Lincoln: Hit or Myth?

Yesterday was Lincoln’s birthday. I wanted to say something new, or at least meaningful, about him. I had little to go by in my recent experience aside from having viewed both LINCOLN and ABRAHAM LINCOLN: VAMPIRE HUNTER. So I did a little research…

Which led me to documentation that President Lincoln frequently used the N-word, loved minstrel shows demeaning to people of color, and told “darky” jokes. In other words, today he’d be considered a racist by many.

There are those who might say that we can’t expect too much from a man of the near-south in the 1800s. And my hero Kurt Vonnegut once confessed to admiration for the writing of known Nazi sympathizer Louis-Ferdinand Céline. And Robert Penn Warren once wrote “And what we students of history always learn is that the human being is a very complicated contraption and that they are not good or bad but are good and bad and the good comes out of the bad and the bad out of the good, and the devil take the hindmost.”

Somehow I found myself grouping Lincoln, Barack Obama, and Jomo Kenyatta, founder of the independent Republic of Kenya, where Barack Obama Sr. came from when it was still British East Africa. Jomo Kenyatta is on much Kenyan currency and coin, but not for long. Perhaps it is because he was publicly in favor of female genital mutilation. “No proper Kikuyu would dream of marrying a girl who has not been circumcised,” he stated in his book Facing Mount Kenya. Wikipedia mentions his taking the “traditionalist” side in public debate.

And what of Barack Obama? He has most of his second term before him. I would like to urge him to become an example to the world of what the United States is all about. He has already done that to some extent. His two inaugural speeches were magnificent, and I have praised them both on my modest Facebook soapbox. But Gitmo remains open for business, and many of his other promises go either as yet unkept or bent or shattered. “That’s politics,” some may say. But, Mr. President, I urge you to at least pretend to transcend politics, to the good of the world citizenry. Pretend to be transcendent, early and often, and with good will and good luck Kurt Vonnegut’s admonition will apply favorably.

NOTE: I wish my journal page above had contained much more of the message that is here below it. I was seduced by wordplay, and the acrostic format, plus some semblance of meter, plus an incorrigible proclivity towards punmanship, made the words what they are. I regret that they did not mean more; I hope they and these words are at least thought-provoking.