Above, you will see a picture of Tom Engelhardt. He may be familiar to some. You can click the link if you don't know who I am talking about.
I subscribe to Engelhardt's, Tom Dispatch, and I am commenting, today, on the bulletin that Engelhardt posted online on July 18, 2024. His column on that date was titled, "The Decline And Fall Of Presidential America."
In that posting, from mid-July, Engelhardt begins with a commentary on the two candidates then vying for the presidency - both old! Engelhardt then turns to America itself, noting that Henry Luce, an American magazine magnate who founded Time, Life, Fortune, and Sports Illustrated magazines, claimed that “The 20th Century is the American Century.”
Well, the 20th Century has now come and gone, hasn't it? If that "American Century" is all over, what's happening now?
Engelhardt doesn't really go into that very much, but he is ruthless in pointing out that the two candidates who were presumed, in July, to be fighting to lead the nation are "ancient," and that this is profoundly discouraging.
THINGS HAVE CHANGED SINCE ENGELHARDT WROTE IN JULY. At the time he wrote, J.D. Vance had just appeared on the stage at the Republican National Convention. Vance wasn't even forty years old, yet. Trump - that "old guy" - was the official presidential candidate, but he had recruited "new blood" in the shape of that "Hillbilly" Senator. As for the nation's other major political party, an apparently decrepit Joe Biden was then the presumptive candidate of the Democratic Party. Engelhardt had little good to say about him. Again, THINGS HAVE CHANGED SINCE ENGELHARDT WROTE IN JULY.
I, for one, am hopeful, and excited, and expectant that those changes - and specifically the candidacy of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz - will mean good things for the nation's future.
In fact, I would like to suggest that it would be most appropriate for us to focus on the "nation," as opposed to the "candidates." Whether the candidates are "old" or "young," the nation is definitely getting on in years, and that "American Century" is definitively over. Where do we all go from here?
Well, how about entertaining the thought - how about "celebrating" the thought - that the so-called "American Century" is, as I just said, definitively and decidedly over? Is is possible that the 21st Century will be the century in which everyone on earth recognizes our total interdependence, so that we attenuate national competition, and collectively address the REAL challenges that face us - challenges that we knew about in July (and that we have known about for a long time), and that we have ever greater reason to pay attention to now, in October. The United States can provide some leadership, to make sure that happens!
Global Warming is, in fact, "global" in its impacts. It is real. It is advancing at a rapid pace and is putting human civilization in peril. It makes planetary (or "international") cooperation a priority. People have been telling us this for years, but maybe this is the year that everyone on Planet Earth will have a more or less simultaneous realization that we are all in this together.
Let us deal with the 21st Century with that truth in mind! Our "American Century" has come and gone, and I am suggesting, to young and old alike, that we should get ourselves current with the century in which we are actually living, right now, the "Century of Planet Earth."
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