Dana Blankenhorn

The E-Bike Life

I have been an urban cyclist for 45 years.  But age is real. At 68, a short ride can easily send my heart rate to places it shouldn’t be.

The answer is an e-bike.

I have been using an e-bike we bought for my son’s commute for several months now. The e-bike I chose is the Lectric XP 3. It cost $1,000, amazing because my old road bike cost me $800 in 1981.

The Lectric is foldable. It’s too heavy for a bike rack, but it breaks at the base and the handlebars so you can get it into the trunk of a Toyota Corolla. The battery is in the down tube. You plug it into the wall. (Unplug it as soon as the light goes green.) Top speed is 20, with pedal assist, but the weight lets it run down Atlanta’s hills at 25-30. Range is estimated at 20 miles but the way I ride, which is carefully, it’s closer to 30.

The Other Urban War

A lot of people want to say American cities are a war zone. They’re not. The whole country is.

But there is a form of warfare happening in our cities. It’s a development war, a transport war.

It’s happening for two reasons.

First, cars don’t scale. Each car takes up space, whether moving or parked.

Second, demographics and economics are creating urban density. A research university, and the businesses that spin off from it, cluster together. The people who work there don’t always make a lot of money.

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.