I apologize for my absence gentle readers. Without going into boring details it has been a crazy, hectic month. I have only been able to briefly follow all of the confrontations and protests in Ferguson, MO. And barely keeping up with the outlines of these ISIS clowns and rest of the world's response to their blood-soaked antics. I simply cannot believe there are grownups in this country seriously considering getting involved in yet another Middle Eastern conflict. Scott Walker continues to be the worst plague ever inflicted upon the people of Wisconsin, he is ahead in the current gop gubernatorial contest of who can harm their constituents the most. I wonder if I can still vote absentee?
Anyway the biggest contribution I have made (and it is next-to-nothing at that) lately is a comment thread on an article Bob Cesca wrote on Sept. 11 of the by now usual shtick.
Michael Moore Thinks Obama Will Only Be Remembered for Being the First Black President Because what is really important is for the pragmatic left to police the far left, not beating back the authoritarian right and the real harm they do to people for spite and profit.
I don't want to be the contrarian here, but what do we remember about presidents from a century ago? Do we popularly remember the Harding administration's establishment of a federal budgeting process or that it was spectacularly corrupt? Bob is a civil war buff, does he champion reconstruction as a far-sighted program of modernizing and enlightening the south? Or a spectacular failure of idealism into corruption and power-grabs? In a way it falls to professional historians to shape whether the Obama administration is remembered as James Buchanan, standing by as the union is ripped apart by reactionary monsters; or Lincoln, trying his best to fix an impossible situation; or something else entirely. There is a reason historians allow twenty years to pass before seriously studying events, passions need to cool and cranks with an agenda need to be rooted out before history can approach the past with anything like objectivity.
Ask yourselves this: if Lincoln had survived his second term would he be remembered as fondly? The Lincoln we know was the Lincoln who died right after winning a war. The Lincoln we know was not sullied by the inevitable compromises that would have come from Reconstruction.
Lincoln accomplished great things before he died, but anyone who studies him knows that he was as much a compromiser and "sellout" as any President who ever lived.
see more
"Sellout" is a very strong word. Yes, Lincoln compromised and changed his mind when situations changed and facts came to light. Lincoln's core value never changed though, he was going to preserve the Union no matter what. The surprising thing is, as the only sitting president to encounter a large-scale armed insurrection, how lenient he was toward the traitors. You make very relevant points. I was mostly speaking about popular history, how we regular folks know history. Reconstruction, in particular, was hijacked for over half a century by southern apologists who wrote the history many of us learned about Carpetbaggers and Scalawags and Redeemers. The right already has an infrastructure in place to destroy any Democratic President's legacy,
see more
-
I used "sellout" in the sense that many people use when really what they mean is "he didn't do what I wanted him to do". I used it loosely to describe Lincoln because it is so often used loosely to describe Obama.
I am not even sure what he is arguing with me over. But boy, do people like to argue with historians.
Then I left this gem from my own intellectual history research on one of Chez'
regular media criticism columns. No replies though but Chez' treatment of WFB shows how much the pragmatic left longs for a conservative opposition that will play fair.
One aspect of this phenomenon, one of many for sure, is that the current mouth-breathing populist front men for corporate power use the intellectual foundation WFB built and propagated to "shorthand" any argument. No one on fox, for example, needs to explain why liberals are bad, or why conservatives are good. Buckley and National Review established all of these preconceived notions 50 years ago or more and they just continue on zombie-like, without ever being challenged. And do not give Buckley too much credit for intellectualism, his books and articles are filled with cheap innuendo, ad hominem attacks, and every other logical fallacy around. In "Up from Liberalism" for example, he goes on a diatribe against Eleanor Roosevelt that must be the template for every subsequent hit job ever undertaken.
