TomDispatch sends along this memory of Chalmers Johnson by his wife, Sheila Johnson.  Lots of stuff you won’t know if your acquittance with him is post 9/11.  Chalmers died November 20, 1910.

In our present world, overflowing with explosive, unexpected moments, I regularly wonder just what “Chal” would have made of events in Egypt, Libya, Japan, or Washington.  His remarkable, restless, penetrating intelligence is missed.  He was a giant.

That said, I’m pleased to offer a special kind of goodbye to him today, a memory piece on his work by Sheila Johnson, his wife, partner in so many endeavors, and an impressive figure in her own right.  It seems like a fitting way to say goodbye, remember the breadth and stature of the man, and take in the scope of his life.

In the introduction to his final book, Dismantling the Empire, America’s Last Best Hope (just out in paperback), he took up a recurring topic of interest to him: “the choice between republic and empire,” and the way “our imperial dreams stretch our means to the breaking point and threaten our future.”  Among “the alternatives available to us as a nation,” he wrote, “we are choosing what I call the suicide option.”  He added that “it might not have to be this way, that we could still move in a different direction.”  Those were, in a sense, his last words.  How true they remain three and a half months after his death.  Tom

Print PDF