Dana Blankenhorn

Overcoming the Crisis: Be Who They Fear You Are

Think of this as Volume 16, Number 44 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Regular readers of this space may know that I believe we've had four major political crises in this nation's history, and four crisis Presidents who led us through them.

This is the fifth.

The four previous crises were the Civil War, the Progressive Era, the New Deal and the Nixon Revolution. The fifth crisis began in the last decade, with Iraq and Katrina and deliberate speculation leading directly to the 2008 economic collapse we're still pulling out of.

I call this crisis the War Against Oil. There's an artificial shortage of energy because we define energy as oil, gas, and coal, which deplete. The oil forces, like the slaveholders of the 1850s, took control of our politics in order to maintain this scarcity. Thus the battle is to overcome them so the market, and science, work their will.

Crisis Presidents Are Always Misunderstood

Think of this as Volume 16, Number 43 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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The most misunderstood President in American history was Willliam McKinley. (Right, from Wikipedia.)

I'm still reading crap about how conservative McKinley was. With hints about his being corrupt.

Fact is it was McKinley who launched the investigations that broke up Standard Oil, it was McKinley who began the Progressive Era, and it was McKinley who made Theodore Roosevelt the President by making him Vice President.

The reason for the misunderstanding was McKinley's assassination, in 1901, at Buffalo, by an anarchist named Leon Czolgosz. (right.)

Reform is the enemy of revolution, in that reform makes revolution unnecessary. The killing froze McKinley within his time, and as the Republican Party moved to the right, his memory moved right with it. It was Bryan's Populists who were the racists, the states' rightists, and the conservative force of that time.

My Favorite President

Think of this as Volume 16, Number 42 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Win or lose in November, Barack Obama has been the Greatest President of my lifetime. Or yours.

He has the class of a great entertainer and lives his values more completely than most religious leaders. He can seem introspective and cold, but so have all America's greatest leaders. He writes in a way that makes you cry. He inspires but can laugh at himself. We are lucky to have him.

There's a scene in “Guess Who's Coming to Dinner,” the 1967 Spencer Tracy vehicle, that always makes me cry these days. Sidney Poitier, playing a version of his “magic Negro” character from the period, wants to marry Tracy's daughter, played by Katherine Houghton (Hepburn's niece). They met, yes, in Hawaii. Tracy has just told him about the discrimination they'll face, that their child will face. “She wants him to grow up to be President,” says Poitier, “but I'd settle for Secretary of State.”

Welcome to the 1970s

Think of this as Volume 16, Number 41 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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This decade could have easily been the 1930s all over again.

You wouldn't have wanted to go there. We're talking no social safety net, people living in shantytowns, and starving. We're talking 32% unemployment at a time when women didn't work outside the home. We're talking social unrest and the almost-universal feeling that democracy was doomed (DOOMED!), that only the iron hand of the Left or the Right could save mankind from extinction. And then, of course, World War II.

Want to know what the 1930s were like? Look at Greece today. Greece was induced to follow the advice of the bankers, to practice extreme austerity in the face of impossible loan demands, and look what's happening. People are going hungry, and they're turning to a neo-Nazi party called the Golden Dawn for comfort. Not just as an electoral force, but as a social one, which is more ominous. Want to know where Hitler came from? Stuff like that.

Things could have easily gone that way for us, had John McCain been elected. What McCain was promising in the wake of a 1929-like crash was a great heaping helping of Hooverism. Instead we got the stimulus, we got some honest government, and while the problems aren't all fixed – too many bankers are still walking around loose – things are indeed getting better.