[Note for readers: More than seven years after TomDispatch began as a no-name e-list, more than six years after the Nation Institute put it on-line and gave it a name, this site is back from its holiday break. Most important of all, we're only 15 days away from outlasting the Bush administration (though not its legacy), something I once doubted was possible. Thank heavens, I was wrong. The next post, Michael T. Klare's latest on energy issues for 2009, will appear this Thursday, and then TD should be on its usual, three-piece-a-week schedule, reading the tea leaves and eyeing the future for omens of every sort. Tom]

The Ponzi Scheme Presidency

It may finally be 2009, but in some ways, given these last years, it might as well be 800 BCE.

From the ninth to the seventh centuries BCE, the palace walls of the kings who ruled the Assyrian Empire were decorated with vast stone friezes, filled with enough dead bodies to sate any video-game maker and often depicting -- in almost comic strip-style -- various bloody royal victories and conquests. At least one of them shows Assyrian soldiers lopping off the heads of defeated enemies and piling them into pyramids for an early version of what, in the VCE (Vietnam Common Era) of the 1960s, Americans came to know as the "body count."

So I learned recently by wandering through a traveling exhibit of ancient Assyrian art from the British Museum. On the audio tour accompanying the show, one expert pointed out that Assyrian scribes, part of an impressive imperial bureaucracy, carefully counted those heads and recorded the numbers for the greater glory of the king (as, in earlier centuries, Egyptian scribes had recorded counts of severed hands for victorious Pharaohs).

Hand it to art museums. Is there anything stranger than wandering through one and locking eyes with a Vermeer lady, a Van Eyck portrait, or one of Rembrandt's burghers staring out at you across the centuries? What a reminder of the common humanity we share with the distant past. In a darker sense, it's no less a reminder of our kinship across time to spot a little pyramid of heads on a frieze, imagine an Assyrian scribe making his count, and -- eerily enough -- feel at home. What a measure of just how few miles "the march of civilization" (as my parents' generation once called it) has actually covered.

Prejudiced Toward War

[Note for TomDispatch Readers: With this post, TD is closing down for the holidays. Expect this site to be back in action on January 5, 2009 -- in its usual critical, ornery, thoughtful, and distinctly idiosyncratic mode, trying, as ever, to connect the dots in our complex, disturbing world. Until then, take care.]

Thank heavens the Nation magazine exists. Otherwise, subjects that should matter to us might simply disappear into the void, along with key aspects of our history. Recently, for instance, the magazine produced Nick Turse's major historical investigation, "A My Lai a Month," on the pattern of U.S. war crimes during the Vietnam War. Important and startling as that piece was, it's hard to imagine what other magazine might have carried it. In its latest issue, the Nation (with the help of the Nation Institute's Investigative Fund) turns to a more recent set of crimes that, until reporter A.C. Thompson investigated, few paid the slightest mind to.

It's appropriate that Thompson's shocking, must-read revelations of vigilante killings carried out against blacks in devastated New Orleans in 2005, "Katrina's Hidden Race War," began with a TomDispatch writer, the irrepressible Rebecca Solnit. On hearing of some of these murders while visiting New Orleans back in 2006, she went in search of someone who would report on them, and the rest is now, as they say, history.

For the last two years, Solnit has helped to close down this site for the holiday season. In December 2007, she laid out a twelve-book "secret library of hope" for TD readers. The year before, she wrote a wonderful "retrospective" on our time to come, "The Age of Mammals: Looking Back on the First Quarter of the Twenty-First Century." As (unfortunately) befits the closing moments of the Bush era and the carnage it let loose across the globe, her 2008 site-closing piece has a grimmer tinge to it. But perhaps there is something seasonally hopeful simply in acknowledging, as fully as we can, what these last murderous eight years have meant. (To listen to a TomDispatch audio interview in which Solnit discusses how the importance of the story of the New Orleans killings dawned on her, click here.) Tom

The Grinning Skull

The Homicides You Didn't Hear About in Hurricane Katrina
By Rebecca Solnit

What do you do when you notice that there seems to have been a killing spree? While the national and international media were working themselves and much of the public into a frenzy about imaginary hordes of murderers, rapists, snipers, marauders, and general rampagers among the stranded crowds of mostly poor, mostly black people in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, a group of white men went on a shooting spree across the river.

Their criminal acts were no secret but they never became part of the official story. The media demonized the city's black population for crimes that turned out not to have happened, and the retractions were, as always, too little too late. At one point FEMA sent a refrigerated 18-wheeler to pick up what a colonel in the National Guard expected to be 200 bodies in New Orleans's Superdome, only to find six, including four who died naturally and a suicide. Meanwhile, the media never paid attention to the real rampage that took place openly across the river, even though there were corpses lying in unflooded streets and testimony everywhere you looked -- or I looked, anyway.

Read More >>

[Note for TomDispatch Readers: I've always been a sucker for lost worlds. As a matter of fact, right now I'm in the midst of historian Mary Beard's latest erudite volume, The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found. It's an exceedingly detailed history of what we don't -- and probably can't -- know about the best-known town in the Roman Empire. Unfortunately, I've never visited Pompeii and taken that deep dive into the stony pools of time. I did, however, steal/adapt a title from a bestselling nineteenth-century potboiler set in that buried town when I wrote a novel about my own world of 30 years and the future of the book, The Last Days of Publishing, back in 2003. As this post indicates, it was far more on target than even I imagined at the time. (You can read the first few Pompeii-esque pages by clicking here [pdf file] or check out reviews by clicking here.)

There will be one more post -- from the redoubtable Rebecca Solnit -- before TomDispatch shuts down until 2009, but I thought I might take this opportunity to offer a deep bow to the TD crew: the ever-efficient and inventive Joe Duax of the Nation Institute, without whom I'd be completely helpless; Christopher Holmes, with his laser copyediting eyes on the eternal nightshift in Tokyo; Tam Turse, regularly riding herd on and lassoing goofs of every sort; Rob Eshelman, audio impresario; the invaluable Nick Turse, there from the beginning; and, of course, all you TomDispatch readers whose letters, even when I don't have time to answer them, make life here worth living. Tom]

The Axe, the Book, and the Ad

Worlds shudder and collapse all the time. There's no news in that. Just ask the Assyrians, the last emperor of the Han Dynasty, the final Romanoff, Napoleon, or that Ponzi-schemer Bernard Madoff. But when it seems to be happening to your world, well, that's a different kettle of fish. When you get the word, the call, the notice that you're a goner, or when your little world shudders, that's something else again.

Even if the call's not for you, but for a friend, an acquaintance, someone close enough so you can feel the ripples, that can do the trick. It did for me two weeks ago, when a close friend in my niche world of book publishing (at whose edge I've been perched these last 30-odd years) called to tell me that an editor we both admire had been perp-walked out of his office and summarily dismissed by the publisher he worked for. That's what now passes for politeness in the once "gentlemanly" world of books.

His fault, the sap, was doing good books. The sort of books that might actually make a modest difference in the universe, but will be read by no less modest audiences -- too modest for flailing, failing publishing conglomerates. If you were talking in terms of cars, his books would have been the equivalent of those tiny "smart cars" you see in increasing numbers, tucked into previously nonexistent parking spots on city streets, rather than the SUVs and pick-ups of the Big Three. It may be part of the future, but who cares? Not now -- and too bad for him.

It wasn't really him, of course. He was just a small fry, like most of us, in the bloated universe of entertainment. As with so many workers at the moment -- and it doesn't matter whether you're talking about the downturn in restaurant hires or the cuts made by that sports titan, the National Football League (about 150 jobs), or the public radio oufit NPR (64 jobs, two shows) -- his firing was a by-product of economic and funding catastrophes elsewhere.

Once upon a time, Detroit was known as "the arsenal of Democracy" because the city's big three automakers converted so quickly from turning out civilian vehicles to producing the tanks and trucks that "helped win World War II" (and then "lent their technology to aircraft and ship manufacturing" as well). Now, the same three companies are simply beggars. Whether they are capable today of transforming themselves, as an Obama administration might wish, into an "arsenal for a green future" is certainly an open question. TomDispatch regular Nick Turse, author of the groundbreaking book The Complex on the militarization of American daily life, recalls a Cold War era in which many corporations producing the big-ticket items of the consumer economy turned themselves into literal arsenals, churning out weaponry of every sort. Now, with that consumer economy on the skids, he wonders whether civilian companies may again opt to become "arsenals" for the Pentagon. Tom

A Recipe For Corporate Success in Tough Times?

SaladShooters, Adult Diapers, and Tactical Ammo
By Nick Turse

Is it possible that one of the Pentagon's contractors has a tripartite business model for our tough economic times: one division that specializes in crock-pots, another in adult diapers, and a third in medium caliber tactical ammunition? Can the maker of the SaladShooter, a hand-held electric shredder/dicer that hacks up and fires out sliced veggies, really be a tops arms manufacturer? Could a company that produces the Pizzazz Pizza Oven also be a merchant of death? And could this company be a model for success in an economy heading for the bottom?

Once upon a time, the military-industrial complex was loaded with household-name companies like General Motors, Ford, and Dow Chemical, that produced weapons systems and what arms expert Eric Prokosch has called, "the technology of killing." Over the years, for economic as well as public relations reasons, many of these firms got out of the business of creating lethal technologies, even while remaining Department of Defense (DoD) contractors.

The military-corporate complex of today is still filled with familiar names from our consumer culture, including defense contractors like iPod-maker Apple, cocoa giant Nestle, ketchup producer Heinz, and chocolate bar maker Hershey, not to speak of Tyson Foods, Procter & Gamble, and the Walt Disney Company. But while they may provide the everyday products that allow the military to function, make war, and carry out foreign occupations, most such civilian firms no longer dabble in actual arms manufacture.

Whirlpool: Then and Now

Take the Whirlpool Corporation, which bills itself as "the world's leading manufacturer and marketer of major home appliances" and boasts annual sales of more than $19 billion to consumers in more than 170 countries. Whirlpool was recently recognized as "one of the World's Most Ethical Companies by the Ethisphere Institute." The company also professes a "strong" belief in "ethical values" that dates back almost 100 years to founders who believed "there is no right way to do a wrong thing."

Read More >>

The single omnipresent historical reference in the American media immediately in the wake of September 11, 2001, was, of course, "Pearl Harbor" -- and those code words for it, "infamy" and "day of infamy," splashed in mile-high letters across the front pages of papers. What we had experienced, it was commonly said then, was "the Pearl Harbor of the 21st century." And with that image of the Japanese attack that began the Second World War for the United States went powerful, if only half-conscious, memories of how that war ended, of nuclear holocaust, and so the place where the World Trade Center towers went down was promptly dubbed "Ground Zero," previously a term reserved for the spot where an atomic blast took place.

Naturally, the idea that 9/11 was an "act of war," and that we were "at war," quickly and heavily promoted by the Bush administration, followed; and all of this would have been appropriate to a surprise attack by a nuclear-armed state, but not to an assault by 19 terrorists backed by a ragtag organization spread from Hamburg, Germany, to the backlands of Afghanistan. That the framework for taking in what had happened that day was so thoroughly askew mattered not a whit to most Americans at that time; and the rest, including the President's "Global War on Terror," came easily, if disastrously, in its wake. Now, "9/11" has become the "Pearl Harbor" of the twenty-first century, the antecedent and analogy of choice, and so, not surprisingly, it was on all but a few media lips, during the recent massacre and siege in Mumbai, India.

Arundhati Roy, the Indian activist and author of the prize-winning novel The God of Small Things, was one of the earliest, strongest, sanest voices on this planet of ours to take on George W. Bush and his Global War on Terror. "The freshest voice on Earth," I called her back in 2003. She was an inspiration. Now, she turns to the events in her own country, in Mumbai, and explains just why using 9/11 as the analogy of choice there, as we once used "Pearl Harbor" here, will lead in no less terrible directions.

The piece that follows was published by the superb magazine Outlook India, which is sharing it with TomDispatch.com. Tom

9 Is Not 11

(And November Isn't September)
By Arundhati Roy

We've forfeited the rights to our own tragedies. As the carnage in Mumbai raged on, day after horrible day, our 24-hour news channels informed us that we were watching "India's 9/11." And like actors in a Bollywood rip-off of an old Hollywood film, we're expected to play our parts and say our lines, even though we know it's all been said and done before.

As tension in the region builds, U.S. Senator John McCain has warned Pakistan that, if it didn't act fast to arrest the "bad guys," he had personal information that India would launch air strikes on "terrorist camps" in Pakistan and that Washington could do nothing because Mumbai was India's 9/11.

Read More >>