The Rising American Chimera? – CounterPunch.org

Prologue

According to Homer, Chimera was a hybrid monster made up of a lion, the head of a fire-breathing goat sprouting on the back of the lion and a dragon in the tail of the monster (Iliad 6.160-183). Such a monster of divine origins had no place in Greek society. Hero Bellerophon riding his winged horse Pegasos slayed Chimera. The symbolic significance of this myth is that the gods sometimes send monsters to remind humans they are violating the order of nature and civilization. This is happening to some degree in America. I explore the story below.

I arrived in America in August 1961

August 2011 marked fifty years since I left Greece for the United States. And August 2026 will add another 15 years, making my American Odyssey 65 years old.

In 1961, in Greece, I was a high school graduate with dreams of becoming a doctor. My beloved physician grandmother Demetra had shown me the way. Now, 65 years later, in the United States, I am not a Doctor of Medicine but a historian with a Doctor of Philosophy — caught in a time warp.

My American college education was a Renaissance for me, a moment of discovery, learning and self-confidence. In a metaphysical sense, I became Greek in America. My college education made that possible. However, the moment I left the university looking for a job, I felt I had eaten the lotus of forgetfulness and entered an alien realm. I developed a blurred vision.

From 1961 to 2026

The world now in 2026 is more complicated and more dangerous than the world of 1961. The experiment on Communism is history. Capitalism in America, however, has evolved into a dinosaur, a global hegemony of me-first accompanied by ceaseless wars. The result? Climate chaos, heating land, waters and the atmosphere, including poisoning and devouring the Earth for profit. Meanwhile, the Wall Street oligarchy and the tech and AI billionaires, who trigger the political and social upheavals, enrich themselves.

In 2008, this plutocratic oligarchy precipitated one of its periodic national financial meltdowns in order to reverse progress towards equality and democracy. The Wall Street bankers wrecked the lives of millions of Americans. And yet, the government headed by Barack Obama, the first black American elected president, did not punish the Wall Street bankers. In fact, the government itself has been under their sinister influences.

The military industrial complex

At the same time, America’s military-industrial complex, the nerve center of unregulated disaster capitalism, is encircling the world with hundreds of military bases. America’s steadfast support for Israel probably triggered the September 11, 2001 Moslem attack on New York and the Pentagon. Then, on February 28, 2026, Israel led America to the war against Iran / Persia. The US accelerated its endless petroleum wars.

The world in 2026 is full of more than 8 billion people. Of these, close to a billion live in extreme poverty and 3.5 billion in poverty. Africa continues to be the mother of hunger and famine.

Despite these developments auguring more severe trouble for humanity, people still live in silence or delusion verging on madness. Like sheep holding AI devices like iPhones, they have bought into “modernity.” This means people feel fortunate they have TV, airplanes, nuclear weapons and computers and genetically engineered corn.

Too many machines

I felt unease about this techno philia from the very beginnings of my American journey. America has so many cars, for example, that cities resemble parking lots.

My education sparked my questioning. I published my first critical essay on the injustice of giant agriculture in “The Christian Science Monitor” in 1975. My first book, “Fear in the Countryside,” was critical of the emerging feudalism behind the shiny armor of large agriculture. It came out in 1976. None of my modest expectations came to pass. Feudal agriculture shows off giant tractors, iPhones, AI and huge poison spray machines. But its most pervasive characteristic is the killing of animals: about 10 billion animals slaughtered year after year in animal farms. These killing fields are everywhere and nowhere in rural America. Americans refuse to see animal farms.

Back to feudalism?

I was hoping for a world where, at a minimum, the peasant and small family farmer could cultivate modest pieces of land without oppression. Why should America duplicate England’s vicious enclosures whereby large farmers grab most of the land? Why has agrarian reform been failing nearly everywhere? What forces are fuelling such violent policies? Could it be that modernity’s model was the new landlord Americans call agribusiness? In fact, a concoction of mining practices, heavy machinery, pesticides, petroleum and other chemicals became agribusiness. This agribusiness hired science to give it a respectable facelift and, together, whitewash feudalism, the harsh Big Ag of our dark age.

When I was studying medieval history at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, a small farm town in Illinois, I thought that the violence and darkness we associate with the dark ages belonged to the people of Europe alone. Europe flirted with darkness because in the fourth century Greek civilization fell to the Christians adopted by the Roman Empire, which, in its tern in the fifth century, fell to the Christians and barbarians of northern Europe. But little did I know my professors blamed medieval Europe unduly because they wanted to tone down their own dancing with the barbarians.

Agribusiness and other large corporations have now resurrected a “modern” version of feudalism. By which I mean they have so much power that they poison democratic institutions. In addition, this global oligarchy is not merely putting the peasant and small family farmer out of business, but it is aiming at total control of the world. It is doing in the open what armies of conquest do in the cover of darkness.

I fear that, at any moment, our world could become more than too hot. It is being poisoned, denuded of biological diversity or, worse yet, possibly blown up by accident or by design.

Yes, 1961 was full of nuclear bombs. In fact, I will never forget my terror when the US and Russia clashed over Cuba in 1962. The world indeed came very close to nuclear annihilation. But now, 65 years after 1961, there are still thousands of “modernized” nuclear weapons on the ready. The tragedy is such that religion has been added to possible causes for war, exactly as in the dark ages.

The US in full force in the Middle East could be preparing the ground for possible nuclear conflict. Trump already threatened to wipe out the civilization of Iran. After all, the Islamic Republic of Iran, a theocratic regime and sworn enemy of both Israel and the United States, is developing its own nukes.

My passion for books

Now back to the education that explains why I think the way I do. I did not become a physician because I developed a dislike for American medicine. It bothered me that doctors impoverish society with their money-first prescription and lust for profit.

I earned a doctorate in history instead. I studied history because history brought me closer to my Greek roots. However, even in my historical studies in the late 1960s and early 1970s, I tripped over the cold war wires embedded in America’s colleges and universities. My dissertation advisor at the University of Wisconsin, an alumnus of the Office of Strategic Services that became CIA, did not endorse me strongly for finding a teaching position because my critique of communist Russia did not match his CIA standards. Moreover, he felt uncomfortable with my critique of the Slavic invasion of Greece in the Middle Ages. Thus his letter of recommendation to the University of Chicago that had invited me for an interview for a teaching job in 1972 must have not been very supportive of me.

Barred from college teaching led me to postdoctoral studies in the history of science and international agrarian development at Harvard, an accident that made me who I am.

In the bureaucratic jungle

After Harvard, I had to learn how to survive. I had to follow orders, but I was nor good at that. I did not hide my feelings and virtues, doing my research as I learned to do in graduate school, documenting carefully all my data and arguments, presenting a reasoned discourse for the understanding and solution of problems. I knew what my paymasters wanted had nothing to do with science, but everything to do with pushing forward their corporate agenda. They wanted my arguments to be lipstick for decisions they had taken. I refused to play their games. Most of the time, I gave them my documented views.

This effort to continue to be myself caused me endless suffering. Out of that I began to see the America these guys represented. This was different from the America I had cooked up in high school: a land of opportunity and democracy, a model for modern Greece and the rest of the world.

The America I discovered during 2 years of work at Capitol Hill and 25 years at the US EPA was a mean-spirited place caring very little about the natural world or human beings. In fact, the rulers of America thought it was perfectly legitimate to embrace the flag of ruthless business, including the mission of agribusiness, even though that entailed the systematic poisoning of all nature and humans.

My supervisors in the government had to keep up decorum of propriety so they tolerated me up to a point. But it became clear soon enough the gulf between us was irreconcilable. They were the executors of corporate policy and I the persistent though invisible defender of the public good. They had doubts I did my postdoctoral studied at Harvard. They called the university and Harvard called me to ask why those officials were bothering them with silly questions.

I knew they knew they were wrong in ignoring public health and the integrity of the natural world. I witnessed their decisions siding with corporate polluters. This meant approving neurotoxic and carcinogenic pesticides / biocides, including ecocidal sprays against insects and weeds.

A colleague with tremendous experience in the chemical industry and the government, US EPA, explained to me the corruption that reins at the US EPA: My colleague, whom for convenience and safety I will call Robert Eagle, was straightforward about the politics of toxic sprays. He said to me:

“I worked for a major chemical company in the development of pesticides for several years. This company used to hire former criminals, just out of jail, to formulate pesticides. Those poor bastards would go about mixing the deadly chemicals blissfully ignorant of what they were doing. Once I saved the life of a man spraying [the neurotoxic] parathion in an experimental plot. Never do these applicators know the dangers of the liquids they spray. And the company scientists creating pesticides never dream about anything else but how to keep their job and make more money. To hell with public health, they say. So when the experimental animals develop tumors or other nasty effects because of their exposure to pesticides, the company toxicologists, or the toxicologists of commercial laboratories hired to test those poisons for chemical corporations, dump those animals in the trash can, replacing them with healthy animals in the middle of testing, and in a thousand other fraudulent ways they destroy any evidence their product might cause what EPA defines as ‘unreasonable adverse effects’ on man or the environment. Then, to smooth their way into EPA, they go about inviting EPA scientists for a brief visit to the company headquarters, ostensibly for showing them all the fabulous scientific machinery, talent, gold and time the company uses in the development of pesticides. The purpose of the invitation, however, is to wine and dine and bribe, with booze and women, those bureaucrats. Having done that, the rest is easy. The ‘kill and count studies’ arrive at the gates of the EPA regulators to be quickly approved and, in the midst of one irregularity after another, the poison gets the government’s blessing to start its deleterious flow in the country’s land, food, drinking water, and people.”

Robert Eagle is telling it the way it is.

The result of this immoral behavior, which I document in my 2014 book, “Poison Spring,” is the ceaseless poisoning of our food, drinking water and wildlife and the acceleration of the extinction of species. For example, the toxic but extremely profitable career of glyphosate / roundup, a herbicide product of Monsanto, now owned by the German pharmaceutical and chemical company Bayer, illustrates the American Chimera, the hybrid monster of unchecked profits and hegemony.

EPA registered / approved glyphosate in 1974, two years before my EPA colleague, Adrian Gross, discovered in 1976 the massive national testing fraud of IBT, Industrial Bio-Test laboratory near Chicago. I discuss IBT in “Poison Spring.” IBT pretty much gave clean bills of health to all pesticide active ingredients it tested – for a fee. The reports of IBT opened EPA’s registration approval. Monsanto’s glyphosate went through the IBT fake data testing, which helped EPA to classify glyphosate as “safe.” Second, like all other pesticides, the active ingredient glyphosate was mixed with “inert” chemicals that turned out to be carcinogens. And third, the final product farmers use, roundup, is not tested. The result of this unscientific and fraudulent registration process is a herbicide that makes tremendous wealth for Monsanto-Bayer while giving cancer to farmers / users and ecocide to the natural world.

In 2011, National Public Radio reported that Monsanto emails about glyphosate revealed the company’s strategy to overcome the prevailing truth that glyphosate is not innocent of harm. The Monsanto emails about glyphosate were made public in a trial: NPR said:

“Monsanto recruited outside scientists to co-author reports defending the safety of glyphosate, sold under the brand name Roundup. Monsanto executive William Heydens proposed that the company “ghost-write” one paper. In an email, Heydens wrote that “we would be keeping the cost down by us doing the writing and they would just edit & sign their names so to speak.” Heydens wrote that this is how Monsanto had “handled” an earlier paper on glyphosate’s safety.”

NPR also reported that, “Lawyers for the plaintiffs [in a trial in California] are arguing that Monsanto executives colluded with officials at the EPA to downplay glyphosate’s health risks.”

A few years later, in 2016, environmentalists formed the Monsanto Tribunal for the investigation of Monsanto. In an “Open Letter to the US Environmental Protection Agency about glyphosate and the International Monsanto Tribunal,” we read:

“In the evidence from the Monsanto Tribunal, the truth is there for the world to see. The US EPA, the European Food Safety Authority, the European Commission, the UK Chemicals Regulation Directorate and the Republic of Ireland have been conspiring with Monsanto against civil society to destroy the environment with chemicals and poison their food. These countries have sustained over the years the largest loss of biodiversity, i.e. ecocide. In the International Criminal Court in The Hague, ignorance is no defence.”

Affected people by coming in touch with glyphosate / roundup have been suing Bayer by the tens of thousands.

In its own strategic way, Bayer has been trying to convince the US Supreme Court to prevent Americans from suing it for glyphosate harm.

Democrats and Republicans in Congress have been ignoring pesticide malpractices that support industrialized agriculture. Republicans, however, are harming public and environmental health even more than the Democrats. They have been belittling solar and wind power, absolute necessary to save Americans and other humans and the planet from the rising violence of climate chaos. This is not exaggeration. On November 14, 2023, the US Fifth Climate Assessment warned America about the climate emergency it faces: greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are higher now than at any time in the past 800,000 years; sea level rise faster than in the past 3,000 years; global temperature higher in the last 50 years than in the past 2,000 years; – America is warming 68 percent more and faster than the rest of the planet.

US Fifth National Climate Assessment, Nov. 14, 2023.

Despite this dreadful reality, the Republicans in Congress and the Trump administration have chosen to pretend they live in the land of their plutocratic dreams. They say climate change does not exist. They keep applauding the over-fishing of the seas and oceans; damming of most rivers; ceaseless destruction of wetlands; increasing poverty and destitution in America and the world; and the deindustrialization of the country because corporations make more money by shipping their factories to foreign countries.

The military factor

I already mentioned that an additional effect of corporate dominance in government is the spending of trillions of dollars in foreign military bases and wars fought with extremely expensive technologies and weapons. Wars are a signature product of the military-industrial complex. This octopus of secret power has been in operation since America nuked Japan in August 1945. The military-industrial complex or national security state is behind every policy. But, curiously, not many politicians, journalists and academics question the black hole of the Pentagon in swallowing most of the budget of the country, leaving trinkets only for environmental and social programs.

Delusions of power

The country is mired in the delusions of presidents, Democratic and Republican. Democrat Barak Obama, for example, either because of fear, timidity or willfulness, embraced the undemocratic policies of his Republican predecessor, George W. Bush. He pretended that by coming ever closer to the Republicans, he wouldn’t have compromised the good of the nation. He even extended tax deductions amounting to about a trillion dollars for millionaires and billionaires. Obama was wrong. The Republicans were not grateful for such magnanimity or stupidity. They hated him for being black and for trying to be fair – at least in his pre-election promises. Republican politicians, in fact, have always been much more than Democratic politicians servants of the oligarchy running America.

Jo Biden and Donald Trump followed Obama. Biden missed a great opportunity to turn the country solar. Trump made petroleum his trademark and policy, reversing all regulations that the federal government had for human and environmental protection. Trump even denied climate change / chaos, no matter the scientific evidence, no matter the billions in costs of the tragic and destructive effects of city and forest fires, the melting of ice, hurricanes, storms, bomb rains, draught, deadly heat waves on land and the seas and destructive flooding. After wrecking America’s environmental future, Trump turned to war, assisting Israel’s biblical hatred to destroy Iran.

Barbarians at the gate

After 65 years in America, I am not very objective about the dangers I detect in the rapid decline of the country. I resent those responsible for this unfolding tragedy. I love America’s universities, public libraries, forests and parks, assets all for the maintenance of civilization. Moreover, I am grateful to America for educating me. My Greek insight, however, tells me the barbarians are at the gate, perhaps at the helm?

My Greek lighthouse

I visit Greece often. Greece is a basket case of corruption and bad foreign influence. Her rulers were educated in America. They borrowed too much money but have failed to demand that Germany pays its debt to Greece. The German debt to Greece must be repaid, a symbolic gesture of the horrific destruction and looting of Greece by the Germans occupying the country, April 1941 – October 1944.

Greek leaders, however, are people who are not proud for being Greek. They feel more at home in New York and Paris rather than Athens or Thessalonike. The result is that Greece is falling apart, foreign and Greek corporations circling the skies for an easy kill.

Despite the crisis of identity and ignorance of ancient Greek history and civilization that cripples Greek leaders, it is Greece that keeps me going. I visit museums and villages for inspiration and strength. In the village that gave me birth, Valsamata in the Island of Kephalonia, my sister Georgia and I used to go to the cemetery to light a candle in the grave of our parents. We then walked through the only olive grove still belonging to me. But I sensed the ancient sacred trees of goddess Athena don’t recognize me. I cry in secret and promise to come back.

It’s impossible to travel through time. Like a river, time moves faster than human feet or the human mind. The bridge between my younger works and days in the 1960s and those of the 2020s is simply too long. But Greece, especially the country and civilization of ancient times, is my source for light and life.

Epilogue

In the very beginning of his “Politics,” Aristotle said that a state has to provide its citizens more than military security or a place for living. A state must afford its citizens ample of opportunities to be self-sufficient and have a good life. Indeed, autarkeia or self-sufficiency is the purpose and happiness of a successful state.

Aristotle would say America no longer serves the public good, its government and the Supreme Court being held hostage by a plutocratic oligarchy on the verge of becoming a tyranny, by far the worst form of organization or constitution or government. That potential chimera must be exiled or slayed. But where’s a new Bellerophon with a winged Pegasos?

The citizens of America must push the oligarchs and servants of oligarchy out of office, the very people who made a killing with their 2008 financial disaster. Americans must return to the Greek-inspired path of Thomas Jefferson: doing away with Gothic darkness: phasing out petroleum and other fossil fuels, phasing out animal farms and industrialized agriculture, returning to democratic small family farming, and reinvigorating democracy while bringing the military-industrial complex under democratic control.