Lincoln's Folly

Lincoln’s folly

By BRETT WARNKE

If Lincoln is consistently ranked as one of the country’s preeminent presidents—earning endless historical attention, novelization, fanfare kitsch, and now even Hollywood dramatization—Americans should also recognize Abe’s lesser addressed contribution to American politics: Andrew Johnson. 

Lincoln’s little-discussed choice for Vice President was the worst decision of a successful candidate in American history.  The Siena College Research Institute has asked 238 presidential scholars to rank presidents five times since 1982.  Johnson, Lincoln’s successor has had a consistent place on the sea floor of presidential rankings, alongside Lincoln’s cockeyed predecessor James Buchanan.  In 2011 he was dead last. 

In her 2011 biography of Johnson, Annette Gordon Reed called Johnson “spectacularly unsuited” to be President in 1865, citing him as the man who “botched Reconstruction, who energized and gave aid and comfort to the recently defeated enemies of the United States, the first president to be impeached by the House of Representative.”  It is simple.  “America went from the best to the worst in one presidential term,” she wrote

Steven Spielberg, ever cursing his films with optimistic endings, did give Andy a silent cameo behind the yarn-spinning Lincoln at the conclusion of his new film.  A Spielberg sequel, however unlikely, disclosing the dysfunction of American politics, which reached its paramount with a President Johnson, would be more appropriate today.  Or, at least, more necessary for “change in Washington” than a soothing flick about unity, sacrifice, and compromise.  Especially, as our politicians peddle austerity to us as if it were necessary. 

The trivia night facts about the senator from Tennessee might include his impeachment by what he labeled “Radical” Republicans and his rescue by one vote.  But with a shamefully low number of 33, Andy Johnson has fewer likes than Frito’s on facebook.  And even the National Park Service is currently looking for someone (anyone!) to be an interpreter at his home in Greeneville, Tennessee.  

Little about Johnson has leaked into contemporary popular culture, despite his crashing failure whose consequences were felt deep into the twentieth century. 

 Lincoln’s selection of Andy Johnson should sully the sixteenth president’s bright legacy a bit more than it does.  By diluting, obstructing, and delaying necessary social legislation during nascent Reconstruction, ripping at the seams Lincoln spent his best years spinning.  

If Lincoln ever remotely suspected assassination during the twilight hours of the Civil War, the obsessed Johnson’s selection was even more reckless.   Lincoln, who could warm up an Arctic night, was the perfect blend of pragmatism and principle.  Meanwhile, the racist Johnson who believed in a “White Man’s government,” was “self-sufficient, grim, impervious,” according to biographer Clifton Hall.  Hall writes: 

No man was ever less qualified than Johnson to overcome prejudice by virtue of his personality…He possessed none of the appealing gentleness, broad sympathy, and deep understanding of and love for humanity, none of the saving humor which made up so much of the greatness and power of Lincoln. His mind was narrow, bigoted, uncompromising, suspicious; his nature solitary and reticent; his demeanor coldly repellant or violently combative. 

 Recent books have been written about Lincoln’s proclivity for friendships (We Are Lincoln Men by David Herbert Donald.) Yet his Vice President was notoriously friendless and wary of southern aristocrats for very different reasons than Lincoln--class envy and personal resentment.  Jaded Johnson was the most intriguing kind of antihero—a small man in power who thought he was the little guy.  However, in Hall’s words, Johnson did have three admirable qualities “singleness of mind, tenacity of purpose, and indomitable persistency.” 

But these traits were borne of an inflexibility Lincoln might have imagined as a roadblock to the compromises necessary in a postwar era. 

 Branded the “Tennessee Tailor” for his humble illiterate upbringing, Johnson is, after all, the godfather of trust your gut, strict-constructionist absolutism.  And if he is scorned by contemporary Democrats and forgotten by his fellow conservatives, he was the heir to an eerily familiar form of American “limited government” fanaticism.  (You know, one of those “self-made” boors who never miss an opportunity to tell you about how they never missed an opportunity and why you should act accordingly.) 

In a disastrous speaking tour Johnson mysteriously labeled “The Swing Around the Circle,” he campaigned to unite northern and southern conservatives.  He failed miserably, splitting even his own Cabinet.  From town to town, with Grant and Seward forced to be at his side, Johnson recited the same speech with the repeated refrain “I stand on the Constitution!”  The Nation’s editorialists got it right in 1866 after his huge Congressional defeat:  “The conductor of the train, as Mr. Seward so felicitously termed [Johnson], has found out that the train has run over him, instead of his having run away with it.” In the same article, the writers described how “passion and prejudice” “are the staple of [Johnson’s] political sentiments.”

The man couldn’t set a foot right:  As commander in chief he opposed universal black suffrage, was nearly removed from office, constantly compared himself to Jesus, nullified legislation, ignored the Senate’s rights at confirmation, and savaged the Freedman’s Bureau (which educated former enslaved people) as costing “more than the entire sum expended in any one year under the Administration of the second Adams.”  (In an ironic reversal, the sixth president sought major infrastructure and education investments but was blocked at every turn by Congress.) 

Johnson’s was a record worth of more attention by Lincoln and his staff.  In today’s parlance, Johnson needed a bit more vetting.  His was a noisy form of status quo apologetics and stump-top windbaggery; in 1869 The Nation called him a “skill of a veteran honeyfugler and inveigher” and his voting record would have made Rand Paul look indulgent:  He tried to cut white-collar public employee salaries, voted against aid for hunger-ravaged Ireland, fought to limit funds to the Smithsonian, opposing infrastructure in his own district, he sought a cap on the number of public clerks, and even voted against raising pay for Mexican War soldiers during wartime.

                All this, by the way, was part of the record by Lincoln’s selection of Johnson in 1864. 

True, the VP selection process sordid, especially then.  In 1864 Lincoln had dumped the useless party hack, Hannibal Hamlin of Maine, in favor of a Vice President Johnson in what must have seemed a savvy gesture at reconciliation:  Not only was Lincoln selecting Johnson, a Democrat and a southerner, he was offering himself as a post-party unifier.  (He previously offered the slot to the much maligned but quite efficient former occupier of New Orleans, Benjamin Butler). 

How did this collision of lives occur?  Both Lincoln and Johnson were ambitious storytellers, raised by women, from humble origins in America’s rural interior.  In fact, Johnson’s resume looked better than Lincoln’s, having an unbroken chain of successes:  He was an alderman, governor, representative, a noted military governor of a southern state, Vice President, and a senator whereas Lincoln had only served in the Illinois legislature and gone to Congress for a single term.  

Johnson’s life, according to one east Tennessee opponent, Oliver P. Temple, was “one intense, unceasing, desperate, upward struggle.”  But while Americans now adore “the outsider” status of politicians, Johnson entered Washington in 1864 unable to lead his own party and with few connections.  Yet, in blood-spattered 1862, Johnson did show competency and resolution in governance; traits which Lincoln might not have predicted would be impediments in a period of legislative compromise.  In fact, Secretary of War Stanton wrote to Johnson after the war, “With patriotic promptness you assumed the post [of governor], and maintained it under circumstances of unparalleld trials, until recent events have brought safety and deliverance to your state, and to the integrity of that constitutional Union for which you so long and so gallantly periled all that is dear to man on earth.”

The key to the contrast between Lincoln and his heir, according to historian Eric McKitrick, was not success:

It lies rather in the way success was conceived.  For Johnson, personal fulfillment had long since come to be defined as the fruit of struggle—real, full bodied, and terrible—against forces specifically organized for thwarting him.  Not for Lincoln.  Johnson, all his life, had operated as an outsider; Lincoln in most of his world dealings, and temperamentally as well, was an insider. 

                Frederick Douglass sized-up Johnson nicely quite early, inauguration day 1864. Johnson spotted Douglass and the latter described a returned glance filled with scorn before Johnson flashed “the sickly smile of the demagogue.”  But give Johnson some credit, he was drunk.  After three glasses of undiluted whiskey, the ailing Johnson embarrassed himself in front of the filled Senate chamber—so much so that Lincoln was forced to comment saying “Andy ain’t a drunkard.” 

                The little-known Johnson was the worst man for the worst period in American presidential history as well as Lincoln’s greatest but least known blunder.  The New York Times obituary read that “undoubtedly the greatest misfortune that ever befell Andrew Johnson was the assassination of President Lincoln…his posthumous fame would have been brighter without this high honor and the consequences it entailed.” 

True, a man is responsible for his own choices; a burden Johnson’s legacy (and his future historical interpreter in Tennessee) will heavily bear.  But Lincoln did disastrously choose Johnson for the country.  America has selected men with worse and slimmer resumes for the White House.  But Johnson was insulated from review by a cocoon of hasty process, strained politics, and war.  Luckily, few subsequent elected embarrassments—save Nixon—have marked the country and presidency so deleteriously after being selected as the executive’s number two. 

The Eagleton, Quayle, Ryan, and Palin selections should give voters pause.  If our pitiful party duopoly offers us nothing worthier, perhaps Hollywood could at least produce a feature film that—if not a historical cautionary tale—offers the public more than the politics of healing.  Perhaps revealing the true politics of obstruction by individuals like Johnson or his many heirs is the surest path to reform. 

                 

Review The Sunset Limited

                  Ever wake up, eye the room and consider never getting up?  It's worth considering.  Maybe staying in bed isn't such a bad idea.  It was that defender of the concept of man's original sin, Blaise Pascal, who wrote that all of man's problems stemmed from the inability to sit quietly in a room alone.  Philosophy, after all, then and ever since has been about preparing to die.  

                The Sunset Limited Cormac McCarthy lives out Pascal's one-room maxim--the two characters ("White" and "Black") don't leave a small apartment (for a while)--using their time to consider existence, grace, suicide, nothingness, and a universe with/without divine supervision.  Black, played by Samuel L. Jackson, is the kind of Christian one can tolerate:  committed but considerate, faithful but devoted to questioning his own apologetics.  He begs his God for the power to voice Truth to White, played by Tommy Lee Jones.  White is a professor of philosophy who has run out of track; earlier in the evening he threw himself in the path of the Sunset Limited model train in New York's subways.  Miraculously, he was saved by Black in what could be grace, or misfortune for the luckless White. 

                  This isn't a standard play.  It has the brooding beauty of O'Neill and McCarthy's obsessive focus on life and death.  What other topic is there for old Cormac anyway?  The only movement in the drama involves slight action around a single apartment in a slum; the only conflict is in the dialogue and the possibility that White will leave the room and meet a preemptive fate.  Albert Camus, the French-Algerian author, probably wrote the most famous work on the question of suicide.  Camus opened his Myth of Sisyphus with these lines:  "There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.   Judging whether life is or not worth living amongs to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.  All the rest--whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories--comes afterwards.  These are games; one must first answer."  Why bother?  Why wake up?  Is there radical contingency or some wicked game of grace and holy meaning?  Is "God" just and loving, a "gentle Jesus meek and mild"?  Or is he some gnostic overlord, ruthlessly indifferent or (even grimmer) actively on the side of radical evil!  With the state of the world, Black and White have a lot to talk about.  Both take the debate seriously and personally.  "It is personal," White admits of his obsessions and preoccupations.  "That's what an education does.  It makes the world personal."   

                   Black is kind and generous and honest.  And he's chosen to live his life sincere and committed to a higher power whom he is convinced "saved him" in the jailhouse.  (Though, as White points out, the bloody episode we are provided illustrates the wicked logic of God's grace.)  White repeatedly asks Black why he lives in the apartment.  It's unsafe, deep in the ghetto.  Black admits that he likes the simplicity and feels his work is unfinished.  Why leave?  Martin Luther King's picture stares calmly behind the characters, wrapped in a baggie and hanging from the wall.  But, admittedly, the best lines belong to White.  And Tommy Lee Jones is amazing as the spiky, easily offended and desperate White.  As the dawn opens behind their conversation, White is exasperated:

                I don't believe in God. Can you understand that? Look around you man. Cant you see? The clamor and  din of those in torment has to be the sound most pleasing to his ear. And I loathe these discussions. The argument of the village atheist whose single passion is to revile endlessly that which he denies the existence of in the first place. Your fellowship is a fellowship of pain and nothing more. And if that pain were actually collective instead of simply reiterative then the sheer weight of it would drag the world from the walls of the universe and send it crashing and burning through whatever night it might yet be capable of engendering until it was not even ash. And justice? Brotherhood? Eternal life? Good god, man. Show me a religion that prepares one for death. For nothingness. There's a church I might enter. Yours prepares one only for more life. For dreams and illusions and lies. If you could banish the fear of death from men's hearts they wouldnt live a day. Who would want this nightmare if not for fear of the next? The shadow of the axe hangs over every joy.

               What is so powerful about McCarthy's two-man show is that by the end you are can identify with a distraught believer and a hopeless man lost in the bleak labyrinth of nihilism.  For White, "the good" was culture.  Meaning and truths, however constructed and buried under a flurry of quotation marks, could be sought if never fully obtained.  But the "fragile" and "frail" culture that propelled him onward, according to White, is precipitously vanishing.  Slawomir Sierakowski, a Polish intellectual and neo-Marxist, recently admitted in an interview:  “In today’s world we know more and more but we don’t use our knowledge to get together and change the world."  He continued, "We use it so that each of us, individually, can adapt to this imperfect world.  That we can get together and change this imperfect world almost no one believes.”  

                Perhaps, if we cannot radically change the world, maybe we can improve it so that we can live decently within it without need of a collision with the Sunset Limited.  Then, at least sleep could come a little quicker and waking up would be a little easier.   

  

                     

Village of a Million Spirits by Ian McMillan

Horror.  Ian Macmillan has revealed true horror.  In his 1999 novel Village of a Million Spirits he transports the reader into a primitive production line of death, Treblinka.  

 Set in eastern Poland in 1943 and 1944—during the year of the camp’s existence—the reader is introduced to the SS, their collaborators, local Poles, and “work Jews” whose detail includes stripping bodies of every conceivable valuable—teeth, hair, rings, stamps, and cash.   The "work Jews" are forced, under pain of death, to dispose of their own families and tens and thousands of bodies.  Some scholars argue a million people died in Treblinka's remote and subsequently destroyed cite, teams of workers reducing the evidence to “bones and gold.”

Simon Schama sent up a warning flare about excessive or at least indulgent use of graphic horror in his Financial Times review of the 2011 novel Emperor of Lies.  What Schama argued was at that "tedious" novel's core was an "emotional void."  And with the amazing histories and diaries from Lodz, Schama argues that the event was unnecessary to fictionalize.
Meanwhile, the traces of Treblinka are now all but rubbed out.  To date, only two of the death camp's inmates survive.  Nothing of the camp remains except a rock memorial.  Claud Lanzmann's Shoah excellently chronicled the camp, using interviews with survivors and guards.  Even recent documentaries ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xnAWWlf_RE) gives new insight and perspective. 

McMillan's novel is brutal, to be sure.  Little is spared but the author does not seem to relish the horror.  Instead, the work allows characters to respond to the horrors as a way of demonstrating the effects of the black world of the camp.  As the Russians approach after the collapse of the Eastern Front at Stalingrad the Germans busily prepare for the end.  Deep death pits are transformed into “grills” used to “roast” the traces of the enormity.   

McMillan offers an arc from the transport, the Himmelstrasse or "road to heaven," and to the pits; from inmates and guards; from survivors, sadists and cynics. It was a hell run by gangsters and populated with broken and terrified men.   

Kurt Franz, a real-life Nazi nicknamed “The Doll” because of his beautiful face, joyfully murders inmates with his dog and takes special pleasure in his “work.”  Other fictional characters, such as Voss, represent the conniving and completely selfish motives of fascist functionaries.  Voss, whose face is a “swollen mask of alcoholic poisoning,” is not a true believer in some Jedeo-Bolshevist plutocracy.  He’s an opportunist; a thief and a war profiteer, nothing more.  Most terrifying  is Schenck who reveals that inside Treblinka—a “wonderland of nightmares”—sadists enjoyed absolute freedom.  Considering the Taiping Rebellion—a civil war that consumed million—during his nightly boredom, Schenck muses:  “How many of us remember that?”

Treblinka became, writes McMillann, a place where “even shame is dead—it hardly even prickles the skin.”  Starved and half-delirious with fear and disease, the “work Jews” cheer after a slump in “transports,” even while their own families burn in the nightly pyres.  The Germans and their collaborators don’t just rob them of their families and goods they rip out the ability to feel.  After his family is murdered, one character realizes he is alone:  “…his attitude should be some kind of grief, but he does not feel grief.  He feels hunger, and thirst, and his skis is irritated with dirt and sour body oil.”

One of them, Janusz is slight and ignored, allowing him to steal in preparation of an armed rebellion.  McMillan mentions, though does not focus on, real characters like Rudolf Masarek, who planned and initiated the rebellion.  Meanwhile, characters like the Ukranian guard, Anatoly, whose Polish girlfriend is pregnant, smuggles the Jews guns.  He hates the Germans—though his presence represents the fact of widespread and brutal fascist collaboration. 

When Janusz enters the camp, Treblinka is not the efficient factory that Auschwitz became.  Bodies lie in the road and SS guards do not take great care to deceive Jews about their fate.  Instead of arbeit macht frei, horrified passengers are greeted by mauling dogs and the truncheon.  Before Janusz is separated from his family, his grandmother thinks, “The guards have apparently struck (the children) as they passed.  It occurs to her that such meanness could indicate that they never had any intention of killing them.  Mistreatment makes little sense.”   

Treblinka was not the efficient factory of death that Auschwitz became.  Its early leaders were inefficient and sloppy.  Bodies piled up and whole transports were left in gas chambers to suffocate—not because of purposeful brutality in this case—but because guards simply forgot about them.  With a change in leadership, Treblinka is “beautified” with paths and flowers and a new goal of orderly, efficient killing.  Even the death pits are sprinkled with flower seeds.

Janusz cares for others in the camp, nicking gold and offering candy to his comrades.  Though, they don’t understand why he does it, considering his behavior irrational and almost inappropriate considering the circumstances.  And in collaboration with another inmate, Dr. Herzennberg, Janusz picks gold and goods from the bodies—even becoming a “dentist” removing the teeth from corpses—and prepares for escape. 

Hovering over each page is the real feeling of doubt that no revolt will occur, the miserable inertia of survival will roll out into death atop the pyres.  McMillan excellently transports you into the experience of those wedged in the vice of fear and those beyond its clutches.  

 Treblinka’s guards have only contempt for the Jews, a people with “fatalistic resignation.”  For the Ukranian Anatoly, the Jews “seem to him like pigs in a slaughterhouse yard, gazing at the fence and scheming while, one by one, they are butchered.”  Even the inmates doubt that their liberation will come, some choose suicide or a trip “to the hospital” a pit with a rude shack front and bogus Red Cross flag. 

But in the broiling hours of August, 1943, a few dozen starving prisoners fight back. 

David Nasaw's The Patriarch

The Patriarch:  The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy by David Nasaw, The Penguin Press, Nov. 13 2012, $40.00, 834 pp. 

The Patriarch dispels the false “facts” that continue to orbit Joseph P. Kennedy’s story.  Nasaw argues that Kennedy really wasn’t a bootlegger, wasn’t his sons’ puppeteer, and didn’t steal any elections.  The truths about Kennedy—like how a New York Times columnist was ghostwriting for him while praising him unbeknownst to readers—are arresting.  Slow to politics, Kennedy supported Republican Hoover over Al Smith in 1928 (even though he was later indignant that fellow Catholics didn’t vote in large numbers for his son John in 1960!)  Interestingly, Kennedy only chose not to become a Republican because of somnolent Governor Calvin Coolidge’s decision to remove an Irish American from public office as a sop to the Protestant establishment. 

Joseph made his millions on Wall Street because “no one knew how to play the angles as well as he did.”  As he says himself in one of many letter excerpts, “I knew all the angles of trading…I had studied pools and participated in them and was aware of all the intricacies and trickeries of market manipulation….I had engaged in many a furious financial fight and knew the formulas—when to duck and when to hit.” 

In fact, he knew the scams of the so-called “free market” we hear so much about—the pools, corners, wash sales, match orders—and was brought into the Roosevelt administration as the SEC chairman to help institute the regulatory state conservative business-types like he now dismantle! In effect, Kennedy regulated himself out of the stock market.  Roosevelt handled more than collaborated with Kennedy even dismissed the patriarch as a “temperamental Irish boy.”

Later he made Kennedy ambassador to England, a regrettable choice given Kennedy’s tendency for isolationism, his suspicion of the English, his hope that the British would just lie down and accept defeat, and his false belief that Hitler was a rational actor.  His notorious interview—“democracy is all done”—is given special attention and while Nasaw doesn’t dwell on the “hundreds of affairs” in which Kennedy indulged, he does highlight Kennedy’s tendency to raise the Jewish question where it didn’t belong.   As everyone knows, this engaging and enormous book cannot end well:  Kennedy outlived four of his nine children.  Three were killed (two on television), his daughter Rosemary was lobotomized, and young Edward fell into scandal. 

Joyce E. Chaplin's Round About the Earth

Chaplin, Joyce E. Round About the Earth:  Circumnavigation from Magellan to Orbit.  Simon & Schuster, $35.00.  560 pp.  Publication Date:  Nov. 13, 2012.

Even the feel-good cliché “Think globally, act locally” reveals the modern tendency to interact with the Earth in a totalizing way:  You can and do make a difference, goes the belief.  From Magellan to John Glenn humans have attempted to see, exploit, conquer, experience, and now protect our “globalizing” world with the terrifying result called Modern History. 

Joyce Chaplin has written a heavily-researched and alluring book detailing five centuries of “globestruck” humanity.  She begins with the “ruthless thug” Magellan who brutally subjugated and converted indigenous peoples from East Africa to India and she later discusses what one later circumnavigator called his subsequent “honorable imitators.”  But the point of travelling is not only commerce or experience it is regaling the world with new stories:  “Survivors shared misadventures, crisscrossers of each other’s paths, the men created one final traffic jam at London’s printing presses, where each was determined to get his story out first,” Chaplin writes. 

Her pages are packed with dozens of wild globe-trotting stories—even the marooned basis for Robinson Crusoe who survived on a desert island according to one traveler, “cloth’d in Goat-Skins, who look’d wilder than the first Owners of them.”  Despite the yawns elicited by the later Apollo mission and recent Mars landing, like a hungry Alexander the bright and eager forever seek new worlds to conquer:  scientists plumb the pits for extremophiles and larger telescopes peer across the universe at distant quasars.  Enlightenment rationalism has produced a hunger.  “The overall sense was that mastery of the planet had been achieved, and that humanity had always been meant to achieve it,” Chaplin writes.  “The new impulse—which still exists—is to fulfill an us-too ambition, to join the club of nations able to go round about the Earth, as if humanity might be united in planetary dominion.” 

Yet humanity has now achieved dominion but finds itself boiling in its own bathtub.  Instead of stories of heroism our travelling contemporaries produce cautionary tales of falling ice, disappearing forests, and a heating world.  Chaplin quotes one, regretful of the transformed world:  “So much of what had fascinated me on my first voyage through the world was disappearing—cultures, customs, animals, whole ecologies, all diluted, muddied or driven to extinction.”  

"Surviving Progress"

             When Jane Goodall spoke at a book talk in New York she was wrapped in a silk scarf and her hair was pinned in her trademark gray tail.  Her latest book Hope for Animals and Their World described the many successes of the conservationist movement--the reintegration of species like the California condor into their habitats--detailing the extraordinary rescue efforts scientists and advocates make for the smallest progress.  As she concluded she removed a single condor feather from a leather tube; it seemed to stretch longer than one of her own legs.  The crowd, mostly urban and young, roared with approval.  Hope.  It is not just possible, it sells books, too.
              The memory of that talk and her beautiful book came to mind as I watched "Surviving Progress," not just because she is interviewed in the film, but because when confronted with the bleak realities of 21st century's globalized free market capitalism, one needs to hold on to something (even a single feather) of hope.  As she says in her interview, "Humans are a problem-solving species."
               In the documentary scientists, intellectuals, and writers take on the major concern of the next century:  Will humanity change its ways or ask for a bigger shovel?  For cynics, it should be said up front, humans aren't going anywhere.  No matter how much eco-freaks and God-botherers howl at an empty sky.  In Curt Stager's excellent book Deep Future we learn sure enough that we can't kill off the species through climate change, but we can make it miserable for the weakest and poorest among us; we can kill off huge portions of the population; and we can deplete (for us and our progeny) the natural abundance of resources in and on the Earth.  Yet it must be admitted that "Market fundamentalism," or the blinkered faith in progress, has tethered all of us to the crazed horse of a global economy with no stable of regulations and rules large enough to house it.
              One flattering problem the film reveals is that humans have been too successful.  It took 1300 years to add 200 million people to the world's population, now it takes 3 years.  With 6 or 7 billion people, some argue that this is too many by half.  But I don't see the ruling elite changing their behavior or the bottom half of the planet living much better just because there are less people.  Our numbers are going up, space and resources are limited, and as one interviewee says, "every time history repeats itself, the price goes up."
             An intriguing and reoccurring topic in the film is the "progress trap."  In learning and making progress 'we' saw at the very limb on which 'we' sit like the cavemen who discovered that charging a herd of animals over a cliff was easier than hunting them individually--smart but self-defeating if taken to extremes.
             Author Margaret Atwood preempts conservative arguments saying that we should think of the earth not as some holy abstraction but as a finite system.  "Unless we preserve the planet," she argues, "There isn't going to be any 'the economy' left."  Her comments carefully juxtapose with the experience of a middle class Chinese tour guide, made comfortable by the rising industrialism in his country, but one who self-silences:  He refuses to confront the problems of the environment directly for fear of retribution even when he and his own family recognize the drawbacks of development.
              Of course the greatest part of this film is blame.  It is not a conspiracy to speak of an international elite who literally dictate world policy.  It does exist.  And their instruments in the banking industry--who so excellently ensnared the developing world in debt obligations they could not possibly repay--have prepared the track for the great collisions of the 21st century:  Who will pay the debts?  Who says 'we' have to?  What will happen if 'we' don't?
              There are deficits to this sleek and beautiful film.  The pseudo-scientific babbling of Robert Wright never ceases to sound like a mad-chemist's parrot set loose on camera:  "Now more than ever you could argue that there's a unified social brain."  What nonsense is this?  And his imperative that we must make "moral progress" is as fantastical as it is a-historical.  As is one interviewees notion that "we're up against human nature...we have to reform ourselves, remake ourselves."  While he wasn't mentioned, philosopher and Enlightenment critic John Gray's recent (exceedingly bleak) arguments and historical work on this point are fairly conclusive.  (For more see The Immortalization Commission.)  Such a ridiculous frame for change as 'human nature' (whatever that turns out to be) will offer up human nature itself:  mercurial, uncertain, radically alternate.
              More convincing is the notion that we need to "prove nature wrong," as one scientist argues.  In this vein, we must prove that "making apes smarter is NOT a dead end."  (The experiment of civilization could topple, the film purports, unless we shore up our world.)  Human beings may not have a "united social brain" or be able to individually transform "their natures" but humans can arise to a challenge.  They can act collectively.  Perhaps the next challenge of societal progress--as opposed to human progress--is a collective decision to overcome impulses to greed for generations as yet unborn.  It will take reclaiming a simple word:  "We."
         

Steven Spielberg's "Lincoln"

                    For those looking to experience a movie that has all the visual quality of the best Civil War films and the charming character-driven plot of the best historical drama, check it out.  Daniel Day-Lewis's story-telling as the chatty Lincoln has a Brando-like quality:  you cant take your eyes off him (and neither can Lincoln's male helpers with whom he has several intimate moments.)
                  Of course the best kept secret of the film (and of the American history of Reconstruction) is Thaddeus Stevens--the powerful Pennsylvania Radical Republican--who has the precise amount of acid and scorn for the House's yokels, cynics, and hucksters.  If few contemporary educated and conscientious voters have an outlet to spout rage at the moronic inferno blazing in Michele Bachmann's district or at a Rand Paul stump speech, Stevens seems to act as a delightful proxy for us--albeit in the 19th century.  He lays waste to 'em!  Tommy Lee Jones, as ever, is masterfully patient in a stern and focused portrayal that could have been ruined by bluster.
                  My only issue is a historical one:  Where was Anderew Johnson, Lincoln's Vice President who, after inheriting the presidency, became our worst President?  Wasn't he, impeached and disgraced, worth seeing since he is the darkest decision in Lincoln's legacy?  And while I thought the dreamy sequences that illustrate Lincon's nightmares were haunting and unexpected, seeing Lincoln's face in a flame with a flashback to his second inaugural (after his assassination scene) was a bit much.  But Spielberg never can give up on the happy endings, can he?
                  The critic for The New Republic made a crucial argument for those who enjoyed this movie:
"That is the real lesson for now, in these few days. Being a nobleman or a saint is not enough in a leader. We need someone who can stoop to getting the job done, and wheedling the necessary votes in any way it takes. Lincoln the movie may look archaic and nostalgic in time—even in quite a short time. But for a few days or weeks now, it is the moment in a way few modern movies have managed. It’s very good, but that’s not the point. It’s necessary. Make sure your children take you to see it."
                  Of course, the 13th amendment passed and the movie does a strong job of illustrating the art of the bribe and the suspense of high-pressure negotiations.  But it also neglects the century blacks had to wait in order to gain political equality.  And it neglects to confront (rather than merely reflect) the dysfunctional and outmoded institutions that can allow such grievous injustices to be perpetuated.  While I would recommend this film to anyone, what our culture needs after Lincoln, a soothing movie about political healing, is a film about Reconstruction:  The moment when the best hopes of federal action were dashed by conservative "small government" types; when bought senators and paid representatives knowingly subsidized private industry; when black rights were buried under the flummery of "states rights"; when Lincoln's notion of a government by, for, and of the people disappeared for a generation into a Gilded Age.