Dana Blankenhorn

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.

Great (Wo)Man Theory

One key difference between the TV era we're leaving and the Internet era we're entering lies in the "Great Man" theory of history.

In TV World, the camera must be on one person. There is always just room for one story.

In the last few years, as the Internet has come to mean more to us, the insanity of this attitude has become apparent. First, with O.J, then with Monica, and now with just about every story TV chooses to obsess on.

This is especially true when it comes to politics. One man, one House, one set. The TV has room for no more than that. This has helped concentrate power in one person, even when that person was, as this President is, a worthless piece of shit. It has also helped create the explosion of "horserace" coverage. Since all that matters is the identity of the face in front of the camera, the minutiae involved in getting someone in front of that camera becomes the only story.

The world doesn't work that way. The Internet certainly doesn't. Even the most important site in the world, Google.Com, is merely a conduit, a connection on the way to somewhere else, an enabler.  Yet notice how the business press has covered Google as though it were a destination, just as it pushed Yahoo into being a destination, just as it pushed Microsoft as a destination. One camera, one destination, one story. TV assumptions are everywhere.

Which brings us to the news of the day. Benazir Bhutto was a product of the TV age, imbued by TV values with TV qualities of perfection and importance. Her death led to a paroxysm, not just on the streets of Pakistan but on the TV, because there was just one camera, one story, and there could be just one heroine in the TV storyline. She knew this, and spent her last months manipulating it, maneuvering herself into  the role of alternative to Pervez Musharraf, whom everyone knew was hopelessly flawed. Everything was set, in a TV world, for her to assume power.

But the lesson of her death, for Pakistan and for us, should be this. Life ain't TV. We imbue a single center with all power at our peril. It's like love. She's not perfect, he's not perfect, no one is perfect. No one person can hold all power and lead righteously, unless they are themselves perfect. And no one is perfect.

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 Populists of 2008

The run-up to Iowa is revealing a single trend in both parties.

The rise of populism.

Populism lets you draw a direct line through the rise of Mike Huckabee, Ron Paul, John Edwards and (to an extent) Barack Obama. Both parties are flirting with Populism today to a greater extent than ever before, and for the same reason.

It's the economy, stupid. (Right, William Jennings Bryan.)

The shorthand way Washington Villagers will explain this is that Huckabee represents religious populism, Edwards economic populism and Paul libertarian populism. That's wrong. Huckabee carries an economic message as well, Edwards carries a libertarian message, and Paul is perfectly willing to see a theocracy if that's what floats America's boat.

They resonate because America has seen a succession of Populist uprisings at every time of political crisis. The Abolitionists of the 1850s were religious populists. The actual Populist Party reached its peak of electoral influence in the 1890s. Franklin Roosevelt won with the support of the Populists. George Wallace was a Populist.

Populism is a broad term, often difficult to define, but generally reflects a distrust of central authority, and a call for power to be given to the people, taken away from the central government. Its origins can be traced back to the first two crises in American political history -- the contested 1800 election of Thomas Jefferson and the stolen 1824 election which fueled the rise of Andrew Jackson and the creation of the Democratic Party. Both men sounded populist themes, Jefferson the yeoman farmer and Jackson the idealized frontiersman. Both based their success on organizing people around their myths and values.

Populism is the real American political religion. No matter what we actually believe, or what we actually do, we tend to cloak ourselves in the guise of Populism, if only rhetorically. This makes the real thing tough to detect.

So what's the key to discerning the real thing?

Ignored in the Big Shitpile

There are three big problems, laid on top of one another, in the financial mess known as the Big Shitpile:

1. Bad loans were mixed with good ones and sold as securities, even options.
2. Millions of adjustable rate mortgages are re-setting to higher rates over the next three years.
3. Homes are priced at twice their value.

There are a lot of "solutions" being proposed by both parties for the first two problems. (Picture from Bayareahousingbubble.)

No one is even talking about the third, because its implications are too massive to contemplate.

But this is the stark reality. What we're reading now, even the pessimists' argument, is not yet even realistic.

When any bubble bursts, the actual value of things gets cut in half. Usually it over-shoots this mark, then it resettles at the halfway line and starts proceeding upward again, slowly.

• This is what happened to the NASDAQ after the tech bubble burst. It fell from 5,000 to under 2,000, but now trades at around 2,600.
• This is what happened to the Japanese stock market after it peaked in 1987 at around 37,000. It now trades at about half that value, and investors are happy to be there.

This is also what happened in the 1970s, the last time we had a housing crash. Homebuilding stopped in most markets -- at least those outside the oil patch. The price you could get for an existing home fell to much less than its replacement cost, and stayed there. Renting made sense.

That is where the U.S. housing market is headed. That's where it has to be headed in order to regain free market equilibrium. That's the way markets operate.

But you'd never know that from the nonsense being proposed right now:

• Easing the pinch on some "sub-prime" borrowers does not make more credit available for new mortgages. 
• Enabling refinancing of adjustable-rate debt doesn't make the value of the underlying home any greater.
• Giving developers incentives to price some homes below-market is useless.
• A moratorium on foreclosures sounds nice, but it's just delaying the inevitable.

Awakening the Netroots

Perhaps nothing illustrates the impact of Howard Dean's achievements than the caving of his party's Congressional wing this month.

It's the reaction to them that's important.

The FISA filibuster and the Bush Christmas Present Budget are angering the Netroots and, hopefully, re-energizing them.

It's a cold slap in the face, one that's overdue.

It's one thing to build a party, or a movement, as Kos has done. It's quite another to see that movement directed toward a goal, and directed toward actively confronting a party, really taking it over. That was the lesson Howard Dean himself tried to teach before becoming DNC chair, when he formed Democracy for America.

That's now taking place. The anger over at DailyKos, at Americablog, at Firedoglake, and elsewhere in the Netroots over what is happening now is palpable.  For much of 2007 netroots bloggers were, when outraged, mainly outraged at President Bush. They cut their own party's leaders considerable slack.

No more. I hope, and expect, that the result of this anger will be a growing sophistication on the part of Netroots activists and a growing number of Netroots-inspired primary challenges, such as those now going on in Illinois and Maryland.

We don't just need more Democrats. We need better Democrats.

We're All Deaniacs Now

In about three months we'll come up on a fascinating anniversary which few in the press will mention. (Image from Rantical.)

On March 22, it will have been five years since Howard Dean's "democratic wing of the Democratic Party" speech.

It's an important event when you compare where we are now to where we were then.

In March 2003 Democrats were in disarray, the base hopelessly divided from the party's center. Today it's Republicans who are in disarray, the base spinning off in all directions from the party's center.

Dean's speech crystallized, in just 20 minutes, the themes that now animate the majority of Americans:

• Ending the war.
• Balancing the budget.
• Health insurance for everyone.
• Caring for the needy.

Dean laid out other markers on that day. A desire to re-animate young voters. A call to conservation and the environment. The 50-state strategy. Absolute inclusiveness. Intellectual honesty and consistency. Honest government.

It's 1938 Over Here

I often decry the call of "Munich" on foreign policy. It's not 1938. Our foreign enemies are not Hitler. They don't have his kind of power, and don't pose his kind of threat.

But domestically, it has been 1938 in this country for a long time, and most Democrats have been Neville Chamberlain before it.

They constantly assume goodwill toward democracy, and to the basic rights of a free society, which Bush, Cheney, and their whole crowd do not share. The Administration uses this assumption of goodwill against them in ways large and small, in their ruthless campaign for absolute power -- not just political power, but personal power, financial power, and judicial power.

It's only the DFHs of the Netroots, the ones called "extreme" by the mainstream press, who are playing Churchill here. They seem easy to dismiss. In the short run, they are. If these people had realized earlier this year they were, in fact, the majority, as they claimed they were, they wouldn't be in this mess.

But let me leave the financial scandals, the power grabs, the planetary destruction and the sick foreign policy for a moment. Let's talk about this in terms of something I know well, the Internet.

This Week's Clue: The Crisis Unseen

Following is the essay you can designate as Volume 10, Number 50 of This Week's Clue, based on the e-mail newsletter I have produced since March, 1997. It would be the issue of December 17.

Enjoy.

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One hallmark of a crisis period is how it represents a change in the dominant medium.

I didn't realize this when I started this project, two years ago. It revealed itself to me slowly. The rise of mass-market books which could impact public opinion in the 1850s. The rise of penny newspapers, organized as nationwide chains, in the 1890s. The rise of movies and radio, with all their dramatic power and immediacy, in the 1930s. The rise of TV in the 1960s.

In all these periods the older medium could not respond. It felt dominant. It had dominated a generation of thought, and the people in those media felt they could go on as before, without change. None of them noticed the new crisis. It was left to the avatars of the new media -- newspaper journalists in the 1890s, movie producers in the 1930s, TV producers in the 1960s -- to tell the story. And in the telling they became dominant, then over time became just as ossified, self-centered, and blind to the next crisis as those they had displaced.

So it is today. The Internet is replacing TV. You don't see much respect for the online medium from TV people.

An Open Source Christmas Letter

I have been sending out Christmas letters for many years.

I got the idea from Lamont Wood, a writer and friend whose annual reports of Conglomerated Woodco are always filled with fun, and details of his family's life in Texas.

Lamont and I co-wrote a book early in the 1990s, called "Bulletin Board Systems for Business." It described the online tools of the period, and suggested that people harness them. Unfortunately it came out two years before the Web was spun.

Since then Lamont has gone on to write many books, on a wide variety of subjects. He is a brilliant writer and a very good man. Merry Christmas, Lamont. To the right is your Christmas present. I found it on the Web. It's a park in Australia. I hope you can take your family there some day.

My own attempts to create something like the Woodco report have been frustrated by talent and, more important, by technology. I wanted to do it in HTML, but found it never worked. The editors I used couldn't translate to a Web page, and were a disaster in print. For a long time I used Microsoft Word and printed the results. But copies, at $1 and more for color, were prohibitively expensive.

A year ago, as part of my work at ZDNet, I got OpenOffice. It didn't work either. Then, this fall, I downloaded another version, Version 2.3.1.

Finally, success. I was able to edit pictures to size using The Gimp, another open source product, and the result printed quite nicely.

Transferring it to the Web, where it appears as the extended body to this post, took several minutes. The pictures didn't follow the HTML code, and had to be manually inserted. Not a problem because they had already been sized. But since the original code had left room for them, the original code for the pictures had to be edited, and the pictures inserted manually. This sounds harder than it was. It took me all of five minutes.

So, finally, with great humility and joy after 13 years of hard work on the Web, our family's first Web Christmas letter: