Dana Blankenhorn

Call it Treason

American history notes that one of our previous 44 Presidents died a traitor to his country.

That President was John Tyler, who served from 1841 to 1845. He’d gone with his state of Virginia when the break came in 1861 and considered himself a citizen of the Confederacy when he died later that year.

Musical comedy fans also know we’ve had a vice president who tried to commit treason. That was Aaron Burr, accused of trying to set up an independent empire for himself around New Orleans, in a dicker with France and with Spain.

Later, Republicans kept power for almost two generations by “waving the bloody shirt,” accusing every Democratic candidate for President of being a quasi-Confederate. Except when the party’s corruption disgusted elites (1884, Mugwumps supporting Grover Cleveland) or the party split in two (1912, Wilson vs. Roosevelt and Taft) it worked for 72 years, an entire human lifespan.

We’ve had 20^th century Presidents called “traitor.” FDR was called a class traitor during the Great Depression, and the Supreme Court ruled his National Recovery Administration unconstitutional, considering it communist. Joe McCarthy was all about finding traitors in Harry Truman’s State Department and implied the 33^rd President was a fellow traveler.

But a true Manchurian President is a first. The closest fiction has come is The Manchurian Candidate, but Laurence Harvey shot his own mother (Angela Lansbury was just three years older than he was at the time) and we were spared the Presidency of James Gregory.

Reasons for Hope

There are two important points to remember about 2018.

First, Trump really is the Manchurian President. We know he colluded with Russia and we know why. He needed Russian investment to stay afloat and he cares more about money than he cares about his country.

Second, Putin is weaker than you think. Despite everything going right for him, Russia’s economy is still smaller than Canada’s, despite its having four times more people. It is aging out and its birth rate is pathetic. It can’t re-create the old Soviet Empire. It barely has enough money to keep Ukraine occupied and pay-off the oligarchs that keep Peronista Putin in power.

What Putin wants, then, is not to take over America, just to weaken America. Just as he wants to weaken every other country. Russia only looks mighty in the war of All Against All.

Which leads to another important point.

Speaking Your Own Truth

In his book The Tools, Phil Stutz found a way to make me cry.

One of his tools is that you should imagine yourself as a child, insignificant and broken, flawed. Not your best self, just the opposite. Then, when it’s your turn to speak, speak through that child. Once you’re unafraid of being seen for what you are, or what you’re afraid you are, you’ll be fearless.

I’ve been using this tool all my life without knowing it. I desperately want to be heard. It’s what I’m about. So, I shout, on this typewriter, as loud as I can, every day. When I’m done, I’m satisfied, whether a lot of people were listening or just a few. This gives me inner peace. It’s not what I do, or my job, it’s what I am, I tell people.

I didn’t understand the meaning of this until I faced a child who didn’t have it. I would tell this child, every day if I could that what mattered to him wasn’t what he was learning, but how he integrated it, and how he expressed what he knew to teach new truths others. The kid didn’t believe me. The fear was too great. He went around the world, learning, but afraid to speak his truth, and no one ever heard what he had to say.

There are many success stories, however, who are just like this child. They just parrot what teachers tell them. They say what they’re told to say. They memorize a script and recite it, believing that they’re saying something but, in fact, contributing nothing new to the conversation.

Time for Tech to Choose

Technology companies will dominate the politics of my children’s generation.

It’s inevitable. The politics of oil and resources dominated my time because the key political issues of that time revolved around resources and access to them. That’s what the Arab oil embargo was all about in 1973. It’s what the Iranian embargo was about in 1979. It’s why we went to war in 1990. That’s why we invaded Iraq. It was oil. Anyone who denies this is like those who deny the Holocaust, or who claim slavery to have been good for black people. They’re lying and should not be heard again on any subject.

In the same way, the politics of manufacturing dominated the lives of my parents. That’s what the Great Depression was about, what World War II was about, what the development of the military-industrial complex was about. It was about creating new markets for the abundance of factories. That’s what the suburbanization of America was about. It was about ginning up demand. Mass consumption leads to mass production.

The point is every American generation has a dominant industry, one whose problems and demands come to control American politics. It will be the same with technology. I, for one, welcome our new Google overlords.

I do, that is, assuming they make the right choices now, assuming they understand where their own self-interest lies, and assuming they take steps to defend it.

The Two Great Opportunities

Most people will tell you that, in 2018, we have two big problems.

There’s not enough money. Machines are going to be doing all the work.

These are not problems. They are opportunities. The “problem” of automation and the “problem” of money are opportunities to transform life and, in time, to transform this world.

When the machines take over, and they are indeed taking over, what I call “Baby Boom retirement” can come to everyone. Automation isn’t the end of the world. It’s the beginning.

I was born at the height of the Baby Boom, in 1955. In 2020 I will reach “retirement” age, 65. For women, that peak came two years later, when the love of my life was born. She is due for retirement in 2022.

As we have grown up and grown old together, the nature of retirement has changed.

In 1934, when the Social Security Act was passed, retirement was a few years of rest before taking the Big Sleep. The average 65-year old only lived to see 67.

By my youth, when On a Clear Day You Can See Forever saw its debut on Broadway, with the song Wait Until We’re 65,  retirement was a never-ending vacation. My parents’ generation all moved from New York to Florida. Robert Klein joked, “I sent you two healthy 65-year-olds, and 25 years later they come back dead!”

Taking Apart Trumpistan

I did not set out to be a war correspondent.

I set out to be a tech writer, then an Internet writer.

Then the war came to the Internet and here I am.

The Internet is where today’s conflict is centered. Donald Trump was elected through cyber abuse, an attack based in Russia and embraced by his Republican Party. Getting rid of him requires that the Cyber War be won.

I’m no Ernie Pyle . I was once told Ernie did a profile on a distant relative, a cop who was killed in the line of duty, in Washington D.C., in 1940. The column called him “Eddie Comiskey,” but his given name was Korzeniewski. This was my great-grandmother O’Donnell’s maiden name.

No. I’m one of those idiots back of the line, sitting in a tent or a Quonset hut, waiting for the generals to lie to us. But I have some sources. And I have some background. So, I’m going to tell you what I can.

Winning a war like this requires that we understand where the enemy’s sources of domestic support may lie.  Donald Trump today has a few core areas of real support (as opposed to Russian bots). For fun, I’m going to call them Freds, Danas and Tillies:

In the Spirit of Oprah

One reason liberals were awed by the distraction of Oprah for President is that we’re up for distractions. Trump plays us like kittens. Twitter is his laser pointer.

Another reason is that Oprah is a convenient shorthand for everything that’s under assault with Trumpism. Her skill is as an aspirational leader, someone who inspires people to think positively, and sometimes to change.

Openness, decency, democracy, fairness, all the shining gifts that make peace on Earth, everything the Republican filmmaker Frank Capra preached about in his movies, everything we claimed for generations to believe, all are under unprecedented assault in 2018. They on the line because those who govern us have rejected them. They have even rejected science, so the fate of human life is also in the balance.

In this battle we say we need a hero, or a heroine, someone with Barack Obama’s rhetorical gifts, John F. Kennedy’s courage, Jimmy Carter’s compassion and Franklin Roosevelt’s gift of media manipulation.

Oh, if they came from Illinois, like Abraham Lincoln, that would be nice, too.

Oprah checks all the boxes. A self-made billionaire from the streets, a woman who has kept her own privacy while shattering the emotional walls the rest of us build, a TV star to set against the TV phony in the White House.

It’s an appealing picture. What might she say, and stand for, we ask?

She says nothing.

Instead, she holds a mirror up to our best selves. Her speech at the Golden Globes encouraged us to act as though we were her, and state our own truths.

This is what my best self would say.

The Creative Destruction of Moore’s Law Trumps the Age of Trump.

There has always been an intimate connection between market cycles and political cycles in American politics.

The 2008 crash brought in Barack Obama, and the age we’re now living in. But like most people (including me), he thought the crash and his election meant the end of the crisis, not its beginning.

We’ve all learned better now.

One reason is that the 2008 collapse, and its quick resolution, didn’t drive home the lesson about speculation, and how man-made bubbles can cause enormous hurt when they pop, as they always do. The “Helicopter Ben” Bernanke solution of dropping money on the banks, replacing the losses, then regulating the banks’ use of the funds, only took the banks out of the equation during the next bubble.

The cycle of crisis, recovery, anti-thesis, and excess accelerated, as change does in the age of Moore’s Law. By 2016 the markets were ready for a new period of excess.

The Fascist Decade

The biggest mistake American reporters make, whether covering politics or any other beat, is in describing the two sides of the political debate.

Liberal and conservative are two sides of the same coin, the democratic coin. Liberals will bow to conservatives, and vice versa, when the other side wins a free and fair election. This is true regardless of how different policy positions may be. Both accept the legitimacy of democracy, the rule of law. They take freedom as a given, as inalienable. They like open markets, everywhere.

This is not the case in our time. Today there are two completely sides in the political debate.  There is a democratic side that supports democracy, an open society, and free enterprise. There is a fascist side that supports dictatorship, a closed society, and enterprise controlled by a small elite in the name of the nation.

Donald Trump is a fascist. This is what makes him different from every previous American President. It’s the word the media, even today, won’t utter. Fascist.

Americans are taught in grade school that we beat fascism in World War II, that it died with Hitler and Mussolini. It didn’t.

How the Web Killed the Media

The great tragedy of our time, the tragedy that led to Trump, is content’s loss of control over its own business models.

When I began writing the weekly newsletter that became this blog, 20 years ago, the threat of this loss was a primary theme. I asked newspapers and magazines “how hungry are you?” suggesting that if they turned advertisers into business partners, and earned commissions on sales, they could prosper on this medium.

Advertising is just a means to an end. Newspapers sell space for ads, and ads start readers down a sales funnel. Sales are what the buyers of advertisements want. If online publishers could deliver sales, I thought, they would earn all their business partners’ marketing budget.

I saw even then how the Internet could deliver a store’s entire experience, from advertising, through marketing and sales, through the transaction to service and support. It was the publishing opportunity of a lifetime.

No One Took It