Dana Blankenhorn

The Best Book of 2017

If Michael W. Twitty’s The Cooking Gene  doesn’t win the 2017 Pulitzer Prize, there’s something very wrong with the committee.

Then again, there always has been something wrong with America, as Twitty details with a righteous anger both searing and enlightening. This heavily researched “cookbook” (there are some recipes in it) is Twitty’s effort to unravel his past, a difficult task for any African-American.

All this gets explained, with the kind of writing that you want to linger over. But it’s hard to, as when he describes in detail how slave auctions worked, through the eyes of his own relatives, and why most African-Americans are part-white, through the eyes of those who were raped, sold, and brutalized in ways large and small over centuries.

Yet through it all, the food shines through. This is the book’s deeper meaning. Southern culture is distinct from northern culture because it’s African at its heart. What we eat, the ingredients we use, our spicing and love of the land, it all comes to us from Twitty’s people. Every southern white man, no matter how white he may claim to be, has African languages, attitudes, and ways of living deep in his heart.

Twitty’s search was made possible by both DNA science and a host of people who have made it their life’s work to tease out the past lives of black Americans through painstaking archeological work as well as hints given in old newspapers, court records, letters, and ads for slave auctions. Portuguese traders bought blacks from black princes, whom they treated as equals. Later waves were simply seized from lands where cash crops like rice were cultivated, and still later waves were seized merely as bodies to work the growing cotton fields as they drifted west. Along the way black men and women brought us barbecue, bourbon, burgoo, pepper sauce and jollof rice, which became a host of different dishes including jambalaya. Among other things.

Winning on the Second Amendment

I had a revelation recently.

Liberals have been dealing with the Second Amendment all wrong.

Instead of arguing around the margins of what kinds of guns people can have under the law, it’s time for some Constitutional Originalism.

James Madison didn’t write the Second Amendment, and the first Congress did not approve it, so that people could shoot their fellow citizens from hiding, or so that an armed minority could overthrow a government they didn’t like. These are technologies that did not exist in 1789. In 1789 only 4% of the people had guns, and most couldn’t shoot straight.

The Second Amendment is a militia amendment. It demands that all gun owners hold themselves available for the state’s business. A big part of that business was catching, or killing, runaway slaves.

A bigger part of that business was serving as an armed force when called upon. That’s how it was used almost immediately upon its adoption. During the Whiskey Rebellion, an armed protest against alcohol taxes by Pennsylvania distillers (and their customers) was put down by 13,000 militia men under the direct command of the President of the United States, in the first decade of the Republic.

Don’t Trust Anyone Over 40

Ken Burns’ epic The Vietnam War  brings up key questions about relativity, about the nature of time and how we react to it.

For the Vietnamese he interviewed, Vietnam is ancient history. It is practically the American Revolution. Vietnam today is one of the planet’s younger countries, with a median age of 31. Most people there have no memory of the war, or of its aftermath. The nation they know is capitalist, a nation of hustlers, everyone looking for the next new taste, the next social trend, or the next buck.

For Americans, Vietnam is not ancient history. Far from it. The Vietnam War is still being fought here. It is still being lost here. The 2016 campaign featured three candidates who both came of age during that conflict. Millions are still punching hippies. Millions remain hippies.

Vietnam was the dominant event in every Baby Boomer’s life. I only saw it on TV, but it still haunts me. The median American’s age is near 38, but that is held down by immigrants. The median voter is 45, their worldview shaped by Ronald Reagan and the reaction against Vietnam protestors. 

The reason for this is that we live a lot longer than we did. In the year 1900, most people had no memories of the Civil War. Those were buried in the Spanish-American conflict and books like Red Badge of Courage which came out in 1895. By the time of World War II, that same progressive era was seen in a gauzy nostalgia, in movies like Meet Me in St. Louis.  The violence and discord had been stripped away, and all that was left was the idea that this was “a simpler time.”

 

The Cloud Czars and the Oil Barons

History shows that a dominant industry won’t get off its butt and take power until three things have happened:

1. Interests opposed to it take power.
2. The economy gets driven into a ditch costing the dominant industry equity value.
3. The government, rather than being embarrassed by this stupidity, vows to create more trouble.

When I first started researching political and economic history here, back in 2006, I saw generational cycles. I even saw that these cycles were driven by economics. I did not see that a political crisis continues until the newly-dominant industry seizes power.

The last time this all came together, in the form of an election, was in 1980. Ronald Reagan took power on behalf of the energy and media industries. The first was most important. The first provided the money.

Oil was handed considerable power under Nixon, in the crisis election of 1968. They got this almost without asking. They had been with Johnson, they stayed with Nixon. There were oilmen in the Ford Administration as well. But Jimmy Carter was elected in defiance of oil’s interests. He tried to rein-in the power of the oil barons, and their Middle East allies. He wore that cardigan sweater, symbolizing his opposition.

The industry organized against him.