By Bill Colley
Not that I’m always a day late and a dollar short but I finally watched Lincoln. And not the movie about the vampire slayer. Cueing up the film was the last thing I did before bed last night. Two hours and twenty two minutes of whispering later (interspersed with 3 minutes of Tommy Lee Jones yelling) it came to an end. A friend at a picnic told me last summer there was far too much talking and too little action, although. The acting was certainly solid. The story a good one and Lincoln’s overwhelming burdens of family, grief and war well documented.
This is cinema the liberals love. It shows a President changed by crisis and following what he sees as self-evident truths. The lead character even quotes Euclid about what in life is self-evident (I must admit there was a great story about Ethan Allen and a portrait of George Washington but I missed the punch line because my Mary Todd suddenly wanted her back scratched.) The movie makes it abundantly clear the President shredded the Constitution of the United States often when he found it suited his political needs and when he believed it for his self-evident causes. It’s also clear Lincoln knew he was violating the bedrock beliefs of the union he was working diligently to preserve.
I’m not a Lincoln revisionist. I still go to his monument and stand in awe. He governed in a time of extraordinary circumstances. Still, I’ve got my own self-evident truths and have now lived long enough to realize my thoughts are generally very subjective. Any polarizing figure with a lick of brains reaches, I suspect, the same conclusion. Lincoln had cause for the war. The Confederacy presented it on a platter by firing on Ft. Sumter. Imagine today the Castro family started shelling Guantanamo Bay? Havana would feel some heat tomorrow. One take away from the movie was Lincoln allowing tens of thousands of corpses to pile up after spurning Confederate entreaties for peace. He traded those lives for the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Some historians believe slavery was collapsing under its own cost even before the outbreak of the Civil War. It no longer made economic sense. The politicians of the day didn’t have the advantage of 150 years of hindsight. Harry Truman is vilified by many peaceniks for smoking two Japanese cities. They claim the Empire of the Sun was ready for surrender. Truman wasn’t even aware of an aborted coup to prevent raising the white flag one week after the second bombing. At least not until after the war was officially finished. He may have traded lives but he didn’t trade American lives.
Liberals don’t fear the ambiguities in Lincoln’s story. Perusing National Review last week I came across a writer pointing out the new left insists their self-evident view of social justice trumps our founding documents. It’s why they clamor for President Obama to rule as Emperor. The Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson wrote after watching Lincoln the current President could rule by decree.
These last couple of weeks I’m hearing even more of that balderdash. Pearl Harbor isn’t smoldering and no Americans are legally being held in chains.
So what’s the commonality from Lincoln’s time? A pollster I saw earlier on TV last night called this pre-revolutionary America. The long economic slide is breaking apart a two party system never even mentioned in the Constitution. Pat Buchanan and Charles Murray are writing about two Americas. The former along a political divide and the latter along cultural and economic lines and here’s more of my self-evidence: The President, his fellow travelers in media, entertainment and academia want an unlimited credit card and to print more deflated currency. It’s the only way they can keep the promises to a constituency raised by a nanny state and a state increasingly hell bent on infantilizing the children from cradle-to-grave. A system not sustainable but to admit the mistake will bring hellfire in the streets. It’s why local police departments are armed to the teeth. These institutions no longer serve the citizens of a republic but protect morally bankrupt masters from the vengeful mob.
This isn’t just a Democrat/Republican divide. I certainly no longer can tell the difference between Boehner and Pelosi and media creates a canyon out of pixie dust to maintain the illusion.
The serious opposition is small. It’s described as illiterate, racist, toothless and any number of calumnies designed to frighten the mobs at the government trough and, yet. The master must realize the mob is the greater threat! It’s where I find hope. While no one will escape the storm the opposition may be the least scathed.
A day will come when it’s time to pick up the pieces. There was a scene in last night’s movie where a character challenged by an antagonist explains despite a series of tribulations the country was still standing. Even if halved it was still standing. Amidst the ruins and piles of corpses it still stood. I just pray to God my loved ones are all still standing when it’s over.
http://blog.saltair.tv/2013/10/12/watching-lincoln–finding-no-obama.aspx
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