Dana Blankenhorn

This Week's Clue: Now is the Summer of our Discontent

Following is the essay you can designate as Volume 10, Number 22  of This Week's Clue, based on the e-mail newsletter I have produced since March, 1997. It would be the issue of May 28.

Enjoy.

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Now is the winter of our discontent,
Made glorious summer by this son of York

(That's Ian McKellan, whom your kids know better as Gandalf from Lord of the Rings,to the right, in a 1992 production of Richard III., by Shakespeare. He played Richard.)

Every season in America is different. Some are good, some bad, and some horrible.

The really, really horrible seasons come about once in a generation. They are horrible in the eyes of their beholders, the adult voters of the time.

They are horrible not just because of events, but the hopelessness most people feel in the face of those events. We feel powerless, impotent, and we fear there are no answers for it.

I point this out because, to many early Baby Boomers (or those born during World War II) the height of the last crisis, the summer of 1967, was a really good time. It was the carefree “Summer of Love,” and it is often seen to have been that way, still, in the misty chords of memory called nostalgia.

Who Gave The Order?

One thing which drives my lovely bride crazy is my eclectic taste in music.

Take Wyclef Jean (above). Not the kind of thing you expect someone weaned on 1970s British art-pop to get into. And I don't like all his stuff. But some of his work, like Redemption Song (above) will make you cry.

One of Jean's best lyrics (the video is not available through Google unfortunately) is Who Gave The Order, from the duets album Preacher's Son. It's a song about lies, and liars, and the killing which results from lies. Very appropriate to our time.

Rice Science Weekly: Quasicrystals

This week's Rice science lesson comes from (of all places) the math department.

Specifically it's from associate professor David Damanik (he's a graduate of Goethe U. in Frankfurt, Germany) and it's about something called quasicrystals.

Quasicrystals are no older than Buckyballs, really. As the name implies, their structure is midway between a crystal and a lump o' stuff. Dan Schachtman of the NIST found the first one, in 1982, through x-ray diffraction. An alloy he'd made was stable, but it had a five-sided diffraction pattern, like a pentagon.

Impossible, the scientists  said. Until they made more.  Dozens more, actually. And the normal equation for figuring out the properties of a crystalline structure, the Schrödinger operator, didn't work. There was no way to tell how electrons would behave in such a structure, and thus what the properties of any quasicrystal might be.

The Essence of Leadership

The essence of leadership is not found when things are going well. It's when things are going badly that you learn who the great leaders are.

Markos Moulitsas is a great leader.

While he remains reluctant to be more than a sysadmin for the Democratic Netroots community, he is, in fact, much more.

He proved it today by saying what needed to be said to Democrats, what no leader has said this year, not John Edwards or Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama or Howard Dean.

He said to stop whining.

I've got to say, of all the things that get me down about this job, there's nothing worse than the people who want to quit the game and take their ball home every time we face a setback. It's as if every word I've ever written about this being a long-term battle means zero. As if it's instant gratification or nothing.

Inconvenient Truths in The War Against Oil

Right now we're in the giddy early phases of The War Against Oil.

The best analogy for my money are the early months of America's Civil War, where young men both North and South were signing-on as volunteers as quick as they could be taken, and the prediction was made (by a Southern gentleman) that the war would spill no more blood than could be mopped up in a handkerchief.

What we're seeing in this case are special pleaders, all with dollar signs in their eyes, grabbing for government subsidies and promising that they're the answer, even when we know they're not. Nuclear. Coal. Ethanol from corn and sugar cane.

Fission has never shown how to safely dispose of its waste, and fusion is still years away from its first commercial production. Coal, no matter how clean, is a hydrocarbon. Ethanol, too is a hydrocarbon, but more important is the fact that when you take it from food crops, you compete directly with food production.

Electricity from wind, from geothermal sources and from the Sun is going to be primary in the future. These can be brought to market far more efficiently than they are, using new materials, and our grids need to become more interactive, so that localized sources can be tapped. All this requires far more planning, more capital, and more government intervention than anyone anticipates offering at the present time.

But these alone won't get us there. We badly need a portable power source to replace gasoline, for jet transport, for back-up power, and for reliable power production off-the-grid.

Outrage Exhaustion

Above you will find the new Democratic theme concerning the war in Iraq, Wake Me Up When September Ends.

I should probably go off on a long rant about how this proves we're at a generational crisis, and the Nixon Thesis, and blah blah blah, but I can't. I'm sick of it, exhausted by it, my outrage fires feel out of fuel.

By capitulating to the White House on funding, Democratic leaders have made themselves complicit in the ongoing murders, both of Iraqis and our brave fighting men. It almost seems as though the government is determined to destroy the Army. There is no strategy, no end in sight. And Democrats are now part of it. John Edwards is right on this, but speculating on what this does to his candidacy feels ghoulish.

I would love to feel outraged, but I can't.

The Duke of Oil - Chapter 7

The following is a work of fiction. Here is the Table of Contents, which is updated as new chapters are written.

It is the third in a series of sci-fi novels of the type known as alternate history. What's different is that this series takes place in our time, with characters familiar in your real life.

The first book in the series, The Chinese Century, was written late 2004. Its table of contents is here. The second,  The American Diaspora, was written in 2005. The table of contents for that book is here.

Moving Forward on Immigration

S. 1348, the Immigration Bill, is dead on arrival.

Bush can't get Republican support, not with the grassroots so angry, not with his lame duck status, not with Teddy Kennedy carrying the water for it. Democrats have no incentive to cooperate. My guess is it won't even get the votes necessary for debate in the Senate.

So what happens next?

Can I offer a modest proposal? It's time for a true national summit with Mexico, in which all issues are on the table. Since Bush won't cooperate, it's completely logical for Congress-critters to step forward.

This could start with a letter to, say, Univision or Telemundo, suggesting it be done as a TV series. And if it gets some ratings, get it on NBC's fall schedule. Or, a Democratic challenger (hint hint) who wishes to distinguish themselves from the pack could go the Mexico City, meeting with government officials, with business leaders, and speaking Spanish on Mexican television.

There are enormous issues right now beyond immigration facing both countries:

• Drugs, which are destroying the Mexican state.
• Jobs, which Mexico doesn't have enough of.
• The hollowing-out of Mexican cities and towns, which have become dependent on payments from workers in the U.S. for their survival.
• Energy, which Mexico is still exporting to the U.S.
• Trade, and whether NAFTA should be maintained.
• Border security, both for goods and for people.

The Real War On Terror

The Real War On Terror did not begin on September 11, 2001.

In fact, it has yet to begin. (Update: I'm not the only person who thinks so.)

The real War On Terror will begin once far-right Republicans realize that Democrats are about to seize all political power in Washington, and there is nothing they can do to stop it.

There is precedent for my writing this. The Clinton years were filled with incidents of right-wing terror, and threats of terror for which law enforcement took the blame. Ruby Ridge (which actually happened in August, 1992, during the first Bush Administration). Waco. Oklahoma City. The Olympics bombing.

Notice how the early incidents became excuses for those which followed. Notice, too, the faces of the terrorists involved. Tim McVeigh and Eric Rudolph were white. McVeigh was a Gulf War Veteran. Rudolph continues to harass his victims from prison. (Do authorities shrug their shoulders when Osama bin Laden does the same thing?) 

I fully expect Rudolph to become a t-shirt in the next War On Terror, kind of a fascist Che Guevara.

Where is the Consensus

Consider these propositions: (I'd never heard of touring game shows until I saw this logo.)

• Bush sucks.
• The Iraq War sucks.
• Global warming is real.
• Evolution is real.
• We need renewable energy.
• America's health care system sucks.
• Things are getting worse.
• Things have to change.

Chances are you answered yes to all these propositions. A vast majority of Americans now answers yes to all these propositions.

What does this mean? It means something very important.