Dana Blankenhorn

The Past is a Sad Country

Of all the songs on Jason Isbell’s breakout 2013 album Southeastern, it’s Relatively Easy that holds up best.

“You should know, compared to people on a global scale, our kind has had it relatively easy.” But people are still unsettled. A brother is on a church kick, “just another form of dope sick.” A man’s wife takes his kids away and he takes Klonopin, “enough to kill a man of twice his size.” The narrator tore up his loft and is now on parole, alone.

Everyone wants more, and prosperity doesn’t change it. We all think it was better back then, that it’s all terrible and about to get worse.

It isn’t. The past wasn’t good. We live longer than ever if we’re not getting ourselves shot, overdosing on drugs, or refusing vaccines. Middle class Americans are richer than anyone in the history of the world, thanks to technology and the creativity economy. We have nothing to complain about.

Reckoning With The Great Awakening

If any period in American history deserves re-examination today, it’s The Great Awakening. 

Following a similar movement in 18^th century Britain, America’s Great Awakening came in the first half of the 19^th century. Most of our popular Protestant denominations – Methodists, Presbyterians, Baptists, and Mormons – had their heyday then.

But the most historically important group were the Millerites. They initially followed a man named William Miller who claimed to know when the Second Coming of Christ would happen, followed by the end of the world. It didn’t happen. But The Great Disappointment led, in turn, to the creation of 7^th Day Adventists.

A version of Millerism has been alive in America ever since. It was the primary reaction to the 1960s. Evangelical and fundamentalist risings occurred in both Catholic and Protestant churches. This was accompanied by rising political involvement, the “Religious Right” that stood behind Reagan, the Bushes, and Trump.

Liberals who pretend that current events are unprecedented, that mass denial of reality hasn’t happened here, haven’t studied the Great Awakening. That, too, was a rejection against elites. Its political tool was Andrew Jackson, who owned slaves, expelled Indians, treated women like dirt, and destroyed the economy along with the Second Bank of the United States. It’s no coincidence that Trump put Jackson’s picture over his desk. His is the same type of movement.

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.