Dana Blankenhorn

Monument to the Present

The media calls it the Lynching Memorial.

Its proper name is the National Memorial for Peace and Justice.  The Equal Justice Initiative built it, and an accompanying museum, on a six acre site at Centennial Hill in Montgomery, Alabama , near where I-85 meets I-65. It is just a few blocks from the first White House of the Confederacy, the Rosa Parks Museum, and the Hank Williams museum.

Call it the duality of the southern thing.

There are 313 names inscribed there, on tombstones that also bear the names of counties across the South where men were murdered during the days of Jim Crow. There are two sets of tombstones, and the museum hopes this second set will eventually be picked up by those counties, creating memorials to the dead there.

It is, without question, the most moving monument built in America since the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was opened in 1982.

Trump, Too, Shall Pass

Recently my dear heart dragged me to a wedding.

It was for the son of one of her co-workers. The groom was born here, the parents arriving from India a few years before his birth. The bride was born in China but moved here as a toddler and is a U.S. citizen.

The bride and groom grew up together. They met in high school about 15 years ago. They moved among their guests with the grace and comfort of a long-married couple, secure in themselves. Their relationship may have once been controversial, but their joy in each other buried that long-ago. They live in Boston. He is a doctor. She’s a business consultant. They came down to be with his family. Some of her relatives traveled from China to Georgia to be at the celebration, in the shadow of Stone Mountain’s Confederate carving. Some of his traveled all the way from India.

Democracy's Business Model Problem

When I started as a reporter, 40 years ago, there was a strict separation between “data” and “service.” There was usually just one layer of data.

The service was a phone call. The data was the time, duration and number called. The data was used to generate a bill for service. AT&T still mails customers this data.

There was also another layer of data, hidden beneath the services data, namely the content of the call. This was only available to law enforcement, with a warrant. A number might be tapped or (when technology permitted) a subject might have all the numbers they used tapped. This data was secured. It could only be used in criminal investigations. Civil cases could be tossed if this data were misused.

In print, there were similar splits between service and data. Editorial was the service. Subscriber lists were the data.

Re-evaluating J.P. Morgan

The Greatest Progressive of American history was J.P. Morgan. But he wouldn’t be one today.

Let me explain.

Businesses have always talked up the idea of progress, of change. It’s at the heart of the progressive idea, a constant, incremental improvement. Progressives believe in things getting better, and the way they usually get better is by something better coming along. Better products, better services, and better ways of doing things. Today these are all byproducts of competition.

They weren’t always.

Morgan was active from the Civil War through the first decade of the 20^th century. He is usually portrayed as either a colossus or an octopus. He was the man behind the “trusts.” Trusts were evil. He was Teddy Roosevelt’s great nemesis.

But was he? We know the men were close. Morgan and Roosevelt were both Republicans.

What is undeniably true is that, during Morgan’s time, America and the world were short on capital and on basic infrastructure. We couldn’t afford to have several rail lines serving the same point, or several telegraph wires serving the same office. That would mean other points and other offices got no service.

Resurrection

Almost a decade ago, I dedicated a week of this blog to the story of Bruce Springsteen. 

I told the tale of a musician called to public service by the horrible events of 9/11 and recounted how he told America’s story through his music during that decade.

Today I want to tell a different, more private story. It’s a story of redemption and triumph, through the power of love, starting with the bitter acceptance of loving yourself.

It’s the story of Jason Isbell 

When I wrote my Springsteen story, Isbell was a mess. As he admits. In 2009 he was a 31 year-old guitarist and singer for the Drive-By Truckers, a southern rock band in the tradition of Lynyrd Skynyrd based in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, near Huntsville.

Skynyrd, I should note, is not my thing. Neither, at the time, were the Truckers. I had never heard of Isbell.

I first heard of him a year after what he might call his “conversion,” on Mark Maron’s WTF Podcast.  Maron had run out of comics to talk with, he was on something of a roll after a New York Times profile, and the call went out for musicians. DBT lead Patterson Hood took Maron through the Truckers’ story, and it was intriguing, because they weren’t a bunch of ignorant hippie kickers out to recapture rock for God’s own people. Quite the opposite. They were a bunch of serious, middle-aged musicians, second generation rockers really, and family men. Such is the duality of the southern thing, as Hood wrote. 

Isbell was the “genius boy” always hanging around the studio, who they brought into the group to liven things up. Which he did. He also partied. Hard. Drink and drugs and wild, wild women. The whole lifestyle. The boy was too much for the good men of the Truckers, and despite their financial success with him, including the title track to 2003’s Decoration Day he was out.

The firing was where our story begins.