Dana Blankenhorn

Death of an Industry

Some time within the next year an amazing event will occur which you need to be on the look-out for. (I first ran with this 1911 Leslie-Judge cartoon back in 2005, at MooresLore.)

A major city's "monopoly" newspaper will shut down. Just shutter. Go dark. Disappear. Leaving that city with (it will think) nothing.

Why? Oil. The cost of oil, and of producing manufactured goods based on energy (paper, ink, etc.) will be the last straw for many papers. Already the biggest chains are, it seems, on their last legs. McClatchy, Gannett, The New York Times -- the smart ones (and Scripps was a smart one) diversified out long ago.

Think about it. A newspaper's subscription rate is designed to just pay the cost of delivery, of getting the product to you. Note that most papers long ago ditched kids-on-bicycles in favor of "more efficient" men in cars. Big, old cars. Station wagons, a lot of them. You can't go to a mini when you're tossing 500 newspapers each morning. The numbers don't work.

Or consider ad space. What the Web didn't eat other competitors chewed up. The big department store ads are gone. The auto dealers are gone. Real estate, gone. The legal ads can go into a specialty legal paper, the entertainment ads into a specialty weekly as well.

It's a spiraling in, as with an airplane that has been hit by a bomb. The paper gets smaller, editorial jobs are cut, it's less interesting, so more jobs are cut and very soon there is nothing left.

The "news business" will eulogize this as Armageddon, but it's not. 

It's an opportunity.

The Nature of the Crisis

Think of this as Volume 11, Number 26 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Some crises are solved by an election. The 1896 Crisis settled the U.S. onto a path of strong money but progressive regulation. The 1828 Crisis created the western "balancing act" that kept the U.S. stable for a generation.

Some crises are only defined by an election. The 1860 Crisis defined the Civil War. The 1932 Crisis defined how we would address the Great Depression.

One thing which is greatly confusing analysts today is that the 1968 Crisis was more like the first two above than the last two. That is, the election settled the crisis, creating a stable political coalition with settled goals that has ruled from that day to this.

But the current Crisis is not of that type. In its nature it is far more like 1860 or 1932. The last few years have only established the parameters of the crisis, and no one's election will settle it. It will go on.

We already know the nature of this crisis. We may call it energy, but it is in fact hydrocarbons.

In order to save the world, the task before us is simply to replace hydrocarbon energy with hydrogen energy -- to get the carbon out of our energy cycle.

This will not come easily, or cheaply. It is the job my children will face for the rest of their lives, along with the blowback resulting from the crisis' development. (Santa Claus will drown this summer.) This is something which took two centuries to develop, and to think it will be settled in half that time is optimistic.

Mbeki Ate My Book

Regular readers may wonder why you haven't seen any fiction here for a long time.

The reason is Thabo Mbeki.

When I began The Chinese Century, then The American Diaspora, I was trying to distance myself from the reality around me, and building (in my mind) a different kind of utopia on a foreign shore. I recognized that from the start, but it didn't stop me. When I picked up The Duke of Oil it was with the intention of finishing that story out, embracing the idea of a different energy future and tracking the fall of the Bush Administration characters who had brought us to this end.

But as I wrote the idea of a South African utopia, as opposed to the dystopian reality, became less and less possible to me.

The reason was Thabo Mbeki.

Revolt of the Sports Fans

Over the weekend my daughter and I decided to visit a local bar and watch the footy. Italy was playing Spain somewhere in Austria, and we thought it would be fun to spend time together before she travels to Italy for a summer semester later this week.

The place was mobbed. We couldn't get a view of the TV. Had to come home.

This is no longer unusual in America. It's seldom remarked upon, but it may be the most important sports story of the decade here. Ordinary Americans are dropping their obsessions with baseball, NASCAR and basketball to cheer on a bunch of guys in shorts doing what their kids do on Saturday mornings.

Now some of these people are immigrants. Some of these people are kids who grew up on soccer. But I'm beginning to believe, increasingly, that some of it is political.

The Crisis, or The Dawn of the 21st Century

Many historians date centuries based on relevant events, not the turn of a calendar page. (From the collection of the State Library of Victoria, Australia. Click here to see it as more than a thumbnail.)

The 20th century, in other words, did not start on January 1, 1901. It started with the Guns of August. World War I ushered in the Great Power era, the wars of ideology, the mass murders, and the auto civilization for which the 20th century will always be known.

We are still living in that century. We still depend on cars, and oil. We still obsess over ideology. We still die over resources, and in vast numbers. We are still divided.

But this old order is dieing. If the War in Iraq should prove useful in any way, it is to kill these presumptions about ideology and resources. Capturing Iraq's oil did not make its price manageable. The "good vs. evil" Cold War game the Bush Era created has been shown to be a sham.

The 20th century is not going out with a bang, but with a whimper. What began in shock and awe is going out in economic and environmental dysfunction.

Most of us have known for many years what the 21st century will be about:

• The Global Crisis of climate change.
• A single planet requiring a single set of standards.
• The Infosphere, science vs. reality.

Tears of a Clown

Lenny Bruce. Richard Pryor. George Carlin.

The grand tradition of comedy states that the comic himself feels miserable inside, that the words are weapons, and that the energy required for brilliance on a stage exists only with the help of chemical stimulants.

Which chemical seems hardly to matter. For Pryor it was coke, for Carlin pot. For the earlier generation it was booze. Is it possible to be funny without constantly teetering on the edge of self-destruction?

It is. Bill Cosby. In retrospect perhaps even better than Carlin. But in other ways an ordinary man, with an ordinary life, filled with ordinary disasters, like the loss of his son. Such things happen to everyone, can happen to anyone at any time. A great man and a great comic, from the very beginning to this very day.

(Trivia note. Carlin's original partner was another like that. Jack Burns. Later half of Burns and Schreiber. Still later the first head writer of The Muppet Show. Edited picture from KXOL. My apologies to Mr. Burns, but I promise the other half of the picture when you go. Rim-shot.)

In some ways we're all teetering on the edge, aren't we?

Obama, FISA, and history

A lot of people in the Netroots are very upset that Senator Obama will apparently support the FISA "compromise."

The bill not only gives the Bush Administration everything it wants, but gives the phone companies immunity for doing it, which means they can't be forced to testify about the war crimes the Bush Administration perpetrated. So write people of goodwill like Jane Hamsher and Digby (right).

I think they're right on the merits. But...

The Netroots today finds itself in the same curious historical position as abolitionists did in 1860 and big government liberals did in 1932. We're on the cusp of being given power but because we've defined ourselves in stark opposition we're seen as extreme. There's nothing extreme today about being anti-slavery or for debt financing, but there was then. As a result Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt worked hard to define themselves as brakes against this radicalism.

They weren't. Not really. When push came to shove they delivered. But push did not come to shove before they were elected. It didn't come to shove until after their inaugurations.

Three and Two

Think of this as Volume 11, Number 25 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Everyone who is analyzing this general election race is missing the point. (Picture from Bexar County, Texas Democrats.)

The point isn't who wins. Barack Obama is going to win.

The point is the margin.

What the Obama people are looking for is a margin of three and two. That's 60% of the vote. That's a landslide.

Three-and-two is a foreign concept to political reporters, and to most voters. The last time we saw it was in 1964. Lyndon Johnson got the 3. Barry Goldwater got the 2. The result was the Great Society. Before that you have to go back another three decades to 1932. FDR 3, Hoover 2. That coalition held firm for 6 years, and the result was the New Deal.

To get to three-and-two you need a broad, deep consensus, one which will extend all the way down the ticket. The opposition must be made to seem out-of-bounds, irrelevant. By tieing himself so closely to George W. Bush, John McCain is giving America its chance. He is Hooverizing himself.

A three and two Presidential election brings with it a 60 vote Senate majority and a two-thirds majority in the House. It brings with it new tensions, as factions  contend within the party in power for the ear of the President, or threaten to bolt if they don't get their way.

Three and two is indeed a magic moment, a moment of momentous and far-reaching, permanent change. But what about the two?

New Yorker Idiocy

I don't know why The New Yorker finds it impossible to cover media well. This was true when Ken Auletta had the beat. It's doubly true under New York Times writer Peter J. Boyer. (The illustration is the cartoon of Olbermann accompanying Boyer's article.)

Boyer's latest, a political takedown of Keith Olbermann, is typical of the genre. Sanctimonious, filled with false equivalence between lies and truth, and (often) as laughably wrong in its facts as anything Olbermann himself satirizes, it misses the mark in so many ways it's hard to know where to start.

Not that a takedown article couldn't be written. But such an article would note how MSNBC has become a "studio network," with such sparse ground resources it's forced to go with non-stop talking heads. Thus the network-wide emphasis on politics, where it's always easy to get talking heads to bounce against one another and where you never have to worry about heat generating any light, like, say, policy.

Policy, not process, is what news organizations covering Washington should be giving us. But it's what they never, ever give us, anymore. Instead it's all process, the "inside baseball" of how we're going to make things seem to be, with no reference as to how things really are.

That, and not some desire to have our ideological itch scratched, is why we've moved to the Internet, and why people like Olbermann appeal to us. If you're going to be worthy of my time you had better be witty, and you had better bring me some facts I haven't likely heard. Olbermann does both.

Now, as to Boyer:

A Clear Choice in The War Against Oil

One of the great ironies of American history is how, at a time of crisis, the key to the next generation's desires is downplayed while the proponents of the old order sound loud and brassy.

• In 1860 Democrats stood loudly for slavery, while Lincoln talked only of Union and limiting its reach.
• In 1896 Democrats stood loudly against a Cross of Gold, while McKinley talked quietly about progressive reform.
• In 1932 Republicans stood firm against stiff action on the Depression, while FDR talked only of experimentation and hoped for a balanced budget.
• In 1968 Democrats railed against Richard Nixon's threat to the New Deal, while Nixon spoke out in relative moderation on behalf of the Culture Wars to come.

In 2008 Republicans are loudly demanding pro-oil policies, while Democrats speak gently about alternative energy and conservation, rather than a War Against Oil.

This is fine by me.