Okay, here’s what this old man remembers nearly a quarter of a century later:

I was living in New York City when, on September 11, 2001, two hijacked planes full of passengers hit the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, killing almost 3,000 innocent people. Until that moment, such a thing would have been beyond inconceivable, no less watchable on TV, in the United States of America. Had someone written up such a plot with Osama bin Laden and crew in the cast of characters, it would have been treated as the worst kind of unpublishable science fiction.

But, of course, it did indeed happen and, in some sense, in its wake (an all-too-appropriate word under the circumstances), our world flipped upside down. That was after President George W. Bush responded early that October by invading Afghanistan and launching his disastrous “Global War on Terror.” That stunned me.

Sometime in the weeks that followed, my memory — which isn’t exactly trustworthy at 82 years of age — is that I saw an article deep inside The New York Times (which I still read daily on paper) noting that US soldiers were by then fighting in parts of Afghanistan where the troops of the Soviet Union had struggled endlessly and lost badly during that imperial power’s disastrous Afghan War (1978–1992), which helped take it down. And that, too, in some grim way, stunned me. Talk about mistakes that history had all too clearly signaled should never happen again (and again and again)!

How I created TomDispatch

I was at the time online, so I copied that piece into an email and sent it out with a note to a small set of friends. And somehow that began the process that led to my publication, TomDispatch.

I soon realized that, thanks to the Internet, I could actually read around the globe — Britain’s The Guardian, France’s Le Monde Diplomatique, etc. — and that people in the rest of the world had different outlooks than the one that largely dominated attention here in the US, post-September 11. And so, as I stumbled across more pieces that seemed to offer different perspectives on our increasingly eerie planet, I started emailing them to a growing list of friends and acquaintances.

After a time, and to my complete surprise, people I hardly knew or didn’t know at all emailed me that they wanted to be added to my list. I remember exactly the moment when I realized that something out of the ordinary was happening not just in the world out there, but to me, too. Susan Sontag, a writer I had long admired but didn’t know from a hole in the wall, emailed me out of the blue and asked to be added to what would become the TomDispatch email list. I was speechless! And soon, I was sending it out to several hundred people (with more being added each week). That was the moment when someone I hardly knew (though he, too, was on my mailing list), Hamilton Fish of the Nation Institute, called me to ask if I might, in the future, be interested in turning those emails of mine into a website that he then set up for me and that he — not I — called “TomDispatch.”

Initially, at the new site, I did what I had been doing in my emails. I continued to find interesting pieces published elsewhere about our increasingly disturbing world, wrote little introductions of my own, and then put in their headlines and first paragraphs with a link to the full piece wherever it had first appeared. At some point, however, I started writing longer commentaries of my own on a planet that seemed to grow more bizarre by the week. Then it suddenly occurred to me that I knew a surprising number of writers whose voices, I thought, were distinctly needed in the post-September 11 reality we were already living through.

Among other things, I had been an editor, first at Pantheon Books for 15 years in the previous century and later, in this one, at Metropolitan Books, the publishing house my old friend (and Pantheon coeditor) Sara Bershtel set up. I had, for instance, published political scientist Chalmers Johnson’s remarkable book, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire at Metropolitan in 2000 to essentially no attention, weak reviews and few sales. Bin Laden’s assault on New York City and Washington, DC, however, turned that book into a nationwide bestseller and put that title word of his into the language in a big way. He would go on to write for TomDispatch memorably in the War on Terror years that followed.

The War on Terror comes home

And yes, bin Laden’s attacks were a nightmare, but this country responded to them almost unimaginably badly by creating a full-scale, seemingly endless set of further nightmares in Afghanistan and Iraq (and other nations over the years, from Cuba in Latin America to Somalia in Africa, not to speak of all those global CIA “black sites” meant for the torture of Global War on Terror prisoners). And out of all those nightmares and so many more came the presidencies of Donald (the mad duck) Trump.

From the start, TomDispatch was witnessing and reporting on America’s imperial fate. I was watching with both horror and fascination as the greatest power on Planet Earth (once the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991) was somehow going down, down, down, without even a helping hand from an opposing imperial power. After all, early in this century, China had yet truly to rise and now that it has, it’s not acting like a typical imperial power of history. As yet, it has not launched its own version of a Global War on Terror and its leaders seem remarkably intent not on colonizing the rest of Asia in some unexpected fashion, but on making a fortune producing the world’s green energy machinery (including, at the moment, 80% of global solar energy panels), even if they’re also still outdoing every other country — despite Trump’s efforts — in burning fossil fuels and pouring greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

I watched and recorded at TomDispatch just how my country was playing out its grim version of the predictable decline of all imperial powers, historically speaking, in an up-close-and-personal way. And in 2016, this country showed our increasingly disturbed world what decline looks like by electing Trump as president.

I find myself at my advanced age (with my friends beginning to die around me) in a reality I could never have imagined. Don’t get me started on artificial intelligence, which, as Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders has pointed out, could someday “replace humans in controlling the planet!” Unreligious as I may be, I’m with the Pope on AI — though perhaps even more so. My own feeling is that no genuine intelligence could have been senseless enough to create such an obvious nightmare to come.

The War on Terror comes home yet again with Trump

It might even be possible to think of Trump as the final chapter in this country’s Global War on Terror. Think of him, in fact, as the way that war came home, big time! He could hardly have been more of a terror. To make matters so much worse, in 2026, a year expected to be the second-hottest in recorded history, he seems intent on making war not just on Iran, or any other random country like Somalia or Nigeria, but on Earth itself. Even his anti-immigrant agenda is, as The Guardian reported, ensuring that more fossil fuels go into the atmosphere via the frightening number of planes deporting those immigrants, making more regions grow hotter and guaranteeing that yet more people will end up as migrants.

In short, whether it’s climate change, Iran or you name it, Trump (the second time around) is already giving heat new meaning.

And none of this would I have believed in November 2001 when all of it began for me. Had you tried to show me such a future then, I would have laughed you out of the room and gone about my business.

In a sense, you might say that the War on Terror never ended, since my country has never stopped bombing other countries around the globe, the latest (but undoubtedly not the last), being Iran. And I suspect that, without that “war,” Trump would have been inconceivable.

It pains me that, when I go, I’ll be leaving such a mess of an all-American world to my poor grandchildren. They truly deserve better. When I started TomDispatch, I might have hoped that I would see them living on at least a modestly better Earth by the time I signed off. I officially ended my tenure on the site this spring, and no, I can’t say my grandchildren’s situation today is more ideal.

No such luck, alas, and that makes me sad. I mean, we already knew that we were truly on the planet from hell when, on his third try, Trump managed to garner 49.8% of the popular vote and win another four unbelievable years as president of the anything-but-United States.

Yes, anyone could have hoped for better. I certainly did, even if such hopes proved unrealistic. Still, one can and should still hope that the next great imperial power, obviously China (if, in fact, there are to be more great powers on this ever less great planet of ours), might prove more reasonable and less Trumpian. At least that country’s leadership plans to make a fortune off the decarbonization of Earth by producing the equipment, from electric vehicles to solar panels, needed to green the planet.

Let’s also not forget that other former great power, Russia, which continues fighting its miserable war in Ukraine into its fifth year, while pouring more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and launching actual nuclear missiles (though with dummy warheads instead of nuclear payloads) at Ukraine. That’s just what we need: the threat of nuclear warfare!

Yes, all in all, we humans are a truly unnerving crew. Worse yet, over the decades from atomic warfare to full-scale war on the planet itself, we seem eerily driven to develop the means to be increasingly destructive. Sigh…

[TomDispatch first published this piece.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.