Dana Blankenhorn

The Road to Chengdu

The tickets are paid for. The visa application is in the mail. It seems likely that my son John and I will be heading to Chengdu, Sichuan, China on May 22, taking his exchange teacher home.  (Not this way, of course.)

A decade ago, I would have gone with great optimism, a representative of American values. Now? Well, consider these two stories, and where in the world they occurred:

• Hundreds of people quietly protest a new refinery, expecting to be heard.
• Regime opponents are subject to political prosecutions, to having their homes torched, while elections are stolen and public opinion is ignored.

The first story is from Chengdu. The second is from Alabama. As others have noted, the Bush war against democracy continues apace, and even seems to be accelerating.

I think it's time for us to get off our ideological high horses and start talking first principles, not just the what but the why.

The Wright Reality

No matter how we feel about "phony" controversies they usually have an important point behind them.

They define the limits of acceptable speech.

Take the Jeremiah Wright mess, which Bill Moyers is still agonizing over. Why is Wright condemned for statements like "God Damn America" while preachers like John Hagee, who (along with Falwell and Robertson) said the exact same things (only with different reasons) go merrily on. Isn't that a double standard?

Well, yes and no.

It's a double standard in that one man's speech is seen as out of bounds and another man's speech is seen as within bounds. True. But the whole purpose of the exercise was to define the bounds of acceptable political speech. It was to make Wright, and everything he says, out of bounds while enabling extremists on the other side free rein. (Actually, free reign.)

In this, as in other phony controversies over the years, the Right has been masterful. Through this process of phony controversy the acceptable discourse within our society has been pushed ever-more to the right, so it's becoming impossible to even publicly utter obvious truths. I'd say that's an important result.

For instance, the following sentence is, politically, completely out of bounds within the American political discourse:

A World Without a Moral Center

As I may have mentioned here before I'm scheduled to visit Chengdu, China next month. Blogging will be sporadic.

Given the recent headlines over the torch run I'm certain you're wondering what I might tell my hosts.

The answer is -- not much.

For one thing I expect few there to know English. But even without the language barrier I'd mainly want to listen. Listen to my son try to puzzle out the language barrier after three years of Mandarin. Listen to people greet me, and try to explain things by speaking Szechuan ve-ry slow-ly (as though that would help).

But there's another, more important reason. I no longer have cause to condemn anyone.

Neither, frankly, do you.

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. 

Don't Get Killed in the Semi-Finals

I was told this a lot in 1968, by conservatives I considered knowledgeable friends.

It summed up their attitude toward Vietnam at the time, and their feeling the Vietcong would be reluctant to risk death. (They were wrong, of course.) The real fight wasn't with us, but between them, they assumed. So don't get killed in the semi-finals.

The good news from Iraq is we seem to be past the semi-finals. The current Battle of Basra is really the Bush Administration's last stand.

If Nouri al-Maliki should win, we will have chosen Iraq's new Saddam. He'll be a Shiite Saddam, he'll be a Saddam allied with Iran, but we'll have put him there. The point is this may be "victory" enough for our troops to get the heckoutofthere.

Unfortunately, right now he doesn't look like a winner. He's already had to call on Uncle Sam to hold Baghdad and we're hearing the same-old same-old about bad planning further south.

Final Warning

After the shiny, happy people feeling you got from reading my last post, now I'm going to bring you down.

Over at Juan Cole's shop, former University of Chicago professor William Polk reads the tea leaves and pronounces the War With Iran to be at go time.

To last week's US News warning he adds the personal recollection that Dick Cheney also made a trip to Saudi Arabia in March 2002 -- ostensibly diplomatic but (we now know) his warning, and assurance, that Saddam Hussein was a dead man.

The article contains the tantalizing possibility that Israel's recent attack on Syria was just a test of its radar and anti-missile defenses, but Polk then adds news that there has been an unprecedented build-up of U.S. Navy assets in the Persian Gulf:

Of course, deploying forces along Iran’s frontier does not necessarily mean using them. At least that is what the Administration says. However, as a historian and former participant in government, I believe that having troops and weapons on the spot makes their use more likely than not.

Instead such forces create a "climate of war" like the one which set off The Guns of August and World War I, a climate which both Bush the Wiser and Bush the Dumber have given in to before. He adds that the rationale for war is contained in the 2005 National Defense Strategy, which asserted America's right to engage in first-strike warfare anytime, and anywhere, it chose.

What can halt the march to war? Just one thing.

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...

The Manchurian Presidency

The Manchurian Candidate is about a Communist plot to install a dupe, played by James Gregory (left in the photo at right), as President. He claims to be fiercely anti-communist, but he's really controlled by the communists through his wife, played by Angela Lansbury. (Sorry if I spoiled it. Watch it for Frank Sinatra next time -- one of his best roles.)

Ever since the movie returned to vogue politicians have been warning that their opponents are secretly working for the other side. The claim is made this cycle about Barack Obama. That is, Barack Hussein Obama.

Of course, this deliberately misses the plot. The James Gregory candidate is a perfect conservative, a neo-McCarthyite. In 2008 parlance, he's McCain.

But what if the Manchurian Candidate has already been elected? What if, in fact, he's been in office for over 7 years?

The Virtuous Cycle of a War Against Oil

Think of this as Volume 11, Number 10 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Right now the U.S. economy, and the U.S. in general, is in a vicious cycle. (Picture from DC Fred  .)

Wealth is decreasing, so sales are slowing. Sales are slowing, so the economy is tanking. The economy is tanking, so the dollar is tanking. The dollar is tanking, so we're importing inflation. Prices are rising so we can't cut interest rates. High interest rates causes wealth to decrease...lather, rinse, repeat.

What if we could replace this vicious cycle with a virtuous one, as we had in the 1990s?

We can, but it can't be the same. Back then we were building the Internet. That's built. We could improve it, add lanes, add competition, and that would be a very good thing indeed, but it won't provide the kind of virtuous cycle we got back in the day. Sorry.

But we can get that virtuous cycle if we commit to a War Against Oil.

What does a War Against Oil mean? It means a total commitment, on the order of a real war (not the kind we've been fighting in Iraq) to eliminating the use of hydrocarbons in our lives. That's the clearly defined victory, and (as the current President likes to remind us) nothing less than victory will do.

How do we do it?

The End of Impunity

One thing which has marked the last two decades, and it's as true for ordinary people as for our leaders, has been a sense of impunity.

Democrats complain often of how the Bush Administration displays impunity. The rules don't apply to them. They make up their own reality. The President cannot break the law.

We talk a lot less about our personal impunity. We can buy what we want. We can walk away from our debts. We don't have to make hard choices.

Democrats most fear talking about the impunity inherent in their own positions. We'll get out of Iraq on our own schedule, and stay in Afghanistan "to win," they say. We'll give ordinary people tax cuts and raise spending on health care and education.

The end of all this impunity is a big theme in our current crisis and all of us -- Democrats, Republicans, consumers, businesses -- remain in the denial stage of the process.

Last week's biggest story may have been Joseph Stiglitz' (above) estimate of the Iraq war's cost -- $3-5 trillion. (It's all here in his book.) The figure seems unimaginable so let me put it into perspective.

It's going to cost the U.S. its autonomy. It's going to cost our currency. It's going to cost you your life savings, and me mine. It's going to end the era of American impunity.

People and their Government

My friend Tariq Mustafa wrote from Karachi this morning.

He was complaining about a New York Times editorial shedding crocodile tears over President Pervez Musharraf's open threats against a journalist.

Tariq's point was that the Times said nothing when Musharraf fired the nation's judges and attacked civil society last year. Instead, the Times (like the U.S. government) seemed more concerned with whether Pakistan would remain an ally in our own "War on Terror" than whether its society was allowed to function.

Today the ZDNet blog Threat Chaos is filled with similar condescension toward Pakistan. First, President Musharraf demanded that access to YouTube be shut, accusing it of blasphemy. Then, a local ISP trying to deal with the order cut itself off entirely from the Internet, taking the whole country with it.

Richard Steinnon concluded, with enormous condescension:

I could say: “be careful what you wish for” to those elements that object to free and open access to information and expression of ideas. But to put it in terms they might understand better: Do not anger the Internet gods or  you will suffer their wrath!

He's right, but....

Have You Heard The Good News About Pakistan?

Pakistan has recently taken on the role Americans once reserved for Iraq, Afghanistan, Serbia, Iran, and (before that) the Soviet Union.

It's the unknowable, foreign, other, dangerous in the extreme. It frightens the children. It's meant to.

We're told, for instance, that Pakistan harbors Al Qaeda, its government is unstable and autocratic. It's the world's most dangerous place.

Maybe. But when you see Pakistan through Pakistani eyes, as it is my privilege to do, it's not so black-and-white.

My friend Tariq Mustafa IM'ed me from Karachi this morning with some of the good news:

• Every corporation in the Karachi area filed their tax returns electronically for 2007. I'll bet you money that's not true in Georgia. Many companies here haven't even started in on their returns.
• A job board launched by two Pakistani emigrants to Stanford now powers some of the biggest blogs in the valley. Silicon Valley, that is.
• oDesk is illustrating their outsourcing capabilities by showing off opportunities in Pakistan.

Revenge, Reform and Justice

Think of this as Volume 11, Number 6 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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The countdown to the end of the Bush era has begun.

We think.

But as we gaze over the immense crimes of this time, and seek justice for the damage to our world, our people, and our finances, the demand for revenge and justice is getting in the way of reform.

I share the thirst for revenge.

If no one pays for all this, if no one is held legally responsible for Iraq and Katrina and torture and the massive thefts which may add up to trillions of dollars we don't even have, then the whole country becomes like the Reagan labor secretary Raymond Donovan (right), plaintively wailing (after being found innocent of corruption) "where do I go to get my good name back?"

Fact is, with countries, it's not so easy. The guilt for this era will never wash off our hands. Not entirely. No matter our politics, the crimes of George W. Bush, his henchmen, and his followers, done in our name, are our crimes as well.

The Answer to All Fears

Think of this as Volume 11, Number 3 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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I'm going to sound a little like George W. Bush here.

But there is a one size fits all solution to all our basic problems.

That solution is The War Against Oil. (Image from Bikecommutertips.)

To fight a War Against Oil means to make this your main priority, and to subordinate all other policies to it. It doesn't just mean throwing a few subsidies to well-connected ethanol growers. It means making certain the market will accept any alternative energy coming in at a decent price, and tilting your market with taxes so that it favors cleaner sources over dirty ones. It means highlighting solutions in all public appearances, and making it the centerpiece of your rhetoric.

Unlike Bush's one size fits all solution (tax cuts for rich frat boys) The War Against Oil actually works.

• The War Against Oil is foreign policy, because it makes us more energy independent and reduces the power of our oil-exporting adversaries.
• The War Against Oil is terror policy, because the new forms of energy can be dispersed, as you will see.
• The War Against Oil is environmental policy, because clean energy means reducing the use of hydrocarbons.
• The War Against Oil is technology policy, creating new jobs through new research.
• The War Against Oil is education policy, since the required knowledge cuts across so many disciplines.
• Perhaps most important, the War Against Oil is economic policy.

The War Against Oil is the issue on which to center our new political Thesis, that of the Internet, and that finding is justified by the history our chattering classes are now so intent upon.

Go To Kenya

There's a simple way Barack Obama can take this campaign by the scruff of the neck and do something marvelous at the same time.

Go to Kenya. Or at least promise to go to Kenya. Send Bill Richardson to Kenya, as a personal emissary, and offer to meet the two disputants to sign a settlement of their dispute.

Barack Obama has the same interest in Kenya as Bill Clinton had in Ireland, when he offered help in that dispute.  Moreover, Obama's paternal grandmother still lives there. And the dispute is similar, with tribes substituting for religious groups. A civil war is raging, and it must be stopped.

There's another reason to get into the middle of this, which is to illustrate the damage the Bush Junta has done to America's cause. Since the Supreme Court selection of 2000's loser, we've seen repeated examples of contempt for democratic process, when that process might result in a change of regime.

Entering the Year of Crisis

Following is the essay you can designate as Vol. 1I, Number 1 of A-Clue.Com, my weekly newsletter. Enjoy.

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The year 2008 represents the start of the generational crisis we've been sliding toward for decades. The games of the last two years are over. Now we get serious.

That's because the myths and values of the Nixon Thesis, on which our political assumptions and power are based, have proven themselves irrelevant. (Image from Tom Tomorrow.)

It's not that they don't answer the questions of today. They don't address those questions. They weren't meant to.

The Nixon Thesis of Conflict holds that we must hold "them" in check to save the nation. In terms of foreign policy, them meant Communists. Russian Communists. Chinese Communists. In the context of the time, Vietnamese Communists. Vietnam was a Cold War activity, and the Nixon Thesis was designed, first and foremost, to support the Cold War. It made that war the nation's partisan divide, with the dominant side supporting it without question. With 9-11 the enemy simply changed -- the 1990s represented the Thesis' search for this new enemy.

Domestically the Nixon Thesis of Conflict also opposed "them" -- represented by any force which questioned societal norms in dress, demeanor, values or lifestyle. Initially this referred to the Dirty Fucking Hippies and their enablers in the academies and the media. Gradually, as that threat receded, new groups were thrown off the majority coalition -- first feminists, then blacks, then gays, then browns. Those who protested at the exclusion of these interests were also tossed overboard, and the full weight of societal scorn heaped upon them.

The Energy Fraud of 2007

The Democratic Congress labored mightily, they said, all through 2007, and they brought forth...this?

No new efficiency standards before 2020? A huge subsidy for ethanol, guaranteeing higher fuel prices? No breaks for alternative energy, and the tax breaks for oil stay in place?

Really? Well, if that's a War Against Oil, I got some waterfront property here in Atlanta to offer you. Trouble is, by 2020 it might just BE waterfront property, only sitting in a desert, and filled to the rim with refugees from what used to be Florida, and New York City, and 10,000 other places.

The only thing worse than this so-called energy bill is the self-congratulatory nonsense spouted by the Democratic "leadership" on its behalf.

Memo to Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and Steny Hoyer. See you in hell, man. No, I mean that literally. Because that's what you're turning the whole planet into with this piece of garbage.

The Arctic ice cap is melting even faster than Al Gore warned it would. The Himlalayas may be glacier-free within a decade. Need a Clue what that means to the ocean level? It'll be on your front porch by 2015, Nancy, and over Steny's head a few years after that. Good luck finding a new place.

The Reckoning

We are past the time of the Good German.  We're even past asking who might be a Bad German.

The Reckoning has begun.

We forget how The Reckoning can begin before the war ends. In Germany The Reckoning began long before the Soviets entered Berlin. It was in full swing at the time of the 1944 plot against Hitler (a plot in which I recently learned a distant relative (right) participated).

So it has begun here, with George W. Bush still in office. The great hope of the Administration, the fact that will keep W's butt out of jail, is to show Democrats' complicity.

Democrats were complicit. Democrats on the Intelligence Committees, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, were apparently briefed on torture and stood silent. The CIA's insistence it acted within the law, that it it was only following orders, Mein Herr, is more evidence that the search for conspirators is well under way.

Essentially our Congressional leaders are being blackmailed, in the full light of day, by the regime's leaders. Protect us and you won't be hurt, they say. And these leaders are knuckling under.

In 2006 the cry was for more Democrats. Today the cry must go out for better Democrats. Despite the risk which our major media (which is also fully complicit in torture, in war crimes, and in the theft of this nation's Constitution) will claim exists, Democrats need to wage war on their fellow Democrats, right now. Netroots Democrats must demand that those Democrats whowere complicit in these crimes be held to account, in order that those Republicans who engaged in criminal conduct be held to account.

What is at stake is our own complicity in these crimes. Your complicity. My complicity.

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.

This Week's Clue: The Nature of Evil

Following is the essay you can designate as Volume 10, Number 47 of This Week's Clue, based on the e-mail newsletter I have produced since March, 1997. It would be the issue of November 26.

Enjoy.

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Evil sees itself as the only good.

This is the paradoxical nature of evil, everywhere and in every time.

Evil is good which thinks too much of itself.

Didn't expect the Spanish Inquisition? Nobody does, because we are taught to see the faith of our fathers as an unalloyed good. It can be, but only if it tolerates other faiths and fathers, no matter how grudging that tolerance may be.

It was the intolerance of Communists that turned the workers' paradise into the peoples' hell in the 20th century, everywhere it was applied. It was blind, self-centered self-belief that twisted the South in the 19th century and was at the heart of Nazi Germany from its beginning, that lay in the weeds of both apartheid and the Mugabe dictatorship.

This is the essence of the evil we see in George W. Bush, in Dick Cheney, in all their followers. They see their own interests as the only possible good. They see all other interests as evil. The terrorists aren't evil-doers. They're good men who do evil because they see their own cause as the only good.

The test is as simple as that.

Islam is mere submission to God's will, an unalloyed good. Once that submission is demanded by force it does evil. Judaism is the glorious word of God, but when others are oppressed in its name it does evil. I've got nothing against Mormons, but when they see only their own humanity and not that of the girls or women around them I call the cops. It was the intolerance of Hinduism which Gandhi most feared, and it is indeed that intolerance that has caused it to do evil, tearing down mosques, banning languages, all the rest.

This paradoxical nature of evil fools everyone.
 

It's Gonna Get Dark, It's Gonna Get Cold