Dana Blankenhorn

The Year of Penance

Think of this as Volume 12, Number 51 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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I have been searching for a word these last weeks, a single word that could sum up what 2009 has meant, the close of the first decade of the 21st century.

The word that finally came to mind is penance. (I didn't know there was a Marvel character of that name, but this picture of him is interesting.)

I was born a Roman Catholic, and I'm certain the church fathers still count me, but we drifted apart long ago. My son goes to an American Baptist church -- Roger Williams baptist as opposed to John C. Calhoun baptist. Long story short I know something of sin and forgiveness.

Penance is important, but it's only the first step on a necessary journey. You're supposed to marry intent to action. You're supposed to change your behavior.

For most of this decade America was an outlaw nation. We rejected your reality and substituted our own. Many liberals, like me, had thought of George W. Bush to be an elite imposition on our politics. What we learned this year is he wasn't. His party's grassroots may have rejected his record, but they have yet to reject a single thing he stood for.

Nixon is back and he's a Democrat

The President's speech on Afghanistan was called adult by some commentators.

Only I'm afraid it wasn't. 

That's because, like President Nixon's Silent Majority speech on Vietnam 40 years earlier, it told only half the truth. 

The President's strategy of a quick build-up, and then a quick draw-down, in Afghanistan only makes sense as part of a larger Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy.

Just as Nixon didn't tell America about his secret war in Laos or his plans for Cambodia, so President Obama did not discuss the dirty war the CIA is waging now, and will continue to wage, in Pakistan.

Culture Shock

Think of this as Volume 12, Number 48 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Ever take a look at hair styles of the 1970s? Or the clothes?

Maybe this will jog your memory. It's a picture of me (the sullen one at the right) taken with my father and brother in 1976.

My dad at that time was 56, close to the age I am now. He was a conservative man, a small businessman. Note the leisure suit. Note the long hair on all of us. My brother, then 13, seemed to be sporting what later came to be known as an "anglo," a sort of white man's afro, a round, curly confection of hair which at the time, I believe, was a sort of dirty blond.

We were dressed this way because that was what culture dictated at the time. This was after 8 years of Republican political dominance, which would be interrupted only briefly by Watergate and the Carter Administration.

America's politics began moving solidly to the right in the late 1960s, and continued moving to the right through the George W. Bush Administration. The turn has just now come, and it's tentative.

The same thing happened (ironically) at the dawn of the liberal era. All those movies featuring elegant people in ballrooms, dressed to the nines, existed against the backdrop of a nation in rags. (Shown are Guy Kibbee and Joan Blondell in "Gold Diggers of 1933.")

Or go back another 40 years. All the cultural touchstones of the "Ragtime" era were in direct opposition to what was really going on. The long dresses, the foppish hats, the attraction of opera, all were in opposition to the growing urban restiveness and populist rage of the time. 

Sure the Populists  lost. They were hammered. Yet William Jennings Bryan remained a very popular figure right up to his death. Mencken's "booboisie" were populist in outlook, sometimes (not always) layered with progressive pretensions.

We're talking culture here, not politics.

Squeal Like a Pig

Think of this as Volume 12, Number 43 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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The recent dust-up between the Obama Administration and Fox News deserves a proper response from someone who knows a little political history.

Squeal like a pig! (This is a family blog. Those who wish to can learn why actor Bill McKinney is smiling at y'all on his Web site.)

Regular readers will know I've been pushing this quite some time. I have actually been looking forward to comparing someone like Joe Biden to Spiro Agnew. And for good historical reason.

The most important thing a Thesis must do, not for validation but just to get its program through, is to change the formula of what is acceptable.

The boundaries were pretty easy to set in our nation's first generational crisis, the Civil War. Supporting the South was treason, supporting peace giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

The job was done most subtly by FDR. Many people think of the Hays Code as having been about sex. But has anyone asked why the Roosevelt Administration endorsed it? It was because the Code demanded that movies support the government, saying that "Law, natural or human, shall not be ridiculed."

The Limits of Tolerance

Think of this as Volume 12, Number 41 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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The most important task we face, in moving from a Thesis of Conflict to a Thesis of Consensus, is defining and enforcing the limits of tolerance.

In a Thesis of Conflict there are no limits. Spiro Agnew began the development of the  Nixon Thesis under the baton of William Safire  with personal invective. He belittled critics  as "nattering nabobs of negativism" and the insults have only escalated from there.

This achieved its ultimate expression during the George W. Bush Administration, where 9-11 ushered in a second era of McCarthyism, an echo of hate as profound in its way as the Second Rising of the Klan during the first years of the last century.

It's important to remember that the Second Rising succeeded for a generation. It legitimized violence against blacks. It transformed the past, turning the Civil War into the Birth of a Nation. It countenanced lynching of anyone who, like Leo Frank, seemed different or even tolerant. It created Jim Crow, leaving blacks little better than serfs not just in the South, but in the North as well.

The Birth of a Nation premiered 50 years after the Civil War ended. The Bush-inspired Second Era of McCarthyism debuted 50 years after the height of the first McCarthy era, the time of the blacklist.

It's no accident.

The Simple Party, the Complicated Party

The current division between America's political parties does not lie in their view of government. (Both like it if they have it.) It's not, as the sketch above shows, between silly and sensible.

It's more basic than that. It's in their attitude toward problem-solving.

Conservatives think it's simple. Liberals insist it's complicated.

Enabling Violence

Think of this as Volume 12, Number 40 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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When violent rhetoric escalates, and it's not put down, the end result is violence.

Speech is free, but free speech carries responsibilities.

I know whereof I speak. I have an ADD temper. My son has an ADD temper. To the right is what he did to the living room, moments ago, because I dared disagree with him.

Politics works the same way. And its patterns run in waves, similar to Elliot Waves. There are short-term waves based on issues, and longer-term waves based on assumptions. The biggest waves come when a generation's assumptions are not just challenged, but overthrown. This happened in last year's election, which was the first time since 1964 a liberal candidate won a clear mandate from the American people.

This fact has driven conservatives loopy. Their loopiness was indulged, even used as a weapon, during the Bush years. It is still indulged by the nation's media out of habit. A single election won't change the knee-jerk media assumption that "America is a center-right nation."

We had this kind of violent rhetoric and acting-out before, in my living memory. It came in 1969-70, it came from the left, and it was finally confronted, first in the words of Spiro Agnew, finally in the killings at Kent State and Jackson State.

These actions scarred the left, and still scar it. Young activists dropped out of activism, becoming yuppies, religious nuts, Reaganites, and now senior citizens. Leftists learned there were limits, not just in what they could do, but what they could say. Liberals learned that they were no longer the majority, they were the minority, and eventually comported themselves accordingly.

For nearly 40 years our politics have been an abusive relationships, with conservatives as the wife beaters and liberals as the wives. Conservatives know that by contriving anger, by throwing fits, by constantly attacking, by never backing down, and eventually by threatening violence they will force liberals to back down.

Identifying the Crazy

Frank Rich did us all a favor by providing some historical perspective to the hysterical ramblings of Glenn Beck.

Glenn Beck, it seems, is playing the 1897 Game.

Much of what passes for the Right today is a reversed version of 1969. Haties are hippies, born followers of the previous thesis who, in the wake of a crisis for which they had no answers, are just taking their ideas to extremes.

Beck's nonsense has deeper historical roots. While we think of Populism in terms of William J. Bryan, even assigning it some liberal values because it opposed Wall Street and led to such innovations as the Income Tax and Federal Reserve, it was in fact a cross-partisan festival of hatred against "the other."

This is reflected best perhaps at the Georgia State Capitol. You won't find a statue of Jimmy Carter or Martin Luther King Jr. there. Instead you'll see this man, the Populist Thomas E. Watson.

Watson actually got a sniff of national power as a potential vice president to Bryan in 1896. His statue stands where it does, however, thanks to his later proclamations of racism and anti-semitism, which culminated in the lynching of Leo Frank and the second rising of the KKK. The statue's legend reads, "A champion of the right who never faltered in the cause."

Beck's nonsense is cut from the same cloth. Unlike Fox' other nutcases, Beck is virulently anti-Wall Street. He is also overtly religious, adding to its bigotry a hatred of black and brown people, all wrapped up in a "caring" attitude for The Little Guy.

That's Watson all over.

Keith Olbermann calls the result "Lonesome Rhodes," after the character Andy Griffith played in 1957's "A Face in the Crowd." Griffith's Rhodes was a bigoted, profane force of nature, an Arkansas con man whose act won him money, fame and power until he took himself too seriously.

Beck isn't as good an actor as Griffith. He's not as  self-aware as Rhodes was. It's important that Watson did not become the man on the pedestal until his national flame had dimmed, when he became a hurricane for regional injustice, until his followers actually committed murder for him.

Beck''s probably not that strong, either.

Stopping the Haties

Think of this as Volume 12, Number 38 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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The most urgent political task before America today is to remove the Haties from our political discussions, to exile them, to set boundaries on the right which politicians and the media dare not cross for fear of being marginalized.

Nixon and Agnew's great success, that is to say William Safire's and Pat Buchanan's great success, was to set such boundaries for the left.

Ever since 1969 the work of conservatism has been to push these boundaries inward. That's part of what a political thesis does. It channels what is legitimate and exiles those who cross the border to the margins of political life. It falls when this becomes bad policy, irrelevant to the times, and when it makes this obvious to the people, as conservatism did in the floods of Katrina.

This was pretty easy for Buchanan, for Safire, and for Nixon. The hippies of the late 1960s were never a serious threat. Their ideology was faintly foreign. They were, even then, just a fringe of the Democratic Party. George McGovern would never have gotten close to a Presidential nomination but for "the horrors" of Watergate that destroyed everyone to his right.

Unfortunately the Haties are buried deep within the Republican Party center. You can say they are its center. Until recently they were our rulers -- even when Haties have rejected George W. Bush as a person they have embraced his policies, including their excesses.

Before Katrina, I would argue, the Haties were the mainstream and the non-Haties were the exiled. The success of writing the Dixie Chicks out of our public life, of transforming Howard Dean into a screaming meamie, and of intimidating the media into printing the lies about Iraq without question, all attest to this fact.

The Sound of Michelle

One more piece about President Obama's speech the other night, because it hasn't been mentioned anywhere.

Near the end, he changed his speaking style. Obama has always been great for the big occasions, noble stentorian tones inspiring millions. But in a small room he's not the best speaker in the world. Not even best in his own bed.

When he spoke of Ted Kennedy, the President adopted the speaking style of his wife, Michelle. I have only seen her speak a few times, during the campaign, and she is great in a small room. She is intimate, she is passionate. If I were on trial for my life I'd want her defending me, not her husband, because she can sway a jury.

An important talent for a great writer, a great comic, a great athlete or a great politician is to steal someone else's moves. Michael Jordan did that. By the end of his career he was doing Karl Malone's leaning-back jumper better than Malone did it, and more effectively.

So in using his wife's voice, Barack Obama paid her a great compliment. She's just as good a lawyer as he is, just as well trained and well educated, yet she has deliberately kept herself in the role of First Lady. It's not beneath her, she tells us by that. And she's great at it.