|
|
|
How Lincoln Gave Us Kwanzaa
 Kwanzaa is imminent, but I’m
planning to observe the holidays in a more traditional manner, curling up with
The Snoop Dogg Christmas Album. Mutatis mutandis, Snoop Dogg is
this generation’s Nat “King” Cole, and I look forward to
his interpretation of that old chestnut “The Christmas Song.”
Yes,
there are obvious superficial  differences
between Cole and Dogg. Cole relied
more heavily on vibrato and orchestral backing, and he was never arrested
for packing heat and illegal drugs in an airport. But then, it was a more
laid-back age. Unlike today’s rap artists, Cole didn’t have to
worry about being offed by his rivals, such as Perry Como. These days, rap
has given the ancient maxim new relevance: ars longa, vita brevis.
Snoop Dogg has already surpassed the normal life span of a rap artist. Ask
any actuary.
Meanwhile, the bipartisan James Baker commission has finally issued
its report on Iraq. Bipartisan is the usual term for a bunch of old
white guys, even if they include an old black guy like Vernon Jordan, who has
probably never heard of Dogg.
The
report says we need to send more troops to Iraq (but of course!), yet it
dodges the real issue: whether Iraq was better off under Saddam Hussein
than under George W. Bush. True, Saddam was not what we think of as a
democrat, but he was a good supply-sider. Though he may have eliminated a
lot of people, he had too much sense to kill the goose that laid the golden
eggs. You could get hummus and tabouleh without risking life and limb.
Thomas Hobbes would have liked him.
Is it
time to pull U.S. troops out of Iraq? Back in 1862 you could have been
arrested for saying U.S. troops should be pulled out of the Confederacy,
because Abraham Lincoln insisted that they were fighting for “a new
birth of freedom.” Lincoln is the subject of yet another new book
— worshipful, naturally — called The Gettysburg
Gospel, by Gabor Boritt (Simon and Schuster).
This
is the second recent book about the Gettysburg Address, the previous one
being Garry Wills’s Pulitzer-winning Lincoln at
Gettysburg. Both books treat Lincoln as a national savior,
overlooking his fallacious appeal to the Declaration of Independence.
According to Lincoln, the Declaration “brought forth a new
nation.” That is plainly not true. The Declaration says nothing about a
“nation”; it speaks only of 13 “Free and Independent
States.” It is, in fact, a declaration of secession! The 13 states are
serving notice that they are pulling out of the British Empire.
![[Breaker quote for How Lincoln Gave Us Kwanzaa: We owe him everything!]](2006breakers/061207.gif) Lincoln
even contradicts himself. In his first inaugural address,
denying the right of any state to leave the Union, he had said that “the
Union is older than the states.” That is like saying that a marriage is
older than the spouses. Apart from being nonsense, it implies that the
“new nation” didn’t begin with the Declaration after all.
But
Lincoln’s worshippers, bewitched by his eloquence, rarely notice these
little things. They overlook not only his lapses in logic but his gross violations
of the Constitution: usurpations of power, suspension of habeas corpus,
arbitrary arrests of dissenters and even elected officials, crackdown on the
free press, the Emancipation Proclamation (Lincoln himself doubted his
authority to issue it but finally yielded to Republican pressure), and so on.
Some
of the worshippers, such as Wills and Harry V. Jaffa, strain to defend these
measures, but Boritt seems not even to notice them. He sounds like Tony
Snow explaining Bush’s Iraq policies: the king can do no wrong. Lincoln
always praised Thomas Jefferson, but under his administration Jefferson,
the ur-secessionist, would have found himself in the clink.
Unless the North conquered the South, Lincoln said at Gettysburg,
self-government itself would “perish from the earth.”
Balderdash, of course. Yet most Americans still take Lincoln’s war
propaganda as self-evident truth. He ranks among history’s most
durably successful humbugs.
Too
bad, because Lincoln is much more interesting when you read him critically.
Boritt is at best a readable storyteller, but this book is nothing but
celebration, and it’s disgraceful — nay, inexplicable — that
such scholars as David Herbert Donald and Harold Holzer should supply it with
enthusiastic blurbs and panting praise.
But
don’t waste your time trying to explain even to Bush’s
partisans that Lincoln was a much worse president than Bush. By a
consensus I can only call bipartisan, Lincoln is a god, to whom we all owe our
freedom — you, me, and Snoop Dogg alike.
Joseph Sobran |
||
| Copyright © 2006 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
|
||
|
||
|
Archive Table of Contents
Current Column Return to the SOBRAN’S home page. |
||
|
|
| FGF E-Package columns by Joe Sobran, Sam Francis, Paul Gottfried, and others are available in a special e-mail subscription provided by the Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation. Click here for more information. |