In Defense of Lincoln

“The key to understanding Lincoln's philosophy of statesmanship is that he always sought the meeting point between what was right in theory and what could be achieved in practice.” ~Dinesh D’Souza

When the news broke it was really quite a surprise. This month Duke Ellington became the first black ever minted on U.S. currency. What surprised me is that I’d never noticed the absence before. In January we inaugurated our first black president, which escaped no one’s notice. With Ellington’s image now imprinted on a quarter, one wonders what we'll see in March.

What I found especially interesting is that when I Googled it, the story was in British, Netherlands, and a host of other European news feeds. I didn’t realize this was an event of such global significance. But it’s a good move and probably overdue.

I doubt there’s any relationship but it did make me think once more of how this is the month of Abe Lincoln’s birthday bicentennial. He of the five dollar bill fame would also probably be saying, “It’s about time.” If he’d lived another hundred years I wonder what he’d have thought of the birth of jazz. It doesn’t take much for me to picture the tall lanky Lincoln tapping his foot to the rhythm of a big band.

Lincoln’s importance was never questioned when I was a kid growing up in the fifties and sixties, but like everyone else who ever achieved anything, the detractors will have their day. Throughout my life I have in my readings run across Lincoln anecdotes that helped define him as a wise, sensitive leader who was driven more by conviction than ambition. His wise words and carefully considered actions have provided inspiration for millions. And he never flinched from making known where he stood on the slavery issue.

As he built his cabinet, President Obama let it be known that he was in league with the pro-Lincoln camp. At least this was the image he sought to project by carrying around the latest Lincoln bestseller Team of Rivals. To be pro-Lincoln is not only a pro-black position, it is pro-humanity. The book touts the genius of Lincoln in selecting a cabinet comprised of men more likely to get into a barroom brawl than run the ship of state, but as history has shown, the backwoodsman from Illinois achieved his aims thereby.

In keeping with this Lincoln theme, I commend to you an insight-filled article by Dinesh D’Souza. D’Souza is a deep well of experience and knowledge, and his observations on our times cannot be easily dismissed. Here in this article, which appeared in the April 2005 issue of American History Magazine, he defends Lincoln against his critics. Be sure to read Lincoln: Tyrant, Hypocrite or Consummate Statesman?

Yes, but...

OK, you there in the back of the room. I see that hand. Please speak up so that we can all hear you.

My last three blog entries have been about Dinesh D’Souza’s What’s So Great About America, a book with much insight about many things, from why we are nation is hated by Muslims to how we came to be who we are as a people.

In response to this defense of America, at least one person has written to point out that “I think the ideal is great, but the reality is far from the ideal.”

He also took issue with my statement that America did not shove its ideals down other peoples’ throats by force. “And the U.S. government hasn't only been using guns, bombs, napalm, and chemicals to control people. They also use forced drugging; invasive Family Court orders that control people's personal lives, and use children as pawns; zoning laws that prescribe in Teutonic DETAIL what people can do, and can't do, and, HAVE to do with their own property; abusive police who almost never are found wrong even when they murder or torture, or are accomplices to murder or torture; secret surveillance of private phone calls with no court warrant required; food inspection laws that allow multi-million pound recalls of filthy rotten meat and vegetables from corporations, but forbid a farmer to advertise and sell even a few pounds of clean, fresh meat .... etc., etc., etc.”

“I've been adversely affected, more-or-less directly, by all of the above. I could write a book about my experiences in the ‘Free’ Vaterland. It's a funny kind of ‘freedom,’ in my opinion, and I wonder how it will look in the history books a couple centuries from now, should this world survive.”

And this is only the short list of grievances one could cite, I’m sure. The insurance racket, the sorry state of health care, the Washington lobby game, unspoken issues which even politicians can’t talk about because it would put them in a bad light to be honest….

In short, we live in a broken world, and America’s beacon may appear inviting for those in more oppressed parts of the world, but this country is not itself exempt from the brokenness.

I am reminded here of the way Bob Dylan puts it in the opening number on his Oh Mercy album.
Everything Is Broken

Broken lines broken strings
Broken threads broken springs
Broken idols broken heads
People sleeping in broken beds
Ain't no use jiving
Ain't no use joking
Everything is broken.

Broken bottles broken plates
Broken switches broken gates
Broken dishes broken parts
Streets are filled with broken hearts
Broken words never meant to be spoken
Everything is broken.

Seem like every time you stop and turn around
Something else just hit the ground
Broken cutters broken saws
Broken buckles broken laws
Broken bodies broken bones
Broken voices on broken phones
Take a deep breath feel like you're chokin'
Everything is broken.

Every time you leave and go off someplace
Things fall to pieces in my face
Broken hands on broken ploughs
Broken treaties broken vows
Broken pipes broken tools
People bending broken rules
Hound dog howling bullfrog croaking
Everything is broken.

editor's note: D'Souza's book is more than a polemic about America's achievement. He addresses a range of issues that need a fresh perspective, including race relations, multiculturalism, Colonialism and a better understanding of our global situation in regards to the Muslim world. The book is worth reading, wherever you stand on the issues.

Rousseau’s Influence

One of the most compelling sections for me personally in D’Souza’s What’s So Great About America is the section on Rousseau. The reason is that he helps explain to me the source of many of my own ideas which, like our entire generation, seemed to originate within us, but were foisted on us by the mass culture and pop media.

“Do your own thing” and “Follow your bliss” (yes, this is Joseph Campbell, but rooted in Roussaeu) and the idea of finding within the truth of who you are and being true to that inner you, free from external constraints… this is all Rouseau.

The idea of freedom is powerful, but can also be out of balance, as the label for our generation later became the Me Generation. This ethic was glorified in magazines such as Life’s photo essays on the hippie communes which glamorized the “throwing off” of traditional family and exalted the hippie foray into communal families. The fruit of such follies only came later. Who would do the work? Who will raise the children? If I am doing my thing and watching the sunset on acid, and he’s doing his thing writing poetry, who will do the dishes?

Rousseau, D’Souza points out, was the guiding spirit of Bohemia. And the heart of it is expressed in our total embrace of the ethic of authenticity. Know who you are and follow your star. You must be authentic to yourself. It doesn’t matter if what you are doing is sick and perverse as long as it is honest. Check out where the art scene went in the seventies, with artists who groveled in feces or worse. One German artist filmed himself cutting off his penis, one inch at a time. It was a statement of some kind, I suppose. Bold, original and stupid. (He died, of course.)

I found the ideas in this chapter quite helpful in understanding the problems I see in broken marriages where “my happiness” is more important than our children, and where “self understanding” is more important than self sacrifice or service or understanding another. Our generation took pride in the overthrow of conventional wisdom, and now we’ve paid a price. The funny thing is, we thought we were all being so original. But our behavior was rooted in ideas as old as mankind, voiced more than a century earlier and shaped by a pop media that rejoiced in its power to influence.

There is power in the idea of freedom. But a deeper self-understanding reveals that we are less free than we would like to believe. And though freedom is a wonderful thing, to put it on a pedestal as the ultimate value is a truth out of balance. Someone still has to fix the toilet, and keep the bills paid. Guess that means that eventually one has to grow up.

Encore

Yesterday I mentioned Dinesh D'Souza's What's So Great About America. I thought I'd underscore my statements with a review from amazon.com.... this one representative of the general tenor of the more that 230 reviews there on this book.

What a shame 21st century USA is so polarized where being a liberal, conservative, Democrat, Republican (etc.) means either entirely accepting without question ideas along party or ideological lines -- or entirely without question rejecting them. People don't want to give "the (domestic political) enemy" a full hearing, let alone even partly CONSIDER a foe's arguments, even if they're reasoned and make actually make SENSE.

It's a shame because this book (published by the conservative publishing house Regnery, which is itself like waving a red flag in front of a bull for some people) is so engaging,well-written, convincing and solid that Dinesh D'Souza may one day be considered a modern day Alexis de Tocqueville.

Three fascinating levels mark this highly perceptive book: 1. D'Souza, who became a US citizen in 1991, shares how his life would have been quite different if he had grown up in his native India. 2. He makes fascinating observations about how US life and culture differ from various parts of the world, especially the Third World. These are the ones future generations may consider on the same level as de Tocqueville's. 3. And then there is material directly related to the book's title. He makes the case, in a nutshell, that other cultures (especially fundamentalist Islamic) detest the United States because Americans are inner-directed and can write their own life's script, while Islamic culture seeks a life controlled and dictated by others.

One key conclusion certainly will not endear him to Islamic fundamentalists. He says the Islamic world is nothing without oil revenues."The only reason it (the Islamic world) makes the news is by killing people," he writes. "When is the last time you opened the newspaper to read about a great Islamic discovery or invention? While China and India, two other empires that were eclipsed by the West, have embraced Western technology and even assumed a leadership role in some areas, Islam's contributions to modern science and technology is negligible."

In this book, written after 9/11, he concludes that terrorism is merely "a desperate strike against a civilization that the fundamentalists know they have no power to conquer" so they try to "disrupt and terrify the people of America and the West."

The book is worth its price ALONE for his observations on how American culture differs from the third world and many Islamic countries: Americans have to be convinced they are fighting a war for noble reasons; young people go away to college and don't return, whereas in other countries this would be like "abandoning one's offspring"; other cultures cherish age, the US worships youth; people welcome visitors for long periods in the Third World where Americans want to get rid of visitors within days. And more.

D'Souza also takes on the "multiculturalists" who, he writes, detest the melting pot idea and "want immigrants to be in America but not of America." And he shows many flashes of great wit. Two examples... On French criticism of the US: "Many Americans find it hard to take the French critique seriously, coming as it does from men who carry handbags." --On calls for reparations for African-Americans (he completely DEMOLISHES arguments for reparations) he writes about debating foe Jesse Jackson: "I found the concept of this rich, successful man -- who arrived by private jet, who speaks at the Democratic National Convention, whose son is a congressman -- identifying himself as a victim of oppression a bit puzzling and amusing."

D'Souza decimates critics' arguments against American foreign policy, history and culture. But his greatest analysis is how World War II's "Greatest Generation," tempered by surviving the Great Depression and the brutal war, upheld traditional values by cherishing necessity and duty -- only to fail to replicate these values in their offspring who made answering their inner voices, pursing their own desires and personal authenticities the focus of their lives... until. Sept. 11.

"Only now are those Americans who grew up during the 1960s coming to appreciate the virtues... of this older sturdier culture of courage, nobility and sacrifice," he writes. "It is this culture that will protect the liberties of all Americans."

The American Experiment

Am reading a great book right now: Dinesh D'Souza's What's So Great About America. There are so many passages I'd like to reproduce here that I'd risk copyright infringement, so I'll try to be brief. This book comes with my highest recommendation.

D'Souza brings a uniquely personal perspective to his theme. He was a native of India, but became a U.S. citizen by choice in 1991.

America, he points out, is not a place. It is an idea. People come to America because of a dream.

I first became acquainted with this notion in a book by John Warwick Montgomery nearly thirty years ago. The Founding Fathers really did create something original in the American experiment. Democracy, science and capitalism have been woven together into a culture without peer in today's civilized (or uncivilized) worlds.

Another facet of our achievement is the notion that history is not a purposeless and meaningless sequence or random events. Americans dream of progress. If I don't make it, my kids can make it.

Certainly we see this played out in myriad ways in our various personal histories. I see it in my family, my wife's famly, my friends' families. D'Souza notes that one part of the American dreams is "that knowledge is cumulative and that its applications to human betterment are continuous and neverending, that the future is certain to better than the past."

Of course this Utopian dream is scoffed at by many cynics and critics of all stripes. Nevertheless, it was this conviction that brought our nation to world leadership, a role that we have a responsibility to not abdicate or feel ashamed of.

The remarkable thing about the American Ideal is that we did not force the world to desire it or adopt it. We did not use guns to win the minds and hearts of our foes.

In one story, D'Souza tells how the TV media attempted to make President Reagan look bad during the "Reagan Recession" by interview the unemployed persons who had been disenfranchised, who were not experiencing the American dream. The Soviet Union showed these documentaries behind the Iron Curtain with the aim of making capitalism look bad. But the footage had the opposite effect as the cameras revealed that even our poorest poor had TV sets and cars and three meals a day.

The ideas in this book are far more vast than these piecemeal scraps. Despite its depth, it is an easy read. Find the book. His reasoned defense of America is well worth your time.