Reflections on a Low, Dishonest Decade

“Tom, I got nothin’.” That’s all I wanted to say to Tom Engelhardt, the kindly and incisive editor of TomDispatch.com. He’d called to check in and see what I was planning for my next piece. I wanted to tell him, “I’m staring at starvation and genocide, the destruction of American democracy and the rule of law, along with the ongoing incineration of our planet. I’m a damp ball of grief, and I’ve got nothing useful to say about any of it.” Furthermore, I wanted to add, “Anything I could say about the present disaster has already been said comprehensively and better by someone else.” That “someone else” includes myriad excellent journalists who have departed (voluntarily or otherwise) from a mainstream media that has repeatedly acquiesced to Trump, succumbing to a malaise of self-censorship at flagship newspapers like theWashington Post and even the New York Times.

People with nothing to say would generally be wise to shut up. Unfortunately, the wisdom to choose to remain silent has never been my most salient characteristic, something even strangers seem to notice about me. Years ago, I was introduced to a woman at a party. Before I’d even opened my mouth, she said, “Oh, good, another short, pushy Jewish dyke from New York!” Must be something in the way I move.

In any case, having nothing for Tom this time around led me to think about all the times I have had something to say and how grateful I am to have had TomDispatch as a place to say it.

So, feeling stuck, I decided to examine my output over all these years. As it happens, there’s a lot of it, 98 pieces in all. I began during Barack Obama’s somewhat disappointing second presidential term, observed with horror Trump’s first time around, slogged through the Biden years, and now find myself reaching for a noun more resonant than “horror” to describe my reaction to the first year (and counting) of Trump 2.0.

It was far too much to read through in one sitting, but not surprisingly, a few general themes did emerge. Most of them had to do with the importance of working to discern — and tell — the truth about the world we live in.

Thinking about Epistemological Anarchy…

My first TomDispatch piece appeared in 2014. It marked the beginning of an oddly personal chronicle of a time that the poet W.H. Auden might once have called “a low dishonest decade.”

That’s the phrase Auden used to describe the period leading up to September 1, 1939, the day Adolf Hitler’s German army invaded Poland, marking the official beginning of World War II. I think we can fairly say that the Trump years, and even those preceding his first election, constitute a low, dishonest decade.

Of course, Trump himself is an avatar — a human embodiment — of the principle of dishonesty. Indeed, the Washington Post recorded more than 30,000 “false or misleading claims” he made during his first four years as president. This time around, most media outlets have given up counting, although several marked his first 100 days with reports on his 10 (or more) most egregious lies. The purpose of “flooding the zone with shit,” as right-wing podcaster and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon once put it, is not really to convince anyone that any particular lie is true but, as I wrote during Trump’s first term, to convince everyone that it’s impossible to know whether anything is true. As I argued then:

“We are used to thinking of propaganda (a word whose Latin roots mean “towards action”) as intended to move people to think or act in a particular way. And indeed that kind of propaganda has long existed, as with, for example, wartime books, posters, and movies designed to inflame patriotism and hatred of the enemy. But there was a different quality to totalitarian propaganda. Its purpose was not just to create certainty (the enemy is evil incarnate), but a curious kind of doubt. ‘In fact,’ as Russian émigrée and New Yorker writer Masha Gessen has put it, ‘the purpose of totalitarian propaganda is to take away your ability to perceive reality.’”

Back in 2019, I was writing about “totalitarian propaganda” in the past tense, speaking of twentieth-century authoritarian regimes. But I was already worried about what Trump’s wild epistemological anarchy portended. “Eroding the very ability to distinguish between reality and fantasy has been,” I wrote, “however instinctively, the mode of the Trumpian moment as well, both the presidential one and that of so many right-wing conspiracy theorists now populating the online world.” For many Americans, it was no longer worth the effort to discern the truth. “When everybody lies, anything can indeed be true. And when everybody — or even a significant chunk of everybody — believes this, the effect can be profoundly anti-democratic.”

In fact, I suggested, “this popular belief that nobody really does or can know anything is the perfect soil for an authoritarian leader to take root.” Trump 2.0 has confirmed that intuition.

“September 1, 1939” was the title of W. H. Auden’s most famous poem, the one that began with a reflection on the previous “low, dishonest decade.” It also contained these lines about what he then imagined was to come:

“I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.”

…And Memory Holes

That first article of mine was about the evil done by the administration of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney in response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11. This was not a surprising topic for me, since I had recently published a book on the subject, specifically about institutionalized state torture as practiced by the United States during what came to be known as the “War on Terror.” It was pretty much all I was thinking about in those days.

In that piece, I pointed out that we had never gotten a full accounting of the torture committed in our names in Afghanistan, Iraq, and globally at CIA “black sites” (their secret torture arenas). I blamed that reality in significant part on President Barack Obama’s “belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards” and pointed out that not “one of the senior government officials responsible for activities that amounted to war crimes has been held accountable, nor were any of the actual torturers ever brought to court.” When, through a 2009 executive order, Obama finally closed those black sites, he argued that, “at the C.I.A., you’ve got extraordinarily talented people who are working very hard to keep Americans safe. I don’t want them to suddenly feel like they’ve got to spend all their time looking over their shoulders.”

Of course, that “need to look forward” (not over one’s shoulder) effectively tossed the history of torture under George W. Bush and Dick Cheney into an Orwellian memory hole. And to this day, there has never been a full accounting of the Bush torture program. As a result, I pointed out then, “the structure for a torture system remains in place and unpunished,” which meant that the next time an administration chose to invoke and weaponize a public fear of dark, foreign others, we could well see torture’s resurgence.

Of course, that is indeed what happened under Donald Trump. Beginning with his first campaign speech in 2015, in which he inveighed against Mexican migrants as rapists bringing drugs and crime into this country, he has continually escalated his attacks on the foreign-born, particularly those from places he infamously called “shithole countries.” By his third campaign for the presidency in 2024, he (along with his running mate JD Vance) was routinely telling his followers that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were dining on other residents’ cats and dogs. In his second term, eschewing earlier euphemistic dog whistles, President Trump has been making it very clear that what distinguishes the migrants he characterizes as “garbage” (Somalis) from good migrants (“nice Scandinavians”) is their color.

As a result, this year I found myself reflecting again on the scourge of Trump’s vicious authoritarianism, writing that:

“It’s tempting to think of Donald Trump’s second term as a sui generis reign of lawlessness. But sadly, the federal government’s willingness to violate federal and international law with impunity didn’t begin with Trump. If anything, the present incumbent is harvesting a crop of autocratic powers from seeds planted by President George W. Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney in those war on terror years following the attacks of September 11, 2001. In their wake, the hastily passed Patriot Act granted the federal government vast new detention and surveillance powers. The Homeland Security Act of 2002 established a new cabinet-level department, one whose existence we now take for granted.”

Honestly, though, I don’t think any of us could then have imagined a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) run by Kristi Noem. She’s the Trump appointee who posed in her DHS baseball cap and $50,000 Rolex watch in front of hundreds of half-naked prisoners like the ones she’d illegally dispatched to CECOT, the notorious Salvadoran “Terrorist Confinement Center.” In ordering the deportation of immigrants to a penal institution well-known for torturing its inmates, Noem was reprising the Bush-era crime of “extraordinary rendition,” a practice that is, of course, illegal under U.S. and international law.

Because of excellent reporting by outlets like the Guardian, we know that those men, now thankfully freed and repatriated to Venezuela, “suffered systematic and prolonged torture and abuse, including sexual assault.” We also know that the Trump administration tried to tip the whole episode into its capacious memory hole by successfully preventing CBS’s 60 Minutes from airing a segment on the abuse of U.S. deportees at CECOT. (That segment ran briefly in Canada, however, and a full transcript of it is now available, courtesy of The Nation magazine.)

Extrajudicial Killings (Also Known as “Murder”)

Another theme I’ve returned to over the years is the U.S. penchant for murder-at-a-distance. Indeed, our country pioneered what now appears to be a significant part of the future of warfare: remotely directed attacks on individual human beings. In 2016, I wrote about the increasing use of military drones and the implications for military ethics:

“The technical advances embodied in drone technology distract us from a more fundamental change in military strategy. However it is achieved — whether through conventional air strikes, cruise missiles fired from ships, or by drone — the United States has now embraced extrajudicial executions on foreign soil. Successive administrations have implemented this momentous change with little public discussion. And most of the discussion we’ve had has focused more on the new instrument (drone technology) than on its purpose (assassination). It’s a case of the means justifying the end. The drones work so well that it must be all right to kill people with them.”

I was still writing about the subject six years later. In 2022, TomDispatch published my piece about the push to develop LAWS (Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems). This U.S. goal had first emerged in the previous century during the U.S. war in Vietnam with the (expensive and largely unsuccessful) automated battlefield. Half a century later, such automation, including the use of so-called artificial intelligence to make kill decisions, is now available in cheap, easily replaceable drones. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the United States has over the years resisted any attempt to outlaw autonomous weapons. “The European Union, the U.N., at least 50 signatory nations, and (according to polls), most of the world population believe that autonomous weapons systems should be outlawed,” I wrote in 2022. “The U.S., Israel, the United Kingdom, and Russia disagree, along with a few other outliers.” I hardly expect the second Trump administration to take a different position.

In fact, despite what Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth might think, contemporary American soldiers probably don’t need to do pull-ups. They only need to sit down — in front of a screen — to cause mayhem globally.

Today, we take our ability to kill at a great distance for granted, as the Trump administration’s actions have demonstrated. We accept with disturbingly little question the now routine murders by drone of more than a hundred people in small boats off the Venezuelan coast and in the eastern Pacific Ocean. Only when it emerged that one of those unpiloted aerial attacks on defenseless human beings included a “double-tap” — a second strike to kill two survivors floating in the water by their devastated boat — was there widespread objection, including from members of Congress.

Hope in Strange Times

Before the 2016 election, I wrote a piece about how the rest of us needed to learn to claim our victories. “In these dismal days,” I said, “of climate change, imperial decline, endless war, and in my city, a hapless football team, I seem to be experiencing a strange and unaccustomed emotion: hope.” How could that be, I asked. “Maybe it’s because, like my poor San Francisco 49ers, who have been ‘rebuilding’ for the last two decades, I’m fortunate enough to be able to play the long game.”

At that moment, however, I did find one thing especially encouraging: “We seem to have finally reached Peak Trump, and the reason why is important.” Or so I thought.

“Calling Mexicans rapists and drug dealers didn’t do it. Promising to bring back waterboarding and commit assorted other war crimes didn’t do it. Flirting with the white supremacist crowd and their little friend Pepe the Frog didn’t do it. But an 11-year-old audio tape of Trump bragging about grabbing women ‘by the pussy’ seems to have been the drop of water that finally cracked the dam and sent even stalwart Republican leaders fleeing a flood of public revulsion.”

Well, even Cassandra can get things wrong once in a while and I was certainly wrong about that one. Today, Trump no longer simply “flirts” with white supremacism. He’s all in. And I’d be surprised now if even a demonstrated association with Jeffrey Epstein’s many predatory crimes will be enough to bring him down. In any case, there’s a solid backbench of genuine fascists — Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller, Director of the Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought, and of course Vice President JD Vance — to take over, should Trump take one nap too many and fall off his gilt-edged chair.

A few months after the 2016 election had disproved my Peak Trump theory, I wrote about waking up terrified, imagining what might be coming. “I’m an old dyke,” I said, “a little ragged around the edges, and prone to the occasional night terror.” I added, though, that while I might quake occasionally at two in the morning, “I’m too old and too stubborn to cede my country to the forces of hatred and a nihilistic desire to blow the whole thing up just to see where the pieces come down.”

I wasn’t done then and nine years later and all that much older, I don’t consider myself done yet. As I put it at the time, “I’ve fought, and organized, and loved too long to give up now. And Trump and the people who run him can’t shove me — or any of us — back in that bottle.”

I believed that then and I still do today. I’ve watched ordinary people insist on fighting back, organizing, and loving each other and this country for too long to give up now. They can’t shove all of us back in any genie’s bottle.

Auden concluded his poem with the following lines. Almost a century later, they still remain an apt response to our contemporary confrontation with fascism and our latest night terrors:

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

Maybe I still have something to say after all.

This piece first appeared on TomDispatch.

The post Reflections on a Low, Dishonest Decade appeared first on CounterPunch.org.