Dana Blankenhorn

My Congressman Has Cancer

John Lewis was diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer a few days before 2019 ended.

A decade ago, that would have been a death sentence. Steve Jobs died of pancreatic cancer in 2011, after a controversial liver transplant in 2009.

But there’s a new way of attacking it, immunotherapy. James Allison and Tasuku Honjo shared the 2018 Nobel Prize in Medicine  for their discovery of immunotherapy, turning the body’s own immune system against cancer. Four years after their discovery Jimmy Carter saw his own cancer go into complete remission, thanks to immunotherapy. An old friend, David Coursey, recently reported his own pancreatic cancer is in remission, a year after diagnosis. He looks good, strong, and has all his hair.

In short, there’s hope. But there’s also the reality. John Lewis will die. Just as you will die, and I will die.

Whenever that happens for John Lewis, he will go in peace because he’s a practicing Christian. His life has been a testimony to Christ’s work among us. He has kept going forward, 50 years past Dr. King’s assassination, because of faith that will make his final moments on Earth a celebration, a going home.

The Limits of Vision

I usually see the future of technology, business and politics pretty well.

But it doesn’t always help to know what’s coming.

It certainly didn’t in 2000, when my predictions of a dot-com collapse came true, and when I went into a profound October depression, seeing clearly both the Bush election and the horrors that would follow it.

Knowing that the “big shitpile” of bad mortgages would collapse the economy in 2006 did not allow me to escape from its impact in 2008, either. My retirement savings collapsed like everyone else’s.

There have been compensations.

My understanding of how urban centers would be rebuilt, based on what happened in Houston during my years there, caused me to buy a house that is now worth 10 times what I paid for it. My understanding of clouds and devices, based on years of careful study of the technology landscape, allowed me to buy the right stocks in this decade and make for a good retirement.

But there are other easy predictions I can’t do anything about.

The Second Debate

The second debate in the race to control heaven, between the Virgin Mary and Satan, was getting off to a rocky start.

For Mary.

“Why am I not 50 points ahead of you?”

“Because I’m smart,” retorted the Prince of Darkness. “Every angel wants to be like me. They want to have my freedom. They want to have my wealth. They are tired of reporting to some feudal lord on high, and eating the same stale, tasteless wafers.”

“The wafers are not stale. They’re the body and blood of…”

Donald Trump Dies for Your Sins

Over the last decade I have learned that America has four different types of elections:

• Crisis elections, where the assumptions of a generation are proven to be past their sell-by date and are overthrown.
• Validation elections, in which the new assumptions are overwhelmingly ratified.
• Anti-Thesis elections, in which a new coalition arises to challenge the assumptions and eventually breaks through.
• Excess elections, in which the anti-thesis is defeated, narrowly, by the knees jerking on the old assumptions.

America works on a generational cycle, tied to economic trends, so there are some elections that wind up fitting midway between these assumptions. Sometimes events do overturn the apple cart, like Watergate, which delivered Jimmy Carter (narrowly). These are the exceptions that keep people guessing, although I really do think Watergate itself drew extensive press coverage.

The point is that 2016 is a Validation Election. It has a lot in common with 1980, or 1948, or 1908, or 1868. In all those cases, the leader who led the nation through the crisis is off the stage, and the political movement they birthed – its assumptions or ideology, its media, its industry – must find a way forward without him.

The Grail

(What follows is a work of fiction. I wrote it early this year, in about a week, after a weekend vacation to Asheville, touring artists' markets. Hope you like it.)

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It was a simple thing, I thought, something fun to have.

A cup or goblet, made of clay, and fired with a simple limestone-colored glaze. I saw it in a storeroom, by the workshop of an artist who was now working, instead, on cartoonish wiener dogs hipsters could hang on a wall.

The price was a snip, $19. I asked what inspired her to make it. She didn’t answer. All she said was, “It’s on sale,” as she wrapped it in newspaper.

I thought no more about it. I was giving my wife our hundredth honeymoon, a weekend in the North Carolina Mountains. There were other artists to visit, and the Google Map on my phone was buzzing in its cradle. We had to move on.

The Troll Decade

From online trolls at Reddit to political trolls like Donald Trump, to ultimate trolls like ISIS, this decade had been marked by a rejection of societal norms by people – mainly men – who confuse liberty with license.

I have been dealing with online trolls for 30 years and when I confront one now I always ask the same question, whether they understand the difference between the ordered liberty of the Constitution and the mere license of “I want what I want,” the essential role of government in guaranteeing that liberty is extended to all.

Sure, the Declaration of Independence held the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to be self-evident, but it went immediately to how those rights were to be established:

Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.  

The 1436 Game

In the year 1436 the Renaissance was just getting started. The Reformation had not yet begun. Columbus hadn't even been born. 

That’s the year we’re now on in the Muslim calendar. The Catholic Church, in this case based in Arabia, reigns Supreme against an Orthodox Church based in Iran.

To modern eyes it all looks barbaric, but it’s in line with Christianity’s own history. As Europe Christianized it also devolved. The Muslim World dominated “technology” and trade for the first 500 years after the prophet, and then entered a dark time of internecine warfare that has lasted from that time to this, with various forces seeking dominance based – at least in part – on how orthodox they could be, on how hard they could make it for “true believers” to consider themselves true.

Things Left Unsaid

Think of this as Volume 18, Number 38 of the newsletter I have written weekly since March, 1997. Enjoy.

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It does not always pay for leaders to speak the truth. Sometimes, when leaders speak the truth they can give the game away and in that moment lose it.

But I’m “just” a blogger. And here are two truths for our time. First, the war with ISIS is actually a war between Saudi Arabia and…Saudi Arabia. Second, the rise of Alibaba may be the greatest existential threat China’s Communist Party has yet seen.

First things first.

The Saudi kings gained power by imposing an absolutist ideology, Wahhabism, on the Gulf Arabs. They were, in their time, no different than ISIS. No one cared then because no one knew just how much oil was under their feet.

Today the world depends on Arabian oil. Oil is the global currency. But for decades many Arabs, spurred by their Wahhabist beliefs (think of it as an Arab Tea Party), have been giving financial backing to young men who would practice a purified form of the ideology on the Sunni people and, by extension, on the whole world. Reagan encouraged this practice. One result was Al Qaeda. But that practice of fomenting war against the West did not end with 9-11. That event, and the Iraq War which followed, probably encouraged many wealthy Arabs in their hatred and distrust of the West.

They doubled down. They funded ISIS.

Suicide saved my life

by Martin Kenneth Bayne 

(Note: Martin has taken the place of a minister in my life for many years. He has had Parkinson's for 20 years, has lived in nursing care for over a dozen years, and still accomplishes more in a week than many people accomplish in a year. Those looking for my own thoughts on Robin Williams might refer to my 2007 piece on ADHD, "The Robin Williams In My Head."  RIP.)

 

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I mean no disrespect to the surviving family with this statement, nor do I seek to make light of another’s suffering. I’m simply recounting my experience.

 

In 1995, at the age of 45, and in the ascendancy of my life professionally, socially and spiritually, I was diagnosed with Idiopathic Parkinson’s Disease.

 

Today, nearly 20 years later, I look back in astonishment at the last two decades and wonder how I managed to not only survive, but to actually grow emotionally, creatively and spiritually. Make no mistake: Parkinson’s is as ruthless as it is cunning – always searching for weakened neurological conduits and components; taking every opportunity to enslave you psychologically; always making it more difficult to live with dignity and purpose. There were days it took an hour just to get out of bed. (I now sleep in a two-motor electric lift chair).

 

To what do I attribute my success? I decided to fight. I made a covenant with myself, vowing to never let Parkinson's get the upper hand.

 

Why God and Religion Seem Incompatible

Think of this as Volume 17, Number 1 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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No one knows the nature of God. We each take the final step alone, and no one has reported back anything but an emptiness or a bright light that drew them in briefly, before life in the form of a science-taught doctor pulled them back.

Faith replaces understanding. We choose to believe this or that. And faith is organized through religions. Faith represents “revealed” truth, stories that may be true or may not be, but are believed by their adherents because we're all afraid to die and we all want answers before we go.

There is nothing wrong with faith, but religions are human institutions. As such they are subject to the same forces that drive businesses, universities, and states. You're either growing or you're dying. A business that stagnates starts to die. Without growth you go backward. The process can seem invisible, to those inside, but it's an inevitable unraveling in every case.

You grow by getting more. More money, more power, more customers or adherents. To grow you contend. You must be aggressive, even ruthless at times. The result is conflict. Those who lose conflicts die quickly. Those who withdraw die more slowly, but they do die.

This is true for religions as it is for businesses. You grow or you die. Just as men grow, then die, religions must grow in numbers, grow in wealth, and grow in power, or they die.

Trouble is, this is incompatible with the nature of God. Sure, I said that's unknowable, but almost everyone agrees that the nature of God is not human, that human nature is not God's nature. What makes you successful in building an institution is not what brings you to a higher understanding of God. Any man or woman of faith will tell you that.

So Buddhism was driven out of India by the more aggressive Hindus. So the Bahai' and Zoroastrians were driven out of Iran by the more aggressive Muslims. So animism was driven out of the Americas, and Africa, by more aggressive Christians and Muslims. So it is within Christianity – passive groups like the Quakers, Unitarians and Episcopalians lose adherents to more aggressive, fundamentalist sects that demand more of their members and constantly evangelize for more.

Powerful religions make demands of their adherents. To grow, they make more demands, and demand more adherents. They demand obedience. The power of a religion is directly related to the amount of crazy stuff its leaders can convince adherents to do. Acts of greed, of brutality, or murder, are routinely committed in the name of religious power, and these acts go unpunished. In fact, groups that don't engage in these acts fade away, they lose adherents, they die.