Recently, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists featured a fiction contest: “Write Before Midnight.” I sent in an entry, which, sad to say, didn’t win. (The winners can be found here.) But that’s OK: I enjoyed writing something other than my usual essays. My “losing” entry to the contest follows. (Re-reading it, it’s perhaps too much like a memoir rather than fiction.)
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Making Armageddon Great Again
And so the missiles are finally here. Long ago, I thought I’d put nuclear war in the rearview mirror. I never expected to see a mushroom cloud through my windshield, rising in the near distance.
I’d seen something like it before—Russian nuclear missiles flying over the North Pole on their way to America—but that was fifty years ago. I was a young lieutenant then, working in the Missile Warning Center deep inside Cheyenne Mountain. Those missile tracks weren’t real; they were part of a war game, fed into our computers on magnetic tape. The exercise ended with a simulated Armageddon, soundless, screamless.
Even so, when the tracks terminated at U.S. cities, we all went quiet. Sitting two thousand feet under granite, staring at monochrome monitors, we imagined those cities vaporized in an instant. Millions dead, incinerated in a heartbeat. The thought chilled us.
I was 24 then, serving my country against the “evil empire” of the Soviet Union, near the tail end of the Cold War. The first Cold War, I should add—as opposed to the “new” one we’ve been trapped in for the past two decades. Well, it’s plenty hot now. Thermonuclear hot.
I was far enough from my city’s ground zero to survive the initial blast and heat. But at 74, I know these are my last days. Fallout will finish me—unless I take care of it myself first.
I now know for certain that, after an unimaginably destructive nuclear exchange (a nice euphemism, isn’t it?), the living will envy the dead. For now, I’m one of the living, caught in a land of the dead.
How did it come to this? We always ask that, don’t we? How did I let a 50-year-old nightmare scenario on magnetic tape become real? Couldn’t I have done something—anything—to stop it?
Even now, I like to think I could have. There was nothing inevitable about the “new” Cold War or its culmination in MAD—mutual assured destruction. I just wasn’t mad enough to resist it with the ferocity required. I gave my quiet consent to the warmongers, the death-wishers, the ones who talk tough about “big-boy pants,” the ones haunted by missile envy and mindless fear. The ones who blow hardest just before they decide to blow up the world.
I saw it coming. So did many others. I wrote against the “new” Cold War. I denounced so-called investments in new nuclear weapons. I warned about militarizing space, how our early warning satellites and sensors could be blinded. I cautioned that President Trump’s “Golden Dome” missile shield might make nuclear war more likely. None of it mattered. Money spoke louder than I ever could—talk of jobs and the promise of profits outweighed any argument I could muster.
And so here I am, facing darkness—smoke, ash, soot blotting out the sun. I’ve stocked enough supplies to last a couple of weeks, but what’s the point? I have no desire to navigate a post-apocalyptic hellscape.
Once upon a time, I was an Air Force historian, a captain, teaching cadets about the making and use of the atomic bomb. That was 1992—45 years ago. Where does the time go? We even took the cadets to Los Alamos, the birthplace of the bomb, and then on to the Trinity test site.
Back then I was oddly optimistic. The Soviet Union had collapsed. Politicians were talking about peace dividends. Some even hinted that America might become a normal country in normal times. Normalcy! Imagine that today.
I remember a somewhat glum spokesman at Los Alamos talking about reinventing the lab—shifting to peaceful purposes, maybe consumer electronics like VCRs and CD players, competing with Japan. I was skeptical. Nuclear physicists designing camcorders and video games? A longshot—but better than cranking out new warheads and bombs.
At Trinity, what struck me most was the absence of the tower from which the “gadget” had been suspended. Vaporized instantly. Only twisted rebar remained at the base. And that had been a baby nuke—mere kilotons compared to the megatons in our arsenal. I tried to impress this on the cadets, some of whom might someday be ordered to launch such weapons. But who can really picture megatons of destruction, repeated again and again and again?
A sharp-eyed cadet found a sliver of trinitite. For some reason, I had to touch it, briefly, radioactivity be damned. This tiny fragment, this ghost of Trinity, made it all seem real. As a few atomic tourists walked around the scrub desert in masks, fearful still of breathing in radioactive particles, I thought of Oppenheimer’s god of death, the destroyer of worlds. That god has finally come for us—bringing mass death just as Oppie knew he would.
Now, back in the present, at least I’ve filled both bathtubs with water. A small reserve. At Cheyenne Mountain, there was a pond underground, a kind of giant bathtub, complete with a rowboat, so I was told. Maybe Charon did the rowing. We used to joke that boat and reservoir was the Navy’s presence in our Air Force-run bunker. I never saw that boat or pond. I wish I had.
There’s a lot I wish I’d seen. I thought there’d be more time. Next month, next year, next life.
Next life. That’s what I cling to now. I fought the good fight. I tried to argue for disarmament as the only sane option—for America, for humanity, for the entire living breathing beautiful planet of ours. But others thought differently. Some were simply making too much money, making Armageddon great again.
So don’t judge me for thinking about the unthinkable. I know suicide is a mortal sin for us Catholics. But my Ruger 9mm sits by my side. Twelve rounds in the magazine—but I’ll only need the one in the chamber.
Yes, I’ve seen the mushroom cloud. And soon, quite soon, there’ll be a smoking gun.
There are at least 30 trillion reasons why the Trump administration is waging war against Venezuela. Recall that Venezuela has proven oil reserves of 300 billion barrels. If those barrels average $100 over the decades of their extraction, that’s $30 trillion, an immense sum representing about 80% of America’s colossal national debt. Of course, most of those trillions will go to multinationals and billionaires, not to the American people—and certainly not to the Venezuelan people. But who said life is fair?
The so-called Donroe Doctrine of hemispheric dominance represents the return of unapologetic gangster capitalism. The basic policy of the Trump administration recalls Michael Corleone, the mafia don in “The Godfather” saga. When his consigliere Tom Hagen (played by Robert Duvall) asks Michael (played by Al Pacino) whether he has to wipe everyone out, Michael coldly replies “Just my enemies.” Anyone who defies the Corleone Family must be eliminated.
Maduro defied the Trump “family” so he had to be taken out. Cuba and Iran may be the next “enemies” to be “wiped out.”
As Trump once said in an interview, the U.S has plenty of killers. This is what the exercise of naked power looks like. Power without morality. Power without principles other than profit and the further consolidation of power.
U.S. democracy is a sham. We have shamocracy. Thugocracy. The strong do what they will; the weak suffer as they must. What matters is control, power, and profits.
Again, as Caitlin Johnstone noted, Trump has been transparent about his motives. Put bluntly, it’s the oil, stupid.
“We’re gonna take back the oil that frankly we should have taken back a long time ago,” Trump told the press following Maduro’s abduction, saying “We’re going to be taking out a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground, and that wealth is going to the people of Venezuela, and people from outside of Venezuela that used to be in Venezuela, and it goes also to the United States of America in the form of reimbursement for the damages caused us by that country.”
“We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country, and we are ready to stage a second and much larger attack if we need to do so,” Trump said.
“We have tremendous energy in that country. It’s very important that we protect it. We need that for ourselves, we need that for the world,” the president added.
Trump is America’s most scrutable president. He doesn’t bother to hide his motives here. This is theft, impure and very simple. We have the power to take it and we will, full stop.
Sometimes, imagining an opposite scenario can bring folly and illegality into relief.
Imagine if Venezuela attacked the U.S. Imagine if President Trump and Melania Trump were seized, and that the Venezuelan attorney general said they would face justice in Venezuela. I’d imagine that nearly all Americans would see this as an act of war, a gross violation of national sovereignty. American vengeance would be swift.
Of course, this is not Opposite Day. It’s the U.S. that has attacked Venezuela, seizing Maduro and his wife, with U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi vowing “They will soon face the full wrath of American justice on American soil in American courts.”
WTF? After kidnapping foreign leaders in an obvious act of war, we’re then going to try them in U.S. courts as if they’re American citizens subjects? When did U.S. courts become international courts of justice? I know—that’s hardly the worst of it.
The conceit here is stunning, as is the exertion of executive privilege. Apparently, Trump didn’t bother to consult with Congress before launching this war. That is unconstitutional and an impeachable offense.
Yesterday, I was reading about how the Maduro government was open to negotiations with the Trump administration. Today, Maduro is apparently in American hands, kidnapped in a military coup.
Yes, the people of Venezuela would prefer to elect or depose their own presidents. Yankee go home!
I know Trump and others have always lusted after Venezuela’s oil and gas reserves, but seriously? Which country are we going to invade next, which leaders will we kidnap next, using the false pretext of fighting a war on drugs? (Speaking of drugs, it seems like half the ads on TV now are for selling “legal” drugs of one sort or another, featuring lots of smiling happy people; are we going to declare war on Big Pharma?)
I’m tempted to write the U.S. has hit a new low on the international stage, but surely we know lower acts are coming. The optimism of the New Year died so quickly, didn’t it?
The scary part is that the official death toll of 76,134 is an undercount. So many bodies remain under rubble or just plain obliterated by bombs.
Of course, the so-called cease fire in Gaza is anything but as Israel continues its policy of not-so-selective killing and slow strangulation. If you suggest genocide is wrong, the predictable response from the Israeli-U.S. government is that you’re a Hamas terrorist sympathizer and probably an anti-Semite as well (the latter is true even if you’re Jewish).
Coincidentally, I just took a drink after typing that and started choking. OK, maybe that wasn’t a coincidence.
I remember during Catholic service we’d sing the hymn: “Whatsoever you do to the least my brothers, that you do unto me.” I guess they’re just empty words to all those avowed Christians in the government.
I’m a Mutt-American. I’m half Italian, 3/8th English, and 1/8th Swedish. But I’ve never thought of myself as other than 100% American.
Ancestors on my mother’s side go back to the 1630s when they came across the Atlantic to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Surnames like Wilder, Bird, and Hayward. I’ve been able to trace them back to England and to specific regions, even to ship’s names that they took in emigrating to the New World. At least one of my mother’s ancestors fought in the American Revolutionary War. Take that, J.D. Vance.
Another ancestor on my mother’s side, surname of Johnson, came from Sweden in the 19th century. He was a janitor. Other ancestors were reverends, clockmakers, and tanners, among other occupations. Again, typically American.
On my father’s side, his parents came from Italy in 1902 and 1913, so in that sense my American pedigree is more recent. That said, my father and his two brothers all served in World War II, my dad staying stateside as his two brothers served overseas, one in Europe, the other in the Pacific.
I think my family background is about as typical, as unexceptional, about as “normal” as they come. Unless you are of Native American ancestry, your roots here in America are fairly shallow, relatively speaking. A few centuries at best—not much on the cosmic timescale.
I mention all this because of the Trump administration’s vilification of immigrants, notably so-called illegals. Yes, I think people should immigrate legally to this country, but I don’t think anyone should be demonized.
Ilhan Omar, American (official portrait, 2019)
Trump in particular likes to attack Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, who is a Somali-American. His harsh rhetoric against her is dangerously irresponsible as well as hateful. I see Omar as akin to my Italian grandmother, who proudly became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1945.
Trump is a remarkably puny man—a man who thinks he can puff himself up by belittling others. It’s shameful behavior. He should be impeached by Congress and removed for his un-American attacks that endanger other lawmakers—that demean others, that sow discord.
So many immigrants came (and come) to this country seeking a better life, a fresh start, a land where you really could be judged by the content of your character. In its attacks on immigrants, the Trump administration has shown itself to be characterless and wanting of the true American spirit.
Unless you’re Cheyenne or Pawnee or Iroquois or some other kinship group drawn from indigenous peoples, you’re a recent American, and probably a Mutt-American like me. As Americans, we’re all in this together—all equal under the law, all striving to form a more perfect union.
Well, except for Trump and his tribe of dividers. It’s high time they left America. Perhaps Elon Musk has a few rockets ready to send them to the Moon and beyond.
Hello Everyone: In 2007, I was fed up with the lies of the Bush/Cheney administration and the way civilian leadership was using the bemedaled chest of David Petraeus to deflect blame for that disastrous war. I knew then the “success” of the surge was an illusion, or, as Petraeus put it back then, “fragile” and “reversible” (and so it proved to be). I wrote an op-ed about how we the people had to save the military from itself and its own self-serving illusions. No one was interested in what I had to say; no one, that is, except Tom Engelhardt at TomDispatch. And so that led to my first “tomgram.”
Eighteen years later, I’ve reached the unlikely number of 115 essays for TomDispatch, something neither Tom nor I ever expected. And just about all those essays have been introduced by a mini-essay by Tom himself. It’s been a remarkable partnership—it’s what got my career as a writer and essayist (rather than a traditional historian) started.
This piece, my 115th, returns again to Cheyenne Mountain and nuclear war. I first wrote about my time “in the mountain” in 2008; seventeen years later, I’m even more dismayed at (and disgusted by) my country’s newfound enthusiasm for nuclear weapons and their “recapitalization.” Read on!
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It’s been 20 years since I retired from the Air Force and 40 years since I first entered Cheyenne Mountain, America’s nuclear redoubt at the southern end of the Front Range that includes Pikes Peak in Colorado. So it was with some nostalgia that I read a recent memo from General Kenneth Wilsbach, the new Chief of Staff of the Air Force (CSAF). Along with the usual warrior talk, the CSAF vowed to “relentlessly advocate” for the new Sentinel ICBM (intercontinental ballistic missile) and the B-21 Raider stealth bomber. While the Air Force often speaks of “investing” in new nukes, this time the CSAF opted for “recapitalization,” a remarkably bloodless term for the creation of a whole new generation of genocidal thermonuclear weapons and their delivery systems.
(Take a moment to think about that word, “creation,” applied to weapons of mass destruction. Raised Catholic, I learned that God created the universe out of nothing. By comparison, nuclear creators aren’t gods, they’re devils, for their “creation” may end with the destruction of everything. Small wonder J. Robert Oppenheimer musedthat he’d become death, the destroyer of worlds, after the first successful atomic blast in 1945.)
In my Cheyenne Mountain days, circa 1985, the new “must have” bomber was the B-1 Lancer and the new “must have” ICBM was the MX Peacekeeper. If you go back 20 to 30 years earlier than that, it was the B-52 and the Minuteman. And mind you, my old service “owns” two legs of America’s nuclear triad. (The Navy has the third with its nuclear submarines armed with Trident II missiles.) And count on one thing: it will never willingly give them up. It will always “relentlessly advocate” for the latest ICBM and nuclear-capable bomber, irrespective of need, price, strategy, or above all else their murderous, indeed apocalyptic, capabilities.
At this moment, Donald Trump’s America has more than 5,000 nuclear warheads and bombs of various sorts, while Vladimir Putin’s Russia has roughly 5,500 of the same. Together, they represent overkill of an enormity that should be considered essentially unfathomable. Any sane person would minimally argue for serious reductions in nuclear weaponry on this planet. The literal salvation of humanity may depend on it. But don’t tell that to the generals and admirals, or to the weapons-producing corporations that get rich building such weaponry, or to members of Congress who have factories producing such weaponry and bases housing them in their districts.
So, here we are in a world in which the Pentagon plans to spend another $1.7 trillion(and no, that is not a typo!) “recapitalizing” its nuclear triad, and so in a world that is guaranteed to remain haunted forever by a possible future doomsday, the specter of nuclear mushroom clouds, and a true “end-times” catastrophe.
I Join AF Space Command Only to Find Myself Under 2,000 Feet of Granite
My first military assignment in 1985 was at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado with Air Force Space Command. That put me in America’s nuclear command post during the last few years of the Cold War. I also worked in the Space Surveillance Center and on a battle staff that brought me into the Missile Warning Center. So, I was exposed, in a relatively modest way (if anything having to do with nuclear weapons can ever be considered “modest”), to what nuclear war would actually be like and forced to think about it in a way most Americans don’t.
Each time I journeyed into Cheyenne Mountain, I walked or rode through a long tunnel carved out of granite. The buildings inside were mounted on gigantic springs (yes, springs!) that were supposed to absorb the shock of any nearby hydrogen bomb blast in a future war with the Soviet Union. Massive blast doors that looked like they belonged on the largest bank vault in the universe were supposed to keep us safe, though in a nuclear war they might only have ensured our entombment. They were mostly kept open, but every now and then they were closed for a military exercise.
The author (right) with Tom Engelhardt
I was a “space systems test analyst.” The Space Surveillance Center ran on a certain software program that needed periodic testing and evaluation and I helped test the computer software that kept track of all objects orbiting the Earth. Back then, there were just over 5,000 of them. (Now, that number’s more like 45,000 and space is a lot more crowded — perhaps too crowded.)
Anyhow, what I remember most vividly were military exercises where we’d run through different potentially world-ending scenarios. (Think of the movie War Gameswith Matthew Broderick.) One exercise simulated a nuclear attack on the United States. No, it wasn’t like some Hollywood production. We just had monochrome computer displays with primitive graphics, but you could certainly see missile tracks emerging from the Soviet Union, crossing the North Pole, and ending at American cities.
Even though there were no fancy (fake) explosions and no other special effects, simply realizing what was possible and how we would visualize it if it were actually to happen was, as I’m sure you can imagine, a distinctly sobering experience and not one I’ve ever forgotten.
That “war game” should have shaken me up more than it did, however. At the time, we had a certain amount of fatalism about the possibility of nuclear war, something captured in the posters of the era that told you what to do in case of a nuclear attack. The final step was basically to bend over and kiss your ass goodbye. That was indeed my attitude.
Rather than obsess about Armageddon, I submerged myself in routine. There was a certain job to be done, procedures to be carried out, discipline to adhere to. Remember, of course, that this was also the era of the rise of the nuclear freeze protest movement that was demanding the U.S. and the Soviet Union reach an agreement to halt further testing, production, and deployment of nuclear weapons. (If only, of course!) In addition, this was the time of the hit film The Day After, which tried to portray the aftermath of a nuclear war in the United States. In fact, on a midnight shift in Cheyenne Mountain, I even read Tom Clancy’s Red Storm Rising, which envisioned the Cold War gone hot, a Third World War gone nuclear.
Of course, if we had thought about nuclear war every minute of every day, we might indeed have been cowering under our sheets. Unfortunately, as a society, except in rare moments like the nuclear freeze movement one, we neither considered nor generally grasped what nuclear war was all about (even though nine countries now possess such weaponry and the likelihood of such a war only grows). Unfortunately, that lack of comprehension (and so protest) is one big reason why nuclear war remains so chillingly possible.
If anything, such a war has been eerily normalized in our collective consciousness and we’ve become remarkably numb to and fatalistic about it. One characteristic of that reality was the anesthetizing language that we used then (and still use) when it came to nuclear matters. We in the military spoke in acronyms or jargon about “flexible response,” “deterrence,” and what was then known as “mutually assured destruction” (or the wiping out of everything). In fact, we had a whole vocabulary of different words and euphemisms we could use so as not to think too deeply about the unthinkable or our possible role in making it happen.
My Date With Trinity
After leaving Cheyenne Mountain and getting a master’s degree, I co-taught a course on the making and use of the atomic bomb at the Air Force Academy. That was in 1992, and we actually took the cadets on a field trip to Los Alamos where the first nuclear weapon had largely been developed. Then we went on to the Trinity test sitein Alamogordo, New Mexico, where, of course, that first atomic device was tested and that, believe me, was an unforgettable experience. We walked around and saw what was left of the tower where Robert Oppenheimer and crew suspended the “gadget” (nice euphemism!) for testing that bomb on July 16, 1945, less than a month before two atomic bombs would be dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, destroying both of them and killing perhaps 200,000 people. Basically (I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn), nothing’s left of that tower except for its concrete base and a couple of twisted pieces of metal. It certainly does make you reflect on the sheer power of such weaponry. It was then and remains a distinctly haunted landscape and walking around it a truly sobering experience.
And when I toured the Los Alamos lab right after the collapse of the other great superpower of that moment, the Soviet Union, it was curious how glum the people I met there were. The mood of the scientists was like: hey, maybe I’m going to have to find another job because we’re not going to be building all these nuclear weapons anymore, not with the Soviet Union gone. It was so obviously time for America to cash in its “peace dividends” and the scientists’ mood reflected that.
Now, just imagine that 33 years after I took those cadets there, Los Alamos is once again going gangbusters, as our nation plans to “invest” another $1.7 trillion in a “modernized” nuclear triad (imagine what that means in terms of ultimate destruction!) that we (and the rest of the world) absolutely don’t need. To be blunt, today that outrages me. It angers me that all of us, whether those like me who served in uniform or your average American taxpayer, have sacrificed so much to create genocidal weaponry and a distinctly world-ending arsenal. Worse yet, when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, we didn’t even try to change course. And now the message is: Let’s spend staggering amounts of our tax dollars on even more apocalyptic weaponry. It’s insanity and, no question about it, it’s also morally obscene.
The Glitter of Nuclear Weapons
That ongoing obsession with total destruction, ultimate annihilation, reflects the fact that the United States is led by moral midgets. During the Vietnam War years, the infamous phrase of the time was that the U.S. military had to “destroy the town to save it” (from communism, of course). And for 70 years now, America’s leaders have tacitly threatened to order the destruction of the world to save it from a rival power like Russia or China. Indeed, nuclear war plans in the early 1960s already envisioned a massive strike against Russia and China, with estimates of the dead put at 600 million, or “100 Holocausts,” as Daniel Ellsberg of Vietnam War fame so memorably put it.
Take it from this retired officer: you simply can’t trust the U.S. military with that sort of destructive power. Indeed, you can’t trust anyone with that much power at their fingertips. Consider nuclear weapons akin to the One Ring of Power in J.R.R. Tolkien’sThe Lord of the Rings. Anyone who puts that ring on is inevitably twisted and corrupted.
Freeman Dyson, a physicist of considerable probity, put it well to documentarian Jon Else in his film The Day After Trinity. Dyson confessed to his own “ring of power” moment:
“I felt it myself. The glitter of nuclear weapons. It is irresistible if you come to them as a scientist. To feel it’s there in your hands, to release this energy that fuels the stars, to let it do your bidding. To perform these miracles, to lift a million tons of rock into the sky. It is something that gives people an illusion of illimitable power, and it is, in some ways, responsible for all our troubles — this, what you might call technical arrogance, that overcomes people when they see what they can do with their minds.”
I’ve felt something akin to that as well. When I wore a military uniform, I was in some sense a captive to power. The military both captures and captivates. There’s an allure of power in the military, since you have a lot of destructive power at your disposal.
Of course, I wasn’t a B-1 bomber pilot or a missile-launch officer for ICBMs, but even so, when you’re part of something that’s so immensely, even world-destructively powerful, believe me, it does have an allure to it. And I don’t think we’re usually fully aware of how captivating that can be and how much you can want to be a part of that.
Even after their service, many veterans still want to go up in a warplane again or take a tour of a submarine, a battleship, or an aircraft carrier for nostalgic reasons, of course, but also because you want to regain that captivating feeling of being so close to immense — even world-ending — power.
The saying that “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” may never be truer than when it comes to nuclear war. We even have expressions like “use them or lose them” to express how ICBMs should be “launched on warning” of a nuclear attack before they can be destroyed by an incoming enemy strike. So many years later, in other words, the world remains on even more of a nuclear hair-trigger, the pistol loaded and cocked to our collective heads, just waiting for news that will push us over the edge, that will make those trigger fingers of ours too itchy to resist the urge to put too much pressure on that nuclear trigger.
No matter how many bunkers we build, no matter that the world’s biggest bunker tunneled out of a mountain, the one I was once in, still exists, nothing will save us if we allow the glitter of nuclear weapons to flash into preternatural thermonuclear brightness.
“America’s children are unwell.” From the New York Times this morning:
Nearly one in four 17-year-old boys in the United States has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. In the early 1980s, a diagnosis of autism was delivered to one child in 2,500. That figure is now one in 31. Almost 32 percent of adolescents have at some point been given a diagnosis of anxiety. More than one in 10 have experienced a major depressive disorder, my colleague Jia Lynn Yang reports.
And the number of mental health conditions is expanding. A child might be tagged with oppositional defiance disorder or pathological avoidance disorder. “The track has become narrower and narrower, so a greater range of people don’t fit that track anymore,” an academic who studies children and education told Jia Lynn. “And the result is, we want to call it a disorder.”
Why did this happen? A lot of reasons. Kids spend hours on screens, cutting into their sleep, exercise and socializing — activities that can ward off anxiety and depression. Mental health screenings have improved.
And then there’s school itself: a cause of stress for many children and the very place that sends them toward a diagnosis.
I can’t read the main article since it’s behind a paywall. The gist of the article is that American schooling is hyper competitive, constricting, perhaps too demanding, and therefore a big part of the problem.
Maybe. Schools are also chronically underfunded. Teaching remains an underpaid profession. Classrooms can be overcrowded. Standards vary widely. And parents are stressed as they try to get their kids into the “right” schools. It’s not hard to see how that educational ecosystem might amplify distress.
But the explosion in ADHD diagnoses, autism, and anxiety is surely also driven by Big Pharma.* “We’ve got a drug for that” should be the motto of these companies. Americans are bombarded every day with drug ads promising to change our lives. I’m not a parent myself, but if my kid had trouble focusing or otherwise had behavioral issues, I’d explore medication as an option. I’m guessing it’s easier to get a prescription for Adderall or Ritalin than for kids to get wise treatment and sustained counseling from a psychiatrist or other mental health specialist.
Not just “mother’s little helper”
Some parents may even feel that particular diagnoses confer a kind of status— confirmation that their child is not merely struggling but exceptional in some “high-functioning” or creatively gifted way. That, too, reflects broader cultural forces.(“Annie is autistic and really too intelligent/creative/artistic/sensitive for this world.”)
But beyond parental dysfunction, omnipresent screens, school pressures, and pharmaceutical marketing, there’s a deeper question: Are our kids simply mirroring the broader dysfunction of American society? We live in a culture marked by relentless competition, materialism, polarization, and chronic stress. There’s little about our adult world that could be described as calm or balanced. If our society itself is unwell, why would we expect our kids to feel—or behave—otherwise?
I know it’s not easy, but surely kids need to unplug more (especially from social media, with all its pressures). They need to get outside more. They need to play more—they need more unstructured time. They probably need less stimulation—and arguably more time to be, in a word, bored. To find their own way to play, their own hobbies and interests to pursue, their own path in life.
A dysfunctional society produces dysfunctional kids. If that’s true, how do we make a society that better serves everyone? If American society and culture is uniquely disorienting and destabilizing, can’t we change that? Can’t we make a better saner world for our kids?
Grim factoid: In 2008, Americans consumed 80% of the world’s opioid supply. Though that percentage has dropped to roughly 40% today, what is it about American life that is so painful? Why are we so addicted to (legal and illegal) drugs? And now our kids too?
Readers, what do you make of all this?
*By no means am I dismissing mental illness; my brother Stevie had his first schizophrenic episode when he was sixteen in 1973 and never fully recovered from it. I have friends with a daughter with severe Asperger’s syndrome. My concern here is the vast increase in ADHD, autism, and similar diagnoses and the potential reasons for this.
It’s been a busy week of news. Here are four items that stood out.
A group of Democratic members of Congress released a short video addressed to the U.S. military, reminding service members that they may refuse unlawful orders. President Trump denounced the video as “seditious behavior” and said such behavior was “punishable by death,” even resharing posts calling for the lawmakers to be hanged. The Democratic message itself was partisan and thin on specifics, but Trump’s response was far more troubling. U.S. troops already know they can and should refuse unlawful orders—though determining what is lawful in practice is rarely simple. What struck me most was the timing: Democrats issued this warning to the troops in response to Trump, but I don’t recall a similar concern when President Biden continued military support to Israel amid mounting accusations from human-rights bodies of grave—indeed, genocidal—violations in Gaza.
In sum, Congress should confront questionable executive actions directly rather than shifting responsibility to Lieutenant Smith or Corporal Jones.
The Trump administration has floated a 28-point plan to end the Russia-Ukraine War. Reports indicate the plan involved Russian input but did not include Ukraine or key European partners. Unsurprisingly, many provisions cross Ukraine’s stated red lines. Diplomacy is still preferable to endless war—jaw-jaw over war-war is a sound motto—but it’s hard to see this plan gaining real traction, especially when it seems designed more to satisfy Washington and Moscow than Kyiv.
One thing is certain: Ukraine is learning that when you dance with elephants, you’re likely to get trampled.
Marjorie Taylor Greene has announced her resignation from Congress, effective January 5, 2026. This surprised me. I read her resignation letter and, despite disagreeing with much of her politics, I respected her consistent opposition to regime-change wars and her outspoken criticism of Israel’s genocidal effort in Gaza and of the undue influence of AIPAC and similar lobbies. She is also right to highlight how far our government has drifted from serving America’s working and middle classes.
MTG, as unlikely as it sounds, is a viable candidate for the Republican nomination for President in 2028, assuming Trump obeys the Constitution and steps aside.
The UN Security Council has approved a U.S.-sponsored Gaza resolution, with Russia and China abstaining. Their decision not to veto suggests a calculation: let Washington bear responsibility for the consequences of its own neocolonial proposal. The plan itself looks like a thinly veiled endorsement of a murderous status quo—one that provides political cover as Gaza remains strangled and devastated. If the United States is now the guarantor of this “peace,” then it also owns the moral and political fallout. If anything, this “peace” plan will only provide cover for Israel’s ongoing genocide in slow motion.
Which brings me back to unlawful orders. Any U.S. service member asked to support actions that clearly violate international law has a duty to refuse. Yet the Democrats who admonished troops about unlawful orders seemed focused only on hypothetical abuses under Trump, not on real-world concerns about U.S. support for Israel’s genocidal operations in Gaza. For too many in Washington, unwavering support for Israel overrides legal, moral, and humanitarian considerations.
Readers, what did you make of this week’s events? One thing seems certain: we continue to live in “interesting times.”
Just when you thought the assault on the English language couldn’t be more severe, I came across a new abomination in a recent memo (11/3/25) signed by the Chief of Staff of the Air Force (CSAF).
The CSAF expressed his commitment to nuclear force “recapitalization,” meaning that he fully supports the B-21 Raider and the Sentinel ICBM, which will cost more than $500 billion over the next two decades. He vowed he’d “relentlessly advocate” for them.
“Recapitalization”: What a word to describe more genocidal nuclear weapons!
Typically, the Air Force refers to “modernization” or “investment” when it comes to new nukes. This latest euphemism is an even more extreme example of bureaucratese and business-speak.
We’re just “recapitalizing” our nuclear forces, folks. Nothing to see here, move along.
One thing is certain. The new CSAF, with his talk of “recapitalization,” will make the smoothest of transitions to industry once he retires from the military.
It’s time for recapitalization! (Red sky in morning, America take warning.)
Above is an idealized illustration of a Sentinel ICBM soon after launch. Don’t think about the aftermath of thermonuclear war. As NBC Pitchman Brian Williams once said, it’s important to be guided by the beauty of our weapons.
Next year we celebrate the 250th anniversary of America’s founding. There’s going to be the usual fight over what that anniversary should mean to Americans, and what lessons we should draw. For example, the Ken Burns series on “The American Revolution” starts this Sunday night on PBS. I’ll be watching it. If it comes close to his series on the U.S. Civil War, it should be interesting and informative.
There are so many lessons we could take from the American revolution (or war of independence). Speaking as a retired military officer, I might stress the citizen-soldier tradition, the ideal of the Minuteman, the rejection of tyranny, the suspicion of large standing armies, the desire for independence and liberty, the courage to affix one’s name to a declaration that could end with your head swinging in the air.
I don’t know what lessons Trump & Crew will be selling, but something tells me they won’t be salutary. Lots of flag-waving, of course, along with American exceptionalism.
We know America was founded as an imperfect union. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness wasn’t granted to slaves. Or indigenous peoples. Or women for that matter. (Let’s not forget women couldn’t vote for president until 1920.) The founders were mostly white men of property, with some holding “property” in slaves. For African-Americans, the “revolution of 1776” certainly didn’t prove revolutionary for them.
I would stress the idea of striving toward a more perfect union, recognizing the early republic was, in so many ways, imperfect. And that’s putting it gently. I’d stress as well what Benjamin Franklin said. As a form of government, a representative republic is better than most but also difficult to keep. And there’s the rub: today our representatives, our public servants, serve the owners and donors, the power brokers, rather than the people. A revival of the republic isn’t going to come from either major political party—they’re both beholden to money.
So how can we end this “tyranny” without a bloody revolution? Is a national revival possible without years and years of domestic conflict and strife? Meanwhile, can America reject its embrace of militarism and imperialism? Can it advance the rule of law as represented by the U.S. Constitution? Can we be touched, as Abraham Lincoln wrote, by the better angels of our nature?
1776-2026. 250 years of glorious imperfection. We can be better. We can do better. Let’s strive to live up to the promise of America.
Bracing Views 