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Robert Lipsyte, Beating the Bully

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[Note for TomDispatch readers: After you’ve read my introduction to Bob Lipsyte’s latest piece, and while you’re considering whether to buy a copy of his new young-adult novel Rhino’s Run for somebody you know, give some thought as well to visiting the TomDispatch donation page and making sure that TD has the ability to keep going in this ever-stranger world of ours. And many thanks in advance! Tom]

Just recently, in an op-ed responding to his threatened 25% tariffs on Canadian goods (now postponed a month), the Toronto Star‘s editorial board labeled Donald Trump a “bully.” Indeed, there probably couldn’t be a more accurate descriptive word for him. Its concluding paragraph read this way:

“These Canadians understand what all of us must now grasp: No one has ever won by appeasing a bully. No one has ever won by negotiating with a knife to their throat. But again and again, battles have been won by those who were counted out, who had no right to survive, never mind thrive, but did because they found strength in each other and a shared commitment to ideals and together did the hard work necessary to overcome. It has never been harder to band together despite our differences, and never more important.”

At 80, I must admit that there’s something deeply painful about having a bully as president of my country and, accompanying him, in a totally made-up Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) that’s only growing more powerful by the day, the richest man in the world, Elon Musk. He is himself, of course, both distinctly a bully and increasingly moving the already right-wing Trumpist movement to greater extremes, even as he’s tried to close down the U.S. Agency for International Development and so shut off any decent American aid to anyone in trouble anywhere on this planet.

If anything, Trump and (at least for now) his buddy (Heil, Musk!) are redefining what it means to be a bully in a country that still passes (even if barely) for a democracy. So, it seemed all too appropriate that only recently this 80-year-old guy sat down and read former New York Times sportswriter and TomDispatch regular Bob Lipsyte’s latest young adult novel, Rhino’s Run. It’s about a high-school football player who fears being bullied and throws an impulsive punch at a teammate’s jaw and what follows. Despite my age, his striking new work gripped me in a distinctly youthful fashion that I’ll continue to savor (before I pass the book on to my grandson).

And while you’re thinking about whether to get the book for anyone you know (or yourself), check out Lipsyte’s thoughts on how to deal with the bully who, for the second time in our life (even if only by 49.7% of the vote), is president of these ever less united states of ours. Tom

How to Bump, Lump, Crumple, and Eventually Dump Donald Trump

In bad times -- and these are bad times -- I call up the spirit of Willie.

Willie has seen me through cancer, divorce, and deaths in the family. His memory has given me the courage and strength to push on when I wanted to give up and hide. Willie reminds me that, even at 87, I can take it, get back up, survive, sometimes even win.

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William D. Hartung, Make Art, Not War

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It couldn’t be stranger when you think about it. For better or worse, our brains have the ability to imagine ourselves somewhere we aren’t and might never be. And in whatever form, art can offer us a vision of our world, for the better or sometimes distinctly the worse, that brings it into a kind of cohesion we often don’t experience in our actual lives.

Only recently, this old guy decided to revisit two classic works of the imagination he read decades ago that, in both cases, offer us visions of ourselves on a planet most definitely for the worse. In the early sixteenth century Thomas More wrote a book about what was then a barely known new American world and, in its title, used the word “utopia” (no place) for the first time in our history. That word then entered our vocabulary forever, along (later) with another that fit the grimness of so much of this planet of ours.  I’m thinking, of course, of “dystopia.”

The two dystopias I revisited recently were Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and George Orwell’s 1984 (written in 1948), both of which offer visions of a future planet in grim shape.  (Both also imagined a world of “television” — Orwell’s Big Brother is, after all, a screen vision of dictatorial horror — long before it became a feature of our lives.) But neither Huxley nor Orwell ever imagined one Donald J. Trump and his — yes, let’s change that “t” to a “d” in his honor — dysdopian world, though they did imagine worlds of horror that have stayed with us into our genuinely dysdopian moment in these increasingly DysUnited States.

They are both works of literary art and artfulness that remind us of just what a strange, unpredictable crew we humans are. And with that in mind, let TomDispatch regular Bill Hartung leave the worlds of dystopian military thinking and Pentagon “newspeak” (“designed,” as Orwell wrote, “not to extend but to diminish the range of thought”), where he so often applies his critical expertise, for a distinctly better world of art that, even on our disturbed planet, still has the ability to do much good. Tom

In Stunningly Bright Colors

A Cry for Common Sense and Common Humanity

The world is in danger, mind-numbingly so, from a combination of crises: disease, hunger, mass displacement, racial and economic inequality, war and the threat of more war, a rampaging climate crisis, and an accelerating nuclear arms race (and that's just for starters) -- all occurring in a climate of massive mis- and disinformation that makes it ever harder to build a consensus toward solutions to the multiple problems we face.

Words can’t fully express our current predicament. We need other tools and other ways of making sense of the situation we now find ourselves in.

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Michael Klare, Droning Washington

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Yes, some of us still remember that the now-famous (or do I mean infamous?) phrase “the military-industrial complex” actually came from the farewell address of former World War II general and then-President Dwight D. Eisenhower on January 17, 1961. But how often do any of us remember the all-too-painfully appropriate context in which he offered it to the American people — as a warning about a future that today is so much ours, as the budget of the Department of Defense (so it’s still called despite the many disastrous and anything but “defensive” wars the U.S. military has fought in this century) heads for the trillion-dollar mark? Here, then, to introduce military expert and TomDispatch regular Michael Klare’s eye-opening account of where the MIC (the shorthand version of that phrase) is heading in the age of the drone and artificial intelligence, is the larger context for Eisenhower’s first use of the term:

“Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.

“This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together. Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.”

And more than 60 years later, with Eisenhower’s grimly visionary statement in mind, let Klare suggest just how eerily on target he was. If you don’t believe me, note that tech giant Anduril is now setting up its first factory in the Midwest — Columbus, Ohio, to be exact — at the cost of an initial billion dollars to produce “autonomous systems and weapons,” as artificial intelligence prepares to go to war. Tom

A New Military-Industrial Complex Arises

The Secret War Within the Pentagon

Last April, in a move generating scant media attention, the Air Force announced that it had chosen two little-known drone manufacturers -- Anduril Industries of Costa Mesa, California, and General Atomics of San Diego -- to build prototype versions of its proposed Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA), a future unmanned plane intended to accompany piloted aircraft on high-risk combat missions. The lack of coverage was surprising, given that the Air Force expects to acquire at least 1,000 CCAs over the coming decade at around $30 million each, making this one of the Pentagon’s costliest new projects. But consider that the least of what the media failed to note. In winning the CCA contract, Anduril and General Atomics beat out three of the country’s largest and most powerful defense contractors -- Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman -- posing a severe threat to the continued dominance of the existing military-industrial complex, or MIC.

For decades, a handful of giant firms like those three have garnered the lion’s share of Pentagon arms contracts, producing the same planes, ships, and missiles year after year while generating huge profits for their owners. But an assortment of new firms, born in Silicon Valley or incorporating its disruptive ethos, have begun to challenge the older ones for access to lucrative Pentagon awards. In the process, something groundbreaking, though barely covered in the mainstream media, is underway: a new MIC is being born, one that potentially will have very different goals and profit-takers than the existing one. How the inevitable battles between the old and the new MICs play out can't be foreseen, but count on one thing: they are sure to generate significant political turbulence in the years to come.

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