Thirty-two of the thirty-three pieces that make up this book were written between April 2010 and mid-2011, thirty-one for my website TomDispatch.com. Barely more than a year on the calendar, but given our exploding world, it seemed like years, not months. Has there ever been a time—not in my life anyway—when so much seemed to happen all at once? So consider this my small record of a period when, for all the fear-suffused attempts to lock America down, the world came pouring in anyway. It’s important, however, to note that the essays included here are not the originals I wrote. They were edited, trimmed or cut down, modestly updated, and woven into book form. The tell-tale signs of the immediate moment—all the recentlys and next weeks, along with examples that were gripping then but are forgotten today—have been removed; as have most of the thematic repetitions that are bound to pop up in any set of weekly responses to ongoing events. Nothing basic or significant about them has, however, been changed; for better or worse, nothing had to be, which tells you something about our present world.
Though this book generally moves chronologically within its chapters, for the sake of whatever flow it may have, I decided not to include in the text the original date on which each piece was posted. For the record, and in case readers should wish to check out any of the essays in their original form at TomDispatch.com, below is a list of them with the dates they were posted (and their original titles, if changed). Note that the second piece in the book was written for, and published in a slightly different form by, Harper’s Magazine. “The Nuclear Story That Refuses to Go Away” is the sole other intruder. I wrote it in 2004 on a subject that’s haunted me from childhood and feels hardly less relevant now.
American Warscapes—October 17, 2010
How the Movies Saved My Life (Harper’s Magazine—October 2011)
The United States of Fear—November 30, 2010
Welcome to Post-Legal America—May 30, 2010
The 100 Percent Doctrine in Washington—June 9, 2011
Obama’s Bush-League World—July 12, 2011
Washington Drunk on War—June 15, 2010
The Urge to Surge—January 4, 2011
Osama bin Laden’s American Legacy—May 5, 2011
Goodbye to All That—February 7, 2011
The View from Mount Olympus—April 13, 2010
The Perfect American Weapon—June 24, 2010
Whose Hands, Whose Blood?—August 5, 2010
One November’s Dead—December 7, 2010
Obama’s Af-Pak Flip-Flop—May 16, 2010
Clueless in Afghanistan—and Washington—July 26, 2010 (also included in this section is part of The Petraeus Syndrome—July 11, 2010)
Forever War—September 30, 2010
The Stimulus Package in Kabul—November 14, 2010
How to Schedule a War—November 23, 2010
Numbers to Die For—April 6, 2010
A Reluctance to Leave (original title: The Urge to Stay)—April 24, 2010
Will Our Generals Ever Shut Up?—September 7, 2010
Cutting $100 Billion—Easy, If Only Washington Had a Brain—February 17, 2011
Ballot Box Blues—November 2, 2010
The Nuclear Story That Refuses to Go Away (original title: Three Characters, No Dialogue)—August 5, 2004
Nine War Words That Define Our World—June 23, 2011
Living in the Fifty-First State (of Denial)—June 1, 2010
One and a Half Cheers for American Decline—September 21, 2010
Life in the Echo Chamber (original title: Washington’s Echo Chamber)—February 24, 2011
Signs of the Great American Unraveling—June 30, 2011
Sleepingwalking into the Imperial Dark—April 19, 2011
All the World’s a Stage (for Us)—March 25, 2010