dinsdag 7 oktober 2014

Tom Engelhardt 71



October 7, 2014
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Inside the American Terrordome


[Note for TomDispatch Readers: I want to offer special thanks to those of you who made $100 donations to this website in return for signed, personalized copies of my new book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World. What a great crew you are! Believe me, it couldn’t be more appreciated (and the books are in the mail). You really do help keep this website alive and breathing. For those of you who meant to contribute but haven’t yet, the offer is still open. Just visit our donation page to check it out.

In the meantime, Juan Cole, who runs the invaluable Informed Comment website, had this to say about Shadow Government: “Tom Engelhardt’s writing on the new forms of government surveillance is crucial because he has spent a lifetime studying the rise of the national security state. He can therefore put the contemporary practices of the National Security Agency and the destruction of the Fourth Amendment in the context of the rise of a twenty-first-century Leviathan that he has chronicled for us for decades. As we arrive a few decades late at Orwell’s 1984, Tom Engelhardt is our anti-Winston Smith, writing the newspaper articles back into their original form and washing out the propaganda.” Tom]


ISIS in Washington 
America’s Soundtrack of Hysteria 
By Tom Engelhardt


It happened so fast that, at first, I didn’t even take it in.
Two Saturdays ago, a friend and I were heading into the Phillips Museum in Washington, D.C., to catch a show of neo-Impressionist art when we ran into someone he knew, heading out. I was introduced and the usual chitchat ensued. At some point, she asked me, “Do you live here?”
“No,” I replied, “I’m from New York.”
She smiled, responded that it, too, was a fine place to live, then hesitated just a beat before adding in a quiet, friendly voice: “Given ISIS, maybe neither city is such a great place to be right now.” Goodbyes were promptly said and we entered the museum.
All of this passed so quickly that I didn’t begin rolling her comment around in my head until we were looking at the sublime pointillist paintings of Georges Seurat and his associates. Only then did I think: ISIS, a danger in New York? ISIS, a danger in Washington? And I had the urge to bolt down the stairs, catch up to her, and say: whatever you do, don’t step off the curb. That’s where danger lies in American life. ISIS, not so much.
Click here to read more of this dispatch.

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