The Ultimate Blowback Universe A Planet Boiling With Unintended Consequences

The Ultimate Blowback Universe
A Planet Boiling With Unintended Consequences
By Tom Engelhardt
You want to see “blowback” in action? That's easy enough. All you need is a vague sense of how Google Search works. Then type into it phrases like “warmest years,” “rising sea levels,” “melting ice,” “lengthening wildfire season,” or “future climate refugees,” and you’ll find yourself immersed in the grimmest of blowback universes.  It’s a world which should give that CIA term of tradecraft a meaning even the Agency never imagined for it.
But before I put you on this blowback planet of ours and introduce you to the blowback president presiding over it, I want to take a moment to remember Mr. Blowback himself.
And what a guy he was!  Here’s how he described himself in the last piece he wrote for TomDispatch just months before his death in November 2010: “My own role these past 20 years has been that of Cassandra, whom the gods gave the gift of foreseeing the future, but also cursed because no one believed her.”
He wasn’t being immodest.  He had, in many ways, seen the shape of things to come for what he never hesitated to call “the American empire,” including -- in that 2010 piece -- its decline.  As he wrote then, “Thirty-five years from now, America's official century of being top dog (1945-2045) will have come to an end; its time may, in fact, be running out right now. We are likely to begin to look ever more like a giant version of England at the end of its imperial run, as we come face to face with, if not necessarily to terms with, our aging infrastructure, declining international clout, and sagging economy.”
You know how -- if you’re of a certain age at least -- there are those moments when you go back to the books that truly mattered to you, the ones that somehow prepared you, as best anyone can be prepared, for the years to come.  One I return to regularly is his.  I’m talking about Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire.
The man who wrote that was Chalmers Johnson, a former CIA consultant and eminent scholar of modern Asian history, who would in that work characterize himself in his former life as a “spear-carrier for empire.”
Click here to read more of this dispatch.http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176392/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_the_age_of_unintended_consequences/#more