Talk about unjust, unfair, or just plain not right: Here I am at 82 years old with children, grandchildren, and old (and I mean old!) friends, and (like me) our country and our world seem to be all too distinctly on the downhill slope. I could, of course, have added aided by my president, Donald J. Trump, and (except for the “my”) that would be anything but inaccurate. And yet, the very fact that a near majority of Americans (46.4% in 2016 and 49.8% in 2024) elected him president of the United States should tell you that the process was already well underway; otherwise, such a... you chose the word... parody or atrocity (or both) of American politics would never have been possible.

In short, after all these years—16 as an editor at Pantheon Books, a decade in a freelance editing (and writing) life, and almost a quarter of a century running and writing for TomDispatch.com, the website I created (and that’s now being run by the wonderful Nick Turse)—somehow, I still can’t believe (not truly) the world I find myself in. Phew! That was an exhausting sentence! (And no surprise there, since we’re on a distinctly exhausting planet.)

If there were a god (which, unfortunately, I doubt there is), he (she, it, they?) would surely be no less unable to believe the world we now find ourselves in. Of course, from the Stone Age on, humanity has always represented a difficult proposition. Our history is, in many ways, a running story of conflicts and wars, one seemingly grimmer than the next—a history that has anything but ended in our moment.

You would think, of course, that, with our very planet imperiled by climate change, which is slowly heating it to the boiling point, we might at least have taken a passing break from fighting each other. That would seem like an especially obvious thing to do, since war pours into the atmosphere in a stunning fashion the fossil fuels that are heating this planet so destructively. But no such luck, of course.

And imagine that, at a moment in 2025 when, from Europe to the United States, we increasingly had a planet that was all too literally in flames, whether from our wars with each other or our ongoing climate war on the planet itself, Americans sent a distinct flamethrower into the White House for a second time.

Quite the opposite, in fact. Even in Europe, a continent warming up approximately twice as fast as the rest of the planet, where only recently more than 300,000 people in France and Spain were displaced by heat and wildfires of a startling kind, there’s still an ongoing major war between Russia and Ukraine. And thanks at least in part to it, at a time when humanity seems incapable of putting much effort into fighting climate change, a whole new form of fighting each other (by drone) has been developed in a distinctly unnerving fashion. And of course, Europe is hardly alone, since wars continue to be fought across parts of the Middle East (thanks significantly to “my” president and Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu), and in Somalia and Sudan in Africa. In short, despite everything we humans might theoretically learn from our past, nothing truly seems to get in the way of more of the same.

Only recently, of course, “my” president launched a war more or less out of the blue against Iran. Yes, Iran, a country that—my best guess—most Americans couldn’t even locate on a map of the world! And talk about learning nothing from the past, how totally mad that my country—theoretically still the greatest power on planet Earth—should start yet another war thousands and thousands of miles away, given that it hasn’t actually emerged victorious from a single one of the wars it’s fought since World War II. And that’s true, despite the fact that it continues to fund its military to the tune of about a trillion dollars annually, year after endless year. And........

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