In a culture where the latest goings-on in entertainment, sports, or reality-TV are more often than not the topic of engaging conversations, any discussion about the 16th president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, is decidedly refreshing.
You too will get an appreciation of this by eschewing the public debate now raging over whether Ben Affleck was robbed because the Academy did not give him a director’s nomination for Argo, to engage in a private debate on whether Lincoln was a racist.
I had this experience yesterday when an acquaintance vented jingoistic disdain at a British historian for writing that Lincoln was a racist. He countered, with religious conviction, that:
If Lincoln was a racist, he would never have freed the slaves. Any dummy knows that.
But how, for Christ’s sake, can any intelligent person dismiss as “antagonistic and politically incorrect” the well-documented, if not inherent, fact that Lincoln was a racist?!
(Incidentally, I suppose any dummy also knows that if Thomas Jefferson were a racist, he would never have bothered having consensual sex with his slaves. He would have simply raped them like other slave masters did.)
Anyway, it just so happens that prevailing reviews of two of the most popular movies now playing dramatize this oxymoronic thinking: For, on the one hand, film director Quentin Tarantino is being whipped for his historically accurate depiction – in Django Unchained – of the relationship between Blacks and Whites in the years before the Civil War. While, on the other hand, Spielberg is being celebrated for his historically sanitized portrayal – in Lincoln – of the “Great Emancipator” as a saintly man who freed the slaves more as a moral imperative than as a military/political necessity.
Frankly, I fear far too many moviegoers will consider this film Lincoln every bit as historically correct as evangelical Christians consider The Holy Bible. Especially after having no less a person than former president Bill Clinton appear on the world stage at the Golden Globes on Sunday to extol Spielberg’s one-dimensional and misleading portrayal of Lincoln as … instructive.
In any event, this British columnist is hardly the first person to call a spade a spade where Lincoln is concerned. For here, in part, is what I wrote in this context just two years ago:
Lincoln favored the gradual emancipation of slaves long before he was elected president. But, just like the Founding Fathers, he subjugated the moral imperative to free them to the political realities that kept them in bondage.
Ultimately, political necessity (i.e., winning the Civil War) compelled him to emancipate only those slaves living in states not under his/Union control. This is why Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation is as compromised as Article I of the U.S. Constitution, which counted blacks as only three-fifths of a person.
(“Abraham Lincoln Was a White Nationalist [aka Racist],” The iPINIONS Journal, March 9, 2011)
You’re probably wondering if I attempted to disabuse this acquaintance of his viral ignorance. I did not. Trust me, I have learned the hard way that, for a growing number of people, ignorance is indeed bliss.
NOTE: Matt Drudge boasts of having 908,457,427 visits to his media portal over the past 31 days. So am I the only one who finds it odd that he has only 165,508 followers on Twitter?
After all, Miss Alabama got more followers than that in just 24 hours after sportscaster Brent Musburger went gaga over her during the BCS championship game last week. Makes you wonder if even one tenth of the web traffic Drudge reports or directs to other sites is real, no? Bot., bot, bot….
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