America's Age of Denial

[struggle4progress]

By Tom Engelhardt
July 31, 2008

... If, on the evening of October 22, 1962, you had told me that, in 2008, America's most formidable enemy would be Iran, I would have danced a jig. Well, maybe not a jig, but I'll tell you this: I would have been flabbergasted.

On that October evening, President John F. Kennedy went before the nation—I heard him on radio—to tell us all that Soviet missile sites were just then being prepared on the island of Cuba with "a nuclear strike capability against the Western Hemisphere." It was, he said, a "secret, swift and extraordinary buildup of communist missiles—in an area well known to have a special and historical relationship to the United States and the nations of the Western Hemisphere." When fully operational, those nuclear-tipped weapons would reach "as far north as Hudson Bay, Canada, and as far south as Lima, Peru." I certainly knew what Hudson Bay, far to the north, meant for me ...

It was the single moment in my life—which tells you much about the life of an American who didn't go to war in some distant land—when I truly imagined myself as prospective burnt toast. I really believed that I might not make it out of the week, and keep in mind, I was then a freshman in college, just 18 years old and still wondering when life was slated to begin. Between 1939 and 2008, across much of the world, few people could claim to have escaped quite so lightly, not in that near three-quarters of a century in which significant portions of the world were laid low.

Had you, a seer that terrifying night, whispered in my ear the news about our enemies still distant decades away, the Iranians, the . . . are you kidding? . . . Iraqis, or a bunch of fanatics in the backlands of Afghanistan and a tribal borderland of Pakistan . . . well, it's a sentence that would, at the time, have been hard to finish. Death from Waziristan? I don't think so ...

http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/tomdispatch/2008/07/americas-age-of-denial.html

[sinkingfeeling]

1. One of the most interesting articles on how we reached this condition I've ever read. I'm 60, so I

recall the same things Tom does.

[struggle4progress]

2. ... lately it occurs to me what a long strange trip it's been ...