Dear Grandson,
Consider my address book -- and yes, the simple fact that I have one already tells you a good deal about me. All the names, street addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers that matter to me are still on paper, not in a computer or on an iPhone, and it's not complicated to know what that means: I'm an old guy getting older. Going on 71, though I can hardly believe it. And that little book shows all the signs of where I'm headed. It wasn't true a few years ago, but if I start flipping through the pages now, I can't help but notice that the dead, with their addresses and phone numbers still beside them, are creeping up on the living, and that my little address book looks increasingly like a mausoleum.
Age has been on my mind of late, especially when I spend time with you. This year, my father, your great-grandfather, who died in 1983, would have been 109 years old. And somehow, I find that moving. I feel him a part of me in ways I wouldn't have allowed myself to admit in my youth, and so think of myself as more than a century old. Strangely, this leaves me with a modest, very personal sense of hope. Through my children (and perhaps you, too), someday long after I'm gone, I can imagine myself older still. Don't misunderstand me: I haven't a spiritual bone in my body, but I do think that, in some fashion, we continue to live inside each other and so carry each other onward.
As happens with someone of my age, the future seems to be foreshortening and yet it remains the remarkable mystery it's always been. We can't help ourselves: we dream about, wonder about, and predict what the future might hold in store for us. It's an urge that, I suspect, is hardwired into us. Yet, curiously enough, we're regularly wrong in the futures we dream up. Every now and then, though, you peer ahead and see something that proves -- thanks to your perceptiveness or pure dumb luck (there's no way to know which) -- eerily on target.
The Future Foreseen
Back in 2001, before I even imagined a grandson in my life, I had one of those moments (and wish I hadn't). It was sometime just after the 9/11 attacks when, nationwide, Americans were still engaged in endless rites in which we repeatedly elevated ourselves to the status of the foremost victims on the planet, the only ones that mattered. In those months, you might say, we made ourselves into Earth's indispensible or exceptional victims.
In that extended moment of national mourning (combined with fear bordering on hysteria), the Bush administration geared up to launch its revenge-fueled global wars, while money started pouring into the national security state in a historically unprecedented way. It was a time when the previously un-American word "homeland" was being attached to what would become a second defense department, secrecy was descending like a blanket on the government, torture was morphing into the enhancement of the week in the White House, assassination was about to become a focus (later an obsession) of the executive branch -- and surveillance? Don't even get me started on the massively redundant domestic and global surveillance state that would soon be built on outright illegalities and rubber-stamp legalities of every sort.
In October 2001, I had no way of grasping most of that, but it didn't matter. I peered into the future and just knew -- and what I knew chilled me to the bone. I had mobilized decades earlier as part of the antiwar movement of the Vietnam era, which was in its own way a terrible time, but when I looked at where our country seemed to be heading, as the president promised to kick some ass globally and American bombs began to fall on Afghanistan, I had no doubt that this was going to be the worst era of my life.
I wasn't, of course, thinking about you that October and November. You were then minus 11 years old, so to speak. I was, however, thinking about your mother and your uncle, my children. I was thinking about the world that I and my cohorts and George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and George Tenet and Donald Rumsfeld and the rest of that crew were going to leave them.
In a quiet way I had done good work -- so I felt -- since demobilizing (like so many Americans) from the Vietnam era. In my spare time as a non-academic, I had written a very personal history of the Cold War of which I was proud. I had been a book editor for two publishing houses, specializing in bringing into the world works by what I used to call "voices from elsewhere" (even when they came from here), including, to name just two, Chalmers Johnson's Blowback and Eduardo Galeano's Memory of Fire trilogy.
But when I somehow stumbled into the future in all its grim horror, more of that work didn't seem like an adequate response to what was coming. I had no sense that I could do much, but I felt an urge that seemed uncomplicated: not to hand your mother and uncle such a degraded country, planet, new century without lifting a finger in opposition, without at least trying. I felt the need to mobilize myself in a new way for the future I'd seen.
At that point, however, my knack, such as it was, for previewing the years to come failed me and I had no sense of what to do until TomDispatch more or less smacked me in the face. (But that's a story for another day.) This April, more than 13 years after I first began sending missives to the no-name listserv that turned into TomDispatch, it's clear that, in my own idiosyncratic way, I did manage to mobilize myself to do what I was capable of. Unfortunately, I'd have to add that, all this time later, our world is a far more screwed up, degraded place.
A Fragmenting Reality
Stretch anything far enough and it'll begin to tear, fragment, break apart. That, I suspect, may be a reasonable summary of what's been happening in our twenty-first-century world. Under stress, things are beginning to crack open. Here in the U.S., people sometimes speak about being in a Second Gilded Age, a new era of plutocracy, while our politics, increasingly the arena of billionaires, seem to second that possibility. Looked at another way, however, "our" Second Gilded Age is really a global phenomenon in the sense that ever fewer people own ever more. By 2016, it is estimated that 1% of the people on this planet will control more than 50% of global wealth and own more than the other 99% combined. In 2013, the 85 richest people had as much wealth as the poorest 3.5 billion, while in certain regions inequality seems to be on the rise. (Whether China and India are major exceptions to this is an open question.) Dark money is rampant not just here, but globally.
