Dana Blankenhorn

Antietam Needed

Think of this as Volume 14, Number 26 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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At the heart of every generational crisis is a period where the new thesis appears on the verge of rejection.

Elections, by themselves, don't solve crises. They begin them. They set a political force against serious momentum, bent on transforming the country by tearing at its foundation. The success of the new movement is never guaranteed.

The problems of the time appear intractable. The uphill fight seems endless. Then, just when it's needed, an event occurs that allows the thesis to move forward, that shifts momentum just enough so that the thesis leader gains confidence and moves as he knows he must.

• During the Civil War, this was the Battle of Antietam. (Above, from Matthew Brady.) It was a bloody, narrow victory, which mostly turned on luck, when Confederate orders were captured. But it was enough to move Lincoln toward proclaiming the Emancipation Proclamation, which while it nominally freed slaves only in areas in rebellion, transformed the war from a struggle over commerce to one over human liberty.
• For the progressive era it was the Spanish-American War. It boosted nationalism, made Theodore Roosevelt a hero, and made America a world power, so he could stamp the age with a progressive thesis of slow, steady reform meant to maintain social peace and order.
• For FDR the crisis really came in 1935, when the National Recovery Act was declared unconstitutional. Much of its work had already been done, but the rejection gave Roosevelt an enemy he could focus on, rally people against, so the alphabet soup he created against the Depression might have a chance to change public attitudes.
• For Nixon the crisis was Cambodia. He sacrificed an entire people for domestic political advantage and it worked. The war, and the war against the war, united conservatives and also gave Nixon the image he needed to open China, which in the end may have been his most important legacy.

In all these cases there was one crisis, and one event, threatening the national future. There was one action that served to give the new thesis momentum.

This crisis is not like that. The Bush era didn't leave us with just one legacy, but a host of crises just waiting to explode. The financial crisis. Two wars. Deregulation, and a feeling among businesses they could act with impunity, that the cops would never come.

But at the heart of all is a more existential question, the immediate past demanding to rule the unknowable future.

Just as the assumptions of the Civil War period set the stage for the 1896 crisis, and the slow pace of progressive change made Roosevelt necessary, and the hubris of America's governing power made Nixon necessary, so Nixon-ism holds the seeds of our present difficulties.

Rampant Hooverism

Think of this as Volume 14, Number 25 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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The Great Recession could easily become a second Depression due to a global outbreak of Hooverism.

The two cures for the First Depression, and any such collapse, are money and demand. In this case TARP supplied the money. The stimulus was supposed to supply the demand but is proving insufficient. That's partly down to where it went -- tax cuts and unemployment benefits have low multiples compared with investments in real capital goods.

The reaction to this shortage of demand by policymakers in Europe and America is the same. Cut demand. Raise taxes, reduce services, increase unemployment.

There is no answer there. How does laying people off put people to work? How does spending less cut your debt if you're also, by doing so, earning less? How does raising taxes, taking money out of the private economy, help anything?

The word for that policy is Hooverism. It is precisely what Herbert Hoover did in the face of the Great Depression. He refused to accept that the private sector was stuck, that someone needed to step up and buy stuff we needed to have made. By the end of his term in office unemployment was nearly 30%. Sounds awful, but the broadest rate of our current unemployment is 17%.

Hooverism is the final triumph of fear. It holds that when bankers and businessmen lose their nerve politicians should too.

It is stupidity writ large.

College athletics is all politics

The big mistake made by sportswriters looking at college athletics is to over-estimate the extent to which their stories are about money, when they're really all about political influence.

Fact. College athletics does not contribute directly to the education enterprise. All the money that goes in stays in. It's either paid to coaches in salary or goes into facilities. 

For kids, college athletics is a money sink. As more schools find they have to play the political game of college athletics, kids are charged for it.

My own son, now at Georgia State, is having to pay $85 per semester this year so GSU can field a football team. Why? Because football makes them a player in the legislature. It means they're no longer just a "commuter school" but a big-time competitor for funding alongside Georgia Tech, Georgia Southern and the University of Georgia.

That's what college athletics is about. It's about winning the loyalty of legislatures for the rest of a school's agenda. When the big state school dominates the headlines, it dominates funding. That's the money sportswriters should be following, not the TV contracts but the appropriations.

In extremism no liberty, without moderation no justice

Think of this as Volume 14, Number 24 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.

-- Barry Goldwater

When I was a kid I found those words stirring. Many people, like my own father, felt them as important a statement as Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I have a dream."

What history has taught me since is that few more dangerous or wrongheaded words were ever spoken by an American statesman. The sentiments are fine, but the implications are monstrous.

No matter how benign the motive, no matter how universal the idea, the same thing happens as any set of principles becomes an ideology.

They excuse madness.

Who can really argue with the words of Jesus Christ, or the messenger Mohammad, with the lessons of Israel, with the Buddha or the Hindu Vedas? Yet every religion born of these great ideas has blood on its hands. Men, inherently fallible, have declared each of these great belief systems infallible, and they have committed murder in their name.

A Solution to Your Imaging Problems

I caused big problems, for myself and my employer, back in April when I used an image, with credit, but without permission on one of my employer's blogs.

I have always been more interested in solving problems than causing them, however. Despite my poking at critics, I knew both I and Chris Buzelli are in the copyright business, and believed technology could create some common ground.

The good news, I've found, is that a Web permission engine exists. The folks at Picscout called to tell me they've been in this business for almost a year, and best of all they have a competitor, LicenseScout, which has been in the business a while longer. (Competition is always good. It helps a market grow.) LicenseScout sees its mission broadly -- including all kinds of content -- while PicScout is focused on images. 

The difference between PicScout and a regular photo agency is that everything's automated, and can be integrated with browsers and search engines. For image owners, it integrates with a service called PhotoShelter, aimed at increasing sales of images for re-use. (The picture above leads to this sales page.)

Amy Love, PicScout's  vice president of marketing since September, was kind enough to lead me through it.  The heart of the offer is ImageIRC, which indexes images through digital fingerprints, maintains a metadata registry on the images, and offers an API through which buyers and sellers can connect.

The result is a suite of software-driven services:

• ImageExchange, which identifies images with metadata and throws up pricing information, then handles transactions. (There are currently versions for Firefox and Explorer.)
• ImageTracker, which lets owners of images see who has accessed them, again by following the metadata, and
• ImageQualification, which helps site owners know the status of their images as soon as they are posted. 

What has me most excited is PicApp, a spin-off that not only allows access to license-free thumbnails, but includes meta data aimed at helping sites hosting the images get more traffic. They're pitching it as a free Search Engine Optimization (SEO) service for sites and a tracking system for image owners. There's a plug-in for Wordpress and a Firefox plug-in.

Most of what I have described is a service for owners and users of stock photography, and in fact big rights owners like Corbis and Getty Images are already playing. But Amy said any artist can register to have their art catalogued, free, because once art goes online it becomes an image by default. Artists can either do this directly or through the agents they prefer to use.

There's money here for someone. Reuters signed up with PicApp last month and traffic has been growing smartly as word has gotten around that friction in this market can be reduced.

I like a happy ending, don't you?

The Blitz of the Gulf and the War Against Oil

What has happened in the Gulf, what continues to happen, is not Barack Obama's Katrina. Nor is it anyone else's. It's not Pearl Harbor, nor is it 9-11.

What it's most comparable to, in terms of American history, is the London Blitz.

(I don't like using AP or even linking to them, but the picture on this page, by the APs Charles Riedel, is becoming the Iwa Jima Flag-on-Mount-Sirabachi moment in this disaster, so I've thumbnailed it. Historians know that an earlier group's arrival on that mountain, with a smaller flag, was the real deal to the men fighting there, and the second flag was put up for show. Yet it's that one we remember. As we'll remember Riedel's Laughing Gull. I entirely agree with AOL's Matt Mendolson on that.)

For most Americans the Gulf is distant. This can be hard to believe but it's true. Even here in Atlanta, where I live, the impacts for now are slight. My neighbor won't be heading to Destin any time soon. Beyond that life remains normal.

This is how America was during the Blitz. It was something happening elsewhere and to other people. What most today have forgotten is that, for many Americans of that time, this was highly desirable. War was highly controversial.

What President Roosevelt did, what Barack Obama needs to do, was to mold public opinion, slowly, toward a war footing. The movies which appeared and were green-lighted in 1940 were not all propaganda pieces, as they would become in the succeeding years. But many did take the gathering darkness as their subtext. And in that era, movies were the dominant medium.

Today the Internet is the dominant medium. It is a medium that is very difficult to dominate. Anything with the taint of propaganda is taken with a grain of salt. Yet, as we see time-and-time again in the Middle East, propaganda gets through.

It gets through when the target is clear and the aim is simple. The Administration's problem lies in its targeting.

The oil is not the enemy. Even BP is not the enemy. The enemy is the system that makes this eternal search for oil necessary, and that makes it the path of least resistance for BP's profit.

I'm not naive enough to think that we can flip a switch and create a world of bullet trains and windmills.  But I'm unwilling to accept the inevitability of oil, and all the bloodshed and destruction that entails.

What has people down right now is just this, the idea that we have no choice but to drill and fight, fight and drill, in order to continue our way of life. That's why the President's approval ratings are down so far, I believe, because his sights are set too low.

Raising those sights means creating a political environment in which an energy bill that moves incentives decisively from carbon to renewables is seen as patriotic, as a jobs bill, and as simple common sense, so that any opposition is seen as unpatriotic. In the face of Big Oil the President has been acting as Chamberlain at Munich, pushing back slowly hoping for "peace in our time."

He needs to become Churchill, not against BP but against the system that made this disaster inevitable. 

What's Wrong with South Carolina?

The following is based on my 4 years covering southern politics for Voic.us and nearly 35 years living in the southern cities of Houston and Atlanta.

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We're rednecks, We're rednecks

We don't know our ass from a hole in the ground

We're rednecks, we're rednecks.

And we're keeping the niggers down.

-- Randy Newman

What's wrong with South Carolina is the same thing that's wrong with the rest of the South, but most especially Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana, which with South Carolina make up the "Deep South."

The southern power structure is racist.

I don't mean here that southern politicians are racist, or southerners are, if by that you mean they believe blacks are inferior to them, or even different. The vast majority know better than that.

When I say they're racist, I mean they practice power as a zero-sum game based on skin color. Politics is defined by race. If you're serious about political power you can either play on the majority (white) side or confine yourself to the minority.

Minorities have power in the South where they have majorities, or near-majorities. Many southern cities like my own hometown of Atlanta are run by black folks, as are counties such as DeKalb or Clayton. There are black congress-critters like John Lewis and Jim Clyburn whose voting records are very similar to northern Democratic norms.

But whites and blacks can add. They know that where whites are the majority, whether statewide or locally, whites are going to get what they want. And vice versa. This is the reality, and it has defined southern politics since the Nixon era, when whites started moving toward the Republicans. Once a state figured out the game -- as Georgia did in 2002 -- there could be no going back.

Power means patronage. It means control over contracts. It has nothing to do with parties or ideologies. Cobb County Republicans don't act that much differently than DeKalb County Democrats -- they just talk differently about it.

Now that we have the lay of the land, let's talk about the specific case of South Carolina.

We can beat England

We can also get drubbed 5-0.

But the U.S. can win their game next Saturday. Here's why.

The Lesson of Van Gogh's Ear

Think of this as Volume 14, Number 23 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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It is said that Vincent Van Gogh cut off his ear because he couldn't sell  his stuff. And that he never did. (Image from Wikipedia.)

The great artists of the 20th century learned this lesson well. Picasso, Dali and Andy Warhol were all relentless self-promoters. They knew that art which isn't seen does not exist, and that an artist's personal style is what he sells during his lifetime.

Somehow, we've gone backward in the era of the Web.

The lesson of my run-in with Chris Buzelli and his friends is clear. No Web site can use a thumbnail of someone else's art without the artist's express permission. This is what artists say they want.

It's self-destructive.

Technically, this position even prevents links. If I write a piece of HTML code linking to a graphic image, and give the a href command properly, my browser will go to the location of that image and copy it, in the size I specify, onto the page I'm writing.

That's the way HTML works.

But to self-important artists if I write such a link I'm a thief. I'm a double thief, because I have not only stolen  art but bandwidth  to display it on my Web page. Thus you don't even link to art without permission.

What galls me is that artists believe they don't have to watermark, they don't have to use robots.txt, they can post their stuff completely in the clear. Ghanaians know to protect their images (try downloading an image from this page) but American artists can depend on webmobs.

The default with images is, don't touch, don't link. So we don't. I won't.

My purpose in writing today is not to litigate the question of legal right. Nor even the moral right to link. I won't link to anyone's copyrighted image henceforth, without a Creative Commons license or a Wikimedia address. Neither will anyone at CBS Inc., nor, I gather, any other media outlet.

Instead I'm arguing that forbidding links, or thumbnails, is counter-productive. It's as dumb as Nikkei forbidding links to its home page or the London Times charging for access.

It's as stupid as Van Gogh cutting off his ear.

Rush to the Left

Here is something no one has told you before.

All the political energy of 2010 is a rush to the left.

Wall Street and Washington lobbyists like Dick Armey thought they could contain the Tea Party, and channel it to their corporatist ends, but they are having less luck with that than BP is having with the oil spill.

People like Rand Paul and Sarah Palin, whatever their strengths and weaknesses might be on governing, are actually leftist radicals who aim to transform both business and government, who have no patience for conserving business as usual.

The difference between them and the Netroots is their choice of weapon. Ideology. It's a blunt instrument that, unlike reform, usually destroys those who wield it.

Both Paul and Palin define the change they want to see in terms of absolutes. Government must not do this. Government must do that. Always, immutable. Once and for all. It's either in the Constitution or must be placed there, so boundaries can be drawn no one will ever be able to cross. It is a childlike leftism, right out of the 1930s.

I don't think the above description is unfair to either of them, or to their supporters. But the idea of immutability, of permanence, of absolute, is  a radical notion to most Americans. It is a faith in words rather than a faith in man, and it's gaining traction because man is fallible -- whether they're at Goldman Sachs, BP, or behind a desk in the White House.

Or course some faith in absolutism always appears in America at times of great stress. The difference is that, in the past, right-wing demagogues did put their faith in people, that is the right people. It is what drove the Wallace legions in the Nixon era, it's what drove the Populists early last century, it's what drove the South, not just against Lincoln but under Andrew Jackson. Its roots are deep within Jeffersonism, in organized distrust of any large institution, and a naive faith in a world that does not exist.

The utopia of Paul and Palin never  existed. That is, when words were interpreted as they now wish we were not a more perfect union. It didn't exist 50 years ago, in America's suburbs. It did not exist 110 years ago on the Populists' farms, nor did it exist 160 years ago in the antebellum South. It didn't exist because it denied full humanity to blacks and women and immigrants and gays. Their utopia was everyone else's dystopia. Their freedom was everyone else's oppression.