Dana Blankenhorn

The Siege of America

Americans have felt under siege for over 13 years now.

The present era of history, the backlash against President Obama and all Americans who supported him, began within days of his election.

It has only accelerated since.

First, Obama himself was declared illegitimate, other, a foreigner. This lie made it easy to define Obama’s supporters in the same way.

Vladimir Putin used this hatred to make Donald Trump President. There is no longer any serious question. Trump was Putin’s man.

Trump created the conditions for a Second American Civil War. It began his first year in office. It only grew hotter after the murder of George Floyd.

Every American, even the most fervent Trump supporters, learned in 2020 that they were a minority among Americans. This broke their faith in the American Constitution, as the Confederacy broke faith with it in 1861. As was true then, government “of the people, by the people, for the people” was redefined to mean only some people.

Many Republicans still support Russia over Ukraine. Others seek to drop their own past into a memory hole, while retaining the essence of Putinism. They believe only those loyal to their twisted, anti-American ideals has a right to rule. They believe women should be slave to a man’s sperm, that blacks should be slaves to whites, that gays should be slave to straights, and that only history reflecting this may be taught. Anyone sympathizing with Obama’s America deserves to be oppressed, forced to repeat lies and made to shut up, forever.

This is what makes Ukraine the real turning point of history. The war in Ukraine is revealing the Civil War within America. The minority is as armed and angry as the South was in 1860.

Electric Scion

I am keeping my 2005 Scion xB. (I tell everyone it stands for eXtra Boxy.)

The xB gets 30 miles to the gallon, which was sweet in 2004. For the first year I had it, so many people wanted to check out the interior I felt like a dealer.

The Scion now has 168,000 miles on it. As I have aged, I have started to notice the lack of seat padding. The inside feels tinny because it is – it’s all sheet metal and plastic to get the best mileage from a Corolla chassis.

Point is I should be in the market for an electric car. But I’m not.

I blame the car companies.

There’s no good reason an electric car should cost what it does. There is a reason, however. The reason is Tesla. They started with the luxury end of the market and have gradually moved down toward the mass market. But a Tesla is still pricey. So is every other electric.

It’s All Biden’s Fault

I have a friend who is mad as hell at Joe Biden right now.

There’s a job waiting for him overseas. He’s fully vaccinated. But he can’t prove it to his new employer’s satisfaction. Even if the host country lets him in, he’ll have to be in quarantine for 2 weeks, at great expense, before he can start work.

How can this be, he asks? Why hasn’t the President mandated vaccine passports?

We all overestimate what a President can do. The media treats him as magic, the final authority, the one person responsible for everything.

But the President’s powers are severely circumscribed. Especially in this case.

There is no national medical database. There’s no federal control over health insurance. Under the McCarran-Ferguson Act , passed in 1945, health insurance is a state function. Even the decision upholding the Affordable Care Act held that states didn’t have to take its Medicaid expansion. Many still don’t.

The Monument

The Civil War is still being fought. It can still be lost.

One way it’s being fought is through monuments.

Early in the 20th Century, groups of southerners seeking to glorify white supremacy and the “Lost Cause” built monuments in town squares around the country, including in DeKalb County, Georgia, where I live.

Stone Mountain is the largest such monument. There are many others. One sits in front of the old county courthouse in Decatur.

When these monuments are threatened, their supporters swarm, claiming they have nothing to do with treason, or white supremacy, but are simply meant to commemorate heroes and a part of American history.

It’s hard to fight them, on behalf of an empty town square.

A Week in Ireland

My late father was German, but my mother is a full-throated Irishwoman, born Mathilda Gertrude Edwina O’Donnell. You don’t get much more Irish than that without potatoes coming out of your ears, a shillelagh whipping the kids’ backsides and “Danny Boy” playing through the speakers of your mind at full blast. (That's Tillie on the left, Fred on the right, with me and my wife between, 

Now, a caveat. I was named for my mother’s grandma O’Donnell, who was born Anna Korzeniowski, in New Bedford, Mass., in 1867. Anna’s dad was Polish, her mother English. Dana is a Polish name, and sounds as much like Anna as my sister Michael’s name sounds like Mathilda. It took me six decades to figure all this out – the Polish origins of Dana are why I’m the only Dana Blankenhorn you’ll ever see or hear from (a great present from my mother to the Internet age). But my grandmother was born a Cooney, and they’re even more Irish than the O’Donnells.

What this means was that I just had to make a pilgrimage to Ireland. I had to go to Ireland, in the worst way.

The Best Journalist In The World

It's not me. It's no one who was trained in the field.

It's this guy. Anthony Bourdain. A cook.

At the heart of all the best journalist is that you go to the heart of the story, that you invest yourself in the story you're telling, and that you change as the reader or viewer changes. 

This is what Bourdain does. It's what no one else does, because we're all trained to be detached, like cops, or given the concept of a “false equivalency,” which makes all actions by anyone equally valid. Which is crazy.

What made Bourdain a journalist was his Beirut show in 2006.  As he said, he went there as a snarky chef out to stuff his face and have a good time. He left it as a refugee, in an American warship. You can actually see the change take hold of him as the show goes on.

It never left. We can all be thankful for that. Because when you watch the run of his shows since then, he's a different man, with a different mission. Instead of having “fixers” show him where the good restaurants are, now he works to find sources who can tell him the story of a place. And then he sits, and he listens, and in the editing room he explains.

It's beautiful.

A Nice Ride for a Good Cause

One blessing of freelancing is that, if the weather's nice and spirit moves, you can just go out and take a bike ride.

That's what I did this morning. For a good cause.

It was called Georgia Rides to the Capitol. It started from the MARTA station by my house. It ran to the State Capitol, about five miles away. It had a police escort. It was 70 degrees and sunny.I'd already blogged about AT&T. I couldn't resist.

I thought I would be among the oldest participants. Boy, was I wrong. I haven't seen that much gray hair since my last college reunion. It was gratifying. I felt like one of the young 'uns.

Not that there weren't young 'uns. One couple pulled a trailer where their two-year old sat like a queen on her throne, playing with a video game. A 20-something couple rode on a tandem, both in street clothes, both sans helmets, both with flowing hair running down their backs. "Hey," I wanted to say. "My youth called. It wants my hair back." A man near my own age pedaled a heavy street bike, without a helmet, wearing a shell sweater over a dress shirt and tie.

My one regret is that I never asked any of my fellow riders to snap a few shots of me, so you'd see how spiffy I look in my riding togs. The picture to the left is a few years old.

America is a Germanic Country

Think of this as Volume 14, Number 42 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Here is something you weren't told in school.

America is a Germanic country.

Our food is German. Our dress is German. Our distances, both personal and urban, are German. Our sense of beauty is German, not French. Our bread and sweets are German. Our loud laughter is German. America has people of French and Spanish and Polish and English and Irish and a hundred other descents, but the Germans set the mood, and the mood remains the same.

Facing the Fear of Otherness

Think of this as Volume 14, Number 14 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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If you've never been to China it can be the most fearsome place imaginable. You think of communist drones, chained to machines by their slave masters, and you think of a government plotting our economic destruction.

That's not China. (I know it's horribly blurry, but these people are ballroom dancing in a park in Chengdu. We Tai Chi, they do the foxtrot.)

China is a far more complex place than you imagine. But this I know. Most of its 1.3 billion people are just like you and I. They want the same things for their children we do. They're mainly just trying to get ahead.

What they fear most, on the whole, is chaos. Chaos destroyed China throughout the last century, it took 100 years away. The chaos of the late 19th century, when China was carved up by Europe. The chaos of the warlord era, the chaos of Japanese occupation, the chaos of civil war, and the chaos Mao Zedong unleashed repeatedly, trying to beat the China-ness out of his people.

Chinese people, I learn, date the history of modern China to only 1978. In these 32 years they have built a great Industrial society, the dominant producer of goods on our planet. This has given hundreds of millions things they never dreamt of before. Cars. Refrigerators. Apartments in the sky and, for a lucky few, fabulous wealth.  (This is Zhang Yaqin in 1978. He is now global vice president for Microsoft, and heads its Chinese research group.)

What built China? Capitalism, we say. Order, they say. In fact is was both. Capitalism needs order just as liberty needs order. Our Constitution gives us Ordered Liberty, not "freedom." It is a system under which we set the limits, and where we have the power to both enforce them and change them. But there are limits. Without law and order capitalism as a system can't exist.

China's government is many things. It is complex, it is opaque, it is bureaucratic, it is powerful. The one thing it's not is communist. Chinese people have fewer guarantees of health care than we do. Everything is a competition. Getting more than a rudimentary education requires passing an ever-harder series of exams. The price of failure in anything is incredibly high. Everyone is a slave to the market, not the party, and the "oppression" we complain of there is the last thing from most minds.

But there's another absolutely vital point you must know about China. They have many more problems than we do, much bigger problems, and most people there know it. There are tensions between the fast-developing coast and the interior. There are ethnic problems. There is pollution. There is the problem of an economy that must slow and a currency whose price must rise, and wherever its leaders turn lies the possibility of chaos large and small.

There is no doubt who has the better hand to play between Hu Jintao and Barack Obama. It's Obama. It's us. (To the left, Hu's expected successor, Xi Jingping.)

It is this knowledge that needs to guide our hand.

We have an opportunity to turn today's great competition into something both sides can win. We remain the stronger side. We can make concessions.

But concessions don't matter unless they're offered in a spirit of equal humanity. We need to learn more about each other -- our governments, our elites, our media, our people. On both sides.

We need more honest translations of what Chinese are writing, and they need more honest dialogue from us. Both sides need to understand the needs of the long term, the need of our grandchildren to have a breathable atmosphere and drinkable water, and the need of China to evolve into a post-industrial society, not just an industrial one. 

The Internet is our secret weapon in that, and while we can protest China's "great firewall," is must be from an understanding that the effort is self-defeating on their part. The great challenges facing both sides require free inquiry, free minds and open hearts if they're to be solved. And solutions can come from anywhere, from anyone. Building walls against possible solutions is building a wall against yourself.

We can be more open, and from that example so can they.

My point is the enemy in this case is not China. It's not China's government, not its people, not its businesses. The enemy is fear, our fear of them, their fear of us. It's the same enemy I faced 35 years ago, the same fear my friend faces every day of his life.

Engagement is the victory. Isolation is the enemy.

Why America Will Win

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Think of this as Volume 12, Number 24 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Having just spent three weeks in China, Taiwan and Japan, I have gotten a new perspective on America's future prospects.

They are incredibly bright.

It's important to note that now, because business lobbyists and conservatives generally have launched a campaign to tell us the opposite. China and other low-wage countries are going to eat our lunch unless we tighten our belts and accept less (except, of course, for rich businessmen, who must have more "incentives" to "keep jobs here.")

It's nonsense. As serious as America's problems are, they are far less severe than those anywhere else. 

And we have more weapons with which to fight those problems than anyone else does.

China

Take China. When rich businessmen want to talk down America's prospects the best "ooga booga booga" they have is China. China has all our debt. China has low wages. China has us by the balls.

Bullshit. We have China by the balls.

The first stop on my recent journey was Chengdu, in Sichuan. It's the last stop west before you hit the Himalayas. With help (widely advertised) from people everywhere else in China, they are recovering from the earthquake. 

You know what the Chengdu middle class most wants to be? American. They take American names, they love American music. While our oldsters are supposedly doing Tai Chi in the morning, their retired are ballroom dancing every evening. When they want a beer their first choice is Budweiser. For coffee it's Starbucks. A big night out is Pizza Hut. They want to drive Buicks.

China today reminds me of nothing so much as America in the early 1960s. Those who have built the present economy are a lot like our Greatest Generation in outlook. The next generation, the "Little Emperors," are spoiled like my peers were as kids. They assume economic freedom (and responsibility), and their kids assume freedom of thought as their right.

China is also like Japan 20 years ago. The one-child policy means that the population is aging, fast. Fewer productive workers to support a growing population of retired. The government won't be able to push the Little Emperors about as they did the parents, because they need the kids to have active minds, to be innovative, to help China climb the development ladder and earn more to support the elderly. 

You can make a man work. You can't make him think. 

China also suffers more from pollution than we do. The 1.3 billion are packed into a fraction of the land mass. Vast areas of Tibet, Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang are, and will remain, nearly empty, without the water to nurture more people. Chengdu's air is like LA's was 30 years ago, already, a choking smog smothering the city. The water's still good because they're so close to the source. 

So you have demographic change, you have environmental degradation, you have a growing generation gap, and you have a political system that currently can't accommodate those demands. If we really are playing poker with China, we've got a much better hand. 

Oh, and that dollar problem? It's all theirs, not ours. Say they've got $2 trillion stashed in U.S. assets right now. Devalue by half (give the Yuan an honest value) and those assets are worth just $1 trillion. China has a bigger stake in a strong dollar than we do. They say that at some point, if you borrow enough from the bank, that you own the bank? We own China. 

Taiwan

If any place illustrates the strains and dangers facing China, it's Taiwan.

I found Taiwanese more into being Chinese than the Chinese. They protect ancient Chinese traditions and culture, even while embracing the modern world. They are far ahead of China in that respect. If China could model its evolution toward any place, it would be Taiwan. 

So China is taking advantage of the current recession to embrace Taiwan. Taiwan is becoming China's unofficial agent, representing its manufacturers to the West, helping them climb the development ladder and climb the value chain. In return China is buying Taiwan's goods and putting a new gloss on its own history.

While in Chengdu I saw how this plays out, in a mini-series about the Chinese revolution. Chiang kai-Shek and the Nationalists are not treated as scum in in this series. They are seen as honorable, as brave and resilient, as noble. It's as if the Confederates built a viable society in Cuba after our Civil War. Takes some of the romantic gloss off things, but it's no longer just good guys and bad guys. 

Why this change of heart? Because Taiwan has freedom and democracy and capitalism, education and talent, but it is not in anarchy, the spectre of which is why Chinese tolerate what we call authoritarianism. China can answer Taiwan's short term problems, and Taiwan can answer China's long term problems. 

But it will take time. More time, perhaps, than either country has.

Japan

I love Japan. I love the Japanese. Some of my best friends are Japanese.

But in terms of international competition, Japan is what's ahead of China. Best case scenario. And Japan isn't taking over anyone.

The last 20 years have humbled Japan. The 90s were an economically "lost decade" and just as the economy seemed to get back on track, this latest recession has hit hard. 

One result is that Japanese have become more insular. Where once they seemed like Englishmen, now they seem more French. If this is all there is make the most of it.

One of my Japanese friends explained the problem this way. Japanese society still can't handle the risks of individualism. The nail that sticks up gets pounded down. This limits the size of the underclass (although it exists), but it dramatically limits its upside. 

It's that upside risk that Japan most needs to take, but remains unwilling to take. If a kid has Asperger's or ADHD and grows up Japanese, they're not nurtured -- they're isolated. Great potential also carries the risk of failure, and a society that won't risk failure won't make great successes either.

There have been Japanese entrepreneurs, great Japanese artists, great Japanese innovators in every field. Just not enough. And there's no prospect that these numbers will grow. Because Japan is getting old, fast. Some 21% in the last census were over 65, and by the next census 25% will be. 

What happens most when a society ages is that it tends to look backward. Some of the most popular shows in Japan today are about history or nostalgia. 

America

After 18 days in China, Taiwan and Japan I headed home anxious to hear some English. 

I was in the backyard yesterday, checking out some vegetables growing near my back fence, and I opened my ears. To my left, a crew of Meixcans were chattering in Spanish, repairing my neighbor's drainage. In front of me another crew was chattering in Czech, framing up an addition to my house. 

"We're taking over," the Czech foreman laughed when I mentioned this. "But by the time you do you'll be us," I informed him, "so good luck to you."

Despite everything, America remains the most diverse nation on Earth, the most welcoming of newcomers, the most willing to accept risky behaviors and mindsets. As a result we're not aging like Japan or even China. We are still in many ways a young society, a society of risk takers.

This is why America will win the future. We have embraced freedom without falling into anarchy for over 200 years. We have fallen many times, but we have always gotten up. And we're getting up again, because my Czech home framers, as well as one of my Chengdu hosts, are all in the process of becoming Americans. 

You forget how exciting the idea of America is until you're away for a while. Then you see it. The risk-taking, the adaptability, the flexibility, the tolerance of difference. It was hard won, especially over the last 40 years. 

Many Americans, as nostalgic for their past as old Japanese, think we took a wrong turn in the late 1960s and things have been going downhill. That's just not true. We have been evolving, as individuals and a society, toward a more perfect union, with more room for growth and innovation than any other nation on Earth possesses.

We're what everyone wants to be, where everyone wants to be. America renews itself as no nation on Earth, and is still renewing itself. 

This will be the second American century. Count on it.