakthrough into the apocalyptic. She takes on climate change in a clear-eyed way without losing her sense of hope and purpose. As ever, it’s an impressive performance and a reminder to all of us that the future remains ours, if only we care to focus on what truly endangers us. Someday, those who sent the most recent rounds of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere utterly wittingly, with profits on the brain -- and I’m talking, of course, about the CEOs of Big Energy (and the various figures who run the energy operations we’ve given names like Saudi Arabia, Russia, and “Saudi America”) -- will be remembered as the greatest criminals in history, the true terrorists (or as I’ve called them, “terrarists”) of our age. It's one of the jokes of our time that we Americans have literally plowed trillions of dollars into what’s called “national security” in the post-9/11 years without seriously facing climate change, a phenomenon that, if not brought under control, guarantees us a kind of insecurity we’ve never known. Call it irony or call it idiocy, but call it something. And let me end 2014, the year that revealed to all of us so much more about the hidden world of surveillance that is ours, with my own New Year’s wish: if I could be granted one relatively modest thing to end 2014, it would be the release from prison of former Army privateChelsea Manning and former CIA Agent John Kiriakou, and the release from exile of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. For their genuine service, for letting us know what no one else would about the nature of the American world we inhabit, they deserve so unbearably much better from this country than they’ve gotten. Someday, when those who jailed or exiled them are forgotten or scorned, they will, I’m convinced, be remembered as heroes of our moment. In the meantime, a guy can hope, can’t he? I take my hat off to all three of them as 2014 ends. Tom Everything’s Coming Together While Everything Falls Apart |
