Dana Blankenhorn

End of the Greatest Generation

I have not been online the last few days.

I was at a funeral. For my mother-in-law. Ruth Estelle Robin Steinhauser was her full name. My daughter was named for her.

She lived a full and rich life, a life ahead of her time, becoming head librarian for a school district with 90 schools in it. She had everything she could have wanted, most especially a marriage that lasted 66 years. She even knew her great-grandchildren.

Before her funeral (a really moving affair and a full house) we had a little get together in the home her husband designed and built back in 1961. I suddenly noticed something about halfway through.

There was no one from her generation left.

Yes, there are stragglers. My mom is 85 and I love her very much. My wife's uncle Otto has survived cancer and looks pretty good for 86. But 86 is the magic number here.

The Greatest Generation, as Tom Brokaw called them, is just about gone.

As recently as 2001, when we traveled to Texas for Ruth and Bennie's 60th anniversary bash, the Woman's Club of San Antonio (Ruth's favorite place next to her own home) was packed with people who'd danced to Glenn Miller's In the Mood when it was new. But if you make it to your 80s (and you're lucky if you do), you know the weight of time is pressing down hard, pressing you into the ground.

There is serious significance in this moment. These are the people who not only won the war, but who invented the Generation Gap, rejecting many of their hippie children as those children rejected the Cold War. These are the people who switched from Kennedy to Nixon and became the backbone of the modern Republican Party. They are the people who defined the suburbs and the Sunbelt retirement.

Gone. There is serious political significance in this moment, as we may be about to elect a President whose grandmother, not mother but grandmother, was part of that generation. But I can't do more than note it here. My heart is too heavy for that.

Hippie Chick Fantasy

The appeal of Sarah Palin is that she is, in fact, George W. Bush in a skirt.

She is just as much a fantasist as our current President. She is just as corrupt, and lies just as shamelessly, because she believes every lie she tells.

That's what makes her loved.

I have said here many times that, if the Republican Party could re-nominate George W. Bush for President, it would. He remains far more popular within the party than their actual candidate, John McCain, who in nominating Palin has come close to creating a literal McCain-Bush ticket.

Those who are now gleefully condemning the pick, and wondering how it has raised McCain's poll numbers, don't get it.

For conservatives, as for liberals a generation ago, fantasy has become reality. It is a hallmark of a generational election that this happens inside the incumbent party. Everything argues against what you believe, so you believe in it all the more. You create your own fantasy world in which what you believe is always true, and anyone who questions always false, and you may even be willing to die for that belief.

Isn't that what Confederates did for their fantasy? Isn't that what Populists did for their fantasy? Isn't that why Republicans went down to with Hoover even after he sent Douglas McArthur out to crush the Bonus Army?

More important, isn't that ultimately what was inside the anti-war movement of a generation ago, its secret sauce? Abandon reality. Embrace fantasy. The world will conform to what you pretend it to be.

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.

Not Good Enough

The apology of Pope Benedict XVI for the Church's sex abuse scandal is not good enough.

Not by a long shot.

His words remind me of what a child says when he or she is caught taking the toy of another child. The personal shame and repentance may be real. But is anything really changing?

In this case it's clear nothing is changing. This is certain because we haven't heard of the Church doing anything in the other countries where it works. The Church is acting like this is some sort of American aberration, when the only aberrant thing about it is priests here were caught, and the Church as a whole was held to account.

"It wasn't just sexual abuse, it was spiritual abuse," one victim told CNN, but he wasn't the only one spiritually abused. His whole family was, and his whole congregation was.

There are few crimes in this world whose impact can compare with that of child sexual abuse. It happens every day -- in every denomination and creed -- and it destroys everyone it touches.

This isn't a gay crime. It's a crime of power.

When done against a child by a person who claims authority from God, it's even worse. The chance of the victim opening up to anyone, and seeking a cure for the hurt and anger inside them, drops to near zero. And the resulting scars last a lifetime.

A Father's Worst Fear

Once you have a child your own death is no longer the worst fear you can imagine.

Every parent knows this. Risk and loss are the price we pay for love. The price is highest when it comes to our kids.

Yet people pay it every day. Babies die, and older children get cancer. Teenagers lose their lives in car accidents, black teenagers more often in a hail of bullets. Athletes get sudden heart attacks. Then we give these most precious gifts to the nation, and risk their loss in war.

We can't protect them, although we try. We fret over them instead, natter at them, worry aloud until they send us an exasperated "Mu-therrrrr" or "Daaaaad" to shut us down, because they have that first fear, their own deaths an unimaginable horror.

Dust

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

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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.

Sudden Death

I suffered some panic attacks recently, and I  now know why.

Russell Shaw (right), my friend of many years, died suddenly on Friday. He was 60.

Sudden death is a shock to loved ones at any age.

For the young it most often comes from a bullet or a car crash. A few athletes die suddenly from undiagnosed heart conditions, and these cause the most shock of all because it's not supposed to happen that way.

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.

A Great Man Passing

I was out last week, saying goodbye to a Great Man. .

Bennie F. Steinhauser (right) was my father-in-law. We drove 2,100 miles over 5 days for his funeral.

He could be intimidating, without trying to be. When I first met him, in the mid-1970s, he was at the height of his power. He was a veteran school superintendent. He lived in a great house he'd designed himself. He was constantly moving among his ranches and his factory. He presided over Sunday suppers for an enormous extended family that included third cousins.

I was there to steal his baby.

He didn't much take to me. I was a scruffy, bearded college student whose sole ambition was to work at a newspaper. His baby, whom I called Jenni, was an honor student, a space science major, maybe a future Astronaut. She was beautiful, talented, and brilliant. Still is.

So I could never bring myself call him Bennie, even after he asked. It was always Mr. Steinhauser. Maybe, had I had known the other Bennie F. Steinhausers, the ones in his autobiography “Never Alone” (which I insisted on not writing), I might have felt closer.

Belief in Evil

The nightmare I've been dealing with concerning our son reaches another climax tomorrow with an appearance at juvenile court.

After three months of this I have a pretty clear idea what happened. We're hoping for the best.

But regardless, what seems very clear is that the teacher who claims my son assaulted her believes firmly in good and evil. Especially evil.

Evil can be a noun, a verb, or a modifier. As a verb it refers to action everyone knows is wrong. As a noun it refers to the person behind that action, and may also be used to damn their character, to consign them to the netherworld of death or prison. As a modifier it's a political football as in the term evil-doer.

How many more innocents have died in Iraq these last 5 years, at our hands, wittingly or unwittingly, compared to the number who died on 9-11? Yet our leaders refer to those who planned 9-11 as evil-doers, and to our own good men and women as liberators.

It's nonsense. War is evil, no matter who does it, no matter their cause. It is all hell. It is violence, it is destruction.  It's a central lesson told by everyone who has come back from any war. The only way to justify such evil is to see the other side as more evil, so that the war becomes self-defense.

I shouldn't criticize. That's our defense as well.