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Tomgram: Jonathan Schell, Goodbye to All That

Jonathan Schell, who lives in downtown New York City, began writing his "Letter from Ground Zero" column -- still unnamed -- almost before the white dust storm of 9/11 had settled. The first of what would become almost four-and-a-half years of such columns -- piercing, questioning, thoughtful -- appeared the next week in the Nation magazine. In those early days, as the country and Congress were being panicked into every sort of folly, Jonathan stuck -- as calmly as possible -- to his most basic beliefs; and, at a time when so many were ducking for cover, he never hesitated to express them as strongly (and eloquently) as possible. To my mind, he has been a model of intelligent analysis and resistance in this strange, unhinged moment of ours.

Tomdispatch was far slower to start up. I began it only after two post-9/11 months of media coverage had driven me to despair, only after I couldn't bear the thought of leaving such a degraded world to my children without having done a thing in response. And then, of course, I had nothing as lofty as the Nation in mind for my first tentative thoughts. An e-list of twelve friends and relatives seemed ambitious enough. It would be another year-plus before my still-unnamed dispatches, now heading out to hundreds of e-readers, became (thanks to Hamilton Fish of the Nation Institute) the Tomdispatch website. Only months after that did I post the first "Letter from Ground Zero" at the site (through the kindness of the Nation's Katrina van den Heuvel). As all of you know, I've proudly posted many of Jonathan's pieces since then.

This was hardly the first time his path and mine had intersected. His remarkable Vietnam writings, The Village of Ben Suc and The Military Half, as well as his classic Watergate book, The Time of Illusion, had helped shape my worldview in the late 1960s and 1970s, though at the time I knew him (the way any reader would) only on the page. In 1980, in the wake of the Three Mile Island nuclear near-catastrophe in Pennsylvania -- I was by then an editor at Pantheon Books -- I decided to publish Unforgettable Fire, a volume of drawings and brief descriptions of the Hiroshima A-bomb experience by some of its survivors -- the first such book, I believe, to take mainstream Americans under the mushroom cloud since John Hersey's Hiroshima in 1946. Jonathan plucked an unforgettably strange and indomitable image from that book -- of a professor standing in his shorts in a sea of fire, holding only a rice ball in his fist -- and, having translated it into words, made it central to the first part of The Fate of the Earth, his bestselling book about the superpower nuclear conundrum that, even without the USSR, still has us in its grip. That book -- and so the image I had published -- was one spark helping to set ablaze the vast antinuclear movement that, in the early 1980s, all-too-briefly challenged the Reagan administration.

Some years later, I became Jonathan's editor, leaving Pantheon Books in 1990, only to be reunited with him years later at Metropolitan Books where I edited his post-9/11 work, The Unconquerable World. (Anyone who bothered to read that account of several centuries of state violence and popular resistance would have known, without a scintilla of doubt, that the Bush "cakewalk" into Iraq would prove anything but.)

Now, in a final "Letter from Ground Zero" column, Jonathan is saying goodbye to all that, only to offer the promise of an even deeper plunge into the American crisis of our moment. I have no doubt that our paths will cross again -- and soon, I hope -- at Tomdispatch. In the meantime, here (with my thanks yet again to the editors of the Nation magazine) is his final column. Tom


Farewell to Ground Zero
By Jonathan Schell

[This column, which will appear in the March 6th issue of the Nation, is posted here with the kind permission of the editors of that magazine.]

Click here to read more of this dispatch.

posted by Annamarie at 9:26 PM