Dana Blankenhorn

The Robin Williams In My Head

For many years I've been seeking a way to explain ADD to strangers. It's something I've had all my life, both my children have it, and I'm quite certain my father had it too.

So here goes.

It's like having Robin Williams in your head.

Robin Williams has been very public about his own ADD. His creative comic explosions are a great way to visualize what it's like. But not all his thoughts are funny.

Some people with Robin Williams in their head will sit back and enjoy the show. My daughter does that. She laughs a lot.

But the Robin Williams in your head can be a trickster. He can play games with you you're not aware of, reversing letters on a page, turning bed to deb, or dog to god. He may reverse the orders of words. It's fun for the Robin Williams in your head. But the rest of the world calls this dyslexia. Many people with passive ADD have dyslexia or dysplaxia, a similar problem with math.

Other people try to face down the Robin Williams in their heads. They argue with him. They try to become like him. Their heads become very busy places, and they may not have much time for what's outside them. If you're a boy and you have Robin Williams in your head, you will likely be diagnosed as having ADHD. You don't know there's anything wrong. You see the whole world from the inside out. You may have great trouble interacting with other people, or suffering other, slower people, like teachers.

I have this type of ADD. I was diagnosed, I later learned, in 1965. I wasn't told this at the time, and I wasn't medicated. To survive I developed a split personality, as my father had. Over time this let me "grow out" of ADHD, as they say, but I was always a house divided against myself until middle age, when an understanding psychiatrist helped me understand what was wrong, that it wasn't wrong, and helped give me ways to integrate myself again.

Not everyone with Robin Williams in their head is a compulsive comic. Some are compulsive inventors, or compulsive artists, or compulsive scientists. Me. I'm a compulsive writer. I can no longer stop writing than I can turn off the Robin Williams in my head.

This Week's Clue: The Three Party System

Following is the essay you can designate as Volume 10, Number 42  of This Week's Clue, based on the e-mail newsletter I have produced since March, 1997. It would be the issue of October 22.

Enjoy.

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The United States actually has, and always has had, three main political parties.

• The Republican Party.
• The Democratic Party.
• The Money Party.

While the Money Party has been associated with Republicans for a generation, its support can actually float. Even a split within the Money Party, as in 1992, can elect a Democrat. As it elected Bill Clinton. As, in 1912, it elected Woodrow Wilson. As, in 1884, it elected Grover Cleveland. Or, as in 1840, William Henry Harrison.

The Money Party is the true swing vote in America. And the Money Party almost always wins.

While voters this year have been switching allegiance, moving from Republican to Democratic (time will tell how permanent this is) the Money Party has been on the same course. Democratic campaign committees are now out-raising their Republican counterparts. Democratic Presidential candidates the same.

The Money Party has been in charge of the Democratic apparatus since about 1988, after successive Democrats lost and the party became anxious to win. The AntiThesis of our generation represents this alliance. Michael Dukakis was a candidate of the Money Party, or at least its Democratic wing. So was Bill Clinton. You can thus call this the Money Wing of the Democratic Party. When bloggers like Atrios complain about "The Village" they're talking about the Money Wing of the party, which only leans against the Republican Thesis, which will only act as an AntiThesis, and which can't conceive of real change.

When Howard Dean (left) said he wanted to represent "the Democratic wing of the Democratic party"  he meant to stand against the Money Wing. (It wasn't the Scream that killed Dean. It was the Money Wing, which was always looking for the "anti-Dean," and aligned with Kerry after Iowa.) When the Clintons moved to New York after 2000, it was to be nearer the offices of that Money Wing, to encourage its movement toward the Democrats.

The Jazz Singer

And now for something completely different...

I'm no film reviewer, but I just felt a need to tell you about an amazing film I saw on TV the other day.

The Jazz Singer.

Stop laughing a moment. This is one of those films we all assume we know, because of what we've been told about it, and because it's something that is supposed to be in our collective conscious. As the first mass market talking picture, it's one of the most important films of all time, and when we think about it all that's what we usually think about.

The Jazz Singer opened 80 years ago this month. It is regularly derided by critics as a minor piece, and in some ways it is. All the spoken parts are done as a silent, complete with speech cards, so there's this shock when Jolson suddenly starts singing, an excitement you can still feel on behalf of your grandparents and great-grandparents.

But, seeing the whole thing, there is so much more. The actors are behaving as in a talkie, without the heavy pancake and darkened lips of so many silents. Even in the sections which are silent, it's distinctively different. All the acting is naturalistic, not the measured pantomime we associate with the period.

Hydrogen and Drought

It's cloudy over Georgia today. Heavy clouds but no rain.

The drought continues. Politicians are panicking. Without rain Lake Lanier, which supplies the region with most of its water, will be sucked-dry in three months. (Picture from the blog Tondee's Tavern, via Voic.us.)

What does this have to do with hydrogen energy? Plenty.

When you use hydrogen in a fuel cell, combining it with oxygen from the air to produce energy, the "pollution" you produce is water. It's pure water, but even if you run it through a drain it's still new water, created in direct proportion to where people are.

The Second McCarthy Era

When the history of our time is written this decade will probably be known as the "Second McCarthy Era," after Sen. Joe McCarthy. (Below, the then-Senator and his lawyer, Roy Cohn.)

The assumption and abuse of government power is similar. The intimidation is similar. The incompetence is very similar.

The incompetence is a direct product of the abuse of power, and it's sad that liberals don't get this because it's simple math. When you play Kevin Bacon and make everyone a suspect, you limit the attention you can pay to any one suspect. Unless, that is, you can expand police budgets to give everyone a suspect's attention, and this the government has been unable to do, in either era.

What we're left with is the expansion of fear for fear's sake, which is exhausting. So without something real to renew our fear the game gets obvious and people stop playing. This is true in the Muslim world as well. Dubai looks a lot more attractive to young Muslims today than Al Qaeda's camps.

But what happens to the McCarthyites? Fear is a drug, intimidation is a drug, you need more and more of it as time goes by, and the loyal Bushies have become addicts. That's precisely what we are seeing now. Once you find yourself attacking toddlers to feed your need for enemies, or decide calling a TV camera names is a rational act (above) a lot of people are bound to think you need help.

Mr. Bubble Admits The Truth

Next year's recession is already baked-into the market. And probably the next years'. And maybe the years' after that. (Picture by Daniel Guidera for iTulip.com ).

Alan Greenspan, the self-proclaimed genius whose silence in the face of frauds never-before imagined has as much to do with this as anything else, admits it. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulsen is waking up to it. Banks are trying to build a firewall, but it's too late, too small, the banking Katrina is in the Gulf and it's coming onshore.

The problem is not what you think. It's not the gross size of the debt. It's not the debt's quality. It's the way that debt was allowed to be used, the way it was mixed together, good debts with bad debts, into instruments and options. Now that some of those debts are going bad, no one knows who has them.

The Great Fraud

One of the first interviews my editor at the Houston Business Journal sent me on, way back in the late 1970s, was with a then-unknown economist named Arthur Laffer.

Laffer sketched for me his famous "Laffer curve," on a real napkin. He was a very fast talker, as I recall, part carny, part used car salesman, part earnest academic. Given the editorial proclivities of the day, I wrote him up as the last.

But he was, in fact, the first. As even I could see at the time, while the curve made some sort of objective sense, that at some point a higher rate would discourage investment and cause tax revenues to fall rather than rise -- the reverse must also be true. Otherwise a tax rate of zero means you have infinite revenue.

The Media War

A hallmark of every generational crisis is a conflict between media, with one medium rising while another fights back.

A generation ago TV was the rising medium. Newspapers thought they were serious competitors in terms of political coverage. The decade began with Nixon's loss of the 1960 debate to Kennedy (radio listeners thought he won) and ended with Nixon triumphant, having learned TV stage management from Bob Haldeman.

We're now going through a similar period, only this time TV is on the defensive. And there are many ways in which that medium is fighting back against the Internet onslaught:

• Denial -- Howard Kurtz's new book Reality Show, and the accompanying interview tour, is a great example. He actually claims that people turned against the Iraq War because of the reporting by TV newscasts. Really.
• Advertising -- This is the method favored by incumbent industries, especially the telecom and oil oligarchs. Run a bunch of ads claiming "it's the network" (while seeking a monopoly on the Internet that will let the telecomms close off "selected" sites) or claiming that oil is green (only if it's made from people, Conoco) in such tight rotation that the TV news can't challenge you and people come to believe up is down, right left, and Eurasia has always been at war with Oceania.
• Strangulation -- Cable and telephone networks are deliberately strangling Internet bandwidth, defining "TV" and "voice" as separate services, which they're not, and charging out the wazoo for the few bits that are left. What will happen is people will pay until they realize the depth of the rip-off. And that will be the end of the cable and phone networks. The Internet itself will go blithely on.
• Goons -- From silly strategery to paid goons, corporations continue to treat blogs as something that can be managed and overcome. They can't. You have to deal with them, and accept their values, or you're the enemy.
• Competition -- This has been the most effective tack, turning journalists and columnists into bloggers. The New York Times kept Paul Krugman in a cage for two years, then suddenly unleashed him as a paid blogger. This makes some objective sense, since publishers know how to monetize pages in ways regular people can't (Blogads is dead), but some can make the transition and others can't.

Some thoughts follow

Learning from History

One of the most important things you should do before reading any history book is to look at when when it was written. I've found that the great insights from most history books usually reflect that time, not the time being written about.

Here's a good example, the 1999 book FDR and His Enemies, by Arthur Fried. It's the best explanation I can find for why Al Gore isn't President.

How so? Start with the title. FDR and His Enemies.  It assumes the Nixon Thesis of Conflict, the idea that politicians must have enemies -- implacable, evil domestic enemies who have to be confronted and destroyed before any success is possible.

That's not true. The heart of the FDR Thesis of Unity argues against it. Roosevelt's entire policy make-up was to create a consensus of belief that would spur people to action. He did this in the 1930s with radio, and he got Hollywood's help, both then and later, in moving people away from their isolationist attitudes.

The Bad Germans

In his column today the newly-liberated Frank Rich calls on the "Good Germans" of modern America to confront George Bush's policies, or be labeled by history as his enablers.

That's just an invitation to another Democratic circular firing squad.

Instead I want to take on the more difficult task and speak kindly of the "Bad Germans."

The "Bad Germans," in this case, are those who still stand with Bush, even after Abu Ghraib, even after the torture memos, even after the thousands dead and the Blackwater scandal and the dirty tricks and all the rest of it. Some 30% of voters, tens of millions of Americans, still stand proudly in support of George Bush's policies.

Thus the Republican Party is unable to repudiate any of Bush's major initiatives. There is one candidate, Rudy Giuliani, who opposes something Bush failed to do, impose a Christian version of "Sharia" law. There is another, Ron Paul, who opposes the Iraq War, but that's because he's an isolationist whackjob who wants to drown government in a bathtub and return to the gold standard. All the others endorse Bush-ism. Some say they want to go beyond it, that he isn't "strong enough" on torture, or "hard enough" on "illegal" aliens, or "forceful enough" on denying struggling families the help of their government.

I'm very interested in these people, with their SUVs and their "W" stickers (still), with their radios turned to Rush Limbaugh and their reading hours turned to Ann Coulter. They're still out there. Tens of millions of them. And, assuming Democrats manage to take power in 2009, they'll be even madder than they are now, some of them mad enough to kill.

What makes someone like that? Let's do a case study and find out.