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| October 29, 2015 Tomgram: Engelhardt, Campaign 2016 as a Demobilizing Spectacle
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: For those of you who, after reading today’s post, want to know more about how the Pentagon came to produce war as a TV extravaganza, it’s a subject I tackled in the updated edition of my book The End of Victory Culture. Signed, personalized copies of that book are available for a contribution of $100. And as the holiday season approaches, TD is, of course, ever in need of support. So check our donation page for a range of timely political books that are similarly available, including Greg Grandin’s Kissinger’s Shadow, David Vine’s Base Nation, Nick Turse’s Tomorrrow’s Battlefield, and other works.
Four Score and Seven Years Ago... at Disney World TomDispatch will be off duty this Sunday. The next post will appear on Tuesday, November 3rd. Tom] The Demobilization of the American People and the Spectacle of Election 2016 By Tom Engelhardt You may not know it, but you’re living in a futuristic science fiction novel. And that’s a fact. If you were to read about our American world in such a novel, you would be amazed by its strangeness. Since you exist right smack in the middle of it, it seems like normal life (Donald Trump and Ben Carson aside). But make no bones about it, so far this has been a bizarre American century. Let me start with one of the odder moments we’ve lived through and give it the attention it’s always deserved. If you follow my train of thought and the history it leads us into, I guarantee you that you’ll end up back exactly where we are -- in the midst of the strangest presidential campaign in our history. To get a full frontal sense of what that means, however, let’s return to late September 2001. I’m sure you remember that moment, just over two weeks after those World Trade Center towers came down and part of the Pentagon was destroyed, leaving a jangled secretary of defense instructing his aides, “Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not.” I couldn’t resist sticking in that classic Donald Rumsfeld line, but I leave it to others to deal with Saddam Hussein, those fictional weapons of mass destruction, the invasion of Iraq, and everything that’s happened since, including the establishment of a terror “caliphate” by a crew of Islamic extremists brought together in American military prison camps -- all of which you wouldn’t believe if it were part of a sci-fi novel. The damn thing would make Planet of the Apes look like outright realism. Click here to read more of this dispatch. |
