Please read this excerpt from the most recent issue (May/June 2009, Volume 38, Number 5/6) of Imprimis.

"Allen C. Guelzo

Professor of the Civil War Era,
Gettysburg College

Hero, Standing

Allen C. Guelzo is the Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era and Director of Civil War Era Studies at Gettysburg College. A two-time winner of the Lincoln Prize, his books include Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America and Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates That Defined America.

The following are excerpts from a speech delivered at Hillsdale College on May 8, 2009, at the dedication of a statue of Abraham Lincoln by Hillsdale College Associate Professor of Art Anthony Frudakis.

Heroes have become invisible. Their virtues have become unexplainable in the language we now use to explain human actions . . . . Great deeds somehow keep on being done, but we have lost a capacity to see them as great. Biographies grow to ever-greater and greater lengths, while the subjects of them shrink into the shadows of the pedestrian, the ordinary, and the relentlessly disclosed secret. And no history textbook can to-day pass muster unless it highlights the insignificant, reduces absolutes to local accident, and eliminates grand narratives in favor of a collection of tales, full of sound and fury, whose chief goal is to elicit pity, sympathy or guilt.

The hero is the story, not just of a good deed, but a great deed—a great deed which climbs the unclimbable, endures the unendurable, holds fast to the lost. But who can be a hero when climbing is so routine that Mt. Everest has become littered with discarded bottles and cans? The dark side of our bottomless wealth and comfort is a cynicism which disarms any motivation for sacrifice, and a suspicion that, in a world of comforts, heroes can only be play-actors. Something other than the heroic must be motivating the heroes, we seem to reason, because there is so little need for heroism. . . .

* * *

What we do here today, in dedicating Tony Frudakis’s statue of Abraham Lincoln, flies so finely in the face of this age of post-heroism that somewhere, we can be sure some voice will fix on this event to tell us that this is all farce—that Lincoln cannot be a hero because he was a racist, or that he cannot be the savior of the Union because the Union was rotten to its exploitative, capitalist, war-mongering, imperialist, Christ-loving, minority-massacring, little-Eichmann core and couldn’t deserve a savior.

For six decades after his death, this was not so. Lincoln was the quintessential, the indispensable, American hero. Of the 600 or so statues dedicated to American presidents, fully one third are of Abraham Lincoln; one of them, Daniel Chester French’s seated Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial, may be the most famous American statue ever created. But the post-World War One cultural malaise, which inaugurated an era of literary debunking and political minimalism, curved the arc of other Lincoln statuary downwards, away from the wise, heroic statesman and in the direction of a more folksy, proletarian Lincoln. Even in Lincoln’s Illinois, statuary of Lincoln continues to bring him off pedestals, closer to the earth, sitting on park benches, in the fashion of Jeff Garland’s 2001 Just Don’t Sit There, Do Something, a park-bench Lincoln whose head was decapitated in 2007 as a wedding prank…Rick Harney’s 2006 Lincoln at Leisure, which captures a shirt-sleeved Lincoln leaning on a fence…and, in Springfield, John W. McClarey’s A Greater Task, which is supposed to depict Lincoln grasping his coat around him as he delivers his farewell speech in 1861, but which ends up making him look like a derelict panhandling for spare quarters.

The statues, however, only reflect a larger decline in our estimate of Lincoln. In a multicultural perspective, no triumphal, Union-saving Lincoln is allowed to emerge; multiculturalism is the celebration of ordinariness, information, and egalitarianism. Which is why most people today are interested in knowing whether Lincoln was gay rather than knowing whether he was right. . . ."

And thank you, as always, for reading AJ's blog.

AJ

TO LIVE IN FREEDOM'S LIGHT IS THE RIGHT OF MANKIND.

Music of the Day: Walter Beasely, Go With the Flow

RATING: S (Serious)

Post-Inauguration Beverage of the Day: Miller Genuine Draft (it went well with the pizza!)

Now and then, while wandering in a daze past the newspaper racks outside the slaughterhouse, I glance at the screed on the front pages—this one, a USA Today story the week prior to our visit to Alaska, caught my eye. The headline read: “Ban on Tobacco Urged in Military.”

Needless to say I didn’t buy the newspaper (who buys USA Today?) but I did read a portion of the article online. Apparently some do-gooder within the Pentagon itself has decided that achieving a smoke-free military in the next 20 years will increase the fighting effectiveness of America’s forces. This sounds like a great idea at first—people who are supposed to be in peak physical shape, to cope with the demonstrable and unique vicissitudes and rigors of combat, probably shouldn’t smoke two packs of cigs a day. It’s hard enough to hump a 70 pound pack in a war zone where the temperatures reach 120 degrees when your breathing is normal; adding tar and nicotine to the alveolar system probably makes the 70 pound pack feel like a 90 pound pack after a while. Killing bad guys is tough business; killing bad guys while trying to catch your breath is tougher still. So, the do-gooder is probably right—let’s get everybody in the military to stop smoking. Good idea.

Many years ago I read Fields of Fire by James Webb, the book that more-or-less launched his successful writing career; in fact, I used that book in many of the various history and literature courses I taught. It was, in my view, one of the finest novels written about the Vietnam War and, in my view, it was the best book that Webb cranked out over his pre-political writing career (although A Sense of Honor was a close second). The USA Today headline caused me to think almost immediately of Webb’s book and this little exchange that takes place in it: “It was Hodges’ turn to be speechless. He lit a Marlboro, thinking of Snake’s usual jest to nonsmokers (we are all sucking wind out here).” Yes indeed. And think about it for just a moment—catching an AK47 round in the chest is of more immediate concern than worrying about lung cancer 50 years down the road. This is why the well-intentioned person at the Pentagon will be sniffed at by the troopies on the ground, no matter the place or the war or the logic behind the notion. If you have asked guys to put their asses on the line in war, and smoking gives them some pleasure and some semblance of “normalcy,” wouldn’t it make sense that they will resist giving up this small pleasure?

Twenty years from now maybe everyone in the military will be non-smoking, non-drinking, non-cursing, non-carousing choirboys with BA’s in psychology. They’ll be able to hump a 70 pound pack with little trouble—but will they kill any bad guys?

AJ

TO LIVE IN FREEDOM’S LIGHT IS THE RIGHT OF MANKIND.

Music of the Day: Pink Floyd, Marooned

RATING: S (Serious)

Post-Inauguration Beverage of the Day: LaBatt’s Blue

We’ve been traveling, hence the lack o’ entries here at Average Joe’s blog. In the last week we have traveled by our private car (twice), taxi (with the standard-issue corpulent, talkative, irreverent driver, even at 4:00am), airplane (four times, once with overhead bins that could accommodate nothing larger than a cheap paperback novel), bus (five times, all with standard-issue talkative, and opinionated, drivers), van (with a lead-footed 18 year old behind the wheel), ship (too many times to count), helicopter, dogsled (mush, damnit!), narrow gauge train (with a vapid and self-loving yapping female tour guide who kept referring to “koala bears” in pointless digressions about Australia), and by foot (in a rainforest with a knowledgeable and sweet tour guide named Katie). We missed out on traveling by floatplane, whale-watching-skiff, kayak (although they were all available), and zip line (although they, too, were available—but sanity prevailed). Thanks to RB and CLG we had a fabulous week in our 49th state where pictures of the still-fetching governor are commonplace in shops, bookstores, stalls, jewelry outlets, bars, and eating establishments. Also on the plus side, there was not a single mention of Michael Jackson and only now and then did we see images on television of our ridiculous president (always CNN, of course).

We consorted with Aussies, Canadians, Brits, and our fellow countrymen from New York, Chicago, Dallas, and various other locales around our great land; we had pleasant conversations with all and heard not a discouraging word even though we were clearly not home on the range. Some of the Canadians were under the impression that all poor black people in America lack for health care in all of its forms; not health insurance, mind you, but health care. We attempted to disabuse them of this fantastic and patently false notion, but their minds had been poisoned by too much CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, and NPR. Apparently Fox News is either illegal or the subject of frequency-jamming in Canada.

We heard other unrecognizable accents amongst our fellow travelers and all age groups were represented—infants, toddlers, pre-teens, punks on skateboards (just kidding), families, retired geezers, octogenarians, and scores of middle-age folks on holiday. Everyone had a camera or two or three. We encountered folks jogging on deck, scrawny men in swim-shorts tottering towards one of the two pools on board ship, and we even came across little old ladies on electric carts with the obnoxious beep-beep-beep backup warning signal. Everyone was friendly, having a good time, and in a good mood—save our neighbor in the adjoining stateroom, a dour looking man who never even so much as acknowledged our salutations and greetings. Perhaps he spoke no English; more likely he was just a turd—in this case, a floating turd. . . .

I made a couple of observations while on board ship, the first of which was a little disquieting. When we went through the mandatory, and necessary, life-boat drill before leaving the pier, some of the men milling around near me were obviously not paying attention or were joking, under their breath, about what a silly exercise it all seemed to be. I tried to fix their faces in my memory for that moment when they might need help in an emergency properly securing their life-jackets so that I could slip my knife out of my pocket to cut the straps around their life-jackets. Thankfully, there was no need for emergency equipment—the sailing was smooth, easy, comfortable, and wholly relaxing. I’ll speak for MLB when I say that we could not have had a better travel experience—the entire trip was marvelous, flawlessly orchestrated, and profoundly beautiful.

My second observation was that some folks lacked what I thought was the proper awe when viewing the glaciers--there was much laughing and drinking and yapping about this, that, and the other. I had hoped people would have just looked at the marvelous sight in front of them, but for some it was just another tourist attraction to be viewed before moving on to the next tourist attraction to be viewed. This was sad, but not new; we saw the same thing, weirdly, at Pearl Harbor when people yakked their way through the memorial at the USS Arizona.

Tomorrow, alas, I return to the grind at the slaughterhouse, but I’ll have some great memories and images in my mind to savor when the pace slackens.

AJ

TO LIVE IN FREEDOM’S LIGHT IS THE RIGHT OF MANKIND.

Music of the Day: Derek Trucks Band, Down in the Flood

RATING: F/K (Flapdoodle/Kidding)

Post-Inauguration Beverage of the Day: Modelo Especial (again, but VERY cold)

The headline [Mirror.co.uk] said “Michael Jackson to be buried without his brain.”

I’m tellin’ ya’, Good People, Loyal Readers of Average Joe’s blog, I could not make up this stuff if my life depended on it—that’s just downright freakin’ funny and beyond anything my puny imaginative powers could conjure up.

Of course there is a serious aspect of this—it will take a couple of weeks, apparently, to examine the King of Pop’s brain. This is being done, I believe, to determine further what might have led to his death; there may be other reasons for the brain examination, such as “What weird mushroom-shaped bowling-ball-sized growth in Mr. Jackson’s brain made him think changing skin color was a good idea?”, but no one is expressing anything remotely like this. The body will be buried while the brain is being examined. Perhaps in a few weeks there will be a separate motorcade for the remnants of the deceased brain; the state of California is already flat broke, so a few hundred thousand more dollars for traffic and crowd control for a brain burial will hardly make any difference to the whiz-bangs in Sacramento.

But really, what’s the big deal about burying the body without the brain? Clearly, Mr. Jackson “functioned” at some level without using his brain all that much while he was alive, and now that he has moved on to the Great Beyond, he won’t have need of the brain at all.

What is remarkable is that no one is claiming responsibility for removing the brains of our ridiculous president, his even more ridiculous vice president, or the “leadership” of the Democratic Party in the House of Representatives and the United States Senate. Talk about brains gone MIA! And today’s post-burial headline said 50% more viewed the burial than watched the inauguration—that would account for everyone who voted for our ridiculous president plus a substantial number of other unaccounted-for-folks. That’s a whole lotta’ missin’ brains for damned sure. . . .

AJ

TO LIVE IN FREEDOM’S LIGHT IS THE RIGHT OF MANKIND.

MUSIC OF THE DAY: Walter Trout, Marie’s Mood

Rating: S (Serious)

Post-Inauguration Beverage of the Day: Lemonade,

Apparently the gentleman known as “The King of Pop,” one Mr. Michael Jackson, passed away the other day; there is some continuing speculation about the cause of his untimely death (I believe he was only 50 years old), but notwithstanding the speculation, it seems appropriate to hope that Mr. Jackson rests in peace.

Not being a fan of “pop” music, I cannot say that I ever found Mr. Jackson’s music to be something I enjoyed or listened to (but, as the old saw goes, there is no accounting for taste) and his videos seemed profoundly and deeply narcissistic and therefore, to me at least, they were tasteless and vulgar. His contribution to American culture was, so far as I could tell, minimal and mostly degrading; his overt weirdness seemed to ensure his status as some kind of pop-culture icon, but for whom and why I cannot begin to guess. If his life was painful and strange and his family was dysfunctional or perverse, Mr. Jackson apparently did nothing to alter or ameliorate his situation other than to amass, and dissipate, a financial fortune, all while botching any and all human interactions (at least according to the post-mortem reports about his life). This is sad.

I guess, finally, I would say that if you believe in the power of prayer, it might be a good thing to pray for Mr. Jackson; it might have been a better thing had we prayed for him while he was here. . . .

AJ
TO LIVE IN FREEDOM’S LIGHT IS THE RIGHT OF MANKIND.