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HISTORY LITE
BY PETER KURTH (published 04.27.05)
“There is
something in the wind abroad in this land besides the vapors of
spring.” – Jim Kunstler
Right you are, Jim, and
I’ll tell you what it is.
It’s a citizenry that knows nothing about history.
I’m moved to say this
not just from conviction, but because Ding-Dong, George W. Bush, turned up
last week at the opening of the new, improved, high-tech, holographic,
pornographic, Disney-style “Lincoln Museum” in Springfield,
Illinois, dedicated to the memory of Abraham Lincoln. There, Dubya delivered himself of a few
remarks.
“I am so honored to be
here,” he said, “to dedicate a great institution honoring such
a great American. Laura and I were
just given a tour.”
Imagine that! While you’re at it, imagine
Universal Studios’ “Island
of Adventure” in Orlando. Throw in a couple of spooky Lincoln
faces, a lot of guns going off at Antietam, John Wilkes Booth jumping down
from the assassination scene, and there you have it -- History Lite. A dumber show couldn’t exist
outside Crawford, Texas.
Better people than I last week
-- provided they could wade their way through all those stories about the
pope and those TV dramas pretending that “American voters never
knew” Franklin Roosevelt had had polio (they did, very well) -- tried
to balance Bush’s brain with Lincoln’s. All of them, so far as I know, have since
run shrieking into corners, begging for death. I refer especially to David
Rossie’s piece in The
Binghamton (NY) Press and Sun-Bulletin, which pled – no, wept
– for Americans to wake up and see how far they’ve been duped. Rossie did nothing but quote the
respective commanders-in-chief:
Lincoln
(1858): “As I would not be a
slave, so I would not be a master.
This expresses my idea of democracy.
Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no
democracy.”
Dubya (2003, speaking from Senegal,
on the west coast of Africa): “I had the opportunity to go out to
Goree Island
and talk about what slavery meant to America. It’s very interesting when you
think about it. The slaves who left
here to go to America,
because of their steadfast and their religion and their belief in freedom,
helped change America.”
“Their
steadfast,” indeed. How dumb
are we? How dumb do they think we are?
Don’t answer that. “Most of you all know,” Bush
continued, that “the First Lady was a librarian. Any time she can get me into a library is
a pretty good deal, as far as she's concerned.”
That Goofus was in a museum,
not a library, when he said this, is a distinction I’m willing to
overlook (inasmuch as the place is called The Abraham
Lincoln Library and Museum).
That he doesn’t know the difference between a museum
and a library is something I’m not
willing to overlook when he compares himself to Lincoln, and especially
when he throws the burden on the “First Lady.” (If she were a real librarian, she'd have seen
through this long ago. She’d
have had a divorce.)
"In a small way,”
Dubya stumbled on (and, for once, this rat-faced bastard got the word right),
“I can relate to the rail-splitter from out West because he had a way
of speaking that was not always appreciated by the newspapers back East. A New York Times story on his first
inaugural address reported that Mr. Lincoln was lucky 'it was not the
constitution of the English language and the laws of English grammar that
he was called upon to support.' I think that fellow is still writing for
the Times."
Oh, he’d better
be. Let us pray that he is.
“[Lincoln’s]
very election as president was regarded as a cause for war … And as he
sent legions of men to death and sacrifice, his own burden began to show in
a lined and tired face."
Leave it to Ding-Dong to
render the whole thing as a question of cosmetics. And leave it to him, also, to know
nothing about Lincoln, who declared, as he sent “men to death and
sacrifice” during the Civil War, that his head was “low and
bent”; that no pride could accrue to it; and that his only goal was
to preserve the Union. Not the “Republicans”
or the “Democrats” or the slaves or “democracy” or
“freedom” or anything else – but the Union.
I don’t think Dubya
even knows what the Union is. In the same inaugural address of 1861,
Lincoln hoped that “the better angels of our nature” would one
day prevail. And, when he said that,
he wasn’t talking about “God.”
"Mr. Lincoln had no
faith and no hope in the usual acceptation of those words,’ said Mary
Lincoln after her husband’s death (speaking of “First
Ladies”). “He never
joined a church; but still, as I believe, he was a religious man by
nature. He first seemed to think
about the subject when our boy Willie died, and then more than ever about
the time he went to Gettysburg;
but it was a kind of poetry in his nature, and he was never a technical
Christian."
Uh-oh. Last week, Bush’s vice president, Dick
Cheney, announced that he, in his capacity as president of the Senate,
would cast the decisive vote, if necessary, to further the Republican
party’s goal of “ending the filibuster” -- the so-called
nuclear option (which Republicans are now calling “the constitutional
option,” since “nuclear” didn’t play well in
polls). All this, supposedly, in the
interest of appointing “Christian” judges to the federal bench
– “people of faith.”
Any student of history knows
that this effort is not about “faith.” It’s not about
Christianity, either. It’s a
blatant and garish attempt to destroy the constitutional separation of
powers, and to put that power, ultimately, solely in the hands of the
executive, the “president.”
Who, at the moment, is a figurehead – no Lincoln,
you might say.
In 1862, Mary Lincoln heard
that one of her brothers, fighting on the Confederate side, had been killed
in battle. Elizabeth Keckley, her
best friend and a black woman, wondered why she wasn’t devastated by
it.
“Of course,” Mary
said, “it is but natural that I should feel for one so nearly related
to me, but not to the extent that you suppose. He made his choice long ago. .. He has been fighting against us; and
since he chose to be our deadly enemy, I see no special reason why I should
bitterly mourn his death.'"
Laura – read a few more
books and get back to me. I wish I
could be hopeful, but I’m not.
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