I, Winston Smith... I mean, Tom Engelhardt... have not just been reading a dystopian novel, but, it seems, living one-and I suspect I've been living one all my life.

Yes, I recently reread George Orwell's classic 1949 novel, 1984. In it, Winston Smith, a secret opponent of the totalitarian world of Oceania, one of three great imperial superpowers left on planet Earth, goes down for the count at the hands of Big Brother. It was perhaps my third time reading it in my 75 years on this planet.

Since I was a kid, I've always had a certain fascination for dystopian fiction. It started, I think, with War of the Worlds, that ur-alien-invasion-from-outer-space novel in which Martians land in southern England and begin tearing London apart. Its author, H.G. Wells, wrote it at the end of the nineteenth century, evidently to give his English readers a sense of what it might have felt like to be living in Tasmania, the island off the coast of Australia, and have the equivalent of Martians-the British, as it happened-appear in your world and begin to destroy it (and your culture with it).

I can remember, at perhaps age 13, reading that book under the covers by flashlight when I was supposed to be asleep; I can remember, that is, being all alone, chilled (and thrilled) to the bone by Wells' grim vision of civilizational destruction. To put this in context: in 1957, I would already have known that I was living in a world of potential civilizational destruction and that the Martians were here. They were then called the Russians, the Ruskies, the Commies, the Reds. I would only later grasp that we (or we, too) were Martians on this planet.

The world I inhabited was, of course, a post-Hiroshima, post-Nagasaki one. I was born on July 20, 1944, just a year and a few days before my country dropped atomic bombs on those two Japanese cities, devastating them in blasts of a kind never before experienced and killing more than 200,000 people. Thirteen years later, I had already become inured to scenarios of the most dystopian kinds of global destruction-of a sort that would have turned those Martians into pikers-as the U.S. and the Soviet Union (in a distant second place) built up their nuclear arsenals at a staggering pace.

Nuclear obliteration had, by then, become part of our everyday way of life. After all, what American of a certain age who lived in a major city can't remember, on some otherwise perfectly normal day, air-raid sirens suddenly beginning to howl outside your classroom window as the streets emptied? They instantly called up a vision of a world in ashes. Of course, we children had only a vague idea of what had happened under those mushroom clouds that rose over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As we huddled under our desks, hands over heads, "ducking and covering" like Bert the Turtle while a radio on the teacher's desk blared Conelrad warnings, we knew enough, however, to realize that those desks and hands were unlikely to save us from the world's most powerful weaponry. The message being delivered wasn't one of safety but of ultimate vulnerability to Russian nukes. After such tests, as historian Stephen Weart recalled in his book Nuclear Fear, "The press reported with ghoulish precision how many millions of Americans 'died' in each mock attack."

If those drills didn't add up to living an everyday vision of the apocalypse as a child, what would? I grew up, in other words, with a new reality: for the first time in history, humanity had in its hands Armageddon-like possibilities of a sort previously left to the gods. Consider, for instance, the U.S. military's Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP) of 1960 for a massive nuclear strike on the Communist world. It was, we now know, meant to deliver more than 3,200 nuclear weapons to 1,060 targets, including at least 130 cities. Official, if then secret, estimates of casualties ran to 285 million dead and 40 million injured (and probably underestimated the longer term effects of radiation).

In the early 1960s, a commonplace on the streets of New York where I lived was the symbol for "fallout shelters" (as they were then called), the places you would head for during just such an impending global conflagration. I still remember how visions of nuclear destruction populated my dreams (or rather nightmares) and those of my friends, as some would later admit to me. To this day, I can recall the feeling of sudden heat on one side of my body as a nuclear bomb went off on the distant horizon of one of those dreams. Similarly, I recall sneaking into a Broadway movie theater to see On the Beach with two friends-kids of our age weren't allowed into such films without parents-and so getting a glimpse, popcorn in hand, of what a devastated, nuclearized San Francisco might look like. That afternoon at that film, I also lived through a post-nuclear-holocaust world's end in Australia with no less than Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, and Fred Astaire for company.

An All-American Hate Week

So my life-and undoubtedly yours, too-has been lived, at least in part, as if in a dystopian novel. And certainly since November 2016-since, that is, the election of Donald Trump-the feeling (for me, at least) of being in just such a world, has only grown stronger. Worse yet, there's nothing under the covers by flashlight about The Donald or his invasive vision of our American future. And this time around, as a non-member of his "base," it's been anything but thrilling to the bone.

It was with such a feeling growing in me that, all these years later, I once again picked up Orwell's classic novel and soon began wondering whether Donald Trump wasn't our very own idiosyncratic version of Big Brother. If you remember, when Orwell finished the book in 1948 (he seems to have flipped that year for the title), he imagined an England, which was part of Oceania, one of the three superpowers left on the planet. The other two were Eurasia (essentially the old Soviet Union) and Eastasia (think: a much-expanded China). In the book, the three of them are constantly at war with each other on their borderlands (mostly in South Asia and Africa), a war that is never meant to be either decisive or to end.

In Oceania's Airstrip One (the former England), where Winston Smith is a minor functionary in the Ministry of Truth (a ministry of lies, of course), the Party rules eternally in a world in which-a classic Orwellian formulation-"WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH." It's a world of "inner" Party members (with great privilege), an outer circle like Smith who get by, and below them a vast population of impoverished "proles."

It's also a world in which the present is always both the future and the past, while every document, every newspaper, every bit of history is constantly being rewritten-Smith's job-to make it so. At the same time, documentation of the actual past is tossed down "the memory hole" and incinerated. It's a world in which a "telescreen" is in every room, invariably announcing splendid news (that might have been terrible news in another time). That screen can also spy on you at just about any moment of your life. In that, Orwell, who lived at a time when TV was just arriving, caught something essential about the future worlds of surveillance and social media.

In his dystopian world, English itself is being reformulated into something called Newspeak, so that, in a distant future, it will be impossible for anyone to express a non-Party-approved thought. Meanwhile, whichever of those other two superpowers Oceania is at war with at a given moment, as well as a possibly mythical local opposition to the Party, are regularly subjected to a mass daily "two minutes hate" session and periodic "hate weeks." Above all, it's a world in which, on those telescreens and posters everywhere, the mustachioed face of Big Brother, the official leader of the Party-"Big Brother is watching you!"-hovers over everything, backed up by a Ministry of Love (of, that is, imprisonment, reeducation, torture, pain, and death).

That was Orwell's image of a kind of Stalinist Soviet Union perfected for a future of everlasting horror. Today, it might be argued, Americans have been plunged into our own bizarre version of 1984. In our world, Donald Trump has, in some sense, absorbed into his own person more or less everything dystopian in the vicinity. In some strange fashion, he and his administration already seem like a combination of the Ministry of Truth (a ministry of eternal lies), the memory hole (down which the past, especially the Obama legacy and the president's own discarded statements, disappear daily), the two-minutes-hate sessions and hate week that are the essence of any of his rallies ("lock her up!," "send her back!"), and recently the "hate" slaughter of Mexicans and Hispanics in El Paso, Texas, by a gunman with a Trumpian "Hispanic invasion of Texas" engraved in his brain. And don't forget Big Brother.

In some sense, President Trump might be thought of as Big Brother flipped. In The Donald's version of Orwell's novel, he isn't watching us every moment of the day and night, it's we who are watching him in an historically unprecedented way. In what I've called the White Ford Bronco presidency, nothing faintly like the media's 24/7 focus on him has ever been matched. No human being has ever been attended to, watched, or discussed this way-his every gesture, tweet, passing comment, half-verbalized thought, slogan, plan, angry outburst, you name it. In the past, such coverage only went with, say, a presidential assassination, not everyday life in the White House (or at Bedminster, Mar-a-Lago, his rallies, on Air Force One, wherever).

Room 101 (in 2019)

Think of Donald Trump's America as, in some sense, a satirical version of 1984 in crazed formation. Not surprisingly, however, Orwell, remarkable as he was, fell short, as we all do, in imagining the future. What he didn't see as he rushed to finish that novel before his own life ended makes the Trumpian present far more potentially dystopian than even he might have imagined. In his book, he created a nightmare vision of something like the Communist Party of the Stalin-era Soviet Union perpetuating itself into eternity by constantly regenerating and reinforcing a present-moment of ultimate power. For him, dystopia was an accentuated version of just such a forever, a "huge, accurately planned effort to freeze history at a particular moment of time," as a document in the book puts it, to "arrest the course of history" for "thousands of years."

Yes, in 1948, Orwell obviously knew about Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the weaponry that went with them. (In 1984, he even mentions the use of such weaponry in the then-future 1950s.) What he didn't imagine in his book was a dystopian world not of the grimmest kind of ongoingness but of endings, of ultimate destruction. He didn't conjure up a nuclear apocalypse set off by one of his three superpowers and, of course, he had no way of imagining another kind of potential apocalypse that has become increasingly familiar to us all: climate change.

Unfortunately, on both counts Donald Trump is proving dystopian indeed. He is, after all, the president who threatened to unleash "fire and fury like the world has never seen" on North Korea (before falling in love with its dictator). He only recently claimed he could achieve victory in the almost 18-year-old Afghan War "in a week" by wiping that country "off the face of the Earth" and killing "10 million people." For the first time, his generals used the "Mother of all Bombs," the most powerful weapon in the U.S. conventional arsenal (with a mushroom cloud that, in a test at least, could be seen for 20 miles), in that same country, clearly to impress him.

More recently, beginning with its withdrawal from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, his administration has started trashing the Cold War-era nuclear architecture of restraint that kept the great-power arsenals under some control. In the process, it's clearly helping to launch a wildly expensive new nuclear arms race on Planet Earth. And keep in mind that this is happening at a time when we know that a relatively localized nuclear war between regional powers like India and Pakistan (whose politicians are once again at each other's throats over Kashmir) could create a global nuclear winter and starve to death up to a billion people.

And keep in mind as well that all of the above may prove to be the lesser of Donald Trump's dystopian acts when it comes to the ultimate future of humanity. After all, he and his administration are, in just about every way imaginable, doing their damnedest to aid and abet climate change by ensuring that ever more carbon will be released into the atmosphere, warming an already over-heated planet further. That's the very planet on which humanity has, since 1990, burned half of all the fossil fuels ever used. Despite the Paris climate accord and much talk about the necessity of getting climate change under some kind of control, carbon is still being released into the atmosphere at record levels. (Not surprisingly, U.S. emissions began rising again in 2018.)

This summer, amid fierce heat waves in the U.S., Europe, and elsewhere, as well as the setting of global heat records, with parts of the Arctic literally burning (while heating twice as fast as the world average), with Greenland melting, and the Antarctic losing sea ice in record amounts, some of the predictions of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for the relatively distant future already seem to be in sight. As climate scientist Marco Tedesco put it recently, speaking of the Arctic, "We are seeing ice melting now that we expected 30 to 40 years from now."

We are, in other words, already on a dystopian planet. With threats to the world's food supply and the swamping of coastal cities lying in our future, with the migration of previously unheard of populations in that same future, with heat rising to levels that may, in some places, become unbearable, leaving parts of the planet uninhabitable, it is at least possible now to imagine the future collapse of civilization itself.

And keep in mind as well that our own twisted version of Big Brother, that guy with the orange hair instead of the mustache, could be around to be watched for significantly longer, should he win the election of 2020. (His polling numbers have, on the whole, been slowly rising, not falling in these years.)

In other words, with the American president lending a significant hand, we may make it to 2084 far sooner than anyone expected. With that in mind, let's return for a moment to 1984. As no one who has read Orwell's book is likely to forget, its mildly dissident anti-hero, Winston Smith, is finally brought into the Ministry of Love by the Thought Police to have his consciousness retuned to the needs of the Party. In the process, he's brutally tortured until he can truly agree that 2 + 2 = 5. Only when he thinks he's readjusted his mind to fit the Party's version of the world does he discover that his travails are anything but over.

He still has to visit Room 101. As his interrogator tells him, "You asked me once what was in Room 101. I told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world." And that "worst thing" is always adjusted to the specific terrors of the specific prisoner.

So here's one way to think of where we are at this moment on Planet Earth: Americans-all of humanity, in fact-may already be in Room 101, whether we know it or not, and the truth is, by this steaming summer, that most of us should know it.

It's obviously time to act on a global scale. Tell that to Big Brother.

(c) 2019 Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His sixth and latest book, just published, is A Nation Unmade by War (Dispatch Books).Previous books include: Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World (with an introduction by Glenn Greenwald). Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050 (co-authored with Nick Turse), The United States of Fear, The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's, The End of Victory Culture: a History of the Cold War and Beyond, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com here.

On Sunday, the New York Times unveiled "The 1619 Project," a journalistic series in the Sunday magazine that seeks to tell the "unvarnished truth" about slavery and its impact on America's history.

In 1619, just 12 years after the founding of the first permanent English settlement in the Americas, the Jamestown colonists bought the first slaves, 20 to 30 enslaved Africans, from English pirates.

The Declaration of Independence, penned by Thomas Jefferson, a slave owner, issued America's founding creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, ... endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, ... among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." As Nikole Hannah-Jones writes in her stunning introduction in the New York Times Magazine, at 43, she is part of the first generation of black Americans in the history of this country to be born into a society in which blacks had equal rights of citizenship.

Blacks suffered under slavery for 250 years, and brutal racial apartheid for a century more.

We have been legally free for just 50.

Americans prefer not to face this reality. Our history classes address it gingerly, if at all.

Even as President Donald Trump and cynical politicians stoke racial divisions for political profit, we too often look away from it. Trump has recently decided to make four young, newly elected congresswomen of color a central target of his already launched campaign for re-election, scorning them as un-American, suggesting that if they don't like America, they should go back to where they came from.

This though all four are American citizens, and three were born right here. Trump is poisonously invoking the old lie of slavery and segregation that people of color are somehow not real Americans.

Yet, as Roger Wilkins wrote in his book "Jefferson's Pillow" and Hannah-Jones in her introduction, it is the freedom struggles of black Americans that propelled the cause of equal rights for everyone.

The Constitution excluded women, Native Americans and black people, and did not provide the right to vote to most Americans. It is the laws born out of the civil rights movement that extended the right to vote to everyone and banned discrimination not simply on race, but on gender, nationality, religion and disability

Without the idealistic and patriotic struggle of black Americans, as Hannah-Jones notes, "our democracy today would most likely look very different - it might not be a democracy at all."

Recently, Ken Cuccinelli, Trump's acting director of the Citizenship and Immigration Services, sparked outrage when he brazenly reworded Emma Lazarus' famous poem found at the foot of the Statute of Liberty that reads "give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free..."

What Cuccinelli probably had no clue about is that the Statute of Liberty was a gift to the people of the United States from the people of France and was dedicated in 1886 to celebrate the national abolition of slavery.

It is the figure of Libertas, the Roman goddess of freedom.

A broken shackle and chain lie at her feet as she strides forward, commemorating the abolition of slavery in 1865, an abolition that turned out to be the first step in America becoming in fact, as well as in word, the land of the free.

In telling the "unvarnished truth" of slavery, we will face the horrors of our past, as well as the triumph of our progress. It is a telling that is long overdue.

Large proportions of African Americans registered strong opposition to building a wall on the southern border, keeping undocumented people in limbo, and mass deportations.

African Americans differ only slightly from Latino Americans in their attitudes towards immigration, and are in some ways more opposed than Hispanics to Donald Trump's policies at the southern border. A comprehensive release of Gallup Polls conducted on immigration since 2006 confirms that the great ethnic political divide in the United States is between English-speaking, U.S.-born whites and virtually everybody else.

On most political issues, Hispanics -- who can be of any race -- line up somewhere in between Blacks and whites, with Blacks consistently taking the more "left" or "progressive" position. (U.S. ethnic alignments on political issues generally reflect objective, real-world social and economic data, with Hispanic unemployment, incarceration, income, wealth and health statistics placing them in between Blacks and whites.) Although the recent attention garnered by the Black anti-immigrant group ADOS may have raised questions about Black attitudes on the subject, the Gallup polls show remarkable agreement between Hispanics and African Americans on immigration questions.

Apparently, Gallup does not routinely tabulate responses by race/ethnicity - a growing problem among corporate pollsters, some of whom now group all "minorities" together while others release only "general" statistics, painting a distorted, too-white national portrait. In its in-depth immigration overview, Gallup compared general national responses from January of this year with white, Black and Hispanic answers to the same question back in June of 2016. Assuming that no earth-shaking changes have occurred in Black-Hispanic relations in the past three years, the polls reveal striking similarities in the two groups' positions on immigration and citizenship.

Asked where they stand on "deporting all immigrants who are living in the United States illegally back to their home country," Blacks and Hispanics spoke almost in unison. The polls showed 76 percent of Blacks were "opposed" (36 percent) or "strongly opposed" (40 percent) to the proposition, while 78 percent of Hispanics were "opposed" (46 percent) or "strongly opposed" (32 percent). Although 2 percent more Hispanics were generally opposed to immediately kicking out all undocumented people, significantly more Blacks (40 percent) than Hispanics (32 percent) took the "strongly opposed" position. Only 61 percent of whites were either "opposed" or "strongly opposed" to wholesale deportation of "illegals."

On the question of "allowing immigrants living in the U.S. illegally the chance to become U.S. citizens if they meet certain requirements over a period of time," the two ethnic groups were closely aligned. The poll showed 84 percent of Blacks either "favored" (36 percent) or "strongly favored" (48 percent) a road to citizenship, while 92 percent of Hispanics "favored" (50 percent) or "strongly favored" (42 percent) the idea. Again, Hispanics were generally somewhat more in favor, but a greater proportion of Blacks lined up in the "strongly favor" column. A total of 82 percent of whites "favored" (45 percent) or "strongly favored" (37 percent) a path to citizenship.

On "building a wall along the entire U.S.-Mexico border," a subject that presidential candidate Donald Trump was loudly trumpeting in 2016, Blacks were equally as generally opposed to the concept, but significantly more fervent in their opposition than even Hispanics. For both groups, 82 percent were generally opposed to the wall. But 55 percent of Blacks were "strongly opposed" versus 40 percent of Hispanics. The order was reversed in the less vehement opposition column, with 27 percent of Blacks and 42 percent of Hispanics "opposed."

The pattern is clear for all three questions. Black Americans closely agree with Hispanics on immigration issues, giving the "progressive" answer to Gallup's inquiries as often, or almost as frequently, as Latinos. However, significantly larger proportions of Black respondents were adamant in their positions, "strongly" favoring or opposing the propositions presented to them.

There is no schism between Blacks and Hispanics over immigration, and we can conclude from the polling data that most Blacks do not blame immigrants, most of whom are Hispanic, for historically high Black unemployment rates, or for depressed wage levels. If Blacks blamed immigrants for these conditions, it would show up in the numbers. Instead, large proportions of African Americans registered what might be interpreted as militantopposition ("strongly") to building a wall on the southern border, keeping undocumented people in limbo, and mass deportations. African Americans appear to feel more "strongly" about such things than Hispanics, although the Gallup poll shows that 85 percent of Black respondents and their parents were born in the U.S., versus only 32 percent of Hispanics. (The figure for whites is 88 percent.)

What Gallup tracked, unwittingly, were the statistical footprints of the progressive and enduring Black political consensus - deeply informed by the Black Radical Tradition. Black people take progressive positions on immigration despite the fact that wholesale immigration of low wage and undocumented workers does depress wages and degrade working conditions. That's what the rulers intend it to do, and the effects are intimately experienced by workers at the bottom of the barrel, where Blacks have been stuck since they arrived on these shores. For most of Black American history, we were the workers that were blamed for every crime committed by the owners of capital and industry and their political servants. The same white workers that blame immigrants for the precarity inflicted on today's society by the bosses, once similarly scapegoated Black people. It is to African Americans' credit that the vast bulk of us reject such chauvinism.

Donald Trump loooooves farmers. We know this because he says so. "Farmers, I LOVE YOU!" he declared in December. And we've learned that whenever The Donald says something, it's true-even when it's not.

These days, he's loving farmers to death. Trump has ignored the obvious need to get monopolistic price-fixing bankers, suppliers and commodity buyers off their backs. And he's ineptly playing tariff games with China and other buyers of U.S. farm products, causing exports and farm prices to tumble. The result is that our ag economy is tumbling into a deep ditch, slamming farm families and rural America with a rising tsunami of bankruptcies.

Adding crude insult to economic injury, Trump's doofus of an ag secretary, Sonny Perdue, laughed at farmers, branding them "whiners" for opposing his majesty's disastrous policies.

So, needing a political "I love you" gesture, Trump has been sending big bouquets of money to some of his beloved farmers. Our money. Lots of it-$28 billion so far, in what he cynically (and comically) calls the Market Facilitation Program, otherwise known as a taxpayer bailout.

But TrumpLove turns out to be highly selective, with more than half of the government payments going to the biggest farm owners. The Department of Agriculture initially announced a $125,000 limit on the amount any one farm could get, but every Trump deal seems to have a gimmick in it to give a special break to the slickest operators. The slickum in this deal is that assorted members of a family can claim to be owners of the same farm and be eligible for bailout money, even if they do no actual farming and live in New York City! Thus, one Missouri farm family got $2.8 million worth of subsidy love from Trump, and more than 80 families topped half a million in payments.

Meanwhile, the great majority of farmers-80% of eligible grain farmers-got zilch from Donald the Dealmaker. The smaller producers who are most endangered by his export collapse got less than $5,000. So Trump's "Market Facilitation" is squeezing the many who are most in need while helping a few of the largest get even bigger.

While the Trumpistas are presently trying to plow a multibillion-dollar subsidy into big grain farms, they're shockingly stingy when it comes to our society's moral responsibility to make sure the least-wealthy among us get an adequate level of food. Their latest effort in the practice of mass minginess is to try literally taking food off poor children's plates. Using a tangle of federal red tape, Trump ideologues and bureaucratic minions are intervening to prevent states from providing food stamp assistance to millions of their people.

According to federal rules, to qualify for food aid, a family of three should have an income under $27,000 a year. But with rents, utilities, health care and even food prices constantly rising, millions of Americans can't make ends meet on such a low income. Thus, 40 states have stepped in to loosen that income restriction so families at least get the minimum nutrition humans need. Far from being welfare moochers (as far-right-wing extremists screech), these recipients overwhelmingly are working families, children, the elderly and Americans with disabilities. The benefit is hardly lavish; it averages only $127 a month, but even this modest outlay has proven enormously successful in mitigating poverty.

Congress actually authorized states to make such pragmatic income adjustments in a 1996 revamp of the law. But look out! Here comes Sonny Perdue again, rising up on his hind legs to proclaim that naughty state officials are using that authority as a "loophole" to circumvent Trump's federal authority. So Sonny and Donnie are demanding that a whole new bureaucracy of food stamp "eligibility police" be set up to monitor the assets of hard-hit people who're just trying to get adequate food on their tables. This nonsense will cost tens of millions of our dollars to harass the poor in an autocratic hope of nabbing a couple of hungry families who have a dime more in assets than miserly Trumpistas claim they should have.

What we have here is government by plutocratic authoritarians who'll gleefully dole out millions to a wealthy family and then just as gleefully go out of their way to deny food to millions of poor families.