Ever get that feeling of being a leaf in the wind? It is the state of the world that makes me not want to care about what’s going on because it is so overwhelming. Tom Engelhardt from Tom’s Dispatch compares the current dystopia with withe one portrayed in 1984.
“Unfortunately, on both counts Donald Trump is proving dystopian indeed. He is, after all, the president who threatened to unleash “fire and fury like the world has never seen” on North Korea (before falling in love with its dictator). He only recently claimed he could achieve victory in the almost 18-year-old Afghan War “in a week” by wiping that country “off the face of the Earth” and killing “10 million people.” For the first time, his generals used the “Mother of all Bombs,” the most powerful weapon in the U.S. conventional arsenal (with a mushroom cloud that, in a test at least, could be seen for 20 miles), in that same country, clearly to impress him.
More recently, beginning with its withdrawal from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, his administration has started trashing the Cold War-era nuclear architecture of restraint that kept the great-power arsenals under some control. In the process, it’s clearly helping to launch a wildly expensive new nuclear arms race on Planet Earth. And keep in mind that this is happening at a time when we know that a relatively localized nuclear war between regional powers like India and Pakistan (whose politicians are once again at each other’s throats over Kashmir) could create a global nuclear winter and starve to death up to a billion people.
And keep in mind as well that all of the above may prove to be the lesser of Donald Trump’s dystopian acts when it comes to the ultimate future of humanity. After all, he and his administration are, in just about every way imaginable, doing their damnedest to aid and abet climate change by ensuring that ever more carbon will be released into the atmosphere, warming an already over-heated planet further. That’s the very planet on which humanity has, since 1990, burned half of all the fossil fuels ever used. Despite the Paris climate accord and much talk about the necessity of getting climate change under some kind of control, carbon is still being released into the atmosphere at record levels. (Not surprisingly, U.S. emissions began rising again in 2018.)
This summer, amid fierce heat waves in the U.S., Europe, and elsewhere, as well as the setting of global heat records, with parts of the Arctic literally burning (while heating twice as fast as the world average), with Greenland melting, and the Antarctic losing sea ice in record amounts, some of the predictions of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for the relatively distant future already seem to be in sight. As climate scientist Marco Tedesco put it recently, speaking of the Arctic, “We are seeing ice melting now that we expected 30 to 40 years from now.”
We are, in other words, already on a dystopian planet. With threats to the world’s food supply and the swamping of coastal cities lying in our future, with the migration of previously unheard of populations in that same future, with heat rising to levels that may, in some places, become unbearable, leaving parts of the planet uninhabitable, it is at least possible now to imagine the future collapse of civilization itself.
And keep in mind as well that our own twisted version of Big Brother, that guy with the orange hair instead of the mustache, could be around to be watched for significantly longer, should he win the election of 2020. (His polling numbers have, on the whole, been slowly rising, not falling in these years.)”
Hmmm…new video games coming out soon…now there is a happy thought…
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
2 comments
August 26, 2019 at 5:49 am
Bob Browning
The next to last paragraph is the only one that isn’t slanted. Trump is a piece of shit who says crazy stuff,and then retracts, repeats and retweets and knows how to control the headlines. Even MSM knows this but happily plays along because what the establishment and Tom Engelhardt don’t talk about is that, even w all the theatre, the war mongering US policies are virtually unchanged for 3 decades now. Maybe the silver lining is that tRump has made the ugliness easier to see for many passive observers.
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August 26, 2019 at 8:04 am
tildeb
I do not understand how easy it seems to be for so many otherwise intelligent people to fall into this mind trap of believing in approaching doom when reality demonstrates good cause for optimism over time. Humanity is a resilient little bugger.
It’s easy to pronounce doom and gloom and have lots of ready-to-share specific examples but we find these are equivalent to believing negative anecdotal evidence over long term congregant positive rates and trends. The latest is climate change and, yes, this is going to be a long term challenge with many examples of profound short term and negative effect. But does the short term anecdotal evidence demonstrate cause for unbridled pessimism over the long term?
Our Western secular values have produced a system of governance that can and do withstand poor leaders like Trump and their policies designed to cause what is easy to call ‘maximum’ harm. None of these policies, however, is irreversible. That’s how we can tolerate swings in voter preferences between socialist and libertarian governments. Our populations have stabilized. Urbanization has concentrated populations into using less land for housing and this slow but steady migration has increased the space for more natural habitat. There is a global rising tide of economic means, translated into decreased rates of poverty and increased health outcomes, longevity, and massive reduction in rates of war and global violence, a slow spread of improving human rights and democratic values. Surely these rates and trends are not indicative of cause only for doom and gloom.
The economic framework of capitalism is addressing climate change at its root, namely, reinsurers and now insurers who by their coverage policies force climate-related issues to the top of local and regional political agendas because these policies drastically affect not only business but tax bases! This galvanizes local populations and their government to begin to implement necessary changes at the local level to have to address the effects of climate change means at the stage of local infrastructure. From this there is a resulting rise in the call for non carbon-based energy to play a greater role, and this changing economic environment is having a profound economic effect on the fundamental infrastructure for creating and delivering energy. Electrical power interruption for large-scale renewables last year and for the year came in around 18 minutes. Compare that to carbon-based energy used for electrical production that came in on average around 18 hours. This trend is approaching a tipping point for utilities, for example, where a small percentage of competitive renewables is creating a death spiral for utilities that are not changing fast enough (as more people switch over to integrating some solar production, fewer customers have to then pay more for carbon-based) and so are burdened with much more expensive carbon-based facilities, smaller market share, and so inevitably lose out on profitability. Is this, too, cause for only doom and gloom?
I keep hearing incorrect information broadcast over multiple sources, for example, that Brazilian rain forests account for 20% of the world’s ‘lungs’ so to speak, and so recent fires threatens our oxygen supply! Good grief. First of all, it accounts for about 6% but what is forgotten is that our oxygen supply has taken millions of years to reach today’s levels and if all oxygen producing plants stopped today, we would have another million years to deplete the current level. So such stories of end-of-days events are no different in quality than the information provided by the sandwich-board lunatic standing on the corner declaring the end is nigh. We have no evidence to believe it.
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