Dana Blankenhorn

Closing the Deal

I'm sort of accustomed to being ignored. But since I often end up being right, I just shrug my shoulders and move on.

I'm a bit like the lady to the right in that. As has been noted before, she passed away at the same age I am right now, at 53. And she didn't live one day for how other people saw her. She charted her own path. She was a role model.

So now, despite my distinct lack of qualifications or notoreity, I'm going to explain to Barack Obama just how he closes this nomination deal.

Yo Mama.

Had Stanley Ann Dunham not been felled by ovarian cancer in 1995, she would be turning 66 this year. She would be right in Hillary Clinton's wheelhouse.

So use that. Speak from the heart of how she might feel. This is the time in campaigns where we start getting the full autobiography anyway. This question has to be addressed.

Start by stating the obvious.

The Oil Standard

Think of this as Volume 11, Number 18 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

---

I have long been intrigued by what stands for value. (Picture from The Zoo.)

Throughout the 19th century, gold was the standard of value.

The 1896 Crisis, the Cross of Gold speech, these were outgrowths of the 1895 gold loan by J.P. Morgan to the U.S. government in exchange for bonds, which Morgan then sold at the "usurious" interest rate of 4%. With gold as the standard of value, the value of other commodities (like wheat) withered. Farmers suffered, bankers gained. The farmers' uprising was called Populism, and it made Democrats dominant in the farm belt for decades.

Today we have a new standard of value. Oil. And the impact is much the same. For wheat read dollars, for farmers read Americans, and for J.P. Morgan read the Saudi sheikhs, Hugo Chavez and Vladimir Putin.

What makes a "strong" store of value is the fact that its supply is limited, that it doesn't inflate. It's stable. It's sound.

The U.S. dollar is no longer sound. It's being tossed out by Helicopter Ben the way farmers a century ago tossed wheat on the market, and the result is very predictable. The age of the "dollar standard" is over, and while the world seeks a new safe haven, oil will do nicely.

There can be only one response.

Principles and Ideology

Think of this as Volume 11, Number 17 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

---

What is most frustrating to me, as I read responses to my blog posts here and elsewhere, is how often I come up against raw, naked ideology.

Ideology is a soul stealer. Ideology blinds us to reality, substituting an artificial construct. Ideology, regardless of where its -ism comes from, is simply impractical.

One big reason why we have generational change is that the principles which first motivate important changes morph, over time, into ideology. This happens at all times, to all types of principle. The kind, simple words of Jesus have been transformed over the centuries into a host of warring ideologies. The same is true for Mohammad.

The same is true, in our time, for Adam Smith, for George Mason, for John Locke, even for Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, all the  great men who are credited with defining what is today modern conservatism.

I have been quite taken with the interviews surrounding the book Pure Goldwater, co-written by Barry Goldwater Jr. (who supported Ron Paul) and former Nixon counsel John W. Dean (who now seems to be a Democrat). Dean revealed that, while Goldwater Sr. was seen as a right-wing extremist in 1964 he was, by the end of his life, considered to be something of a libertarian, out of step with his own party. He even befriended the Clintons!

Goldwater was a man of principle. What he saw in his lifetime was those principles morph into an ideology, an absolutism as troubling as what he had fought in the 1950s.

Open Source is Parallel Processing on Steroids

I was chatting up a Washington liberal today, and it was depressing.

The subject was computing. The liberal bemoaned the power of corporations to wreck a great, highly-functional government project.

The project was starved for funds, its developers allowed to leave, and now its bones were being picked by lobbyists, all aiming their "best of breed" systems as replacements for bits-and-pieces of what had once been a magnificent computing edifice.

Even if Democrats are elected this fall, he said, they don't understand these technical arguments about open source vs. proprietary. They'll be bought off just like the current crop.

Which is when it hit me, the frame he could use to tear down all those vendors and bring back what was lost, what is in the process of being lost.

Open source is parallel processing.  (Shown is the parallel processing lab at the University of Utah.)

No matter how big a vendor might be, it's still one system. Like the Von Neumann architectures that dominated computing for its first 40 years they have a bottleneck. The only way to speed up the process of finding a solution is to speed the whole process, get more GHz. It's this kind of thinking which led, by the 1980s, to so-called "supercomputers" like the Cray.

Parallel processing was developed in the 1980s at the Sandia Labs in New Mexico. The idea was simple -- to break jobs into parts, to move the parts onto many systems, and then to put the solutions together on the back end.

In the 20 years since parallel processing has come to dominate computing, relegating Von Neumann to a Wikipedia entry. First people stacked Macs to beat a Cray. Then they used parallel processing on the Internet itself, creating distributed computing projects like SETI @  Home. Today parallel processing is used inside chips -- all today's latest AMD and Intel silicon is doing parallel processing. From two to four to eight -- who knows how far we can go with it.

That's sort of how open source works. Only on steroids.

Because with open source not only do you parse out pieces of a project to different companies, or different developers, but their work can cross-pollinate. Not only can you build systems in parallel, but you can also use a vast community of users to find bugs, and another vast army to stamp out the bugs.

The genius of Linus Torvalds lies in his ability to constantly re-engineer Linux' development process, first farming out all the work, then finding new ways to coordinate the massively-parallel architecture which develops in response. And the design of Linux itself responds well to this parallel processing impulse, since it consists of central functions in a kernel, ancillary functions surrounding it, and a host of distribution providers who can build working systems from all the pieces -- sometimes using just parts of the kernel for a mobile system, embracing optional things like virtualization for a server.

Class War

What was the most amazing statement in this week's ABC debate?

For my money it was anchor Charles Gibson's assertion that $200,000 is a middle class income. It is, in fact, within the top 4%.

The Census Bureau estimates the current median family income at $62,228. It varies by state. As high as $78,000 in New Jersey, as low as $46,000 in Arkansas. A median income means half of all families make more than that, half make less. It's a true, real-world average.

But I have no doubt that, to Gibson, his statement was right-on. Half the people he knows make more than $200,000, only half less. Which is precisely the problem.

If you make your living as a talking head, on network or cable TV, it's almost certain that you are, by most common definitions, wealthy. This is true for those so-called "newspaper" people you see on TV, not to mention nearly all the pundits and "strategists" who populate the political chat shows. (For the record, our family is doing just fine -- nowhere near $200,000, though.)

This is a very important point to understand when you're looking at today's media. If there is a class war -- and I would argue that there has been for many years -- everyone on the tube is on the rich side of that divide. Everyone, whether they're claiming to argue for conservatives or liberals.

This was not always the case. When I was a kid journalists were truly middle class, their incomes close to the median. Top editors were a bit above, reporters were always below. Our job was to identify with the middle class, and with those who had middle class aspirations. We could do that because that's where we lived -- in the middle.

No more. Now those paid to supposedly advocate on behalf of the middle class are themselves far above that station.

Passing the Media Torch

Perhaps the most important story coming out of Pennsylvania may be this.

The media torch has been passed. Not to a new generation, but to a new medium.

Not that the incoming medium notices. To read DailyKos you would think that idiocy were triumphant. Yet despite the constant drumbeat of "Obama's going down" from TV "pundits" and newspaper wags, nothing has really happened. Polls have barely budged.

This would not have been the case 20 years ago, or even 4 years ago. Michael Dukakis was destroyed for simply looking goofy in a tank, Howard Dean by a misrepresented attempt to rev up his supporters. The power of pundits and the media to make (and break) candidates has gone unquestioned for decades now.

What happened?

Something very important.

Rage, Rage Against the Dying of the Light

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

What is true for mortal man is also true for ideas, for concepts, for myths and values, for political theses.

That's what we're dealing with in events like the supposed "bitter" contretemps and Barack Obama.

Forget for a moment whether Barack Obama is a black man or white. He is, first of all, a Hawaiian.

Hawaiians surf. They stand on a board above the waves and they ride the water the way Texans ride horses. Obama surfs history the way painters like Picasso surf artistic trends or the way a Tom Brady surfs through defenses seeking a receiver.

As do we all, once we realize it. But journalists are stuck in the eternal now, and have no concept of this idea of surfing.

Thus they see scandal where there is, in fact, the death rattle of their own assumptions of political myth, value, and power, and the alchemy in which both are created.

What Barack Obama said last week in Pennsylvania was the simple truth. It should surprise no one that people turn bitter when their jobs disappear, when politicians in both parties use that to gain power and then do nothing about it.

The Clintons promised to help, but instead took that power and endorsed free trade agreements which guaranteed the jobs would never come back. The Bushes blamed the blacks, the browns, all the "others," then continued the march away from production, towards consumption.

There is no lie there. There is no scandal.

Tribes of the GOP

Think of this as Volume 11, Number 15 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

---

Back in 1968 it was easy to identify the Democratic tribes splitting off from the party by the way they dressed and the way they looked.

White, black, brown, male, female, young, old -- each tribe had its own look and its own outlook.

It's tougher now. About the only black Republicans are on TV. Republicans are generally Euro-Americans, aged 30 and higher. They blend in. It's only when they start talking that you detect the tribal differences.

Anthropologists had two ways to discern the tribal identity of Nixon-era Republicans, by where they sat and by what they obsessed over. 

Where they were definitions include:

• Wall Street Republicans -- Urban only if they had an apartment in New York itself (maybe Philly), otherwise strictly suburban or exurban. Their first concern is money, getting it, keeping it, getting more of it, keeping other people from getting any.
• Church Street Republicans -- Usually found in megachurches or in front of their TV sets. Densest populations in the South and Southwest, but found in every state. Their first concern is morality, usually others, and using the power of the state to force that morality into a mold their preacher approves of.
• Easy Street Republicans -- Mostly found in Florida, Arizona, and California, these are Wall Street Republicans who made their pile. Often found in motor homes, on golf courses, or on condo balconies.
• Talk Show Republicans -- Often found in pick-up trucks on on job sites. They like them some Rush Limbaugh. Used to call themselves Reagan Democrats. Archie Bunker's real kids. The kind of people other Republicans like to rob.
• Professional Republicans -- Mostly found in Washington and its suburbs, or on TV.  Professional greasemen (and women),  sucking either at the government teat or those of other Republicans, mainly the Wall Street variety. Rush Limbaugh himself.
  

Ending the Zero Sum Game

Perhaps the grossest myth of the last American generation is the Zero Sum Myth.

This myth was very much on display yesterday during the Iraq testimony. This is why it seemed at times that Gen. David Petraeus and the Democrats questioning him were speaking different languages, living on different planets.

To Petraeus, as to John McCain and the great majority of Republicans, there can only be two outcomes in Iraq. You win, you lose. The idea of some different, muddier, more real outcome is entirely foreign to them. Listen to any of them closely, listen to them tolerantly, and this comes through. You don't have to argue with it. It's simply their reality.

The point was brought home by Barack Obama's questioning (above). Is there an outcome other than a fully democratic (well Republican) Iraq, under American control, with no Al Qaeda and no influence from Iran, which you might define as victory, he asked? Petraeus reacted as though Obama were speaking his father's native Luo language. It was, to him, inconceivable.

This is in the nature of the Nixon Thesis of Conflict. It's at the heart of it, really. Life is a zero sum game. You either win or you lose. Peaceful coexistence is impossible. There can be no meeting of the minds, no agreeing to disagree. 

Dust

Think of this as Volume 11, Number 14 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

---

On sunny Sunday mornings, while the rest of Atlanta is in bed, at church, or huddling over brunch, I ride my bike downtown and visit Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (right).

It's quiet then. Just a few Japanese tourists wander by. If it's sunny, if I've been riding a few hours, I will sit by the reflecting pool and talk to him.

I don't expect him to talk back. He's dust. His tomb is a symbol for the life he lived, and the work he did. I was pleased when I snapped this picture, because it shows his wife Coretta is now with him. She lived nearly as long without him as he'd spent time on this Earth (38 years against 39) but they're together now in heaven, and in memory.

Why the Media is the Last to Know

One of the great ironies is that journalism, which deals in the eternal now, changes far more slowly than other institutions.

It's easy to understand when you think about it. You rise as a journalist mainly by pleasing those above you. These decision makers are older. A journalistic institution has very slow turnover in its management class, so barring bankruptcy you're dealing with people whose formative experiences lie 20-40 years in the past.

Change in journalism, in other words, is generational. The rate of change in an established journalism enterprise has nothing to do with events, nothing to do with reality, certainly nothing to do with how readers' minds may be changing. Then recall how with each new set of political assumptions one medium tends to rise and another fall -- the falling medium digs in its heels as the new medium rises.

Book publishers in the 1890s were slow to credit the journalistic ideas then rising into vogue. Publishers like Mencken were slow to credit film or radio in the 1930s, and Hollywood resented TV in the 1960s.

Yet people in today's rising Internet thesis, like Digby (above) and Glenn Greenwald, people working every day in today's rising medium, continue to get their undies in a bunch over the glacial pace of change in TV newsrooms.

They see conspiracies when they're looking at evolution.

My Candidate is Teh Awesome. Your Candidate is Teh Suck

That (complete with misspellings) is the "deep thought" Atrios (alias Duncan Black, right) often offers concerning the Clinton-Obama race.

The implication, made explicit when he addresses the point at some length, is that it doesn't much matter, in the end, which Democrat runs in November. Just that they win.

If you look at their policy positions he's right. Choosing between these candidates based on the proposals on their Web sites is a losing proposition.

But what's left is not atmospherics, as some may think. There is in fact some there there.

And that there is probably why my preferred candidate, John Edwards, has yet to make an endorsement. It's worth exploring.

The AntiThesis Must Fall

Think of this as Volume 11, Number 13 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

---

When you look at American politics from the perspective of generations, one of the most startling things you learn is how each generation's Anti-Thesis, the myths, values and assumptions which fought the previous era, must fall as the era falls.

Easy to say, hard to put into practice, but voters manage it. They do it by building a new Thesis within the rising party, then battling the old Anti-Thesis within their own party  until it's dead.

Here's how it has run, in every generational crisis, from the last crisis in the 1960s backward through the Civil War:

• 40 years ago, this meant the Eisenhower Republicans. The party faction which Dwight D. Eisenhower brought to power was moderate in tone, wanting only to lean against the assumptions of the New Deal and make them work better. By the 1960s this meant Nelson Rockefeller (right), who became a hated figure within the new New York Conservative Party starting in 1960. While Rockefeller ended up (briefly) as Gerald Ford's Vice President, he had lost his relevance by that time. Today moderate Republicanism is just about dead.
• 36 years before that, this meant Wilson Democrats, represented best by Wilson's own son-in-law, William McAdoo. Woodrow Wilson crafted a marriage of convenience between business-oriented Democrats in the northeast and the remnants of failed Bryan populism. Roosevelt's nomination was fueled by his opposition to the former and his alliance with the latter. It was McAdoo (right), who had tried for the nomination twice before, whom Roosevelt most needed to outmaneuver in order to win himself.
  
• 36 years before that, this meant the Mugwumps. The Mugwumps -- a made-up word implying Big Chiefs -- were reform-minded Democrats who allied with urban machines to elect Grover Cleveland starting in 1884. Cleveland's endorsement of bonds backed by private gold in 1895, meant to stave off U.S. bankruptcy at a time when tariffs were the main source of revenue, collapsed his coalition. Mark Twain (right) is credited with coining the term Mugwump, and represented this early progressive impulse. Theodore Roosevelt inherited the Mugwumps in his Progressive Republican coalition. 
• 36 years before that, this meant the Whigs. The party of Henry Clay (right) believed in "civic improvements" like canals and railroads, meaning they sought a more activist government than the Jacksonians. They were wiped out by the creation of the Republican Party starting in 1854, which had different priorities, namely slavery and industry.

Notice however that Nixon came out of the Eisenhower Anti-Thesis, that Franklin Roosevelt had been a cabinet member under Wilson, that Theodore Roosevelt had been a young Mugwump, and that Lincoln had run in the 1840s as a Whig. This is what fueled my November, 2007 Clue  and my identification of her as Hillary M. Nixon.

Night of the Concern Troll

You can fool all of the people some of the time.

That's one-third of a famous quote, from Abraham Lincoln. Cynics depend on that to maintain power. After all, in a democracy you only have to fool most of the people once in a while, at the time of an election, to rule.

At a transformative time -- and this is such a time -- that trick doesn't work. But it does work most of the time, which is why concern trolls continue to trot it out. Even now.

"I'm not a racist. I'm an adult. But most people aren't," they'll say. "Most people are easily manipulated. They're fools. Want proof? They listen to me."

Want further proof? Just look at the polls.

In the face of such "overwhelming evidence" it is easy for idealists to get discouraged. The worst thing that can happen, however, is that you accept the trolls' premise. I'm an adult, you're an adult, but those people over there are children, easily led, just looking to follow.

That way lies madness.

That is the cold cynicism at the heart of the Nixon Thesis of Conflict. It has a long history in our culture. It was central to H.L. Mencken's derision of middle class voters as the "booboisie."

Now I think Mencken was one of our greatest writers, but his own politics were fascist. His sensibility, the idea that there is a "better" class of person and that the majority is a mob, sounds great in the salon, but if you really believe that blatherskite you should turn in your American citizenship.

Each new Thesis rises based on reaction to what came before. The cynicism of the Nixon Era, whose sunset we now see before us, was a reaction to the idealism, the Capra-corn if you will, of the Roosevelt Era. Which itself was a reaction against Menckenism.

Hate, Fear and Hope

The great progress of my generation is that our hates and fears have become our political divide.

That wasn't the case before the 1960s. Before the 1960s we were united in our hates and fears. Hatred of black people was endemic to the Democratic Party's mission for generations. The response by generations of Republicans was to speak to those fears while doing as little as possible about them.

The idea that this is progress came to me while watching Barack Obama in Philadelphia today. It was the kind of transcendent talk I was hoping for. It even shocked some Republicans for its bluntness, because he acknowledged the legitimate grievances of people like Geraldine Ferraro, even as he urged us all to get over them.

But he also went beyond this. In talking about Jeremiah Wright (above), and about the Trinity Church he attends, he brought home the religious nature of our hates and fears as well. Then he turned the mirror on himself:

I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

In giving his own confession, Obama challenged us all to testify, and in that testimony to make the changes in our hearts which are a precondition to real racial progress.

It's Not That They're Clueless

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

---

My blog friend Oliver Willis calls those in charge of our financial house clueless.

That's an easy mistake to make.

In fact, it's in the nature of our economic system that you go right up to the line of legality in order to maximize profit. Anyone who doesn't do that is an economic loser, either in the short run or the long run.

You want to go right up to the line, peer down over the edge, and maybe move your toes back a bit. That's what your lawyers are there for, to move your toes back a bit.

This is fine so long as the law is reasonable. If the law is reasonable and cops are on the beat, walking right up to the line of legality and staring down into the canyon is both legitimate and good business. It's what makes markets efficient.

The problem in this case is the law was made unreasonable, and the cops chose to look the other way.

All the problems Bear Stearns caused were through the creation of new, "unregulated" markets. An unregulated market is a market that's looking for scandal. Because there is no reasonable line you can walk right up to, it's easy as heck to become Wile  E. Coyote in such a market -- everything is fine so long as you don't look down.

The defaults on sub-prime mortgages last year were when we started to look down.

Too Casual About It

Tinfoil hat time!

I first got this feeling last week, with Bush's dance before his endorsement of John McCain. It was like he didn't care what anyone thought, like democracy (small d) was meaningless. (Picture from Sushimoo.)

Is anyone else out there worried that the Bush Administration is acting a little too casual and flip about its continuing efforts to undermine the Constitution?

To the complete disregarding of Congress' oversight and its treaty-making role, we now have the sudden resignation of Adm. William Fallon, who was thought to be among the few voices in the military trying to tamp-down talk of an attack on Iran.

Every week or so, it seems, I read new blog posts about buying "taser cannon" to control demonstrators, about the growing politicization of our military, even a deliberate refusal to abide by Supreme Court rulings which go against them.

It sometimes seems as if the Bush people aren't even trying anymore to hide their disgust with the popular will.

It's true that this may just be total incompetence, and it's also true that such dark thoughts as these are one mark of a generational crisis. Anyone who remembers the late 1960s remembers fearing for democracy, as their fathers feared for it in the early 1930s, and their fathers feared for it in the 1890s, and their fathers feared for it in the 1850s.

Fear for democracy's fate is a necessary precondition for major democratic change.

But still...

How Long Has This Been Going On?

My 16-year old son and I got into a big fight this afternoon over the previous post.

Partly it was his exhaustion after a hard week of school. (Afterward he took a 3 hour nap.) Partly it was his natural inclination to play Argument Clinic over just about anything.

But he got me to thinking. Just how long has this been going on?

Unlike many trends this one -- calling the other candidate a danger to the planet -- can be dated precisely, at least in terms of mainstream use. The ad above ran once, and Lyndon Johnson was heavily criticized for calling out Barry Goldwater as an ignorant, war-mongering nutcase who might blow up the world.

But Johnson won, and the ad tapped into something in our lizard brain. Republicans, who had been thinking such things about Democrats since the era of Joe McCarthy, saw the ad as legitimizing the tactic, and have been impugning Democrats' patriotism ever since.

Today, of course, even Democrats use it against one another. Ads like Clinton's 3 AM ad are pernicious because they end discussion. They do not further debate. They call all those who disagree illegitimate, unworthy, and call their supporters traffickers in treason. Beneath that any kind of corruption may freely hide, since there is no such thing as legitimate dissent from its premise.

The Money Trap

Hillary Clinton may be poised for a comeback on Tuesday.

The reason for that is a truth that even the Netroots have yet to acknowledge.

TV ads can be counter-productive.

This is an artifact of a changing media landscape. As the new medium rises, the old media is disbelieved. This is not news in the commercial world. It's only news to those who follow politics.

Remember 40 years ago when conservatives started railing against the "liberal media" and "liberal Hollywood," just as they were becoming a majority? Same thing. Agnew (and his muse, Safire) were reflecting attitudes which were already abroad in the world, in the new majority they spoke for, that TV was believable and "older media" was not.

The same thing is happening now. We believe what we see and read on the Internet, and discount what comes over the TV. Especially the ads.

Don't believe me? Then explain how John McCain, who was grossly outspent by his rivals, especially Mitt Romney (but before that Giuliani and even Thompson) rode to his party's nomination?

Dirty F'ing Haties

Think of this as Volume 11, Number 9 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

---

One of the smartest things I have written at this blog came from my daughter, Robin. In a 2006 post I compared right-wing bloggers and talk show hosts to hippies from the 1960s.

No, she said. They're haties.

She's right, but the historical comparison remains apt, and I've made it many times. The haties are in the same historical role that hippies were 40 years ago.

The key to understanding the political changes of that time was its rejection of the hippies, then all those who enabled them. It was these people Spiro Agnew was describing in his speeches about liberal elites -- he was extending the public distaste for hippies to those who found anything redeemable in them.

The historical rejection of the hippies is a key to understanding the Nixon Thesis of Conflict, the political assumptions which have dominated America since that time, and which still dominate our media discourse.

The next step, after dismissing the hippies, was to defang them, and in this their supposed supporters in the media were highly complicit.

You can see it proceed throughout the 1970s. First they were turned into cartoons -- Scooby Doo. Then they were turned into suburbanites -- the Partridge Family. By the end of the decade they were merely a laughable stance -- Mork & Mindy. And they were an historical artifact, forgotten, crushed under history's wheel.

This process is just beginning for the haties of today. I would like to urge you to join in.