TomDispatch.com

My dad came from Brooklyn, which meant I was a Brooklyn Dodgers fan from the start. One year, I even lost whatever I had saved up from my microscopic allowance betting on World Series games with Gus, who worked behind the soda fountain at the local drugstore. When he refused to take my money, my father made me pay anyway. (“A man,” he told me sternly, “always pays his debts.”) In October 1952 -- I was only eight-and-a-half years old -- I remember bursting into tears on the corner of my block when I learned that Dodger pitcher Joe Black had just lost the seventh game of the World Series to the Yankees and having some strange man kneel down to help me because he thought I was lost. I can recall as well lying on my bed at night in my pajamas sometime in those years with a wadded up piece of paper. I would bounce it off the wall while thinking (radio-announcer fashion): Furillo goes back! -- that was Dodger right fielder Carl Furillo -- Back! Back! He leaps and... I would, of course, then catch the paper “baseball.”

So I was a serious (and typical) sports fan from boyhood on. The Dodgers treacherously decamped for Los Angeles in 1957, so in 1962 I switched to the new Mets.  Sometime in those years, I added in the New York Giants pro football team and, later in life, the Knicks in basketball. In my grown-up years, I automatically checked out the sports pages in the morning, often before I read the news, perhaps because it all meant so much and yet so very little compared to whatever else was going on in our world. So it’s been strange to watch the sports pages shrink to next to nothing and realize that I no longer even glance at them. Sports is simply gone and, oddly enough, after all these years, in a world on the brink, I don’t seem to miss it at all. These days, there are other more serious reasons to burst into tears on the corner of your block.

But as TomDispatch’s jock culture correspondent Robert Lipsyte, former New York Times sports columnist and author most recently of SportsWorld: An American Dreamland, suggests today, I may be anything but typical. In yet another of his grotesque gestures, President Trump has recently been tweeting for his “troops,” his own personal pandemic death cult, to head into the streets and “liberate” locked-down states with Democratic governors not eager to immediately begin “reopening” the country to an even worse pandemic moment. He may be no less eager to declare open season when it comes to bringing back professional sports as well. In fact, as Lipsyte points out today, his reelection may depend on it. Tom

Reopening Day 2020?
Big-Time Spectator Sports Are the Last Things We Need
By Robert Lipsyte

As controversies about the “reopening” of America loom over our lives, nothing seems as intrinsically irrelevant -- yet possibly as critically important -- as how soon major spectator sports return.

If sports don’t trump religion as the opiate of the masses, they have, until recently, been at least the background music of most of our lives. So here’s my bet on one possible side effect of the Covid-19 pandemic to put in your scorebook: if the National Football League plays regular season games this fall, President Trump stands a good chance of winning reelection for returning America to business as usual -- or, at least, to his twisted version of the same.

Read more »

[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Signed, personalized copies of Frostlands, the second book of John Feffer’s gripping Splinterlands series of dystopian novels, are still available for contributions of $100 or more ($125 if you live outside the U.S.). Here’s how a favorite writer of mine, Ariel Dorfman, describes that book: "By taking us on a cautionary journey into a future planetary collapse where the term ‘one percent’ is redefined in a terrifying way, John Feffer forces us to look deeply at our own society’s blindness to ecological apocalypse and greed. But the novel’s enchantment goes beyond dystopia: the quest for salvation depends on a crusty female octogenarian who would make Wonder Woman salivate with envy." Check out our donation page for the details and, as ever, many thanks to you for keeping TomDispatch afloat in tough times. Tom]

So here’s a basic dose of President Trump: On April 14th, he met with a group of Covid-19 survivors in the cabinet room of the White House and, citing the “Spanish Flu” pandemic of 1918 in which, he claimed, 75 million to 100 million people died globally, he offered this bit of typical (and typically only semi-coherent) self-congratulation:

“But not since then have we seen anything like this. And we’re winning our battle; we’re winning our war. We’re going to be doing -- announcing some very good things in the near future. The American public has been great -- you know, far greater than anybody would’ve thought. They had minimum numbers of 100,000 and I think we’re going to beat that 100,000 deaths. Can you believe that? That was a minimum. And if we didn’t practice what we practiced, and if they -- if we did it a different way -- because we had a maximum of 2.2 million people [who might die here]. Who knows even if that’s right? But the way I look at it, if you cut in half, and cut it in half again, it’s 500,000 or 600,000. That’s what we lost in the Civil War. That’s not acceptable. So, we couldn’t have done it, you know, to bull through, as we call it. To bull through it. Just, like, treat like a flu. If we did that -- so we made the right moves. Now we have to get our country open again. You all know that.”

Believe me, when you hear him say that, it sounds even more callous. After all, only 28,000 Americans had died by then (and that was undoubtedly an underestimate). So, be sure to high-five the president for keeping such deaths to a drop in the pandemic bucket -- to which he’d surely like to add the New York Times reporters who recently challenged his failure to respond to the threat of Covid-19 with reasonable speed. But of course, we’re talking about the man who won’t wear a face mask; whose daughter, with her husband and children, traveled from Washington to Trump National Golf Course in Bedminister, New Jersey, to celebrate Passover, flouting the federal coronavirus guidelines; and whose son-in-law’s family real-estate company was still sending out eviction notices recently, even as it might, like the president’s real-estate operation, receive windfall aid via Congress’s $2.2 trillion coronavirus bailout package.

We’re talking about the president whose clearest urge -- however unsatisfied (as yet) -- is to declare absolute power (to hell with the governors!), “adjourn” Congress so he can appoint anyone he cares to unopposed, and generally create the equivalent of informal martial law in this country before he tries to catastrophically “reopen” it. Of course, he’s likely to be as successful at this as he’s been at combatting the spread of Covid-19, but what the hell! At least, give him an A++ for effort!

In such a context, it’s fitting that Reverend Liz Theoharis, co-chair with Reverend William Barber of the Poor People’s Campaign and author of the book Always With Us? What Jesus Really Said About the Poor, writes her first TomDispatch piece today. Her focus: what an American world that experienced a pandemic of inequality long before the present nightmare hit really looks like not from Trump down but from an increasingly discarded and endangered bottom up. It’s a daunting view in the age of The Donald. Tom

Inequality and the Coronavirus
Or How to Destroy American Society From the Top Down
By Liz Theoharis

My mom contracted polio when she was 14. She survived and learned to walk again, but my life was deeply affected by that virus. Today, as our larger society attempts to self-distance and self-isolate, my family has texted about the polio quarantine my mom was put under: how my grandma fearfully checked my aunt’s temperature every night because she shared a bedroom with my mom; how they had to put a sign on the front door of the house that read “quarantine” so that no one would visit.

Growing up with a polio survivor, I learned lessons about epidemics, sickness, disability, and inequality that have forever shaped my world. From a young age, I saw that all of us should be valued for our intrinsic worth as human beings; that there is no line between the supposedly deserving and the undeserving; that we should be loved for who we are, not what we do or how much money we have. My mom modeled for me what’s possible when those most impacted by inequality and injustice dedicate their lives to protecting others from what hurts us all. She taught me that the dividing line between sickness and wellbeing loses its meaning in a society that doesn’t care for everyone.

Read more »

He hosted 14 seasons of The Apprentice and its successor, The Celebrity Apprentice, and in all those years I probably spent seven minutes watching the show, or flipping past it as I looked for something else -- and, as far as I was concerned, that was seven minutes too many. I don’t want you to think that I didn’t watch my share of junk on TV. I did. But a blowhard New York real-estate (self-)promoter whose most memorable line was “You’re fired!” judging the business skills of a group of sycophantic contestants? I preferred Law and Order reruns any day of the decade.

And here’s the thing: now, I get to watch the “You’re fired!” show (“nasty!”) whether I want to or not. In fact, just about the only thing Donald Trump has proven good at is firing people in his administration, which has a turnover rate the likes of which is surely historically unprecedented. In fact, the Brookings Institution estimates that 85% of his “A team” has turned over in these years, sometimes many times. After all, he's had four chiefs of staff, five deputy chiefs of staff, five communications directors, four press secretaries, four national security advisors, at least six deputy national security advisors, three secretaries of defense (one “acting”), and so on.

Unfortunately, just about the only ones who haven’t been fired are the rest of us and, in our coronaviral moment, we have little choice (if we aren’t front-line workers) but to sit idly and watch, or force ourselves not to watch, you-know-who.

Once upon a time, if you had predicted such a future for me, I would have thought you mad. No longer. How appropriate, then, that today TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon, facing the slings and arrows of outrageous press conferences, focuses on Hamlet’s famous query, modernized for the era of The Donald: to watch or not to watch, that is the question, and it's one hard not to ask nightly in the Covid-19 era. Tom

Strange Attractors
On Being Addicted to Trump and His Press Conferences
By Rebecca Gordon

My partner and I have been fighting about politics since we met in 1965. I was 13. She was 18 and my summer camp counselor. (It was another 14 years before we became a couple.) We spent that first summer arguing about the Vietnam War. I was convinced that the U.S. never should have gotten involved there. Though she agreed, she was more concerned that the growth of an antiwar movement would distract people from what she considered far more crucial to this country: the Civil Rights movement. As it happened, we were both right.

She took off that fall for college at the University of California, Berkeley, where, as she says, she majored in history with a minor in rioting. I went back to junior high school. And we’ve been arguing about politics ever since.

So maybe it’s no surprise that, since the coronavirus pandemic exploded, we’ve been fighting about the president. Not about his character (vile and infantile, we both agree) or his job performance (beyond dismal), but about whether anyone with a conscience should watch his never-ending television performances. Since 2016, she’s done her best not to expose herself to either his voice or his image, and she’s complained regularly about the mainstream media’s willingness to broadcast his self-evident lies, to cover any misconceived or idiotic thing he might decide to say at rally after rally as if it were actual news. More recently, she’s said the media should send their interns to cover his Covid-19 “news” conferences. (Of course, MSNBC and CNN now no longer always broadcast those events, whose ratings the president so treasures, in full. In fact, by April 13th, CNN appeared to have let their chyron writer off the leash to run legends below that day’s news conference like “Angry Trump turns briefing into propaganda session” and “Breaking news: Trump refuses to acknowledge any mistakes.”)

Read more »

[Note to TomDispatch Readers: In this deeply disturbing, demobilizing, coronaviral moment, TomDispatch is still on the job (so to speak). With today’s piece by John Feffer, who writes about our distinctly dystopian world as, aptly enough, the author of two remarkably vivid and farsighted dystopian novels, Splinterlands and its successor Frostlands, we have a rare offer for you. If you’re willing to contribute $100 or more ($125 if you live outside the U.S.) to this website, he’ll send you a signed, personalized copy of Frostlands. Just go to our donation page and do your damnedest and you’ll be helping TD get by in tough times indeed. Tom]

At maybe age 13, I can remember reading H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds, his Martian invasion classic in which aliens tear up London, under the covers by flashlight while I was supposed to be asleep -- and I’ve read science fiction ever since. Ditto dystopian fiction from the time I stumbled across 1984 and Brave New World, again in my teens. I was an only -- when I was little, I thought it was “lonely” -- child and reading saved my life. So did the movies. They gave me a sense that there was another world out there, maybe scarier and stranger but also far more gripping and compelling than the one I was growing up in. With one exception: I’ve never been able to take horror films, never experienced the thrill of being scared out of my wits that way. I live in horror of horror, you might say, of something suddenly jumping out at me when I least expect it.

I remember, for instance, that when the film Jurassic Park came out (and I was writing a piece about dinosaurs), I had to recruit my son, who had already seen it, to go with me so that he could whisper warnings at the right moments. (“Dad, in maybe 30 seconds the Velociraptor is going to leap out of the grass.”) He was at an age when it was embarrassing as hell and I’m lucky he ever forgave me.

I bring this up only because, as TomDispatch regular John Feffer, the author of two dystopian novels, Splinterlands and Frostlands (that have proved remarkably on target when it comes to our splintering, sweltering planet), suggests today, we are now in a landscape of horror. A world we all thought we knew well is disappearing and, no matter what his scientific advisers may be telling him, our president has been visibly determined not to avoid the velociraptors. So, among the rest of stressed-out America, I finally feel in good company. Something -- we call it Covid-19 -- did indeed jump out at us, scaring the hell out of most of us. As the horror mounts, none of us can leave the movie theater, no matter how thorough our social distancing. Unfortunately, the equivalent of my son isn't here to warn us. Instead, we have the president Feffer labels “Trump Rex” (or, to fit thematically with this introduction, I might even call him, T. rex) who’s ready to scare us to hell and back daily. Nor is he from some dystopian future, some nightmarish fantasy written by a modern, slightly whacked-out George Orwell. He’s here right now, every day, a figure directly out of a horror movie -- and at present, he jumps out of the bushes, news conference by news conference, every night of the damn week. Tom

From Here to Dystopia
Not With a Bang But a Cough
by John Feffer

In retrospect, it’s no surprise that, after the election of Donald Trump in 2016, dystopian fiction enjoyed a spike in popularity. However, novels like George Orwell’s 1984 and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, which soared on Amazon, would prove more horror stories than roadmaps. Like so many ominous sounds from a dark basement, they provided good scares but didn’t foreshadow the actual Trumpian future.

Of course, it didn’t take an Orwell or an Atwood to extrapolate from the statements of candidate Trump to the policies of President Trump -- and such projections bore little resemblance to the worlds of Big Brother or an all-powerful patriarchy. Many Americans quickly began bracing themselves for something quite different: less totalitarian than total chaos. There would likely be unmitigated corruption, new wars, and massive tax cuts for the wealthy, along with an unprecedented reduction in government services and the further concentration of power in the executive branch. And it was a given that there would be boastfully incoherent presidential addresses, as well as mockery from officials in countries that had only recently been our closest allies. A Trumpian dystopia would be a Frankenstein monster constructed of the worst parts of previous administrations with plenty of ugly invective and narcissistic preening thrown in for bad measure.

Read more »

[Note for TomDispatch Readers: I usually plug other people’s books, but in this coronaviral moment when so many of us are inside and isolated, I picked up a book I wrote long ago on the collapse of the triumphalist American war story in the hell of Vietnam. While I can’t claim to be the best judge of it, I've found it strangely compelling at this moment (as you’ll see from my piece below). After all, if an American sense of triumphalism hadn’t morphed into what, in that book, I called “triumphalist despair,” it’s hard to imagine how Donald Trump would have ended up in the White House via a “Make America Great Again” campaign. If you feel the urge to turn off the TV and read something, think about getting your hands on that book of mine, The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation. Once upon a time, Studs Terkel did call it "as powerful as a Joe Louis jab to the solar plexus." Tom]

History Is More or Less Bunk
The Light at the End of the Tunnel?
By Tom Engelhardt

Let me quote a Trumpian figure from long ago, Henry Ford. That’s right, the bigot who created the Ford Motor Company (and once even ran for president). Back in 1916, in an interview with a Chicago Tribune reporter, he offered this bit of wisdom on the subject of history:

"Say, what do I care about Napoleon? What do we care about what they did 500 or 1,000 years ago? I don't know whether Napoleon did or did not try to get across and I don't care. It means nothing to me. History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker's dam is the history we make today."

As it happened, Napoleon Bonaparte died only 42 years before Henry Ford was born and I’m not sure he tried to cross anything except a significant part of Russia (unsuccessfully). My suspicion: Ford may have been thinking, in the associative fashion we’ve become used to in the age of Trump, of Julius Caesar’s famed crossing of the Rubicon almost 2,000 years earlier. But really, who knows or cares in a world in which “bunk” has become the definition of history -- a world in which Donald Trump, in news conference after news conference, is the only person worth a tinker’s dam (or damn)?

In fact, call Ford a prophet (as well as a profiteer) because so many years after he died in 1947 -- I was three then, but you already knew I was mighty old, right? -- we find ourselves in a moment that couldn’t be bunkier. We now have a president who undoubtedly doesn’t know Nero -- the infamous fiddling Roman emperor (although he was probably playing a cithara) -- from Spiro -- that’s Spiro Agnew, Richard Nixon's vice president who lived god knows how long ago. In fact, Agnew was the crook who fell even before his president was shown the door. But why linger on ancient history? After all, even yesterday’s history is water through the gate, if not under the bridge, and in these glory days of Donald Trump, who cares? Not him, that’s for sure.

Read more »