Dana Blankenhorn

Black Camelot

It is almost certain that, in the next few years, Broadway will mount a re-staging of the Broadway musical Camelot, probably with an all-black cast.

This will happen regardless of the election results. If Obama wins, it's an echo of the Kennedy era. If he loses it's in keeping with the play's actual plot, which is that Camelot is destroyed.

How do I know? This is how Broadway rolls. They reprise musicals 50 years after their opening. Kiss Me Kate re-opened in 1999, The Pajama Game in 2005. Camelot, which first opened in 1960, is due.

That's sort of forgotten these days because, in its first run, Julie Andrews took it over. It was all about the singing. She was a marvelous singer. But at that time, she wasn't a great actress. She wasn't ready to play the villain.

That's what Guenevere is, the villain. And that's what she will be when the play is re-staged.

Why an all-black cast? Because, frankly, there are more really talented black folks ready to grab these parts right now than white ones. (Brian Stokes Mitchell doesn't count. He's played both Coalhouse Walker, a black man in Ragtime, as well as The Man of La Mancha and the lead in that Kiss Me Kate I mentioned earlier. If you want to re-do Flower Drum Song I'm sure he'd be great.)

Rather than concern ourselves with the details of the re-staging (what might be added, or dropped, what might the costumes look like, or the staging) it's far more fun to play that great Hollywood Game -- I wanted, I'd take, I got.

As in I wanted Laurence Olivier, I'd take Dick Van Dyke, I got Dom DeLuise. Only to make this game even more sporting, let's play it this way. Who plays the role on Broadway, who gets it in the Hollywood motion picture, and who goes about touring it in the sticks?

The Elmer Gantry Bank

The crimes of this era will, in retrospect, dwarf any American era which has come before.

Most of our attention has focused on things like torture, war, abuse of power, and the Big Shitpile.

Not enough has been focused on the smaller crimes, the Little Shitpiles, and what caused them.

What caused them, in a word, was belief. Belief that an unregulated market won't be a shark tank. Belief that those who loudly proclaim their faith actually believe in something outside themselves.

The answer, as Ronald Reagan said most famously, is trust but verify. We didn't do that in this decade. And we have paid a terrible price for that.

Fatherhood

Think of this as Volume 11, Number 35 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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I have a long-time grudge against someone who shares my last name. David Blankenhorn (right).

The other Blankenhorn runs something called the Institute for American Values, a wingnut front group. He is best known as the author of Fatherless America, where he argues for the obligation of fathers to stay with their kids.

I may resent him because of what my dad did. He stayed. He had demons, but he stayed. He was abusive, and he was a hound, but he stayed. He was miserable, he made us miserable much of the time, but he stayed.

I had two fathers coming up. One was a drunk who hit me and only expressed his love through things. The other was a small businessman who charmed his customers and managed his people.

Among my siblings I was the fortunate one. I spent most of my time growing-up with this second man. I called him Fred. But he wasn't my dad. He was my boss. I filed, I stacked inventory, I went out on calls. It was a TV repair shop so I watched a ton of TV. My dad spent 66 hours a week at his shop, and what I learned was that if I didn't get away from it I'd die.

Many years later, through the eyes of my own kids, I learned some of what drove him through the eyes of my own children. By then my old family was gone, they were all 3,000  miles away, and I had to find my own answers.

What I most resent about "the other Blankenhorn" is his idea that you have to stay, because I felt my dad should not have stayed. How much better might his life had been, might my life had been, if instead of sucking it up we just had his money, and my mom had a chance to find someone more compatible?

What my dad taught me was that a miserable marriage is worse than none at all. This was the opposite of what I heard from the other Blankenhorn. His teachings ran counter to everything I had come to know.

Then I had my own kids, and I learned something important.

McCain's Best Move

I've watched Republicans concern troll Democrats for years, pretending to give "honest" advice which was, in fact, dismissive criticism.

I'm nicer. I'm going to give John McCain an idea that can actually make this election close.

It has to do with his Vice Presidential choice.

All the current names on the list -- Mittens, Droopy Dawg, Whodat -- do nothing. Romney hates McCain's guts (and vice versa), Lieberman will alienate the base, and Pawlenty is an empty suit.

The candidate himself has said he wants someone who can help him fix the economy, so that implies someone who has been successful in business.

No, not her. Carly Fiorina would be an absolute disaster, for the party, for the country, for the world. She is vainglorious and incompetent, a Britney Spears among American CEOs.

The Key To The War Against Oil

The key to winning the War Against Oil will lie in the appointment of a new Energy Secretary.

The Department of Energy has been moribund practically since the day it was born, in part because the President who created it, Jimmy Carter, became so discredited he wasn't even asked to speak at his party's convention this week, despite two Nobel Peace Prizes.

It was designed to implement an industrial policy, but instead it became a political dumping ground, staffed by businessmen under Republicans and party hacks under Democrats.

We can't afford that now.

The Department of Energy must deliver research and policy to guide public and private investment toward a hydrogen economy. Since people really began recognizing the priority we have seen scam-after-scam-after-scam get funding, get publicity, and get power.

1. Ethanol is a scam. It raises food prices, and costs more in energy to produce than it delivers.
2. Clean coal is a lie. The technology does not exist, yet. It might one day, but until it does new coal investments are counter-productive.
3. T. Boone Pickens is a fraud. He wants government power, and subsidies, to turn West Texas into his own fiefdom, stealing and selling its water, running roughshod over property rights with special eminent domain laws.
4. Wind efforts are being wasted. Power lines lose half the power getting it to market. There is, as yet, no infrastructure to turn that power into hydrogen and get it to market.

That's not all. Nuclear power is making a comeback, even though we still don't know what to do with the waste, or even how to protect it against dirty bomb makers. Drill here, drill now advocates threaten to seize the capital we need to make the future and re-enslave us to the past.

I have a very simple plan for the next Energy Secretary:

They Don't Understand (Perhaps They Never Will)

Having followed the political blogosphere for 5 years, and the Internet medium for 25, I really expected that by this point the media would be more integrated than it is.

After all, the Internet Generation is now grown. My two kids can't remember a time before the Internet. They have had broadband access in their rooms since she was 10 and he was 7. Today he never watches TV, and her TV-watching is usually accompanied by the clicking of her keyboard.

The Internet is not just integrated into their lives. It is their lives. It is the medium of their lives.

Their reality is also the reality for tens of millions of others. Not just old fogies like me. I grew up with TV and, while I now work exclusively online I'm more like a 1950s sitcom writer, translating the vocabulary of what I know into where I am.

So you would expect that, by this time, the old medium would have a fine-grained understanding of the new, and be able to bring the best of it along into the new age.

Nope. Not at all.

The Hillary Zone

Anxious to find some sort of phony story to tide them over until the speechifying, MSNBC and other cable networks are pushing this "Democratic split" nonsense.

What makes me angry is not that it's a lie. What makes me angry is they know it.

Fueling the lie are surveys showing upwards of 30% of "Hillary supporters" insist they won't vote for Obama. Fact is most of these people were never Hillary supporters to begin with.

As the press reported at the time, Republicans made a concerted effort to keep the Democratic race going by supporting Clinton. In states like Mississippi the bulk of her vote came from committed Republicans just trying to muddy the waters.

So of course if you poll these people a lot of them will say they support the Republicans. They're Republicans. Duh!

Any Clinton supporter who goes to McCain at this point never really supported Clinton in the first place. They have no clue where she stands, no clue what she believes in, they're trolls or drama queens. I'm sure she will make this clear when she speaks tonight, and the press will have to find something else to obsess over tomorrow.

This is just the way the "old media" works. You have to have a story, you have to have a conflict, or else you think you're wasting your time.

No, you don't.

The Audacity of Bits

I am sick and tired of the liberal blogosphere panicking about the Obama campaign.

I am sick of their repeating tired Old Media narratives. I'm sick of the henny pennies at the HuffPo, and I'm getting frankly sick of Digby's assumptions that "they're going to do it again and we're going to let them."

I'm sick and tired of the whinging.

This is not 2000. This is not 2004.

This is also about more than the country having changed. The Obama campaign is like a giant iceberg -- most of it is under the water line. What is above the water line looks to be of similar size to the McCain iceberg.

But there's nothing under McCain save water.

Obama and McCain have been making similar-size media buys, but Obama is raising more than twice as much money. What's going on? Is anyone even asking?

No. They're not. So I'll tell you.

Joe Adams

Every nominee for Vice President gets a quick re-evaluation by the national media.

It's important work, because the VP can become The Man in a heartbeat. Or (as we've seen in this decade) he can become The Man anyway.

Since I first voted, in 1976, I have seen many of these re-evaluations. Most of these men (and one woman) held up well. Some -- Ferrarro, Quayle -- completely failed the test.

Politics is a field that brings out your faults and magnifies them. It seldom happens that the re-evaluation brings out hidden strengths, and the candidate grows before our eyes. George H.W. Bush and Al Gore both did this.

So has Joe Biden.

I didn't know he was the poorest U.S. Senator, in terms of wealth. Remember, this guy has been in office 35 years. The Senate pays pretty well. In all that time he has built one grand house, in Wilmington, Delaware, saving the cost of a Capitol abode and commuting by train instead. I thought he was the "Senator from MBNA," but apparently he didn't take much of their money, because you can't find it on him.

When I have thought of Joe Biden over the years (and that was seldom) I've seen an ambitious blowhard who was great mainly in his own eyes. I didn't see anything of the Founding Fathers in him at all.

Until this weekend, when I suddenly saw John Adams.

The Lost Cause

Think of this as Volume 11, Number 34 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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The Crisis of 1860 restored the Union, but the Crisis of 1896 settled the question of race for three generations. (That's the square in Decatur, Georgia, in the 1940s, dominated by the Confederate War Memorial which still stands.)

For black people, the cause was lost. Jim Crow's reign was thoroughly established in the 1890s. All the gains black folks fought for during the Civil War were taken back. Their sons and daughters would live in virtual slavery, second class in the North, serfs here in the South. Separate but "equal."

Under Jim Crow young blacks were lynched routinely. Through the 1960s an innocent man could be grabbed off the street, tossed into jail, condemned in a show trial, and placed into chain gang slavery for years, ostensibly to pay the costs of his own jailing. Black schools were shacks, water fountains and bathrooms were separate.

The struggle to change this, the crisis of the 1960s, would nominally succeed, but it would turn the Democratic Party which fought that struggle into a minority party for another generation. Today's rule is equal but separate.

One of my first friends after I moved to Atlanta was a soldier in that struggle.

In the summer of 1983 John Flint, my new next-door neighbor, invited me to his birthday party. It turned out to be his centennial. Born in 1883, the son of a slave, he was honored that October 1 as the lifeblood of Agnes Scott College, having run its dining hall and helped turn plain brick into something fancy and fine. Every living President of the college was there. One said he proved by the way he lived that some black men aren't the equal of white men, that they're better, and this knowledge transformed generations of southern girls, changed them, enlisted them in the struggle.

It was Mr. Flint's daughter Edna House who encouraged our friendship. It was one of the great pleasures of my life. It introduced me and my family to my other neighbors because  our "bargain" home placed us on the black side of the color line.