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Rebecca Gordon, Passing the Torch?

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When is it my turn to retire? That question represents both a distinct kind of horror and a certain luxury. Yes, one day you can simply stop and, even if you’re lucky enough not to be in instant need, as aging TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon vividly reminds us today (says 80-year-old Tom Engelhardt), you undoubtedly face a potential crisis. Once upon a time, I couldn’t even have imagined such a crisis. It was something that belonged to my grandparents’ or parents’ generation and was inconceivable to me. Now, for Rebecca and so many other older people, myself included, that crisis looms and the question in this society is: once your “value” is gone, not just what do you do, but what are you (if anything at all)?

And keep in mind that we’re in an — excuse me for using the word this way — age (or era, if you prefer) in which one of the two candidates for president (and I know you won’t have the slightest doubt which one I’m thinking of) has been talking about the possibility of cutting Social Security and Medicare retirement benefits for retirees. And why not, since they hardly matter anymore, right? I mean, who cares about how comfortable life might be for the people who are no longer in the workforce and may not, in their own lives, have much force at all? (Keep in mind that an estimated 50% of older workers have nothing in the bank for retirement!)

Of course, that same candidate has been denouncing Kamala Harris for mistreating Mike Pence. Yes, Mike Pence! (“The way she treated Mike Pence was horrible. The way she treats people is horrible.”) Uh, I wonder who actually treated former Vice President Pence horribly? I can’t imagine, but I do have the feeling that, under the circumstances, the candidate I’ve just been writing about might consider retiring. Otherwise, should he somehow win in 2024, we may all have to retire. Sigh… And while you’re waiting, let Gordon take you on a little retirement voyage of her own. Tom

A Personal Meditation on Growing Old

In a Catastrophic Age

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The Washington Post headline reads: “A big problem for young workers: 70- and 80-year-olds who won’t retire.” For the first time in history, reports Aden Barton, five generations are competing in the same workforce. His article laments a “demographic traffic jam” at the apexes of various employment pyramids, making it ever harder for young people “to launch their careers and get promoted” in their chosen professions. In fact, actual professors (full-time and tenure-track ones, presumably, rather than part-timers like me) are Exhibit A in his analysis. “In academia, for instance," as he puts it, "young professionals now spend years in fellowships and postdoctoral programs waiting for professor jobs to open.”

I’ve written before about how this works in the academic world, describing college and graduate school education as a classic pyramid scheme. Those who got in early got the big payoff -- job security, a book-lined office, summers off, and a "sabbatical" every seven years (a concept rooted in the Jewish understanding of the sabbath as a holy time of rest). Those who came late to the party, however, have ended up in seemingly endless post-doctoral programs, if they’re lucky, and if not, as members of the part-time teaching corps.

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Liz Theoharis and Cedar Monroe, The (Im)moral Treatment of the Poor and Unhoused

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Keep in mind that the man who first made his reputation — The Apprentice aside — and his fortune as a real estate developer has remarkably few plans to develop anything (housing included) that would help most Americans. Count on one thing, though: he’ll continue the major tax cuts he passed in his first term for — of course! — the distinctly more than well-to-do, while he has his eye on freeing Wall Street from further financial regulation. No surprise there. And this in a country where, as TomDispatch regular Liz Theoharis and Cedar Monroe (author of the new memoir Trash: A Poor White Journey) suggest today, housing space of every sort is desperately needed and the unhoused are both growing in numbers and about to suffer ever more painful fates. (That’s thanks, at least in significant part, to the recent decision of the six conservative Supreme Court justices in Grants Pass v. Johnson essentially making it a crime to simply sleep outside when you have no place else to go.)

In that context, give Kamala Harris some credit, since she’s put a spotlight on this country’s housing crisis — and yes, there is one! — and is talking about acting to “end America’s housing shortage” by pouring government money into new housing in a country where the median home price now tops $400,000. She hopes to spur the construction of at least three million new homes, while offering some genuine help in buying (or renting) that housing at reasonable prices (even if not ones most of the homeless in this country could possibly afford).

Talk about a nightmare and a half, just check out Theoharis and Monroe today on the ever more horrifying homeless crisis in this country, which few politicians of any party care to truly face, and what to make of it. Tom

Where Can We Live?

The Homeless Crisis in America

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In 2019, a group of homeless folks were living on a deserted piece of land along the Chehalis River, a drainage basin that empties into Grays Harbor, an estuary of the Pacific Ocean, on the coast of the state of Washington. When the city of Aberdeen ordered the homeless encampment cleared out, some of those unhoused residents took the city to court, because they had nowhere else to go. Aberdeen finally settled the case by agreeing to provide alternative shelter for the residents since, the year before, a U.S. court of appeals had ruled in the case of Martin v. Boise that a city without sufficient shelter beds to accommodate homeless people encamped in their area couldn't close the encampment.

Indeed, for years, homeless people on the West Coast have had one defense set by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. In Martin v. Boise, it ruled that criminalizing people who had nowhere else to sleep was indeed "cruel and unusual punishment." However, a group of homeless folks in Grants Pass, Oregon, who had been fined and moved from place to place because they lacked shelter, took their case all the way to the Supreme Court. And in June, it ruled against them, overturning Martin v. Boise and finding that punishing homeless people with fines and short stints in jail was neither cruel, nor unusual, because cities across the country had done it so often that it had become commonplace. 

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William Astore, Making America Sane Again

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I’ve recently begun reading Caroline Alexander’s new book, Skies of Thunder, The Deadly World War II Mission Over the Roof of the World. Its focus is the theater of operations in which my father served as operations officer for the 1st Air Commandos, an all-volunteer unit, in World War II. And no, he isn’t mentioned, though his commander Phil Cochran (“Flip Corkin” in the comic strip of that time, Terry and the Pirates) is. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the U.S. was instantly at war in both Asia and Europe and my father, then too old to be drafted, soon volunteered. Though, as a Jew, he undoubtedly wanted to fight the Nazis, he was sent to India as part of that unit’s operations against the Japanese in Burma.

By May 1945, the Nazi regime had gone down in flames, and that August, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki were A-bombed more or less to smithereens, the Japanese surrendered, ending “his” war, but, as it turned out — from Korea to Vietnam, Afghanistan to Iraq — anything but ending Washington’s disastrous urge to be a global war state. Like so many former soldiers of that war, he never really talked to his son about his experiences. Fortunately, he at least got to see (and help) the genuine good guys win.

However, by the time American-style war hit my world — in Vietnam — the United States looked like anything but the good guy (at least to me and so many young people like me) and I found myself volunteering (so to speak) to turn in my draft card and protest that war in the streets. By then, of course, the American national (in)security state was already succeeding in a striking fashion at only one thing (other than turning itself into a remarkable growth industry): it was largely freeing itself of us and of Congress. And of course, as retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, historian, and TomDispatch regular Bill Astore, whose Bracing Views Substack is a must-read, makes all too clear today, this country, the globe’s (once) dominant power, has only gone from bad to worse when it comes to both preparations for and making war in a big time and, in both cases, remarkably disastrous fashion. Tom

From the Arsenal of Democracy to an Arsenal of Genocide

The Pernicious Price of Global Reach, Global Power, and Global Dominance

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During World War II, American leaders proudly proclaimed this country the “arsenal of democracy,” supplying weapons and related materiel to allies like Great Britain and the Soviet Union. To cite just one example, I recall reading about Soviet armored units equipped with U.S. Sherman tanks, though the Soviets had an even better tank of their own in the T-34 and its many variants. However, recent news that the United States is providing yet more massive arms deliveries to Israel (worth $20 billion) for 2026 and thereafter caught me off guard.  Israel quite plainly is engaged in the near-total destruction of Gaza and the massacre of Palestinians there.  So, tell me, how over all these years did the self-styled arsenal of democracy become an arsenal of genocide?

Israel, after all, couldn’t demolish Gaza, killing at least 40,000 Palestinians in a population of only 2.1 million, including thousands of babies and infants, without massive infusions of U.S. weaponry. Often, the U.S. doesn’t even sell the weaponry to Israel, a rich country that can pay its own bills. Congress just freely gifts body- and baby-shredding bombs in the name of defending Israel from Hamas. Obviously, by hook or crook, or rather by shells, bombs, and missiles, Israel is intent on rendering Gaza Palestinian-free and granting Israelis more living space there (and on the West Bank). That’s not “defense” -- it's the 2024 equivalent of Old Testament-style vengeance by annihilation.

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