‘How to Read Donald Duck,’ that classic guide to U.S. cultural imperialism in Latin America: there was always more to a Disney comic than gags.
Can the American Dream Survive Trump until 2029?
Trump has already demolished the fundamental geopolitics that have undergirded U.S. global hegemony for the past 80 years
Ozymandias on the Potomac: Energy Policy and the Politics of American Decline
( Tomdispatch.com ) – At the dawning of the British Empire in 1818, the romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley penned a memorable sonnet freighted with foreboding about the inevitable decline of all empires, whether in ancient Egypt or then-modern Britain. In Shelly’s stanzas, a traveler in Egypt comes across the ruins of a once-monumental statue, […]
How Trump is Demolishing U. S. Global Power and its World Order
( Tomdispatch.com ) – In his novel The Autumn of the Patriarch, which is eerily evocative of our current political plight, Gabriel Garcia Marquez described how a Latin American autocrat “discovered in the course of his uncountable years that a lie is more comfortable than doubt, more useful than love, more lasting than truth, [and] […]
Tariff Man: Bringing back the Worst Excesses of the Gilded Age
( Tomdispatch.com ) – Count on one thing: if Mark Twain, the famed American author of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, were alive today, he would certainly have written a novel about Donald Trump. After all, his 1873 novel, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, distinctly caught a nineteenth-century version of our Trumpian moment, […]
Trump can’t Stop the Green Energy Revolution any More than Horses could Stop the Automobile
( Tomdispatch.com ) – He lived over 1,000 years ago, but King Canute’s life still has some important lessons for our own time. After conquering England, Denmark, Norway, and part of Sweden, he forged a vast North Sea empire that made him, by the year 1030, the greatest of all the Viking kings. At that […]
Starving Babies: The Self-Liquidation of U.S. Global Soft Power
( Tomdispatch.com ) – With the Oval Office looking more like a middle school classroom every day, let’s recall the way, once upon a time, we responded to childhood taunts from a playground bully. You remember how it goes. Your nemesis says mockingly that you’re a this-or-that and you shout back: “Takes one to know […]
Trump’s “1984”-Like Vision for a New World Order
( Tomdispatch.com ) – Most of us can remember at least a few troubling scenes from George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984: the mandatory love demanded for the spectral dictator Big Brother; the malleability of facts at the Ministry of Truth; or the ruling party’s memorably grim slogans, “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery.” But for […]
The End of the American Century, courtesy Donald J. Trump
( Tomdispatch.com ) – In the weeks leading up to the recent presidential inauguration in Washington, this country and an anxious world expected many different things from what might be called, to borrow the title of a famed William Butler Yeats’s poem, “The Second Coming” of Donald J. Trump. But nobody expected this. Nobody at […]
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