Dana Blankenhorn

Torture

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Think of this as Volume 12, Number 19 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Everyone who has been a parent, or a child, knows something of torture.

As my son John prepares to graduate high school this month, my parenting career enters a new phase. I will try out this new role on a trip to China, Taiwan and Japan starting May 23rd. Posting will be sporadic.

It is not easier for someone with ADD to parent children who have it. It's harder. My son's ADD is much like mine, only sometimes it's on steroids, and our long-term efforts to treat it have left different scars on him than my own long-term denial left on me, coming up.

I must admit here that there were times when I hit him. Hard. He could be, can be, infuriating. He has the same buttons I have, and has known how to push them since he was a small child. Parenting him has helped me deal with my own ADD, for which I'm thankful. 

But there have been times when we tortured one another, both mentally and physically.

The Landon Road

The ongoing collapse of the Republican Party, with its absolute rejection of the new President, and accompanying collapse in public approval, has no precedent in American political history, although it has elements in common with every other generational change:

1. As in 1860 it's centered in the South and the rhetoric is violent. But that rhetoric was followed by action. There is no evidence, despite the stockpiling of weapons, that America is about to be visited by a Second Civil War.
2. As in 1896 the issues of the minority are primarily economic,  having to do with the nature of money and of government. But there has been no divide into small parties, as there was then, and the populism has all been rhetorical. 
3. As in 1968 parts of the old governing coalition are abandoning politics altogether, social conservatives into churches, economic conservatives onto Wall Street, neoconservatives into think tanks. But back then the old governing party, the Democrats, controlled Congress for another 12 years, often by large majorities. These Republicans can be ignored.

Thus it's 1932 that seems to offer the best comparison. As it is now, opposition Republicans had immediately become a rather ineffectual minority. But the leaders of that Congressional Party, Senator Charles McNary of Oregon and Rep. Bertrand Snell of New York, did not entirely reject the New Deal, as this crowd has rejected President Obama's program.

Question before you click. Who is that at the top of the post, and what does he have to do with our story?

Make Him

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The last week has marked a real turning point in the Presidency of  Barack Obama.

Until this week we have allowed ourselves to obsess over the incoherent and morally bankrupt opposition to the President's political right. Now events are forcing us to consider growing anger to his left:

1. The War Against Oil is not being fought because the President's nominal allies in the Democratic leadership are scuttling plans for cap and trade.

2. The Health Care Reform so essential to continuing Democratic governance is being compromised away, again by nominal Democrats.

3. Arlen Specter has  become a nominal Democrat and now feels free to act like a Republican again.

4. Perhaps most upsetting, the President seems ready to let the entire  Bush Administration skate on the torture regime, accepting the precedent that when the President does it then it is not, in fact, illegal. Even if it directly contravenes international law and treaties the U.S. has previously signed. We're all Banana Republicans now. 

Here's to You, Mrs. Robinson

Of all the people I thought it unlikely I would ever write about, Marian Robinson would rank pretty high. 

Mrs. Robinson is the "first grandma," brought to Washington by her daughter in order to continuinglooking after her grandaughters at the White House. The widow of Frasier Robinson (to the left in this picture, taken when their daughter Michelle was a baby), it seemed like a nice, small story, a curious sidelight.

I'm wondering if we shouldn't make it a little more. 

First because, as The New York Times reports, Mrs. Robinson is having a good time. She has gone out to the theater, she has seen the Washington scene, and she has taken to it as it has taken to her. 

Second because Mrs. Robinson is an excellent role model. A former sprinter, she and her husband raised two lovely children, she nursed her husband through his long-term (losing) battle with MS, and she seems to be an excellent grandmother, a good person. The perfect image for our aging society. 

So I was thinking...