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GELFAND’S WORLD - Kevin Drum passed away at the age of 66 following a long and drawn out case of multiple myeloma. He was, to borrow a phrase, perhaps the most influential blogger that nobody had ever heard of. I borrow this phrase, which was previously used to describe the Washington Monthly magazine, because Kevin was, for several years, the official blogger for them. Prior to that, he did his own online column which he called Calpundit. At a later time, he became the blogger for Mother Jones, and for the rest of his life after retiring from Mother Jones, he did his own blog which he called Jabberwocking. It's not exactly true that nobody had ever heard of him -- he seems to have had a following of several tens of thousands of people -- maybe even more -- but he stayed writing rather than trying to make the stretch to television, as it suited his talents.
The result of all this blogging was to create an oasis of rationality in an increasingly polarized country. He was particularly good at challenging the sorts of rumors that became conventional wisdom. Here is one example: Does increasing the minimum wage cause prices to shoot up? If you read conservative commenters, you will learn that they must shoot up because reasons. Kevin looked at the actual data for the state of California after it raised the minimum wage for fast food workers. Take a look at it here. Kevin showed that the cost of a $4 hamburger went up about 6 cents.
That was his way. He considered the political and economic arguments communicated by either side of the aisle and then went looking for the actual data.
By the way, if you look at the piece cited above, you can see the other Drum talent, which was to present material in the form of a graph. In the story on the California minimum wage increase, he showed pictorially that the conventional wisdom was way off, and that fast food prices were not skyrocketing in response to the new law.
There are a couple of things he was best known for. Back in the early days of internet blogging when downloading was slow and the technology was still limited, he uploaded a photo of his cat to the blog. It became the habit called Friday Cat Blogging and was known around the world.
But most of what Kevin did was on politics and economics and in one memorable case, the cause of violent crime. I suspect that this is what he will be remembered for best, and it's worth describing here.
The discovery was not Kevin's. But Kevin popularized the theory in a world which would otherwise have not heard about it.
Here's the briefest summary possible: When cars burn gasoline which contains the additive tetraethyl lead, it puts a lot of lead into the air. In the parts of cities where traffic is heavy and goes right past dwellings, young children breathe in the lead. It harms their developing brains. One of the most significant effects is a loss of self-control due to damage to one part of the brain. The result, as history and statistics showed, was a dramatic increase in murders and other violent crimes to approximately double what they had been previously. When countries such as the United States banned the use of lead as a gasoline additive, the crime rate dropped back to the level it had been pre-lead. That, Kevin explained, was why we saw such a dramatic drop in murders in this country over the 1990s.
By itself, this theory is interesting but not perfectly compelling. Kevin followed up the original discussion with new data as it accumulated, until it was hard to resist buying into the belief in what has come to be known as the lead-crime connection.
The theory may not seem all that important at this point since we no longer use lead in gasoline, but that would be untrue. It's vitally important since society's failure to understand the connection resulted in the public backlash against rising crime that continues. Some of us will remember the use of the term "super predators" by the Clintons to describe the anticipated crime surge at a moment when crime had been steadily increasing, and before the decline had begun. As Kevin explained -- and showed with convincing graphs -- there was about a 20-year lag between the introduction of lead into gasoline and the crime peak. That's because brain damage was most severe in the very young -- those whose brains are just then developing -- and the same children reach their peak crime years in their 20s. There was, likewise, a slow decline in violent crime following the outlawing of leaded gasoline. (Even the lead-damaged criminals will somewhat grow out of their peak crime years, partly because they spend a lot of time in prison.) As Kevin (and then others) pointed out, crime went down all over the country, but each new police chief took credit for it and pointed to his own particular methodology as the saving grace.
I will admit that this is a strange way to craft an attempt at an obituary, but it is fitting that we understand and give credit to one -- and this is just one -- of Kevin Drum's contributions to understanding.
Kevin Drum had a dry wit. Here's my favorite story. Back in the early years of the George W. Bush presidency, Vice President Dick Cheney came to Los Angeles for a fundraiser. In his blog, Kevin mentioned that Cheney was coming to town, and you could meet him if you were willing to pay the $2500 price for attending the event. But If you want to meet me, Kevin told us, I'll be having lunch in the upstairs picnic area at the Farmers Market. No charge.
So that's how I met Kevin. I figured that there might be 3 or 4 of us showing up, and it would be a polite chat. When I got there, I saw that there were dozens and dozens of people. Practically every influential blogger between here and Bakersfield had managed to come. "That person looks sort of familiar," I said to somebody, and was told, "Oh, that's Arianna Huffington."
What started as a bit of wry humor developed into something of a convention of the online community.
He described his own illness in a straightforward and calm way, as if he were reporting on somebody else. He would on rare occasions run a new entry -- typically with the heading "My health" and he would report on that indication of cancerous growth called M Protein. Along the way, he explained how he was about to undergo some new, experimental therapy and would then report dispassionately as to the result. Perhaps this was just his adopted literary style, but it seemed incredibly brave at the time.
As an honest and thoughtful person, Kevin was outraged at the way that the Fox News organization has perverted reality in order to push its right-wing agenda. He was outraged at Donald Trump's behavior in office and his penchant for lying. He was particularly good at chronicling the Trump offenses, and I think that that is what I will best remember him for.
I was asked who Kevin's heir will be in terms of presenting the rational and accurate story. I don't know. There are still a few bloggers, and there are larger sites (such as CityWatch) but there is currently nobody with that penchant for searching out the wrong beliefs that are spread by lazy journalists. And that nose for sniffing out lazy journalism and exposing the truth was the great Kevin Drum talent, and the one that will be sorely missed.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected].)
