A Personal TomDispatch Farewell |
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A Personal TomDispatch Farewell
After 24 years of incisive reporting and commentary on America’s destructive imperial exploits, Tom is passing the torch.
Then-President George W. Bush speaks aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln off the California coast in 2003.
This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com.
Yes, I began TomDispatch 24-and-a-half years ago and, today, I’m finally putting up my own last piece, at least as the editor in chief of this site. Very soon, the superlative Nick Turse will be running TomDispatchunder the auspices of The Intercept (though I’ll undoubtedly continue to lend a hand). It’s been a long run. I only wish I could say that, so many years later, this world was a better place.… Sigh, no such luck. (Anything but, in fact!)
There are so many people to thank, including all the remarkable authors I’ve published. I couldn’t even begin to list them here, though I’d love to thank each of them from the bottom of my heart. And what a mess their pieces might have been if Christopher Holmes hadn’t shown up online to lend an eternal hand or my old friend Annette Liberson-Drewry hadn’t done the same, both proofing the stories in a fabulous and never-ending manner. And let me not forget Annelise Whitley, who was always there, as (until relatively recently) was Erika Eichelberger!
And I can’t even begin to thank the scads of wonderful writers who kept this site afloat all these many years! I only wish I could still thank Mike Davis, Barbara Ehrenreich, Eduardo Galeano, Todd Gitlin, Chalmers Johnson, David Rosner, Jonathan Schell, and Howard Zinn, who are now gone from this world of ours, not to speak of so many TD authors (far too many to name) who are still deeply alive and kicking on this all-too-strange Trumpian planet and many of whom, I hope, will continue to write for this site under Nick Turse.
I can’t even imagine what my world would have been like if Hamilton Fish hadn’t called me so long ago. He suggested turning the e-mails I had begun sending out to friends in the wake of the 9/11 attacks on my city and Washington, DC, containing articles that struck me at media sites around the world and my own little explanatory introductions, into a website that he (not I) called TomDispatch. And what would I have done if The Nation Institute (which then became Type Media Center) hadn’t supported me all these years? They—and Taya McCormick-Grobow, in particular—were simply fantastic! And how would I have lasted if so many TomDispatchreaders hadn’t so generously contributed money to keep this site alive?
And so, nearly a quarter of a century (and many exclamation points!!) later, I find myself in a world that would have been unimaginable, even in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, when life on this planet became ever stranger. Sadly, then, let me bid farewell not on a planet gloriously or even passingly better, but Trumpianly worse than I ever might have imagined. And let me also offer a small bow of thanks to the many thousands of wonderful readers who have followed this site, sent its pieces around, contributed money to keep it going, and made my life matter. And let me also offer my thanks to all the other sites that reposted TD pieces so wonderfully over the years. Thank you so, so much.
Oh, and if you feel in the mood, I now have my own Substack ready for me, where, after a little time off, I hope to keep writing the odd thing—perhaps the equivalent of my TD introductions—about this ever-stranger planet of ours (as I will also, I hope, continue to do at Nick’s version of TomDispatch from time to time). To subscribe to my new Substack, just click here. And as I used to do so regularly in another life on another planet (or so it now seems to me), I’m soon going to pick up the book manuscript of an old friend (and well-known writer) and begin editing it. And with all of that in mind, here’s my final piece as the guy who created and ran TomDispatch all these years, the last of the hundreds (certainly 300 or more!) I’ve personally written since 2001 at this site.
OK, here’s what this old man remembers nearly a quarter of a century later.
I was living in New York City (as I still am) when, on September 11, 2001, two hijacked planes full of passengers hit the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, killing almost 3,000 innocent people. Until that moment, of course, such a thing would have been beyond inconceivable, no less watchable on TV, in the United States of America. Had someone written up such a plot with Osama bin Laden and crew in the cast of characters, it would have been treated as the worst kind of unpublishable science fiction.
But, of course, it did indeed happen and, in some strange sense, in its wake (an all-too-appropriate word under the circumstances), our world did indeed seem to flip upside down. That was, of course, after President George W. Bush responded early that October by—God save us!—invading Afghanistan (which, at least to me, was a shock and a half in its own right) and launching his disastrous “Global War on........